In our spotlight on Business Report, seeing access to the Internet as a basic necessity, not a luxury.

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka recently announced high speed Internet service has been installed in 12 Newark Housing Authority buildings, giving some 1600 families living in public housing access to the connectivity, which is often pointed to as a barrier preventing low income households from getting ahead in school or securing higher paying work.

Raven Santana has the story.

While some may take for granted that they have access to high speed Internet service, nearly one in five new work households still do not have an Internet subscription at home.

And Newark Mayor Ras Baraka says that's a result of residents not being able to afford it.

The reality is, if you can't afford the Internet in your city, then you might as well not have it anyway because it's it's close to you.

You just can't touch it, right?

You can't use it because it's not cost effective for your family to pay the rent, to put food on the table and pay $180 or $80 or $200 for the Internet.

Today, that reality has changed.

After the city announced that high speed Internet service has been installed in at least 12 Newark housing Authority buildings as part of the city's new partnership between Newark Fiber and Telecom provider and Arena.

We did it in the places we thought was needed.

We did it our rec centers around it so kids could be able to distance learning.

They could come there and learn.

We did it in our parks and then we did the housing authority build.

And then from there we'll be able to move on to the rest of the city.

Andrew now offers residential users access to a high speed Internet service for just $20 a month per month, saving families nearly $700 a year.

We study this citywide is about $75 a month for your home Internet package.

And so this really is a tremendous savings.

And we started it with the partnership with the Newark Housing Authority.

We had to go out and find people actually to do the work.

So we solicited bids.

We went with a group called Andrena is doing a fantastic job.

We have local people helping us get people trained as well.

South Ward Councilman Patrick Council says the new affordable access to wifi has eliminated barriers for both the younger and older generations.

Oh, this is a game changer.

One, because when we were at the height of COVID, you know, our children were stuck in a house.

Many of them had no access to broadband Internet.

We noticed that the digital divide was not just hurting our young people, but it was hurting our seniors.

They didn't have access to telehealth.

They didn't have access to family members to have conversation and to be able to reach out to people who loved them and cared about them.

Aron Meyerson of Invest Newark says despite the Internet service being available for all 600 units since the launch, only about 150 households have signed up.

Meyerson now hopes that changes with today's announcement promotion on social media and word of mouth.

For NJ Spotlight News, I'm Raven Santana.