BY JUAN PABLO GARNHAM
Although much of the attention is focused in the lack of infrastructure in rural areas, large numbers of urban residents also don’t have broadband subscriptions. Four months ago, Argentina Matute had to cut her internet service. After losing her job cleaning at a dentist’s office in Houston early in the pandemic, she had been struggling to pay bills. Before long, she owed more than $300 to her broadband internet provider.
Since canceling the service, her two daughters have depended on her phone as a hot spot, but sometimes the speed isn’t good enough and they have to go to a nearby McDonald’s to do their homework. “We get some fries, a juice or some chicken nuggets so no one bothers us,” Matute said in Spanish. When she doesn’t have money to pay for food and her phone won’t connect — which happened when she tried to apply online for health benefits — she headed to a nearby Cricket store that has free wifi. “I would just go there, park my car nearby and try to connect,” she said.
In Texas, experts say more than 9 million people don’t have a broadband internet connection, either because the infrastructure doesn’t reach their homes or because they aren’t subscribed to a service. The state is one of six that don’t have a broadband plan — a roadmap to address the digital divide. Four of the five least-connected cities in the country are in Texas, according to a 2019 analysis of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance. And three of those — Pharr, Brownsville and Harlingen — are in the Rio Grande Valley.
But state leaders appear ready to address the lack of statewide planning this year: Gov. Greg Abbott has designated broadband access as one of his priority items for this legislative session and lawmakers have filed several bills to promote broadband access in Texas.
Much of the debate has focused on the lack of infrastructure to connect rural areas with broadband internet. But in Harris County, where Matute lives, almost 200,000 households still don’t have internet in their homes, according to the Census Bureau. Together, the six biggest urban counties in Texas have more than 590,000 households without internet subscriptions.
According to Luis Acuña, a policy analyst with the public policy nonprofit Texas 2036, the digital divide has three main components: building the infrastructure to support high-speed internet, people’s ability to pay for it and their ability to use it once they get it — which requires digital literacy.
“Texas is impacted by all three of those,” Acuña said. “Nearly one million Texans right now do not have infrastructure to support broadband speeds, and that population is larger than South Dakota.”
The homes lacking infrastructure are mainly in rural areas. Another 3 million households in both urban and rural areas — or roughly 8 million people — have access to broadband but aren’t subscribed, Acuña said.
Jennifer Harris, the state program director for Connected Nation Texas, an organization that promotes broadband in the state, said that the challenge in rural areas of the state is definitely big, but urban challenges are overlooked.
“That adoption piece, that does affect our urban and suburban [communities], but also our rural communities too, I don’t know that that is being discussed as much as I would like to see,” Harris said.
Source: https://www.texastribune.org/