Worst Connected Cities 2019

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) has released its Worst Connected Cities of 2019, a list of the cities in the US facing the biggest struggles with Internet connections by drawing from the 2019 American Community Survey (ACS) One-Year Estimates. This data is not an indication of the availability of home broadband service, but rather of the extent to which households are actually connected to it.

At the top of the list were a pair of cities in the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas, which can be found in the southeast corner of the state. Pharr (TX) which is adjacent to McAllen (TX) ranked as the least-connected city in the country, with 59.66 percent of residents there having no access to Internet at all, including via cellular data plans. In addition, 68.75 percent of residents of the city, which is near the US-Mexico border, did not have wireline Internet connections. Larger cities (more than 100,000 people) that fared poorly on the list included Cleveland, Miami, and Newark (NJ), all of which have a substantial number of households that lack broadband of any type. At least 30% of households in 185 large and medium-size US cities still lack a wireline broadband connection in 2019.