The changing Digital Divide: Connected Nation's evolving mission — Part 1

"Our mission is to improve lives by providing innovative solutions that expand the access, adoption, and use of high-speed internet and its related technologies."

Part 1 of 2: The closing bandwidth gap and who remains offline

For 25 years, Connected Nation (CN) has worked to close the Digital Divide. But as infrastructure expands, the goalposts keep moving. The gap is less about who has a wire running to their home than about adoption and skills. A complex matrix of digital literacy, economic security, latency geography, and artificial intelligence (AI) readiness equips some people to flourish in the digital age much better than others. This is a challenge that policy and civil society need to keep wrestling with because it is on track to get worse rather than better, even as the problem of not being able to order internet service because of where you live recedes.

Before 2020, the Digital Divide primarily meant, in public discourse, that rural areas lacked the broadband speeds common in cities and suburbs. That version of the divide has retreated. A quarter-century of network buildout, culminating in the federal Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, has made available almost everywhere connections at speeds that exceed the needs of ordinary use, even if tens of millions of locations still lack the gigabit service that most big cities now enjoy.

Yet the divide is not so much ending as shifting. It persists today as a set of gaps — households confined to smartphone-sized screens, households that cannot reliably afford a connection, and people who lack the skills to make one useful — and it is opening new dimensions of digital advantage and disadvantage, especially in adoption of AI and in the availability of the ultra-low latency that physical AI will demand.

This article traces that arc across two parts. This first part describes the great coverage expansion and looks at who is still offline; a second part will turn to the current pain points of screen size, affordability, and digital literacy, and the emerging divides of AI and latency. By now, very few people are completely left behind by the digital age, but many are still missing out in important ways, and if anything, the advancing frontier is probably leaving more people further behind.

The great coverage expansion

Much of the internet’s last-mile infrastructure was built by repurposing legacy assets. Copper telephone networks became DSL, and coaxial cable-TV networks adopted DOCSIS technology. Today, while cable remains the most widely available form of broadband and still meets modern needs, fiber-optic networks purpose-built for internet service represent the "future-proof" standard. When fiber overbuilders arrive, legacy cable networks typically start losing much of their customer base and end up with a minority market share (But cable internet service providers (ISPs) have been innovating and increasing the bandwidth they offer, too. DSL, meanwhile, is obsolescent and is being rapidly decommissioned, and low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite is filling in the gaps. The net result is a major increase in bandwidth availability.

While private investment has driven the bulk of coverage expansion in recent decades, reaching the most remote areas has often required public subsidies. A long series of progressively larger broadband grant programs culminated in the U.S. Treasury’s $10 billion Capital Projects Fund (CPF), authorized as part of the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, and then the $42.45 billion BEAD program, administered by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). With these two programs, Congress showed its determination to end the Digital Divide as we knew it.

The BEAD program rollout has evolved as the new administration in Washington shifted policy priorities. The Biden administration built the program around a technological definition of “reliable broadband” that included only fiber, cable, and licensed fixed wireless and excluded unlicensed fixed wireless and satellite.

Since June 2025, the newly restructured BEAD program under the Trump administration has allowed LEO satellite and unlicensed fixed wireless providers to compete for BEAD funds, presenting this as a technology-neutral, cost-focused framework, although the concept of a “priority broadband project,” rooted in the original Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) statute and requiring states to favor higher service tiers, complicates the implementation of technology neutrality and helps to explain why most of the awards still went to fiber.

Meanwhile, the restructured BEAD program still used maps based on the original “reliable broadband” standard to determine eligibility. Otherwise, there would have been nothing to fund, since if LEO satellite coverage alone was to be deemed sufficient, then universal 100/20 Mbps low-latency coverage was already theoretically achieved before any BEAD-funded network construction began.

BEAD’s eligibility footprint was also reduced between 2021, when the IIJA passed, and 2025, when awardees were selected, by the rapid buildout of fixed wireless and especially fiber networks. A smaller footprint and a cost-first approach have reduced the BEAD program’s spend to achieve universal coverage far below what was forecast.

At the time of writing, with nearly all states having received NTIA and National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) approval on their BEAD Final Proposals, approximately $21 billion, roughly half the total budget, remains unassigned. Fiber secured roughly % of funding and 65% of locations. Satellite providers captured 4% of dollars but covered 21% of the most remote, high-cost locations. States await NTIA guidance on allowable uses of BEAD non-deployment funds.

Looking ahead, millions of locations will benefit from BEAD's fiber investments, and multiple levels of government will probably continue to subsidize fiber deployment despite LEO satellite availability. But already, the rural bandwidth deficit is sunsetting.

Throughout the buildout of the infrastructure that has made universal broadband access possible, Connected Nation (CN) has been actively engaged, mostly by assisting governments at all levels to map coverage and administer grant programs. During BEAD in particular, CN helped with planning in Texas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Tennessee, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Massachusetts, Kentucky, and other states. It continues to be involved, especially as an on-the-ground verifier of ISPs' physical deployment of broadband facilities (see “The great BEAD monitoring challenge”). CN is proud that its advocacy and operations have contributed to the historic success of closing the bandwidth divide.

The upshot is that adequate bandwidth is now available almost everywhere, often at speeds well beyond what ordinary use requires. A substantial minority of locations still have no wired option and rely on Starlink; for them the constraint is real, but it is increasingly one of price, data caps, and latency rather than raw bandwidth, which LEO satellites now deliver at levels once reserved for wired subscribers. The bandwidth deficit that defined the past quarter-century has largely closed.

But that’s not the end of the Digital Divide; it has simply shifted its ground.

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