Wisconsin's Broadband Issue

Hurley, Wisconsin

 

Hurley is a city in northern Wisconsin adjacent to Michigan and isn’t merely rural, it's “rural remote,” according to resident Neil Klemme, who is also the Hurley 4-H Youth Development Director.

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“It’s a two-hour drive for school shopping every year,” he said. “I see more bald eagles on my drive to work than I see cars on most days.”

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A high-quality internet connection is a dream in an area like this, even for those who could afford it. Growing internet usage due to the coronavirus pandemic is exposing the lack of network technology in rural areas.

 

This leaves students and teachers to navigate persistent connection problems in a time of online education.

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Piper Symons and Mackenzie Backman are seniors at Hurley High School and work with Klemme through the 4-H youth organization. They deal with slow, sometimes nonexistent, internet service in Hurley, population of 1,438.

 

In a time when online schooling is pushing the limits of home internet service, living in a rural area exacerbates the effort to digitally participate in class.

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Symons lives in downtown Hurley and considers herself “one of the lucky few,” due to having a relatively better internet connection compared to other residents. The pandemic has forced families everywhere to simultaneously conduct their work and school in the same household.

 

Symons’ situation is no different.

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“If my siblings are home and they’re streaming, it’ll cut out,” she said. “When they were trying to do their zooms and I was trying to do mine, we had to choose who could be on.”

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Gaining an education online can be difficult even with quality internet access due to the lack of human connection. Poor internet connection can make virtual learning unfeasible at times.

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“I am a hands-on learner and have different types of disabilities,” said Backman. “It makes it harder for me to learn online. A teacher can’t come up and physically help me and tell me what I’m doing wrong.”

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Hurley's primary internet provider, Viasat, said it was always working to enhance customer experience when called for comment.

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Network connection issues also plague rural teachers and youth leaders. They have been forced to considerably adjust their curriculum, and they sometimes just leave things out.

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“4-H is a very hands-on program, so it’s been challenging to teach kids about how to handle animals or how to cook. It just doesn’t work always.”

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Wittenberg, Wisconsin

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Wittenberg-Birnamwood High School English teacher Joanna Fradrich can relate to these challenges of online learning in a rural environment.

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“My kids have had trouble too getting stuff to me,” she said. “There would be times when I would set up a google meet with a student then 30 seconds after we get on it would get glitchy and wouldn’t work.”

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Fradrich sometimes receives texts from her students saying they can’t do their assignment due to poor Wi-Fi. It is decent, but not always reliable. It comes from a phone company in town. Her students will sometimes have to go to the library and sit outside of it in their car to do homework.

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Fradrich remarked that her students miss being in class with their peers and learning about each other.

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“Even though this is a really small community and the kids have been in classes together since kindergarten, there is still stuff they don’t know about each other,” she said.

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In her 20th year at the high school, Fradrich and her colleagues must figure out their own ways of adjusting the course material to be compatible with an online environment.

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Fradrich describes her home internet connection as decent, but from time to time she’ll “come home and turn on Netflix and it won’t work and the whole town will be down.”

 

The stress on the town’s internet connection caused by increased time spent at home forces Fradrich to develop workarounds for her online classes.

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Normally it takes three or four minutes to upload a five-to-seven-minute video to her Chromebook and then post it; however, there were a lot of times during the pandemic when it would not download all day, she said. “Then I’d have to wake up at 2 a.m. and do it when hopefully nobody was using the internet in town.”