Internet too slow?
You would not complain if you were to visit towns in America with incomplete infrastructure
Shawna Williams, who lives in Akiak, Alaska — a small village that’s only reachable by boat or plane — pays around $300 a month for her internet service. It's so expensive because that's what it takes to connect thinly clustered towns and villages.
It’s not only outrageously expensive, but the connection is bad, which makes taking online classes to earn her college degree nearly impossible. “The internet is so unreliable, and it’s usually too slow, especially in the evenings when I get off of work, to load even a PowerPoint,” Williams told NPR.
According to Health Affairs, in 2018 “the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) estimated that one-quarter of rural Americans — and one-third of Americans living on tribal lands — did not have access to broadband (meaning download speeds of at least 25 megabits per second). By contrast, less than 2 percent of urban Americans lacked that same access.
“It’s unfortunate, but these small towns are older, sicker, poorer,” Alan Morgan, the CEO of the National Rural Health Association told CNN. “You’ve got these populations clustered in these hundreds of small towns that are absolutely the wrong population to be together.”
As for Shawna in rural Alaska trying to earn her college degree? Thanks to federal govt. funding that subsidizes the cost, Akiak is to get high-speed broadband soon, Williams' bill is expected to become a quarter of what it is now and her internet speeds and data limits will more than double. Else she will earn her degree without benefiting from the Internet. And that would exclude her from participating in something important.
Today her town's overloaded connections don’t allow simultaneous videos.
Now picture rural Germany, Nigeria, India and you get a more nuanced picture of how a large part of the planet is not even part of the conversations that you and me take for granted. Unless people like Shawna Williams create a bridge into our connected world and advocate for their needs, they get left out.
You have a different view?