Mar 15, 2016
Why connectivity needs to be a right, not a privilege for Americans in poverty
In today’s divided and divisive political climate, advocating education for the poorest of Americans — especially people on government assistance, can be something of a fire-brand topic. It is my belief, however, that educational progress can only be made when connectivity catches up to device accessibility.
As someone that has built websites and web apps for a living for almost twenty years, we finally recognized as an industry around ten years ago, that building for one type of screen, or a couple of different User Experiences simply speaking, was Dark Age material. Nowadays, User Experiences we build cater for users on the tiniest cell-phone screens to 70" 4K Ultra-HD screens; we’ve come a long way in ten years. My point being, that as a child in poverty today, learning is happening everywhere; from your mom’s cellphone in her pocket, given to you to placate you in the doctor’s office, to the plethora of screens you see each day. In the IT industry we are building technology that plays nicely on every device we can get our hands on.
Device and platform neutrality are great things for technology, but connectivity is what is now holding us back. Let’s look at some key facts about connectivity, specifically for people in poverty:
- 94% of households have some kind of access to the Internet;
- 33% of households under the poverty line with Internet rely only on their mobile carrier for Internet access.
- 52% of them have reported issues with connectivity, including unusable speeds and cut-offs due to non-payment.
- 30% of smartphone-dependent Americans reach the data cap on their plan each month.
- And most shockingly, 26% of all households earning less than $30,000 per year have no access at all.
Children in those households have a very different shot at attaining a decent education for the 21st century workforce than a child in a more economically comfortable household. Every school day, they face something called a homework gap, whereby their limited or non-existent access to the Internet hinders them a fraction at a time, leading to a wider achievement gap over time.
According to a report in 2008, children without Internet access are nearly 8% more likely to drop out of school. It would be naive to think that this is the only reason contributing to this figure, but it is certainly playing a part in the disenfranchisement of children from academic success.
We are witnessing an unconscionable failure for a first world country: to have a large subset of individuals among us who simply do not have access to free educational resources, to digital learning activities and most importantly, to the unprecedented human knowledge-base that the Internet has become.
At Business Access, we are enablers. Everyone who participates in our In-Home Learning System, we call an Achiever. We give Achievers what we consider to be basic human rights: access in several forms. Access to a device, access to the Internet (via high-speed LTE), access to learning materials, access to play, access to knowledge that for a hundred different socioeconomic reasons has been beyond their reach. We have served hundreds of thousands of people and had great success in helping people towards self-sufficiency, but we want to do more for more Americans.
By all means, there are other companies, non-profits and foundations doing work like ours, but it isn’t easy to effect change. In order to deliver Internet for all, we are looking at a challenge that is unlike any other first world nation. Our populous is incredibly spread out and economically diverse, and without the ground-based infrastructure that Europe already has in place, we will struggle to implement similar plans they have enacted. Instead, we have to look to the skies for solutions.
- Google’s Project Fi: a conglomeration of cellular networks into a potentially affordable, data-centric cellular plan for the future. It desperately needs subsidies for those on low incomes and a way to use phones that aren’t $500+.
- Outernet: an innovative satellite broadcasting solution specifically encompassing connectivity and learning.
- Google’s Project Loon: a potential network of balloons delivering connectivity to the developing world.
None of them are perfected yet, and current mobile providers are punitive when it comes to data, but the answer is up there. We already see better throughput for our Achievers at Business Access than any DSL offering and it’s only a matter of time before 5G starts rolling out — Verizon are already testing it, but wireless connectivity is expensive. We are, however, on the cusp of a connectivity breakthrough and at Business Access, by goodness, we’ve been waiting for you.
As the father of the modern web as we know it states:
It’s time to recognize the Internet as a basic human right… That means guaranteeing affordable access for all — Tim Berners Lee
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