Residents of St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, had no internet for 5 days as rural broadband disparity lingers

Residents of a St. Landry Parish (LA) town say they were recently left without internet for five days while getting no answers from the service provider after a line was inadvertently cut. On July 11, some Sunset residents noticed they weren't receiving emails and web pages refused to load. Residents took to Facebook to find out that all Brightspeed customers in their community were without internet. Customers were not notified about the outage, several residents said, and calls to Brightspeed’s customer service yielded little in the way of information. The company insisted that the internet would be restored the following day. It wasn’t until Sunday evening that customers could connect. Even the public library could not connect to the web. The situation in Sunset illustrates a larger problem in rural areas throughout Louisiana, where smaller communities are left with few options for service providers.  Through federal and state grants, Louisiana is working with internet service providers to expand into rural communities throughout the state. The digging that took out Brightspeed’s line was part of those programs to bring fiber-optic internet to Sunset.  However, the rollout of faster internet in rural areas is still far away.