[Bloat] Fwd: Broadband Bias

[David Collier-Brown]

Yes, I'd tend to flatten my prices unless I could show end-user 
customers a really easy-to-detect improvement from the high-speed offerings.

My across-the-road neighbor was talked into upgrading by Bell Canada to 
a higher-priced package, and ended up in a 'spirited discussion" about 
whether they were /obtaining money from him upon a false and fraudulent 
pretense/ (;-))

--dave

On 10/22/22 09:02, David Lang wrote:
> long distance phone plans used to be tiered as well, nobody misses 
> those days.
>
> eliminating tiers could just mean that people are getting the best 
> service available in their area (the car analogy they are trying to 
> use breaks down because you can't get Porsche service in a location 
> with Chevy infrastructure)
>
> IMHO, flattening tiers is good as it gives the ISPs more incentive to 
> use the tools that we've developed here to prevent the traffic from 
> one individual from interefering with the traffic for another, making 
> life better for everyone.
>
> David Lang
>
>
>  On Sat, 22 Oct 2022, David Collier-Brown via Bloat wrote:
>
>> Date: Sat, 22 Oct 2022 08:56:14 -0400
>> From: David Collier-Brown via Bloat <bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net>
>> Reply-To: David Collier-Brown <davec-b at rogers.com>
>> To: bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net
>> Subject: [Bloat] Fwd: Broadband Bias
>>
>> 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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