As the threat to Net Neutrality looms, the important role the Internet plays in the day-to-day lives of Americans has been front and center. Its reality that is hard to ignore; United Nations agency the International Telecommunication Union says 75 percent of Americans in 2016 had access to the Internet. It’s common to assume that people in rural areas are most often left behind, but there are also people in urban areas—like Detroit—that have a significant population without Internet access.
VICE’S Motherboard reports that a whopping 40 percent of Detroit residents don't have Internet access. Fortunately, there’s a grassroots initiative working to bring the World Wide Web to the underserved.
“When you kind of think about all the ways the internet affects your life and how 40 percent of people in Detroit don’t have that access you can start to see how Detroit has been stuck in this economic disparity for such a long time,” Diana Nucera, director of the Detroit Community Technology Project, told me at her office.
Nucera is part of a growing cohort of Detroiters who have started a grassroots movement to close that gap, by building the internet themselves. It’s a coalition of community members and multiple Detroit nonprofits. They’re starting with three underserved neighborhoods, installing high speed internet that beams shared gigabit connections from an antenna on top of the tallest building on the street, and into the homes of people who have long gone without. They call it the Equitable Internet Initiative.
The Equitable Internet Initiative is going to assist needy folks who have been slighted by giant telecommunications companies like Comcast and Verizon.
Because of Detroit’s economic woes, many Big Telecom companies haven’t thought it worthwhile to invest in expanding their network to these communities, Nucera told me. The city is filled with dark fiber optic cable that’s not connected to any homes or businesses—relics from more optimistic days.
They prioritize folks who are normally priced out of Internet access, which is particularly timely considering that the FCC recently voted to kick off a majority of the low-income households using Lifeline, the federal program that provides affordable Internet.
This is just another example of communities taking Internet access into their own hands. A few weeks ago, a Colorado town voted to build its own broadband network.
To learn more about the project’s work, check out the video by Vice below: