The chatter about a digital divide has been going on since high-speed internet networks started being built in the 1990s.
It became background noise as our lives more and more revolved around our gadgets.
Decisions by Congress and the Biden administration over the last couple of years disrupted that noise like the sound of a record scratch. They decided to spend more than $65 billion this decade installing broadband to households, mainly in rural and tribal areas, that don't have it.
I've spent most of my career writing about the tech industry. And yet, when I read about this money being spent on rural broadband or the digital divide, I often think something like, "Wait, they're still working on that?"
With help from some Minnesota experts, here's my attempt to simplify a deeply complicated situation, to provide some context for what's unfolding in coming years.
First, this technology divide and slow road to ending it has a precedent. It took about 70 years for the U.S. to deploy an electric grid in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. In the mid-1920s, nearly everyone in America's cities had electricity and hardly anyone on farms did.
A giant acceleration happened during recovery from the Great Depression in the 1930s, when several agencies created under the New Deal focused on rural electrification. The Biden administration compares its efforts on broadband to that time.
As of last year, 88% of Minnesota's households had access to broadband, according to the state Office of Broadband Development. It defines a broadband connection as one with at least 100 megabits per second of download speed and 20 megabits per second of upload. That's fast enough for several people in a home to be streaming video and playing video games simultaneously.