Doug Dawson reports on the POTS and PANS blog…

One of the most interesting positive things that came out of the COVID pandemic was that communities and organizations across the country deployed public WiFi hotspots. This was done at the time to support students and workers who were expected to find a way to work remotely. And this worked well in a lot of places, and I’ve talked to communities who said the public flocked to the free WiFi during the pandemic.

There was another benefit of the free hot spots – they created places where people who couldn’t afford broadband suddenly had a place to access the Internet. This number of people varies by community, but the nationwide numbers suggest that around 14% of homes don’t have a home broadband solution, and as many as 80% of those folks say they would buy a home broadband solution if they could afford it.

As I wrote about in a recent blog, the number of homes without broadband is unfortunately growing due to affordability issues related to the other increasing costs of daily life like rent, food, health care, and transportation. An increasing number of homes are finding it harder to maintain their broadband connection. Several ISPs have told me about a growing number of broadband customers that regularly disconnect and then reconnect broadband during the year depending on their ability to pay the bill.

The post goes on to talk about aspects of providing public WiFi to the community.