Butler County is not the worst place in Pennsylvania to live, if your main concern is access to high speed Internet service.

Nearly 97 percent of the county’s 186,847 residents have access to an Internet connection with a download speed of least 25 megabytes per second — third-best in the region behind Allegheny County (99.2 percent) and Beaver County (97.4 percent).

Sounds pretty good, right? In a state where about 800,000 residents, and 20 percent of people in rural areas, lack access to high speed Internet, that’s not too shabby.

But “not too shabby” doesn’t mean there’s not room for improvement when it comes to the state’s digital divide. There’s still plenty of work to do to bringing rural broadband access in-line with service in urban areas, where only about three percent of residents are without high-speed Internet.

The question now is whether or not there will be money to do that work. About $140 million is at stake, as state officials renew a push to keep federal subsidies that are meant to improve Internet service to rural areas in Pennsylvania. The money — part of the Connect American Fund — was put at risk two years ago when Verizon, one of the state’s largest Internet providers, declined to accept the federal subsidies here and in 10 other states.

It’s not clear why the company declined the funding, but the result was straightforward: the Federal Communications Commission began laying plans to auction off the money in early 2018.

Now the push is on to stop that from happening. The Pennsylvania Utility Commission and U.S. Sen. Bob Casey have both called upon the FCC to keep the funding in Pennsylvania, which is undoubtedly the right call. But the FCC has not yet ruled on the state’s petition to retain the subsidies. And the money could conceivably be funnelled elsewhere.

That would be a grave disservice to residents here and across the state that still lack broadband Web access.

To some high-speed Internet service may still seem like a luxury. Why does it matter how quickly people can stream the latest Netflix show, browse websites like YouTube, or shop online?

These people forget how ubiquitous our reliance on the Internet is, and how powerful e-commerce has become. From 2005 to 2015 online sales nationwide grew from $291 billion to more than $341 billion, according to figures cited in June, at a congressional hearing on the matter.

Access to high-speed Internet is no longer a luxury. It’s a necessity — for students, businesses and workers — everyone from doctors to people delivering pizzas. And the wide gap between service in rural areas versus urban centers represents a serious drawback for counties across Pennsylvania.

State officials and the FCC must ensure this money remains in Pennsylvania and helps correct the disparity between urban and rural Internet access.