The crisis is acute in some parts of Indiana County, where probably hundreds of square miles of the 834-square-mile county lie outside the modern age, according to Byron Stauffer, executive director of the Indiana County Center for Economic Operations.

Internet service providers want the biggest bang for their buck, which means skipping over the hollows and back roads to serve clusters of customers in bigger towns and urban areas. “It’s a matter of return on investment,” Mr. Stauffer said.

Putting specific numbers on the economic cost of poor internet service is challenging, but there’s little doubt that commerce is hobbled when small businesses and consumers can’t connect easily online. That is especially true today, when even simple credit card transactions depend on an online link and websites and social media have become the core of modern advertising.

Indiana County’s connectivity issues didn’t deter Philadelphia-based clothier Urban Outfitters from recently opening an 800,000-square-foot fulfillment center in White Township, just outside Indiana, Pa. The operation — key to the retailer’s push into prompt, direct-to-consumer sales — was expected to create 225 jobs. The company didn’t return a request for comment about the operation.

And internet access isn’t a problem 17 miles from the Purchase Line School District at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. But, in what is a concern for the local economic development team, the college — the county’s biggest employer — has seen enrollment slide 26% between 2012 and 2018, a trend that partly reflects a trend among state institutions of higher education.

As Mr. Stauffer looks for more economic development opportunities, he wonders about the difference that widespread public broadband access could make across Indiana County if it were easy to “be part of the 21st century.”

“Imagine if everything else was equal: How many people would want to live here in the rural area,” he said.

A 2018 study by the Purdue University Center for Regional Development concluded that every $1 invested in broadband returns nearly $4 to the economy.

The link between online connectivity and economic growth is well established, said Darrell M. West, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution.

“Broadband is absolutely essential for job creation and economic development,” said Mr. West. “There is a strong tie there. Counties without good broadband access will just fall further behind.”

In Pennsylvania, some local governments have struggled to solve the internet access issue. In 2004, Philadelphia created a municipal broadband service for the digitally challenged. The effort dissolved by 2008 over technical and other issues. A similar effort in Indiana’s neighbor Cambria County in 2008 folded in 2013 when revenue fell far short of projections.

Indiana County’s own efforts to expand residential internet connections began around 2008 with an $18 million upgrade of its emergency communications system. The county’s towers were tricked out with gear needed for residential cellular and Internet access, leaving only what is called the “last mile” connection to get homes online.

But the high cost of stringing cables from towers to homes, along with the anticipated low returns from serving a sparse population, have kept internet service providers away.

“People know we’re really doing what we can to make this happen,” said Indiana County Commissioner Rodney D. Ruddock, a retired high school principal. “We have to find a model way of moving forward.”

Indiana County is continuing to invest. The commissioners recently agreed to spend $60,000 to extend cell phone access to Blue Spruce Park, a wooded, 650-acre reserve.

The upgrade will improve public safety: Blue Spruce has been a digital desert visited by 125,000 people a year, with no GPS, no internet or cell phone connections in case of emergency, despite the location of a county emergency communications tower in the park.

Meanwhile, the hunt for Wi-Fi sends residents across the country to places such as coffee shops, public libraries and some fast-food chains. That’s true in Indiana County, too, where the need to get online drives some to local eateries, including several convenience stores that Altoona-based Sheetz Inc. operates in the county.

Indiana County missed out on the migration wave away from cities between 2016 and 2017. About 33,000 people nationwide moved into rural areas, which gained population for the first time since 2010, according to the census.

Indiana County’s population has been slipping for years, down 8% to 84,879 since peaking in 1980.

The national migration into rural areas has been attributed, in part, to the growing ability to do work and hold down jobs remotely — working via computer for an employer in Los Angeles or New York from a home office in a smaller, less expensive community. Not so in Indiana County.

“People cannot buy homes in rural areas if they need the internet,” said Tim Greene, a 54-year-old mortgage underwriter who ran into connection problems after moving back home to Indiana County after living 35 years in Virginia. “It’s not fair.”

Fairness is sometimes mentioned by folks talking about the things that divide the city from the county, especially when the issue is Indiana County students not having online interactive study guides, current-events information and research capabilities — something most city dwellers take for granted.

A four-hour drive east from Purchase Line schools, a pile of Chromebooks also were distributed to eighth, ninth and 10th graders in the Bethlehem Area School District this fall.

Superintendent Joseph Roy admits to getting a “little outside my lane” in lobbying elected officials and business leaders for wider internet access in the Bethlehem Area, the state’s sixth largest school district, where kids get to take their Chromebooks home.