Lifeline offline: Unreliable internet, cell service are hurting rural Pennsylvania’s health

Even as businesses in Pittsburgh (PA) compete to commercialize artificial intelligence and give machines the human quality of “learning,” just a three-hour drive away people struggle with dial-up connections — if there are internet connections at all. More than 24 million Americans — 800,000 in Pennsylvania and mostly in rural areas — lack an internet connection that meets a federal minimum standard for speed. The result is a yawning divide in commerce, education and medicine that’s splitting America into the digital haves and have-nots. It’s not only broadband access to the internet that is lacking in this part of central Pennsylvania. The towers needed to make cell phones work are also lacking for the same reason broadband hasn’t caught on: too many miles, too few subscribers. Troubling correlations have been drawn between poor health and the areas of the country where broadband is lacking. Federal Communications Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, in a February speech, called it “alarming.”  "The damage done to a 21st-century community by not being part of the 21st-century economy is astoundingly bad,” said Sascha Meinrath, a telecommunications policy specialist at Penn State University who believes the number of people without usable internet connections is higher than government estimates. “Our lack of connectivity is costing us lives.”