Digital Redlining and Its Enduring Impact on Communities

When Wendyliz Martinez traveled from Pennsylvania to the Bronx to stay with her mom during the pandemic, she was looking for a way to balance childcare with her online graduate studies at Penn State. Instead, she found that she was often interrupted by glitches during Zoom meetings, stuck refreshing the same websites and crowded into a corner of her mom's one-bedroom apartment in the hope of getting a stronger Wi-Fi signal. Martinez could've chalked up her mom’s spotty cable internet to a number of issues: a faulty router, the Wi-Fi setup or a slow speed tier, perhaps. But she suspected something else after her mom switched to a new router, only to find the speeds still lagging. Locating local internet providers If old equipment wasn't to blame and Martinez's mom was getting the fastest speeds she could afford in an area without other internet provider options, were other households in the neighborhood experiencing the same thing? Martinez decided to turn that question into a resea ... Read full article.