Nearly One Million U.S. School-Aged Children Live In Counties With Less Than 50% Broadband Coverage

Earlier in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic cast new light on a divide that has impacted millions of Americans for decades. The lack of access to affordable, robust broadband was already a massive economic and humanitarian issue before this year. Now, with millions of students potentially returning to classes online this fall, it is an unprecedented educational crisis in the making.

Internet Desert Counties 

There are counties across the U.S. in which access to the internet has remained largely unestablished. Most of these are in less-populated rural regions, but combined, the 101 counties amount to 966,134 children ages 5-17 that are faced with the prospect of being left behind if their district is forced to cancel in-person classes this fall.

Several of the counties we’ve identified have virtually no access to broadband at all – the direct result of a systemic failure in the current system of broadband deployment, which primarily leaves planning and execution to the private sector.

Additionally, income generally skews lower in rural communities relative to urban ones, and this disparity makes measuring the true digital divide in the U.S. even harder than it appears on paper. Though an area may have access to at least one wired connection, that plan may not be affordable to thousands of families living and working in the community. We’ve previously identified that the average cost of a wired standalone broadband internet plan in the U.S. is $79. Only 50% of Americans have access to a standalone plan that costs less than $60 per month.

Below you can view each county organized by state, along with its associated level of wired broadband access and percent of the population living in poverty: