North Carolinians without access to high-speed internet at home tend to face worse health, employment and educational outcomes than those with access. This “digital divide” was exacerbated after the pandemic brought so many essential services online.
North Carolina leads the southeast in terms of internet access and subscription rates, according to Nate Denny, deputy secretary for broadband and digital equity for the NC Department of Information Technology (NC DIT).
Still, 15% of North Carolinians do not have a subscription to high-speed internet. Some of those without access live in isolated geographical areas where reliable service is not available. For many others, what service exists in their area is economically out of reach.
Progress is being made in terms of infrastructure: in July, the state announced an additional $112 million for their Completing Access to Broadband program, connecting 25,903 households and businesses across 19 counties.
However, recent economic and legislative setbacks have set officials on edge.
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Buncombe County extended broadband access to 40% of its unserved or underserved households and businesses this summer, bringing high-speed internet access to 967 locations.
“We looked for locations in the county that had a relatively high level of density and lots of unserved households,” Buncombe County economic development program analyst E.B. Odderstol told Carolina Public Press. “This project is a significant step forward.”
Access to broadband is vital across economic sectors, even ones where employees don’t sit behind a computer. According to a 2020 survey conducted by the state’s Broadband Infrastructure Office, 90% of farmers in North Carolina consider reliable high-speed internet either extremely or very important to their livelihood.
North Carolina launched the county’s first Office of Digital Equity in 2021 to address the problem of people of color, immigrants, low-income, rural and elderly populations disproportionately lacking internet access at home.
Digital equity extends beyond simple access. Ben Hitchings, a fellow at the University of North Carolina School of Government and expert in North Carolina planning issues, told CPP that access to smart devices, the skills to use them effectively, access to technical support and online content are the other crucial factors.
The North Carolina DIT awarded Bellsouth Telecommunications, or AT&T North Carolina, with a grant of more than $10 million for the recent project in Buncombe County. Bellsouth Telecommunications is just one of the providers awarded funds to bring broadband access to North Carolinians. The county contributed more than $3.5 million using funds from the American Rescue Plan Act.
“Western North Carolina has two core issues in expanding broadband: the geographical challenge of being a mountainous area and the low density of rural areas,” Odderstoll said.
“If you live on the side of a mountain and have three neighbors, it’s going to be more expensive for a provider to bring service to your area than it would be for a densely-populated community that’s close to downtown Asheville.”
More than 236,000 locations in the state remain unserved, meaning they have very little or no access to high-speed internet. Just under 150,000 are underserved, meaning they have enough bandwidth for a single person to send emails or do some occasional streaming.
The barriers to high-speed internet in rural NC and urban NC are distinct, and it makes mapping out the problem statewide difficult.
In rural areas, the problem is access itself.
“The question is going to be: are there actual wires that come to my house?” Bruce Clark, project manager at Queens Knight School of Communication in Charlotte’s Center for Digital Equity, told CPP. That was the focus of the project in Buncombe County this summer.
In urban areas like Charlotte, however, broadband is much more accessible. The metric to examine in cities is the adoption of high-speed internet. Clark estimates that while nearly 99% of the houses in Charlotte can access the internet, between 10 and 14% of households aren’t able to adopt it.
“The question here is: do I have enough money to pay an internet bill every month so my house could have access to the internet?” Clark said.
The answer is no for more and more people in North Carolina and across the country. In early 2024, Congress elected not to renew funding for the Affordable Connectivity Program, which had been coming from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. In late May, the program ran out of money, and is now discontinued.
The program offered eligible households a discount of up to $30 per month on internet service bills, and a discount of $75 per month for households on qualifying tribal lands. It was the most quickly-adopted federal program in history, according to Clark.
More than 23 million households across the country received assistance with their internet bill through the Affordable Connectivity Program. In North Carolina, more than 900,000 households received assistance — that’s 20% of all households in the state.
According to Clark, there were strong lobbying efforts from many industries in favor of the program, but it wasn’t enough to keep it alive.
“There are both the macro-political constraints that prevent anything from getting done in DC today, and then layered into it was also the tail end of massive government spending that many seem to think should slow down,” Clark said. “ACP (Affordable Connectivity Program) was a casualty of a combination of the two.”
The state is feeling the stress of the program’s end. Gov. Roy Cooper dedicated $1.1 billion of the state’s American Rescue Plan Act funding to expanding broadband access, and the state still has $470 million left to award for this purpose.
Denny worries that North Carolinians will not be able to afford to access the broadband that the state is building.
“The Affordable Connectivity Program running out of congressional funding is a huge piece of the challenge,” Denny told CPP.
“We need Congress to act and invest more into the Affordable Connectivity Program so that more North Carolinians can afford the service that we’re funding here. If we subsidize all this infrastructure deployment and no one can afford the service, we’re all in trouble. We won’t have a chance to take advantage of these investments.”
Correction: North Carolina still has $470 million in American Rescue Plan Act funding to award for improving broadband access. An earlier version of the article gave an incorrect figure.
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