Ashley Leal parks in front of the Plains, Kansas, Community Library. It’s about to close, but she doesn’t care. She pulls out her blue laptop.
“I’m … using the Wi-Fi,” Leal says with a laugh.
Her home internet was so slow, she came to the library parking lot. Cars often idle there in the evening while their drivers tap into a plodding, but treasured, link to the internet.
“I’m just thankful that we have somewhere to go,” Leal says.
It’s the only free internet in this small western Kansas town. For many people, it’s the only internet, period. Surprisingly, part of the problem and the solution, for rural areas may lie in Netflix traffic.
The more remote you are, the more critical the connection to the rest of the world. But the Federal Communications Commission says while 10 percent of Americans had no access to broadband in 2016, that number was nearly 40 percent in rural areas.