Why Rural Internet Is Still Terrible, Despite Billions in Federal Spending

The US government has spent billions of dollars on several rounds of programs to upgrade internet speeds in rural areas over the past decade. Despite those efforts, many residents are still stuck with service that isn’t fast enough to do video calls or stream movies—speeds that most take for granted. Many communities have been targeted for broadband upgrades at least twice already, but flaws in the programs’ design have left residents wanting. The Wall Street Journal analyzed 1.4 million largely rural census blocks that were included in a series of nationwide Federal Communications Commission broadband programs over the past decade. In the latest program, the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, rolled out in 2020, internet service providers won rights to public funding in about 750,000 census blocks, covering every state except Alaska. The Journal's analysis found that more than half of those census blocks—areas with a combined population of 5.3 million people—had been fully or partially covered by at least one previous federal broadband program.