Which cities are the country?s worst-connected?

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA), a collection of non-profit organizations and public libraries that work to reduce digital disparities, released rankings for the 25 cities with the most households without Internet access, calling them the “worst-connected U.S. cities.” NDIA’s two rankings – one for all households in the United States and one for households with annual incomes below $35,000 – rely on data from the 2014 American Community Survey released last Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau. Here are the two rankings.

Top 25 Worst Connected Cities in 2014:

Top 25 Worst Connected Cities for Poor Households in 2014:

In a release announcing the rankings, NDIA Director Angel Siefer highlighted the many benefits of Internet connectivity – economic, educational, civil, and health – and reiterated that poverty is a significant barrier to Internet adoption:  

We draw attention to the worst-connected cities to help those cities attract the resources necessary to improve broadband access and use. Such high percentages of non-connected households impacts the whole community. Local government, schools, libraries, hospitals, businesses and social service organization all incur higher costs to reach community members who are not online. We point out the starkly reduced connectivity levels of our poorest neighbors in order to clarify the fact that poverty is a factor we cannot ignore in our work to reduce the digital divide.

Worst-Connected U.S. Cities in 2014 (NDIA, Sept. 21, 2015)