The Next Digital Divide: Falling Off the Edge

The COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the fact that millions of people, especially in rural America, do not have access to broadband. In response, more than $150 billion of federal and state funding will be spent over the next five years to close the digital divide. However, a new digital divide centered around latency—the delay before a data transfer begins, exemplified by video stuttering—could emerge if rural communities lack the broadband infrastructure to provide low-latency services. Technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and the internet of things will rely on low-latency, edge computing capabilities of data centers. Rural America's lack of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) infrastructure and their great distances from the nearest data centers that enable low-latency will accelerate the creation of the digital divide of latency. Coalition-based, federal and state-funded middle-mile networks are the perfect way to build infrastructure that can support edge networking for rural populations. These networks provide access to a large number of points of presence (POPs) to content providers under a single banner that allows them to use the POPs as mini edge data centers to resolve latency issues. 

[Sachin Gupta is the director of government business and economic development at Centranet.]