You might go online to work remotely at your job, to interact with your doctor, to file your taxes, to shop, to kill time – even to read this article.
But in America, there are millions of people on the other side of a “digital divide” who, even in 2025, all too frequently experience America offline or solely through the limited screen of a smartphone.
Studies and data have identified digital divides separating suburban, urban, and rural areas, and based upon income, education, race, and age.
“You need to make sure that you get people access wherever they live so they can do the things that they need to do to create wealth and … wellbeing and be connected to civic discourse,” says Nicol Turner Lee, author of Digitally Invisible: How the Internet is Creating the New Underclass, and director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution.
“People have much more complicated lives” than in past generations, she adds. “They need access because they have to do telehealth visits. They need access because they’re learning online. They need access because their job requires some level of technical skills and perhaps remote work.”
Digital Divide by the Numbers
Though 96% of U.S. adults say they use the internet, according to the Pew Research Center, up from 52% in 2000, some may not be using it to its full potential.
In fact, nearly a third of U.S. workers lack digital skills even though more than 90% of jobs require some digital skills aptitude, according to a study by the National Skills Coalition (NSC).
Priyanka Sharma, director at World Education, JSI, and co-director of Digital US, a collective of organizations working to close digital skills gaps, says people often won’t admit to lacking digital skills, which may be “a function of just it being 2025, where that’s something that you cannot say out loud.”
“It’s like everybody’s supposed to be digitally comfortable,” she says.
But the data suggests many are not even properly connected.
Though 79% tell Pew they subscribe to broadband service at home, the rates are lower for people with lower incomes or lower levels of education, Black and Hispanic people, and older age groups. What’s more, people in many of those groups are more likely to say their only computing device is a smartphone, rather than a desktop or laptop computer, which experts say is necessary for the complex access to online resources required for life and work in 2025.
In addition, since the pandemic, a gap has opened between the 85% of suburban users and the 76% of urban users with home broadband, according to Pew. Add that to an ongoing gap with rural areas, equipped with home broadband at a 73% rate, that has persisted for the past 25 years or more.
Digital Divide: More Complicated Than a 3-Legged Stool?
Bridging the digital divide has been compared to building a three-legged stool, where the first metaphorical leg would be internet access via reliable high-speed broadband, the second would be access to hardware, preferably a large-screen device such as an up-to-date computer, and the third would be digital skills.
But many observers say it’s more complex than that.
Turner Lee says we also need to coax people toward greater digital engagement “so that they can be much more participative in our economy and provide a better quality of life for their families.”
“If you look at the digital divide as hardware and software and training, you don’t necessarily accomplish that,” she says. “You accomplish one part of solving the problem, which is accessibility. But there are many scenarios that we’ve seen over the years – even with President Clinton, when he actually codified the term (‘digital divide’) – that you can build it and they won’t come.”
Where We Must Bridge the Digital Divide
But if we don’t even build it at all, they can’t come – and the most recent FCC data suggest that as of last June there were 7.5 million locations unserved or underserved by broadband, according to an analysis by the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society.
It puts those people at a disadvantage that can become evident when the digital isolation ends.
“We see real enthusiasm when good broadband gets deployed, and it just unlocks all sorts of opportunities for people, especially when they can also get access to the skills they need to take advantage of that,” says Alex Kelley, director of broadband consulting for the Center on Rural Innovation (CORI).
Connectivity can mean “finally being able to consider a remote job or being able to take advantage of your employer’s hybrid work availability … (or) even just doing various entertainment options,” he says. “I mean, the savings that people are documenting with telehealth usage are quite phenomenal.”
Places where people still await connectivity can be seen on the FCC’s National Broadband Map, which identifies parts of the country with and without a certain minimal level of broadband access. The FCC updated the map in recent years and invited review by local communities amid criticism that prior versions were inaccurate and misinformed funding decisions.
The updates were sought as tens of billions of dollars in new funding became available to address the digital divide through the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act signed by President Biden in 2021, to be disbursed through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) via the $42.45 billion federal Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program and the $2.75 billion Digital Equity Act.
Digital Infrastructure in the Pipeline – or Stalled?
Some have questioned the Biden-era programs’ effectiveness so far, particularly BEAD.
“To this day, not a penny has gone to actual shovel-in-the-dirt construction,” says Kelley, of CORI.
Gabe Horwitz, a senior vice president for the economic program at Third Way, a center-left think tank, co-authored a memo on BEAD’s lack of quick wins, and blames excessive red tape built in.
“Government had great intentions and absolutely horrible follow-through,” he says. “With all that bureaucracy that the government put on it, they completely strangled their own priority, and so it just made the program so unworkable and so slow and unresponsive that it really prevented the build out of this, what I would consider a national critical priority.”
Others say BEAD and the Digital Equity Act could still drive success. Although observers are unsure the programs’ planned flow of funding will proceed amid disruption in Washington, some note that the federal government already sent initial payments to localities as the Biden administration wound down.
