Internet performance and income

Many families now rely solely on their home connections to take meetings via video conference or help their children complete the day’s lessons, not to mention leverage telemedicine to safely visit the doctor. But for the poorest among us — those who once had the option to visit the local library or head into the office to get a reliable connection — the bandwidth available to them at home often isn’t enough. To understand the degree to which the digital divide is affecting low-income families during the COVID-19 pandemic, we compared download speed against five median income brackets in the US using 2017 tax return data by ZIP Code from the Internal Revenue Service. The  stratification of performance is even starker than we had hypothesized, that an acceptable connection is now more important than ever, and that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have the power to make a significant difference. The difference in performance between the highest and lowest income groups is pronounced: download speeds for those making less than $30,000 annually were 41.4% lower than for those making $200,000 or more.