Broadband: [1] How to get a discount if you qualify, and [2] A map of America's broadband problem

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[1]

How to get a government-paid discount on your broadband

The Emergency Broadband Benefit Program can help with broadband bills — but you need to apply soon

By Barbara Krasnoff May 11, 2021, 3:14pm EDT

 

One warning: if you think you may qualify, don’t put off sending in the application.

This is a temporary program, and you lose your benefit when the fund runs out of money, or “six months after the Department of Health and Human Services declares an end to the COVID-19 health emergency” — whichever is sooner.

There are a variety of ways you can qualify for the program.

Qualifications can include your income level (at or below 135 percent of the Federal Poverty level), participation in a program such as SNAP or Medicaid, job loss due to the pandemic, or other criteria. You can get more information by either visiting the FCC website or by going to getemergencybroadband.org

If you think you qualify, you can either apply online, contact your current broadband provider to see if they are participating in the program (or check this list for a provider near you), or print out and complete an application and send it to:

Emergency Broadband Support Center
P.O. Box 7081
London, KY 40742.

 

The past year, a lot of people were laid off or otherwise unable to pay for basic necessities. So the stimulus package passed by Congress in December included a provision to pay for broadband and other basic tech for those who, because of job loss or other financial difficulties, can’t afford to pay for it on their own. And starting this week, if you qualify, you can take advantage of it.

The Emergency Broadband Benefit Program is being administered by the FCC and offers a temporary discount on monthly broadband bills — up to $50 a month (or $75 if your household is on qualifying Tribal lands). If your income qualifies, you can also get a one-time discount of up to $100 for a computer or a tablet.

It’s not a lot, considering how much tech costs these days, but every little bit helps.

And applications for that discount will be available starting tomorrow, May 12th.

 

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[2]

This is a map of America’s broadband problem

A county-by-county look at the broadband gap

By Russell Brandom and William Joel May 10, 2021, 9:00am EDT

 

"If broadband access was a problem before 2020, the pandemic turned it into a crisis. As everyday businesses moved online, city council meetings or court proceedings became near-inaccessible to anyone whose connection couldn’t support a Zoom call. Some school districts started providing Wi-Fi hotspots to students without a reliable home connection. In other districts, kids set up in McDonald’s parking lots just to get a reliable enough signal to do their homework. After years of slowly widening, the broadband gap became impossible to ignore.

So as we kick off our Infrastructure Week series, we wanted to show the scope of the problem ourselves.

This map shows where the broadband problem is worst — the areas where the difficulty of reliably connecting to the internet has gotten bad enough to become a drag on everyday life. Specifically, the colored-in areas show US counties where less than 15 percent of households are using the internet at broadband speed, defined as 25Mbps download speed. (That’s already a pretty low threshold for calling something “high-speed internet,” but since it’s the Federal Communications Commission’s standard, we’ll stick with it.)

Maps like this are important because, for much of the past decade, the scale of the problem has been maddeningly difficult to pin down. Most large-scale assessments of American broadband access rely on FCC data, a notoriously inaccurate survey drawn from ISPs’ own descriptions of the areas they serve. Even as the commission tries to close the broadband gap, its maps have been misleading policymakers about how wide the gap really is.

Instead of the FCC’s data, we drew on an anonymized dataset collected by Microsoft through its cloud services network, published in increments by the company over the past 18 months. If the FCC monitors the connections that providers say they’re offering, this measures what they’re actually getting. You can roll over specific counties to see the exact percentage of households connected at broadband speed, and the data is publicly available on GitHub if you want to check our work or drill down further. It’s not a perfect dataset, since device speeds can also be affected by bad routers or slow processors that have nothing to do with the underlying connection. But for better or worse, these are the speeds users actually experience, which puts the dataset worlds ahead of what you’d get from the FCC.