Marketplace

The Federal Reserve is taking on the digital divide

A Q&A with Jeremy Hegle, a senior community development adviser for the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. The Federal Reserve Bank is trying convince businesses that the digital divide is their problem, too. He said:

The promise and reality of Google Fiber

In the Kansas City region, Austin (TX), and Provo (UT), Google Fiber did something almost too good to be true. It handed out free internet (for up to seven years) to anyone willing to pay a one-time installation fee of $300. Sure, the gratis package was one-200th the speed of Google Fiber’s drool-inducing gigabit plan. But free is free. By the time Google Fiber put out its shingle in Atlanta, it had dropped the on-the-house option in favor of a $50 (and much faster) monthly plan.

Is politics tearing apart the FCC? A retiring commissioner says yes.

A Q&A with Mignon Clyburn, outgoing commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission. 

There is a major digital divide on the Texas-Mexico border, one of least connected parts of the country

The Texas-Mexico border is one of the least connected in the US. A map from the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas shows border counties bathed in bright red, meaning less than around 60 percent have home internet access. It’s a distinction shared by the Mississippi Delta and Appalachia, other parts of the country with pernicious poverty. But that may change. The small city of Pharr, Texas — just a handful of miles from the border — is trying to make a change, and end the kind of disconnectedness that plagues low-income border communities.