Technological factor, barrier 1 of 7
The digital divide
ITU's Facts and Figures 2025 estimates 6 billion people use the internet, but 2.2 billion remain offline. The gaps are sharp.
| Group | Share online |
|---|---|
| High-income countries | 94% |
| Low-income countries | 23% |
| Urban areas | 85% |
| Rural areas | 58% |
| Men | 77% |
| Women | 71% |
Evidence
- Offline population. 96% of those offline live in low- and middle-income countries.
- Quality gaps. Quality gaps are growing even where people are connected. 84% of people in high-income countries have 5G coverage, compared with 4% in low-income countries.
- Beyond access. ITU's Secretary-General describes today's divides as being defined by speed, reliability, affordability, and skills, not just access.
Why it matters: The internet now plays the role that Riebau's bookshop played for Faraday. People offline are cut off from most of the world's accessible knowledge, courses, and networks.
Proposed and experimental methods
Methods that are proposed, under trial, approved in some places, or tried and then failed. Each shows a stage label and an evidence rating. A stage label shows how far a method has progressed, not whether it works. The stage labels are explained on the technological factor page.
- Subsidized home broadband for low-income families (Approved but not scaled, B). Internet service providers or governments discount home internet for households below an income threshold. Comcast's Internet Essentials program, launched in 2012 for low-income households with school-aged children, raised the probability that an eligible low-income adult was employed by nearly 1 percentage point and raised incomes among eligible people by over 1%, and the estimated benefit for an enrolled household (about $2,202) was more than four times the estimated cost of the service (Zuo, 2021). The study uses a triple-differences design (comparing areas, eligibility, and timing) rather than randomization.
- Technology-neutral rural broadband grants (Approved but not scaled, contested, C). The U.S. Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program is a $42.45 billion federal grant program funded by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (NTIA, n.d.). New guidance on June 6, 2025, dropped the preference for fiber and allowed satellite and fixed wireless to compete, NTIA expects about $21 billion in deployment cost savings, and by June 30, 2026, NTIA had approved 54 of 56 state and territory final proposals while BEAD-funded infrastructure had been deployed in only two states (Benton Institute, 2026). In Illinois, whose plan was the last approved, 68.1% of locations went to fiber, 23.6% to fixed wireless, and 8.1% to low Earth orbit satellite (Hardesty, 2026). No outcome data exist yet.
- City-owned fiber networks (Approved but not scaled, contested, D). Local governments or public utilities build and run broadband networks. A study commissioned around Chattanooga's municipal fiber network reported $2.69 billion in benefits and 9,516 jobs created or retained in its first ten years (EPB, 2021), but a peer-reviewed difference-in-differences analysis found "no economically- nor statistically-significant effect" on nine labor market outcomes (Ford and Seals, 2021), and a 2026 policy bulletin by the same lead author argues that the job estimates misapply a source study that found no effect in urban counties (Ford, 2026).
- Reversed: the U.S. Affordable Connectivity Program (Failed or reversed, B). The program gave monthly internet discounts to low-income households for about two and a half years. The FCC froze new enrollment in early February 2024 and ended the program on June 1, 2024, because Congress did not provide more funding, when over 23 million households were enrolled (FCC, 2024).
- Reversed: zero-rated "free basics" internet (Failed or reversed, B). Facebook's Free Basics let people use selected sites without data charges. In February 2016 India's telecom regulator ruled that "no service provider shall offer or charge discriminatory tariffs for data services on the basis of content," which ended the program in India after critics argued it violated net neutrality, the principle that all internet content is treated equally (Ghoshal, 2016).
- Failed: stratospheric balloon internet (Failed or reversed, B). Alphabet's Loon used high-altitude balloons to bring internet access to remote areas and ran a pilot service in Kenya. It was shut down in January 2021 because, in its chief executive's words, "we haven't found a way to get the costs low enough to build a long-term, sustainable business" (Via Satellite, 2021).
Sources cited on this page
- Ford, G. S. (2026). When narratives replace evidence: Employment claims and the EPB municipal broadband network (Phoenix Center Policy Bulletin No. 84). Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal & Economic Public Policy Studies. link B Moderate
- Ford, G. S., & Seals, R. A. (2021). The rewards of municipal broadband: An econometric analysis of the labor market. Telecommunications Policy, 45(8), 102220. link C Limited
- Ghoshal, A. (2016, February 8). Facebook's Free Basics blocked by India over net neutrality rules. The Next Web. link B Moderate
- Hardesty, L. (2026, August 25). NTIA signs off on Illinois BEAD final proposal, the last of 56 proposals. Fierce Network. link B Moderate
- Zuo, G. W. (2021). Wired and hired: Employment effects of subsidized broadband internet for low-income Americans. American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, 13(3), 447-482. link B Moderate
Every source for this factor is listed on the technological factor page.