“A lot of the progress in the next year or two is going to happen on a state-by-state level because they have received money,” says Sharma of World Education and Digital US. “That money is there. They have to dole it out because that’s their contract with the federal government.”
Emailed requests to NTIA’s press office for clarification on the status of remaining BEAD and Digital Equity Act funding approved by Congress went unanswered.
Addressing the digital divide traditionally has been a bipartisan priority. Under the first Trump administration, billions of dollars were allocated through programs such as the $20.4 billion Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF), which led to some new broadband connections, though numerous contractors defaulted without fulfilling their contracts. Other funding efforts and programs over multiple presidential administrations also built up digital infrastructure, tools and skills.
The pandemic’s sudden shift to remote work and learning raised wider awareness of the digital divide and fueled the ongoing efforts to narrow it. An Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) to subsidize broadband service even allowed households with lower incomes access at more affordable rates.
Congress discontinued ACP as of June, though observers say affordability remains a major factor in the digital divide, affecting internet access and computer ownership among both urban and rural populations. In the rural areas, for instance, providers might seek to recoup the higher costs of building infrastructure over longer distances that serves fewer customers, Kelley says.
Addressing the Digital Skills Divide
To boost digital skills in less-advanced areas, advocates have long touted the use of digital navigators, local individuals who can provide digital guidance, as needed, thereby making it easier to build skillsets and get people acclimated to engaging digitally. But digital navigator programs require continued funding and effort – and the skills they teach may not stay current forever.
(WorkingNation’s editor-in-chief, Ramona Schindelheim, will moderate a panel, “The Digital Navigator Playbook,” today, March 12, at the Connected America 2025 Conference in Dallas – 2:50 p.m. CT, Room A1, 3rd Floor, Irving Convention Center.)
Partly because digital navigators require funding and can’t be everywhere, Digital US also emphasizes the idea of digital resilience, a need for people to have the confidence to adapt their skills to new contexts as technology advances.
“You can’t just say that somebody has digital skills or doesn’t have digital skills,” Sharma says. “We’re all learners because the technology is changing. We need … transferable skills between platforms.”
Having people around who already have the skills also helps – but can take some time to bear fruit.
“Are you exposed to people who are really using the internet for aspirational ambitious things – and do you therefore have role models and know how to do that?” Kelley asks.
“How do you figure out how to get online trainings that actually lead to real certifications and real jobs? Do you think of the internet as a place to seek opportunity or do you think of it as simply for entertainment? … Nothing wrong with that, but I think part of understanding what’s possible is the kind of exposure and the culture of the community, which when you’ve never had internet before, you have to kind of build that muscle.”
Digital Divide: Haves and Have-Nots
But even as infrastructure arrives and skills gain ground, fixing the digital divide can mean aiming at a moving target.
“You had DSL and people famously saying, ‘Oh, well, nobody needs more than DSL,’” Kelley says. “Well, as soon as someone invented a way to add a picture to an email, that created the need for more bandwidth.”
That leads to a pattern: As technology races forward, the wealthiest areas tend to be first to build infrastructure to accommodate it, and then gain a head start on using the newest digital skills.
“That perpetuates the digital divide, and then the have-nots are always struggling to catch up, whether it’s from the infrastructure or the technology,” he says. “It is getting better, but at the same time it’s kind of racing away.”
The resulting skills gap could be what’s reflected in recent research by a group of academics and Microsoft staffers that measures how 40 million Microsoft Windows users engage with different types of programs online. Besides seeing a rural-urban divide, the study finds wealthier and more educated zip codes using complex programs to a greater extent than others.
The pattern even seems to hold up between zip codes within the same metro areas, according to Raffaella Sadun, Charles Edward Wilson professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and a study co-author, who cites contrasts on the study’s color-coded maps.
“One (neighboring area) is super dark blue (and) the other one is very light blue, meaning one is super-intensive and the other isn’t, and this is kind of intriguing,” she says. “These differences are tightly related to differences in income and education across zip codes. And so that is telling you that these differences come from socioeconomic characteristics.”
Incidentally, Sadun’s prior research suggested to her what she believes is another aspect of the digital divide: work. Some employers, she noted, give employees freer reign with technology and tech training, while some limit access and use on the job, perhaps dampening both productivity and the ability of employees to advance their digital skills.
Bridging the Digital Divide: A Key to U.S. Competitiveness?
So as the goal posts move and less-advantaged areas struggle to keep up, can the divide ever be closed?
Turner Lee believes it can, and suggests framing the quest for a solution as a competitive issue for America, with all elements of society engaged and empowered, rather than merely as a social program to help have-nots.
“It’s really about: How does this factor into the larger competitive goals of the nation?” she says. “Do we want a populace that has access to technology where they can become more producers, versus subjects of the technology? … When we look at advanced-capability technologies like AI, there are certain populations that have the ability to leverage the technology simply because of their resources.
“We have to do more to make closing the digital divide part of the national conscience of this country as everything migrates from inline to online,” she adds. “The digital divide can be solved provided the country prioritizes universal access to communications as one of the core pillars for how we operate.”
