Rep Donna Edwards on Broadband

Rep Donna Edwards (D-MD) said the US needs to adopt a comprehensive broadband policy to bring connections to many areas of the country that don't yet have them. Rep Edwards said she does not have access to broadband service in her Fort Washington, Maryland, home. Rep Edwards hasn't used her home dial-up connection for months, she said during a OneWebDay event in Washington. "It's too much of a pain," she said. "It's too cumbersome. All of the data, all of the information that really I most want, you can't just handle on dial-up." In addition, an elementary school near Edwards' house has limited access to the Internet, she said. The students "really should be engaged on the Internet for information, for resources, for research, but they can't be because they're in an old school with old wiring that's not really equipped to handle today's technology," she said. Without broadband those students will be "left farther and farther behind," Rep Edwards added. Many areas don't have broadband despite government reports saying about 99 percent of U.S. postal codes have broadband service, she said.