America has two half-connected segments and a third that is not connected at all, and the policy conversation gets all three wrong. The two half-connected segments are mirror images, each on a single network: the household with a phone and no home internet, 14.8 million strong at 11.5% of the country in the 2024 American Community Survey five-year estimates, and its mirror, the household with home broadband and no cell phone, three to six million adults the industry does not track. The third segment is connected to nothing, 11.5 million households, 8.9%, with no internet subscription of any kind, and most of them are offline by choice. The dominant reason they give is not price and not availability; it is that they do not want the internet, and that answer has grown through every subsidy era. Much of the disconnection in this country is a decision, not a deprivation, and a free society owes that decision the respect of its dignity, not a conversion campaign. The two half-connected segments fail the policy frame differently: it prices the connection and forgets the endpoint. Lifeline and the programs after it hand a low-income household a working phone with the service included; no program of any size hands that household a computer. A home with no computer gets nothing from a wired connection the phone in its pocket does not already deliver. Call it the missing screen.
The screen is where the adoption story actually turns. In the 2024 estimates, 12.2 million households own a smartphone and no other computing device, and 5.8 million own no computing device at all: 18.1 million households, 14.0% of the country, whose largest screen is a phone. The long arc that looks like a triumph, no-subscription households falling from 25.3 million in 2017 to 11.5 million in 2024, was closed largely by the phone, not the wire. Cellular-data-only subscriptions rose from 8.9 million to 14.8 million over the same span, so more than 40% of the headline gain was a phone plan. Households with no computing device at all fell from 15.2 million to 5.8 million while smartphone-only-device households climbed from 4.7 million to 12.2 million. America’s poorest households did not buy computers. The phone became the computer, and every statistic that counts a cellular plan as a connected household ratified the substitution.
The households living this way are not the deprived customers the policy frame imagines. In the Recon Analytics Pulse over the trailing twelve months, from June 19, 2025 to June 19, 2026, smartphone-only customers rate their wireless provider at +24.4 cNPS, about seven points above the +17.3 that households with home internet give their carriers. They are more satisfied with their one network than two-network households are with either of theirs. They skew poor, 80% under $50,000 in household income and 55% under $25,000, and prepaid, 28% against 18% for dual-service households, and value brands led by Straight Talk, Cricket, and Metro by T-Mobile hold roughly 40% of the segment. A pitch built on what they are missing bounces off people who do not feel they are missing anything.
The no-internet-at-home segment is the poorest of the three, and its +11.5 cNPS, though below the smartphone-only score, is still solidly positive. Its income tells the policy story: 37.5% report household income under $10,000, against 26.7% of the smartphone-only group and 10.1% of dual-service households; 63% sit under $25,000 and 87% under $50,000. This is Lifeline’s customer base, the household for whom the marginal dollar competes with groceries. And yet affordability no longer explains why they stay offline. The NTIA’s offline households name “don’t need it, not interested” as their main reason 55.7% of the time, up for a decade, while “too expensive” fell from 18.8% in November 2019 to 15.4% in November 2023 and “not available” sits at 2.8%. Through the entire ACP era, the largest connectivity subsidy in American history, the don’t-need share rose and the too-expensive share fell. Price is not the residual barrier. The cleanest refuser is the older household, two-thirds of offline seniors give the don’t-need answer, that ran a full life without a computer and sees no reason to buy one now. A connectivity policy that cannot accept that answer is a conversion campaign, and the honest public metric is universal offer, not universal adoption.
For carriers, the prize is not the refuser. It is the device-blocked household and the second network it will eventually add, and one variable decides which brand gets it. Cross a smartphone-only customer’s current mobile brand against the home internet brand they would choose, and the brand on the bill, not the network underneath, predicts the answer. Metro customers stay in the T-Mobile family 56% of the time, T-Mobile customers 50%, Verizon 47%, AT&T 44%, Straight Talk 35%. The control case proves it: Cricket is owned by AT&T and runs on AT&T’s network, but the bill says Cricket, and only 16% of Cricket’s smartphone-only customers pick an AT&T-family home product. They scatter to cable. The network transfers nothing; the brand on the bill transfers almost half. Call it one-bill gravity, the cheapest customer-acquisition channel in telecom, where the relationship already exists and only the second product is missing. The carriers are now packaging it: Verizon One bundles a line with home internet at $70 a month, and AT&T OneConnect hard-bundles fiber and wireless from $90, both selling the second product into an existing bill.
Wireless is taking share among exactly these households. Among those earning under $50,000, 9.0% named a wireless connection, fixed or prepaid, as their home internet provider over the trailing twelve months, and 10.8% in the most recent quarter, a gain of about 0.8 points a quarter. Halve that slope to respect fixed wireless capacity limits and state low-income mandates, and the share still clears 12% by the end of 2027. The affinity points there too: forced to choose, 46% of smartphone-only households name a fixed-wireless or prepaid-wireless product, and Starlink’s 5% pushes wireless past half, against 21% for cable and 12% for fiber. T-Mobile and Metro hold the largest prize, 300,000 to 600,000 conversions worth $110 to $320 million in annualized service revenue at the entry tiers these households actually pay. Two things would break it: a fixed wireless capacity wall in the urban, lower-income ZIP codes where the segment lives, since spare capacity concentrates in rural markets; and cable pricing its entry tiers below the floor wireless can match, the dynamic that let cable win the subsidized ACP-era conversions four to one over T-Mobile’s own products. The wildcard above both is policy: a device benefit, an ACP successor that funds the screen rather than the connection, would attack the missing screen head-on and hand the segment to whoever bundles the computer with the wire.
The mirror segment runs on the same physics. The adult with home broadband and no phone is overwhelmingly a senior who pays her own bill: 84% of phoneless respondents over 60 pay the household internet bill, against 71% of phoneless 18-to-29-year-olds who do not, household members who will get a phone at household formation regardless. The senior is the buyer, she rates her aging cable or DSL line at -1.1 cNPS, and cable already bills 59% of these households. Cable owns the right first-line product in by-the-gig mobile, attachable with no new relationship and no second bill, and Consumer Cellular just sharpened the senior pitch with SpeakEasy, a brand for adults 75 and older selling a flip phone from $14.95 a month and a smartphone from $19.95, device included. It is the whole thesis in miniature: the first-line sale is won by whoever shows up with a working phone, not a SIM card and a setup guide. The segment is small, 200,000 to 500,000 lines worth $35 to $180 million a year, but for cable it is found money inside accounts already served.
The through-line is simple. The country did not close the digital divide so much as paper over it with a five-inch screen, and the policy and competitive playbooks both still aim at the connection when the constraint is the endpoint and the relationship. Subsidize the computer, not just the connection, and respect the dignity of the household that has weighed the offer and said no. Sell the second wire through the brand already on the bill, not the network under it. The half-connected are not waiting to be rescued. They are waiting to be sold the right thing, by the company they already pay.
Based on the Recon Analytics Pulse, both survey populations, July 2022 through June 19, 2026, roughly 1.84 million unweighted responses; the trailing-twelve-month window runs June 19, 2025 to June 19, 2026 (smartphone-only n=18,751; no internet at home n=8,786; no mobile service n=3,168). Population sizing from US Census Bureau ACS five-year table S2801, 2017 and 2024 releases; non-use reasons from the NTIA Internet Use Survey, November 2023; telephone status from the CDC NHIS, second half of 2024. cNPS is promoters minus detractors per Recon Analytics’ standard. Forced-choice responses measure affinity, not realized conversion.