ATLANTA — Robert Carr waited anxiously Thursday as he tried to load the Weather Channel’s latest online report on the movements of Hurricane Matthew.

It proved a futile effort. Carr, whose daughter and mother live in Florida, watched as the video buffered endlessly on the screen.

The retired Lutheran pastor said he relies on a hotspot for his internet service, which crawls at 1.3 megabits per second. That’s fast enough for email, mobile banking and light web browsing.

The Federal Communications Commission defines broadband internet as at least 25 megabits per second.

Carr’s experience represents how fraught broadband access can be in Georgia and how poor coverage isn’t just a problem reserved for the rural corners of the state.

Carr lives in Valdosta, home to about 56,000 souls. His nearly decade-old subdivision, Knights Mill, is within the northern edge of the city limits. It’s near Moody Air Force Base, making the homes an attractive option for service members.

Carr and his wife moved down two months ago from Detroit, where he had AT&T’s ultra-fast broadband service.

“I come here and find it’s sort of a technological desert,” he said, adding that the last couple months have been a “very difficult adjustment.”

The dearth of broadband infrastructure affects the qualify of life, Valdosta’s city manager recently told lawmakers studying ways to protect the state’s military installations from the next potential round of closures.

“That’s an impact to families, not having good broadband coverage,” Larry Hanson said at the time.

Hanson said the city is trying to work with providers to increase coverage, but it needs help from the state.

A group of legislators say they are trying to find remedies for these coverage gaps, by enticing providers into underserved areas and ensuring that companies provide service as advertised.

As part of that effort, lawmakers are asking the state’s residents to participate in a survey about their broadband experiences.

That survey, which also includes an internet speed test, can be found at broadband.georgia.gov.

Carr is among nearly the 5,200 people who have already taken the survey, but he said he has little hope that lawmakers will be able to boost his internet.

He currently pays $140 a month for his mobile hotspot, which grants him 20 gigabytes of data a month.

Another Knights Mill resident, Chelsea Boda, said she spends about $71 for speeds up to 12 megabits per second through Exede’s satellite service.

But that’s only for the first 10 megabytes of monthly use. After that, her speeds are throttled to 5 megabits per second or less.

Boda said her family avoids watching video to ration their allotment of data.

For comparison, nearby Valdosta residents serviced by Mediacom can pay about $80 and enjoy 100 megabits per second of speed and nearly 1,000 gigabytes of data per month.

“It’s just absurd,” Boda said. “In an age when internet is just a household factor, we essentially have no access to it at all.”

A handful of residents in Knights Mill have AT&T service, but it’s unclear why the company hasn’t expanded as the subdivision grew.

AT&T spokeswoman Ann Elsas did not comment specifically on why internet service is limited at the city’s northern borders. She said the company regularly assesses the “balance of customer needs, our network infrastructure, and the overall service experience.”

A Mediacom spokeswoman said Thursday that, as of last year, there were not yet enough households to justify the cost of building the additional infrastructure needed to serve the area. Construction costs, she said, have also been on the rise.

Jill Nolin covers the Georgia Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach her at jnolin@cnhi.com.