Broadband, or high speed internet, seems as essential to life since Covid-19 as oxygen: it’s how we work, interact with friends and families, educate our children, and receive medical care. For many, however, high-speed internet is either unavailable or unaffordable. According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 20–24 million Americans don’t have broadband. That number, however, is far higher according to a recent study by Microsoft, which estimates that 162 million people don’t have speeds that the FCC defines as “broadband.” The FCC defines broadband as 23Mbps. (The fastest internet speed available in America is 2000Mbps while the average is 133Mbps.)

his discrepancy, if correct — and according to Gigi Sohn, Special Counsel to the FCC under the Obama Administration, it is — is staggering: it means that 49% of the US population has very slow internet or none at all. The reason for this discrepancy is likely due to the fact that the FCC says if you can serve one person in a “census block” that means you are serving everyone in a census block. Census blocks are mapped regions that the government uses for measuring population; a census block can be one city block or hundreds of square miles in rural areas. If there are 5,000 people in a census block and just one person has broadband internet, then theoretically that block “has” broadband.

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