The Digital Divide
In this day and age, the digital divide can be detrimental to those without access to high-speed internet or any devices. With how necessary the internet is in the modern age for things as important as jobs and school, not having a computer, phone, or access to the internet can make it extremely difficult to maintain a job or do well in school. Putting public WiFi in places like libraries and giving students access to laptops and tablets is helpful, but the problem of not having access to these at home still remains.
I think one of the only ways to close the digital divide, or to at least make it better, is for WiFi and digital devices to become cheaper, which they have been over the years as technologies improve. Now, even the slower speeds of the internet that are on the relatively cheaper side are much faster than the top-of-the-line Wi-Fi in previous years. The only issue with this is that it seems that as technologies improve, software also gets more intensive and requires better hardware, but with how efficient Google and Microsoft suites are, I believe that these will not become much more intensive, which means that I believe that the lowest-end devices and WiFi will be able to do the bare minimum of things like sending emails, typing up papers, and other important, simple tasks. I know already that most bottom-line devices can already do this, but I believe they will continue to get cheaper over time.
This only leaves the price point for WiFi and a mobile line, which I think can only be helped if the behemoths in this class are knocked down a bit, such as Xfinity or Spectrum. Luckily, smaller companies in California were given a grant by the government to improve their services and prices in an attempt to allow more companies to enter the WiFi space, so the best-case scenario would be this working out, as well as other states adopting the same idea and making wifi overall much more affordable. With both of these things going right, I think the digital divide could be closed, or at least shrunk down by a bit.
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