Efforts mount to increase digital access in Louisiana’s underserved communities
10th June 2024 · 0 Comments
By Mason Harrison
Contributing Writer
Louisiana, boosted by millions in federal funds, is in a race to close the state’s digital divide by the end of 2028, grappling with a hodgepodge of state, local and private sector efforts to beef up cyber adoption in rural and urban areas among residents for whom cost and infrastructure may be barriers to entry.
The push comes as the state is the first in the nation to receive a cash injection under the recently enacted bipartisan infrastructure deal totaling nearly $1.4 billion dollars to expand high-speed Internet access. “Our plan is to allocate these dollars by the end of the year and to complete all projects by 2028,” said Baton Rouge native Veneeth Iyengar, executive director of the state’s broadband and connectivity office.
Extending the availability of high-speed Internet to underserved corners of the state, Iyengar said, will bolster telehealth communication in rural areas, support business creation in urban enclaves and meet Gov. Jeff Landry’s goal of reaching the final 40 percent of homes in Louisiana that lack regular Web access.
Louisiana plans to use a mix of fiber optic cable, orbiting satellites and fixed wireless technology to reach its five-year timeframe to nullify the digital divide in keeping with the federal schedule for doing so. Yet merely closing the digital divide does little to address Louisiana’s persistent device gap, a scenario in which residents may have access to high-speed Internet, but not devices with which to utilize online access.
Locally, 200 students, thanks to AT&T and the Zulu Community Service Foundation, were gifted with refurbished laptops on May 9 as part of the telecom giant’s annual AT&T Connected Learning initiative, a device giveaway for low-income pupils, which come equipped with a hardware warranty, tech support and tools for increasing digital literacy.
“Equipping students with devices is a strategic step toward a more connected and informed society,” said Jamar McKneely, a local educator and president of the newly formed Zulu Foundation. “By leveling the playing field, we empower students with the tools they need to thrive and open pathways to success.”
Louisiana ranks 46th in the country in access to, speed and availability of the Internet, according to a broadband industry trade association, while nearly 16 percent of families in the state have no regular access to the Web and a staggering one in three rural Black residents across the South is not regularly online.
“AT&T is proud to collaborate with organizations like Compudopt to help close the digital equity gap in Louisiana,” said Eric Jones, the company’s regional external affairs director, referring to the Texas-based nonprofit that procures the second-hand devices given to students. “Access to connectivity is vital in helping to bridge the digital divide and we are glad we can provide resources to those that need them most.”
City Councilman J.P. Morrell celebrated the giveaway as an “investment in education” for students in New Orleans for whom “technology should never be a barrier to education,” while noting that “swaths of the city [have] no prevalent broadband…[service]” something that is “even worse for Black students.”
Experts have long described the gap between Black and white rates of Internet adoption as a digital dividing line, a disparity that negatively affects a range of outcomes, including career opportunities and, most recently, school attendance at the height of the coronavirus pandemic when classes were moved online.
Louisiana, however, under the Landry administration will take a decidedly race-neutral approach to closing the digital divide versus employing potentially equity-based solutions to the problem. “No matter where you are, we will get to you,” Iyengar said, noting that the state will not set a demographic priority.
In 2022, AT&T announced plans to expand its fiber optic network in the Woodlawn area of Shreveport, a low-income, historically Black community and the home of then-Shreveport Mayor Adrian Perkins, who made turning Shreveport into a city for the 21st Century, a pillar of his 2018 campaign for mayor.
“This issue is important because digitally connected cities are more resilient cities,” Perkins said. “It gives more opportunities to businesses and residents to thrive in an increasingly competitive global economy.” Perkins’ administration used device-enabled garbage trucks to map the city’s level of Web access and then employed the library’s wireless Internet to fill coverage gaps by creating a municipal network, benefiting low-income residents. “Anyone with a library card could access the network,” Perkins said.
“We were well on our way to closing the digital divide when I left office,” said Perkins, whose bid for a second term was interrupted by Republican Tom Arceneaux. “Had I been given the opportunity for a second term, we would definitely have closed the digital divide on my watch.” Perkins planned to renegotiate the rates telecom firms pay to access public rights of way. “Those fees are incredibly low and firms lobby to keep them that way, but raising the rates would have given us the funding to close the divide.”
A spokesperson for Arceneaux did not respond to a request for comment about whether the city plans to continue the efforts of the Perkins administration or launch its own project to address digital equity.
In 2021, the Louisiana arm of the Urban Land Institute drafted a plan to bring high-speed Internet to businesses along Plank Road in Baton Rouge, an historic thoroughfare constructed by enslaved Africans in 1850.
“The biggest takeaway from the report is that underserved areas really need a strong advocate who can make demands on behalf of their community,” said a member of the technical assistance panel that helped craft the report, speaking on the basis of anonymity, about digital access issues across the state. “We did not get a sense that these residents had a strong advocate, which is needed to close the digital divide.”
Corporations like AT&T have been at the forefront of resisting efforts that would meaningfully close the digital divide in areas across the United States. In 2015, the company leaned on legislators in Tennessee to forgo a plan to allow towns and cities to expand their low-cost municipal broadband offerings, arguing, in a letter to lawmakers, that “[g]overnment should not compete against the private sector.”
In April, the company threatened litigation to stop various state-level efforts to cap prices for home Internet service for low-income customers as part of the federal infrastructure law and lobbied state legislatures in several states in the Deep South to prevent the low-income relief plan from taking effect.
New Orleans is among Louisiana’s most digitally divided cities, according to research from the New Orleans Public Library. In Algiers alone, more than 80 percent of homes in some areas have neither a desktop nor laptop computer, and 79 percent of residents in some ZIP codes have no access to the Web entirely.
Last March, New Orleans received a grant from the Federal Communications Commission for more than $300,000 to fund Web access for low-income residents enrolled in the federal Affordable Connectivity Program, which covers the cost of broadband access by footing the bill for reduced-price home Internet plans set as low as $30 per month. AT&T and local service provider Cox Communications are participants in the program, which will maintain the allotted subsidies as long as federal program funds exist.
Louisiana law requires cities to hold a referendum on whether to create municipal broadband services and New Orleans’ own attempt to provide citywide Internet access failed to boot up in 2022 after Mayor LaToya Cantrell’s plan to turn a famously luddite locale into a smart city collapsed under bid-rigging claims.
Smart cities are urban areas designed to improve service provision through better data collection, necessitating wide-scale Internet adoption among residents by building out Web infrastructure and closing the device gap, particularly among students who will become the next generation to request municipal services and whose increased academic performance through better Web access will benefit their hometowns.
Yet, in 2021, an opinion-editorial in Technology Review, a publication of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, criticized the perennial praise around student laptop giveaways as “missing…the social component of learning,” which “has always been…important” and ideally “includes a stable home environment without housing or food insecurity, a safe community with good infrastructure; and caring, skilled, well-resourced teachers.”
Still, a 2016 study from the University of Michigan noted that increased laptop adoption by students showed “generally positive” academic results, but did not offer “a ringing endorsement” of attempts to improve classroom performance by handing out devices as the sole mechanism to better engage certain pupils.
In 2013, similar data from the National Poverty Center found “no effects on any educational outcomes, including grades, standardized tests, credits earned, attendance or disciplinary actions” for low-income students who were given home computers and that there was “no change in homework time” for these students, ruling out, according to the group’s white paper, “even modestly-sized positive or negative impacts.”
A spokesperson for Mayor Cantrell did not respond to a request for comment about whether the city plans to resurrect the smart city initiative or how the city plans to deploy the newly available federal funding.
This article originally published in the June 10, 2024 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
