In the past twenty years, population density has favored the building of Internet infrastructure in urban areas, but there has been little economic incentive to do so in many rural parts of the country. It’s a void that the COVID-19 lockdown has laid bare, with so many Americans working from home, attending school using Zoom, relying on telehealth, registering for vaccination online, and, in many cases, saying a final goodbye to a loved one on a screen. Among the enduring images of the pandemic are pictures of children without broadband at home, logging on to remote classrooms from the parking lots of fast-food restaurants or the steps of shuttered elementary schools.

Part of the problem is the absence of reliable data on how many Americans lack high-speed Internet.