Aug. 2, 2023 8:20a
(WGTD)---High-speed and reliable internet is taken for granted by many of us who live and work in urban areas, but it’s a problem for many folks in rural parts of the WGTD listening area.
Vice-President Kamala Harris is expected to highlight the problem in her appearance Thursday in Pleasant Prairie.
The Biden administration announced recently that Wisconsin will receive more than $1 billion in federal money to help internet providers reach those hard-to-service areas.
John Holloway chairs Kenosha County’s broadband committee which is in the process of mapping areas that are in need. He says the committee has already collected a lot of anecdotal information from people who are unable to work from home or even use a phone app to contact family members who live out of the country. Poor connectivity also makes in hard to run a business.
The solution, he says, will be using public money to supplement private dollars.
The committee is studying the problem with the help of data from the state Public Service Commission, and from the responses of county residents who’ve taken a ‘speed’ test to measure just how fast service is where they live and work.
The speed test app is available on the county’s website. “The speed test is really one of the more valuable modeling tools that the county has, and we would appreciate people continuing to take it as well because the more data points we have the more useful it is,” Holloway said.
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