T-Mobile plans to provide free internet to 10 million households in the U.S. The idea, called Project 10Million, is to get low-income children online so they can continue learning during the lockdown.
T-Mobile customer shares frustration over 'free' offer
Qualifying households will receive a free hotspot and 100GB of data per year for five years. T-Mobile’s CEO announced the program in November, long before the COVID-19 shutdown. There’s still a huge digital divide in the U.S., and the pandemic has only made the disparity more apparent. For children and workers, internet access is almost as essential as electricity.
“Based on our summer school with refugee and asylum-seeking youth, we know that it’s a combination of an adequate computer and connectivity that’s needed,” Janet Gunter, co-founder of The Restart Project, told Lifewire via email. “And many lower-income households still only have cell phones.”
It’s 2020, and broadband internet in the U.S. is far from equal. One kind of digital divide is the rural-urban divide, with more than a quarter of rural residents still lacking a fixed broadband connection, according to these 2017 numbers from the FCC. The other kind is the one where nonwhite households in cities lack internet access, even though the cable is in place.
