No Cell Signal, No Wi-Fi, No Problem. Growing Up Inside America’s ‘Quiet Zone’

Viral dance memes and dance challenges on TikTok largely bypass Green Bank, W.Va. So do viral sensations like augmented reality filters on Snapchat and Instagram.

And when a Facebook fad had people all over the globe dumping ice water on their heads a few summers ago, Charity Warder, now a senior at Pocahontas County High School, was late to the game.

Sure, Charity has an iPhone, but she uses it mostly as a clock and a calculator. She makes phone calls from a land line, and she rarely texts her friends. Texting and driving? “It’s not a thing here,” she said.

When Charity wants to get online at home, she sits at her family’s desktop computer, which has a broadband connection that is so sluggish, it takes minutes to load a YouTube video.

“We fight over the computer,” said Charity, 18. “That’s actually a thing here.”

“People come to our gym to play and they walk around with their phones looking for Wi-Fi and we’re like, there’s none of that, so live like the rest of us.”

Welcome to Green Bank, population 143, where Wi-Fi is both unavailable and banned and where cellphone signals are non-existent.

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