C|Net

With broadband affordability especially high on the agenda following the pandemic, it could seem that Europe has all the answers. Yet Europe has its own struggles with digital divide, and it hasn't cracked the affordability problem across the board.

Microsoft said that it's expanding its Airband program, which was initially designed to connect rural areas, to eight cities: Atlanta, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New York, El Paso, Texas, and Memphis. Along with enabling inexpensive broadband, Microsoft will make devices more affordable by providing free and low-cost refurbished computers and tablets to communities of color through partners like PCs for People, Human-I-T and PlanITROI, a company whose Digital Dreams Project provides refurbished devices to K-12 students in need.

Federal and state governments have earmarked billions of dollars to build out fast internet service, but most plans don't address one of the biggest reasons people don't have broadband at home: They can't afford to pay for service. If the early days of the Emergency Broadband Benefit program are any indication, there is big demand for a more substantial subsidy. In the first week of the program, more than 1 million households signed up. Some civil rights and consumer groups are joining with the broadband industry to push Congress to make the broadband subsidy permanent.

Beyond supporting students, information being collected by schools across the country could prove useful when addressing the problem of the digital divide. The work to close the so-called homework gap, exacerbated when the coronavirus pandemic shut down schools and forced 50 million students to suddenly adopt remote learning, could also provide the federal and state governments a roadmap toward fixing the broader digital divide problem. The homework gap is a subset of a much larger d

The digital divide and the homework gap haven't gone away, even with new attention and funding directed toward emergency relief.

AT&T Fiber is giving its customers a free bump in speeds, boosting its 100 Mbps customers to 300 Mbps, and its 300 Mbps customers to 500 Mbps. AT&T will still offer its 1 gig plan as well, and these customers get HBO Max included. For a number of years fiber has been regarded as too expensive to deploy in most places. But the Covid-19 pandemic is causing a renewed interest. With so many people working and learning from home, they’re clamoring for faster broadband. And they’d like it to provide symmetrical downstream and upstream speeds.

While cellphones, and now modern smartphones, have brought new ways to access information to more people than ever, there are still many left behind. Martin Cooper, who led the team at Motorola and is credited as the father of the cellphone, estimates that 40% of the students in this country don't have access to broadband wireless. "Just imagine what that means over the long term," he said.

When Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann and lawmakers in the Mississippi legislature got $1.2 billion in federal money from the first stimulus bill in March, they decided to do something different.