Exploring the 5G Digital Divide in the Non-Contiguous US: LEO Satellites to the Rescue?

5G cellular networks and Low-Earth-Orbit (LEO) satellite networks, such as Starlink, promise enhanced performance and coverage capabilities. While a large number of research works have evaluated these technologies in the mainland US, their performance in non-contiguous US regions remains under-explored, despite their unique challenges and significant visitor demands. Through extensive drive tests covering over 4200+ km across Alaska, Maui (Hawaii), and the mainland US (as a baseline), while simultaneously measuring the performance of the three major US mobile operators and Starlink, this work presents the first detailed evaluation of cellular and Starlink network coverage and performance in the non-contiguous US regions. Our study shows a persistent digital divide between mainland and non-contiguous US for cellular networks in terms of coverage and performance, highlighting the challenges of cellular deployments in non-contiguous US regions. Starlink provides substantially higher performance than cellular networks most of the time, but area-specific challenges, including unique terrains in Hawaii and sparse satellite deployment in Alaska, significantly degrade performance compared to the mainland US. Additionally, we explore the spatiotemporal diversity between cellular and Starlink performance and study the potential of multipath transport to bridge the connectivity gap in non-contiguous US regions.