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Comcast Gives 6 Months Free Internet To Poor and Unpaid Bill Amnesty
An anonymous reader writes with news about a controversial Comcast program designed to give internet access to the poor that just got a little better. After complaints about a program that offers cheap Internet service to poor people, Comcast today announced it will provide "up to six months" of free Internet to new subscribers and an "amnesty" program for families with unpaid bills. Comcast's Internet Essentials, mandated by the federal government when Comcast acquired NBCUniversal, gives $10-per-month Internet service to low-income households with schoolchildren. Critics have argued that the program is too hard to sign up for, that eligibility criteria should be less strict, and that further requirements should be implemented if Comcast is allowed to buy Time Warner Cable.
But after the free six months is up, good luck trying to cancel the service.
And this is exactly why I wish Google Fiber was deployed in more areas. They have a simple solution: a FREE tier for life.
https://fiber.google.com/citie...
And as far as the $300 setup fee, I'm not sure about other cities, but Portland is working on subsidies to cover this cost as well, so it is $0 for low income families to have basic 5mbps internet service.
having tutored several underprivileged kids in a large urban environment (and having witnessed how when left to their own devices they used their internet access for NOT educational rich-poor-divide-shrinking stuff, but rather typical time-wasting stuff ) this seems like a poor answer to social responsibility to me for a $139 billion company that is Comcast.
Without guidance and structure, 'for the children' will go to the lowest common denominator, so basically, they are subsidizing a new generation of kids to grow up addicted to watching 'teen-wolf' on MTV-tube.
What might actually be nice would to see comcast, oh, i dont know, sponsor after-school computer education programs? Or frankly anything that provides for the real thing that tends to be absent in households that are barely making ends meet - additional educational structure.
It's sorta like the guys at GitMo telling their guests today they get free waterboarding.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Did anyone expect Comcast to actually honor the spirit of the low cost Internet Essentials agreement? Hands???
We had a municipal fiber in Provo before google. It was terrible. The speeds were all over the place, it was mismanaged, any profit it made was constantly raided as another source of income for other projects. It was so bad that they sold it in entirety to google for $1. Since, its been great. Sure google has issues, but making the internet a utility isn't a silver bullet and has its own share of problems. I also don't want to be charged "per bit". And no Im not downloading TB of data every month, but having that hanging over my head would not be something I want to think about before starting a stream. Especially when it becomes a tax source and I get petitioned to raise my streaming "rates" by 10 cents a kb to pay for a new fire truck, and another 5 cents for a new school in the mayors neighborhood.
What we need is to break up this idea of internet "markets" giving comcast and their ilk a bunch of small monopolies. Since google moved in, comcast has sent people door to door "explaining" to people why google fiber is terrible and having that fast of a connection "isn't a good idea" and offering to double their speeds and give them tv free for 3 years if they promise not to switch. Amazing what a little competition does.
I'm a Comcast TV and internet subscriber (not really by choice, as in many places it's the only solid option). Over the past few weeks I've seen an ad from, by, and for Comcast promoting this service... over and over and over. It shows a kid in school with some narration about how everything would be better if only he had access to the internet, then he goes home, and imagine that! A Comcast truck is sitting outside his home, hooking up some internet service!
Comcast loves kids, loves schools, and wants to help all students do research for their education! Yeah, right. This is a very low cost (or free), but also extremely low service plan. You have to be around or below the poverty level to qualify. The local news did a segment recently and the way they presented it, Comcast won't be letting you sign up unless you can prove that you qualify for food stamps and free school lunches. I'm not looking to go into a welfare debate, but living in a city with a fairly high number of section 8 residents, many of the folks who would qualify for the Internet Essentials plan are already paying Comcast for much better services using subsidies from other sources.
I love the idea of internet access being available to everyone, but don't think for a moment that Comcast is doing this out of some kind of corporate benevolence. It was required the last time they were involved in a giant merger (buying out NBC) and they're finally getting around to promoting it in hopes of their next giant merger (with Time Warner) being approved.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Provo was poorly managed, then. I'd hate to see what they did with other city-run utilities.
I have seen great models of city-run utilities from all over the country, both from the perspective of wholly-owned city utilities, non-profit corp spinoffs and city managed private contracted utilities. The benefit of the spinoff is that the city can't raid the coffers for revenue, and the utility has to be self-sufficient to cover maintenance and charge rates appropriately. The private contract model forces the contractor into a position where the city is the customer and not the consumer.
