[Bloat] Fwd: Broadband Bias

Sat Oct 22 08:56:14 EDT 2022

Here's an interesting "rantlet" on inequity in price and service by big 
ISPs, which of course makes me wonder

  * if end-users fixing bloat is enough to mitigate lack of IS investment
  * if the markup's research team should be talking to the speed-test
    sites to collect actual-performance and observed bandwidth data

--dave

reference:https://themarkup.org/show-your-work/2022/10/19/how-we-uncovered-disparities-in-internet-deals 

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	Broadband Bias
Date: 	Sat, 22 Oct 2022 12:02:07 +0000
From: 	Julia Angwin <newsletter at themarkup.org>
To: 	davecb at spamcop.net

Broadband Bias
Poorer and less White neighborhoods get slower speeds
Hello World <https://themarkup.org/>
Hello World
Dispatches from our founder

Hello World

This Week
Broadband Bias

Hello, friends,
Imagine shopping for a car and being told that every car on the lot is 
being offered for the same price, but you don’t get to choose which car 
you’ll get. The dealership decides if you walk out with a Porsche or a 
Chevy.
That’s how some internet pricing in the U.S. works. Most home internet 
plans are offered at a flat base rate, ranging from $40 to $60 a month, 
but what you get for that price varies widely, according to a new Markup 
investigation 
<https://themarkup.org/still-loading/2022/10/19/dollars-to-megabits-you-may-be-paying-400-times-as-much-as-your-neighbor-for-internet-service>that 
was published this week.
Reporters Leon Yin and Aaron Sankin analyzed more than 800,000 broadband 
plans 
<https://themarkup.org/show-your-work/2022/10/19/how-we-uncovered-disparities-in-internet-deals>offered 
across the U.S. from AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink, and 
found that the speeds they offered varied from more than 200 megabits 
per second (Mbps) in some neighborhoods to below 25 Mbps in others.
To put that in simple terms: 200 megabits per second is the recommended 
minimum speed for a household that wants to participate in multiple 
concurrent Zoom calls without interruption. Anything below 25 Mbps is 
not even considered broadband by the Federal Communications Commission 
(FCC).
Calculated by price per megabit, that means customers are paying hugely 
different prices for the same service. For example, CenturyLink offered 
consumers rates that ranged from 25 cents to  $100 per Mbps—which is 400 
times greater.
Chart: Providers offer different speeds for the same price.

And guess which neighborhoods generally got the worst speeds? 
Lower-income, historically redlined areas that were less White.
In 92 percent of cities in our investigation where broadband speeds 
varied, lower-income neighborhoods disproportionately received worse 
deals. In 66 percent of cities, people of color disproportionately 
received worse deals. And in 100 percent of cities where data was 
available, historically redlined neighborhoods received worse deals.
Map: In most cities, poorer neighborhoods were offered worse internet 
plans more often.

The amazing thing is that the speed disparities are probably even worse 
than what we found. We calculated these numbers based on the speeds that 
the companies /advertised/on their websites, not the speeds that were 
actually delivered. And as anyone who uses the internet knows, speeds 
are often quite different from what is advertised 
<https://pcrd.purdue.edu/the-real-digital-divide-advertised-vs-actual-internet-speeds/>—and 
usually not in a good way.
The telecom companies defended their practices. Mark Molzen, a 
spokesperson for CenturyLink’s parent company Lumen, said, “We do not 
engage in discriminatory practices like redlining and find the 
accusation offensive.”
AT&T spokesperson Jim Greer said that The Markup’s analysis had ignored 
the company’s low-cost access offerings and participation in the FCC’s 
Affordable Connectivity Plan, which provides a subsidy for household 
Internet bills. “Any suggestion that we discriminate in providing 
internet access is blatantly wrong,” he said.
Verizon spokesperson Rich Young referred inquiries to the industry group 
USTelecom, which said that internet providers can have good reasons to 
charge the same price for slower service. “Operating and maintaining 
legacy technologies can be more expensive, especially as legacy network 
components are discontinued by equipment manufacturers,” said USTelecom 
senior vice president Marie Johnson.
The findings come at a time when U.S. regulators are looking into 
broadband equity. The FCC is currently drafting rules 
<https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-initiates-inquiry-preventing-digital-discrimination>“to 
promote equal access to broadband across the country, regardless of 
income level, ethnicity, race, religion, or national origin.”
Broadband pricing wasn’t always this way. Companies used to charge 
different prices for different speeds, in what were called “tiers.” But 
in recent years, they have moved toward a single price in what the 
National Digital Inclusion Alliance called in a 2018 report “tier 
flattening 
<https://www.digitalinclusion.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/NDIA-Tier-Flattening-July-2018.pdf>.”
Unlike buying a car, however, it’s hard for broadband customers to know 
that they are getting a Chevy and not a Porsche when they pay that 
single, tier-flattened price.
To buy broadband, you must enter your address into one of the telecoms’ 
websites to see the price, speed, and availability. Very few people are 
likely to enter other addresses into the site to compare speeds that 
their neighbors are getting—and even if they do, they aren’t likely to 
be able to convince the company to lower their rate.
This lack of transparency means that the companies have been able to 
hide the stark disparities from public view. It took Leon and Aaron 
months of work to scrape all the prices from company websites, then 
match them with Census records to analyze which neighborhoods were 
getting which prices.
It’s hard work, but it’s the important work that journalists must do to 
make these hidden disparities visible to the public.
As always, thanks for reading.
Best,
Julia Angwin
The Markup
/(Additional Hello World research by Eve Zelickson.)/

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