Common Sense Media is urging Congress to use the next round of coronavirus relief legislation to make sure all US students can connect to the internet. The campaign, dubbed "Connect All Students," comes as a poll from the group and SurveyMonkey finds that teens are worried they'll fall behind in school due to the pandemic. More than half of students whose in-person classes have been canceled worried about not being able to keep up with schoolwork and extracurricular activities.

In addition to the increase in traffic, sheltering in place strains the internet in two more ways. First, last-mile connections—the ones that run from local exchanges or data centers to your home—are typically the weakest links in a network. Many run over outdated cables. When broadband was rolled out in the US, for example, it often piggybacked on cables originally installed for TV. These cables were designed to pipe data into a home and not out of it, which is why uploading video from a home internet connection can be flaky.

A coalition of more than 45 organizations and scholars has called on Congress to include vital funding for local news in the next coronavirus stimulus package. Free Press Action, PEN America, Common Cause,  and other organizations urged the House and Senate leadership to consider local press an “essential service” vital to the nation’s health, prosperity, and recovery. The organizations ask Congress to allocate at least $5 billion to support local journalism in the next stimulus package.

Your cable is out and you want the technician to arrive and help you? That might not be possible right now. Due to the coronavirus and social distancing directives, cable firms will still send out a technician as a last resort, but they might not enter your home. Cox Cable, which serves 19 states across the US, has stopped sending people for in-home visits, and instead has begun doing smartphone video conferences with customers, sometimes even from the truck outside their home, to troubleshoot. Verizon has also stopped routinely sending technicians to the home.

As digital equity work becomes a new priority for decision-makers in both the public and private sectors, several state governments have already put quite a bit of work into bridging the digital divide, primarily by working to foster better broadband access. What Pew Charitable Trust researchers have found is that there’s no magic bullet — no incentive, regulation, law or partnership — that by itself can fix the digital divide. There are, of course, actions that can be taken at all levels of government to support the work.

Verizon is one of numerous home-Internet providers offering temporarily free service to low-income households during the pandemic. But a big restriction on Verizon's offer makes it impossible for many people to get the deal. Verizon on March 23 said it would provide two months of free home-Internet and phone service for current low-income subscribers in the Lifeline program and $20 monthly discounts for new low-income subscribers. The $20 discount lowers the starting price for 200Mbps Internet to $19.99 a month.

Verizon is canceling many home-Internet installations and repairs during the pandemic, and some customers are being given appointment dates in Nov when they try to schedule an installation. The Nov appointment dates appear to be placeholders that will eventually be replaced by earlier dates. But Verizon is sending mixed messages to customers about when appointments will actually happen and about whether technicians are allowed to enter their homes.

In the United States prior to coronavirus, total home internet traffic averaged about 15% on weekdays. But it started growing in mid March, and by late March it had reached about 35%, clearly connected to all the working and learning from home due to stay-at-home orders. This doubling of work-from-home traffic mirrors the events in China. But it’s too soon to tell if home traffic in the United States will increase permanently even after the crisis has passed. “The data suggests remote working will remain elevated in the U.S. for a prolonged period of time,” wrote analysts at Cowen.

Telehealth can play a vital role in keeping more Americans healthy and easing the stress on the capacity-strained health care system.

One small silver lining in the Covid-19 virulent cloud: an unsponsored and truly unbiased empirical test whether wireless broadband networks offer a direct competitive alternative to wired broadband.  The answer is clear: No.  Not even close. Despite all the happy talk and sponsored researcher advocacy, broadband consumers understand the financial incentive to use Wi-Fi access to wired broadband wherever available. When homebound consumers have access to wireless broadband access via their smartphones and wired broadband access via personal computers and Wi-Fi, they opt for the latte