If it needs recapitalization for expansion, then the city is responsible for coming up with the money to fund the expansion, and then the utility charges appropriately until the city has been reimbursed for the expansion. Most cities float a bond issue past the constituents to fund such endeavors, such as new water mains or sewage expansions to newly developed areas.
It sure beats the for-profit model where the regional monopoly ends up wringing the customers dry since they have no viable alternatives for reliable fast internet.
From TFS:
[Emphasis Added]
Regardless of Comcast's record of "helping" the poor or any other "requirements" to be levied against Comcast, they should not be allowed to purchase TWC under any circumstances. That would concentrate far too much "last mile" power into too few hands.
Of course, that's the point so the deal will go through and we'll have another win for regulatory capture.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Some waste, fraud, abuse and improper management happen in any system. Obviously too much is a problem but it is equally as bad to obsess over reaching 100% perfection.
Simply because they own a TV doesn't indicate a great deal; they could have previously had one, been given one, stole one, etc. It would be difficult and vindictive to make them sell everything they had in order to not starve. There are plenty of pawn shops all over the place so we must have plenty of victims for those vultures... not that one can get much money for those things used anyhow. If you only hand out food stamps to homeless naked people are you going to feel slighted because they have shoes? Sure, YOU won't (but not everybody) but you have to keep in mind that studies show that the poor are pretty bad with money as well as capable of finding ways around their troubles (actually proving capitalist ideals about being inventive) such as eating subgrade food or cutting other corners so they can save up and buy the TV they think they need. After all, TV IS THE DRUG OF THE NATION. Homeless starving addicts will skip meals for a fix.
As far as implying that a race is making up most the people on food stamps etc, it is likely not based in reality as the whites are usually higher in such numbers than other "races" and while it is true that as a % of the demographic the minorities may be doing worse but they are by definition a smaller population so the absolute numbers come out different. Now if one actually treated the whites equally I don't think their % would differ as much as it does and then the absolute numbers would explode (because their population is so much higher.)
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
The biggest problem with iProvo, which the residents didn't usually see, was the lawsuits.
Back when I lived there from 1999-2003, the mayor was pushing iProvo quite a lot. Many businesses and apartments signed up. The city started their rollout by providing hubs to the various city buildings, the historic library, and they even ran lines to the major traffic control cameras. They hooked up quite a few businesses along the main roads, like the main street plaza was covered from the overpass on the west to the roundabout on the east. University Ave, Freedom Blvd, and 500 West were installed from Orem on the North down to the mall and the Novell campus on the south. They got quite a lot of core infrastructure in place during those years. ...
... Then they were sued by basically everybody who had an interested in providing Internet services. As a result of the lawsuits they rolled back to just giving fiber to the city's buildings, to their own infrastructure like traffic cameras, and to some existing contracts. If you attended the city council meetings or watched their broadcasts (yeah, I know, who does that, except I remember it was on channel 17 at the time...) you could have listened to reports on how many million they were spending fighting off Qwest (now CenturyLink), Comcast, and the rest. They provided erratic service largely because the money was frequently redirected to the courts. Existing companies REALLY did not want municipal fiber, and they fought it hard.
While the mega-corps know they can stomp on a small city like Provo very easily, they were quickly outmatched when Google came in. They stopped the decade-long hemorrhaging of money to lawsuits, so the service became much better.
Utopia has also been heavily plagued by lawsuits and governmental contracts cancelled mid-deployment. Even the US government (under RUS) contracted out some services and then abandoned it, leaving the fiber network on the hook for over $11M (the lawsuit is still ongoing). People complain and suggest Utopia is mismanaged, and while they have had a few management missteps, their biggest problem has been the many millions of dollars spent trying to fight legal battles against incumbents.
Even today if you look a bit North up the Wasatch front corridor, Centerville is right now the hotbed of the issue. Comcast and CenturyLink are funding a bunch of signs for anyone who wants them. They're discussing putting municipal fiber in as a tax, complaining that residents shouldn't have to pay because they already have Internet providers. ... conveniently overlooking the fact that the very small tax will provide everybody in the city a minimum fiber to the home connection with 5 megabit if you don't pay for any plan, and 150 megabit or faster if you do pay for a plan, and the plans are far cheaper than either Comcast or CenturyLink.
Municipal fiber is the future, just like municipal sewer, municipal water, municipal trash, and other city-managed services. The incumbent companies are fighting with all their power and disinformation campaigns to keep their high profit system in place. Just like your Comcast salesmen knocking at the door trying to convince you fast and unlimited is bad, slow and bottlenecked is good, disinformation is really all they can rely on these days.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement