First published in The Record, Sept. 21, 2020

Covid stranded millions at home. Then their internet died.

NEPTUNE, N.J. — It was 8:03 a.m., and the screen of Carlos Cano’s laptop was black. This meant he was three minutes late for his eighth-grade science class. In the next room, beneath a painting of Jesus, Cano’s mother kneeled on the hardwood floor.

She was not praying to God. Instead, she faced a white internet router as big as a kitchen blender. She unplugged the power cord, then plugged it in.

“Is it working, Carlos?” asked Adriana Medina, Cano’s mother.

“Nope,” Cano said.

“Oh, come on!” Medina said. “This is supposed to be Verizon’s biggest, fastest router. And every day, it doesn’t work! Why am I paying for this?”

As the COVID-19 pandemic forces millions of American families to try online learning for the first time, many are discovering their internet service is not up to the task. Nor is it cheap. Medina has Verizon’s “Fios Gigabit Connection,” supposedly enough broadband to support 100 computers. Along with two cellphones, router rental and other fees, Medina pays $400 every month to connect her family to the world.

Yet she can’t even connect to teachers at her son’s middle school, a half-mile away.

“I don’t blame the school. I blame the internet service companies,” Medina said. “These people are making billions of dollars during this pandemic, but my kids can’t even go to school.”

America’s broken internet

America, the nation that invented the internet, has terrible internet. Experts who study internet performance find that service in the United States is often too slow for the modern world of constant connection and two-way video chats.

“Our telecommunications network, when it first launched, was the envy of the world,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School who studies internet access worldwide. “Now it’s more like a Third-World nation.”

For millions of families, internet service isn’t available at all.

“Imagine if people said, ‘We don’t need water in our house – there’s a river a half-mile away,’” said Adam Longwill, founder of MetaMesh Wireless Communities, a nonprofit in Pittsburgh. “That’s what it’s like to get internet in Pittsburgh. People can’t get internet, so they drive a half-mile to the library. We’re starving in a land of plenty.”

Even families with reliable broadband access pay more for slower service than people in other developed nations.

“Because of COVID, a whole bunch of folks got computers and connectivity and think, ‘We’re good to go,’” said Sascha Meinrath, a telecommunications professor at Penn State University. “Now they find out, oops, it doesn’t work. It’s a slap in the face.”

It took a pandemic for America to confront the archaic anomaly that is its internet. To much of the developed world, America’s information superhighway looks as modern as a rocky goat path.

“It might be great for running Netflix. It’s terrible for Zoom,” said Meinrath, co-founder of M-Lab, which collects real-time data on internet speeds. “Even in places that have broadband, you find out that your broadband connection is wholly inadequate. It’s stupidity.”

Experts disagree on how to fix the problem. Industry leaders and regulators say the best way to expand internet access is to continue the strategy established by the Telecommunications Act, passed by Congress in 1996, which combines voluntary industry action with public subsidies.

“The mechanism that we have traditionally used since the Clinton administration of this light-touch regulatory approach has really been the engine that has unlocked all of this private capital into the building of networks,” said James Assey, executive vice president of NCTA – The Internet & Television Association, the leading trade group for major cable companies. 

Independent experts counter that it’s precisely this cozy relationship between the FCC and industry that is causing the United States to fall behind. The only way to drag the American internet into the 21st century, many scholars say, is to treat the internet like any other utility, and force providers to compete for business by offering better access, faster speeds and lower prices.

“Internet access in the United States is the worst of all world,” Crawford said, “because we have neither competition nor oversight.”

Want internet? Great. That’ll be $31,885

Geoff Wiggins leads a high-tech life. He supervises a team of information technology specialists at a university in Columbus, Ohio. His house, on a hilly country road, stands six miles from a Facebook data center. Before buying his dream home, Wiggins won assurances from CenturyLink and Time Warner Cable, now called Spectrum, that both companies deliver high-speed internet to the address.

“I’m in tech,” Wiggins said, “so I checked it out.”

Both companies’ maps were wrong. CenturyLink’s old copper DSL line ends at Hardscrabble Road, a quarter-mile south of Wiggins’ house. To the north, Spectrum’s fiber line stops 900 feet away. After years of negotiation, Spectrum finally agreed to extend the line.

All Wiggins needed to do was pay $31,885.

“That’s a little bit out of my reach,” Wiggins said.

Instead, Wiggins paid Sprint $350 a month for spotty cellular internet. Then came COVID-19. Wiggins’ son must attend third grade online, so Wiggins was forced to accept a modem from the local school district, part of a program for low-income families.

“It was really a struggle for me to accept” government help, Wiggins said. “I would have been happy to pay for broadband out of my own pocket. But it’s not available to me.”

When all else fails, Wiggins finds internet service by driving to a Marathon gas station and using its Wi-Fi.

“My second office is my Jeep,” he said. “And I live 30 miles from the state capitol.”

Wiggins’ saga is also a story of FCC failure. According to the agency, Wiggins’ problems don’t exist. The FCC’s latest report on internet service, released in July, finds that 309 million Americans have broadband at home. That equals 94.4% of the population. This rosy conclusion is based on data from internet service companies, which count every census tract in which broadband reaches a single house.

By this definition, Wiggins has broadband access because his neighbors do. In a twist worthy of Kafka, this means Wiggins can’t qualify for the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, announced in February, which aims to expand internet access by giving private companies $20.4 billion in public subsidies

.“The maps of internet and broadband connection are made by the carriers themselves,” Meinrath said. “And the FCC accepts them, scout’s honor.”

Towns, suburbs and cities experience similar connection problems. Twelve cities in New Jersey place among the worst 100 in the nation for speedy internet, led by Trenton, where 30.7% of all households don’t have broadband, according to census data compiled by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance. In Brownsville, Texas, 47% of all families have no broadband internet at home. In Homewood, an overwhelmingly poor and African American neighborhood east of downtown Pittsburgh, 61% of families don’t have broadband, according to a survey by MetaMesh.

Stranded at home by COVID-19, many families find no broadband means no school, no work, no doctor’s visits.

“The internet is just like water and sewage and electricity,” Crawford said. “It’s essential for a modern life.”

Your 'broadband' isn’t broadband

Millions more Americans do have internet service at home. Like Adriana Medina, many prepared for COVID-19 by paying extra for service advertised as “broadband,” “gigabit” or “high-speed.”

For many families, it’s not enough. Rania Bakaturski works for MetaMesh. Her husband works for a hospital in Pittsburgh, and her son just started kindergarten. During the pandemic, all three rely on the internet for work and school.

Yet every few minutes, her son’s computer conks out.

“I’m paying twice. I have two modems,” Bakaturski said. “When you’ve lost your connection, you’ve lost your child’s attention, especially for a kindergartner.”

Millions of Americans are experiencing the same problems because America’s concept of broadband is archaic, Meinrath said. Back in 2015, the FCC defined “broadband” to mean a computer receiving 25 megabits of data every second from the internet, and sending 3 megabits per second to someone else. (This definition matches the data speed of cable TV lines, which is no accident, Meinrath said.)

Five years ago, this was merely adequate.

Today, Meinrath said, it’s pitiful.

“If you have three or four family members at home, all trying to do calls on Zoom, 25/3 doesn’t cut it,” said Jenna Leventoff, a lobbyist for Public Knowledge, a nonprofit group that pushes for internet modernization.

In Hong Kong, the average computer download hustles along at 1,450 megabits per second, according to the Open Technology Institute. In most developed countries, internet service isn’t broadband until it hits 100 megabits per second in both directions, Meinrath said.

Yet thanks to the FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, American taxpayers are about to pay internet service companies $20.4 billion to extend the same slow, out-of-date service they already provide. During peak daytime hours, many connections run even slower, according to M-Lab data.

“The FCC is spending billions of dollars to build networks that are already outdated,” Leventoff said.

America’s internet service is expensive, too. The average European customer pays $44.71 monthly for broadband, according to the Open Technology Institute. Americans pay $68.38. Such comparisons remain hidden from consumers because the FCC doesn’t require carriers to share their costs, said Sarah Morris, the institute's director.

“We’re professional researchers, and this report took us 16 months to put together,” Morris said of her latest study, released in July. “It was shockingly difficult to get data.”

During the pandemic, millions of families are confronting these problems for the first time.

“Our computers keep saying the signal strength is strong, but then it doesn’t work,” said Adriana Medina. “It’s outrageous.”

Industry and critics agree (kind of)

Internet industry leaders say the federal government’s current strategy of heavy subsidy and light regulation is working.

“As the world has shut down around us, the internet remains open,” Jonathan Spalter, CEO of USTelecom, the leading trade group for telephone giants like AT&T and Verizon, told Congress in May. “Broadband providers made these investments as a direct result of smart bipartisan policy decisions allowing companies to compete, invest, and innovate in a lightly regulated marketplace.”

But even industry insiders agree the system isn’t designed to connect poor and rural families to the internet.

“There’s a point at which the economics take over,” said James Assey of the NCTA. “You’re not going to get private capital to invest in building a multi-billion-dollar piece of infrastructure to reach one house.”

Nor should it, Crawford and Meinrath said. Rather, the federal government needs to fix problems the markets can’t. If the internet is now as necessary as electricity, the government should treat it like a utility, Crawford said, paying for the construction of modern networks and forcing companies to compete with lower prices and faster speeds.

“We should be thinking about broadband as a necessity,” Meinrath said, “as a utility provided like streetlight, public education and health care.”

As a baby step, many experts said, the FCC should force internet service companies to publish their broadband speeds, coverage maps and prices.

“In the U.S. we don’t have anything close to pricing transparency,” said Siefer of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance.

In the meantime, parents like Adriana Medina are stuck on their knees, begging for the internet they already pay for.

“Every morning there’s glitches, classes getting canceled," Medina said. “We have no choice. We have to spend the money.”