The Birth of the Digital Divide
I define the digital divide as a technology gap where good broadband is available in some places, but not everywhere. The technology divide can be as large as an entire county that doesn’t have broadband or as small as a pocket of homes or apartment buildings in cities that got bypassed. Until late in the 1990s, the only way for most people to get onto the Internet was by the use of dial-up access through phone lines. At first, dial-up technology was only available to people who lived in places where an ISP had established local dial-up telephone numbers.