With online education becoming the norm due to the pandemic there is a growing debate about inequality that is brought about by access to reliable, affordable internet connectivity. At the same time, many countries in the developing world are seeing a huge increase in people connecting to the internet, many of them for the first time. With prices of internet becoming affordable in many parts of the developing world, more and more services are being offered online.

If the number of subscriptions in 2019 were any indicator of the growth, the pandemic has only accelerated the subscriptions. More and more of our daily activities like education, work, essential services like shopping groceries, etc. all have come to rely on internet connectivity. The mobile phone, being the most affordable computer in many parts of the world today, with an internet connectivity dictates whether you can participate in these activities or not.

While growing internet connectivity is certainly good news, let us see how affordable they are across the globe. The cost of internet in most parts of the developing world is much less than in the west. However, the quality of internet is not as good as in the west. The visualization below shows the cost of internet (in USD) in different parts of the world as well as the mean download speed. We can see that the mean download speed is relatively poor in many parts of the world. Crucially several activities like education, work, etc. require not just a connectivity but a good one.

Even when the pandemic ceases to exist, many important everyday activities, commerce and essential services would require internet connectivity. With AI based upscaling technologies, we can hope that many of the educational material could be delivered even with a poor connectivity without reducing the effectiveness of the medium of delivery. In parallel, technologies like low orbit constellation of satellites delivering internet, like the ones being planned by Starlink and OneWeb should see its deployment fast enough in order to rebalance the loss created by internet inequality.