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Non-Cable Internet Providers Offer Faster Speeds To the Wealthy (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When non-cable Internet providers -- outlets like ATT or Verizon -- choose which communities to offer the fastest connections, they don't juice up their networks so everyone in their service area has the option of buying quicker speeds. Instead, they tend to favor the wealthy over the poor, according to an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity. The Center's data analysis found that the largest non-cable Internet providers collectively offer faster speeds to about 40 percent of the population they serve nationwide in wealthy areas compared with just 22 percent of the population in poor areas. That leaves tens of millions of Americans with the choice of either purchasing an expensive connection from the only provider in their area -- typically a cable company -- or just doing the best they can with slower speeds. Middle-income areas don't fare much better, with a bit more than 27 percent of the population having access to a DSL provider's fastest speeds. The Center reached its conclusions by merging the latest Federal Communications Commission (FCC) data with income information from the U.S. Census Bureau. The non-cable Internet providers -- the four largest are ATT Inc, Verizon Communications Inc, CenturyLink Inc, and Frontier Communications Corp -- hook up customers over telephone wires that are Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL), or they use hybrid networks that include some fiber connections near (and sometimes directly to) homes. The Center included all types of connection in its analysis. These companies account for nearly 40 percent of the 92 million Internet connections nationwide. Cable companies, such as Comcast Corp and Charter Communications Inc, operate under a different set of conditions. These providers offer the same fast speeds to almost every community they serve, in part because of franchise agreements with local governments. But a previous Center investigation and other reports have shown that cable firms sometimes avoid lower-income or hard-to-reach areas based on how franchise agreements are written. Poor areas not served by the cable companies are not included in the Centerâ(TM)s analysis, which results in what seems like an equitable distribution of speeds across income levels. "Society said it did not matter if you could pay for electricity; we wanted everyone to have it. Society said we would not limit dial tone to those who could pay the most, we gave it to all," said telecommunications lawyer Gerard Lederer of Best Best and Krieger LCC in Washington, D.C., in an e-mail. "Broadband is quickly becoming that utility, and if applications only work at high speeds, then the universal availability of that speed must be the goal, otherwise you are providing everyone with water, just some of the water is not drinkable."
When seeking money, they tend to seek out people with more money. More news at 11:00.
It is just unfair, that the rich have a better life than the poor... The government must mandate equal quality of life for all!
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Problem with that is that only the wealthy areas would get any infrastructure. Had this applied to power, the power company would have New York lit up, but everywhere else would have to bring their own generators. Vital services need to come under the eyes of government, otherwise, it will only be a rich man's toy, and the digital divide will only grow larger.
In a better world, we would have a wireless mesh system by now, spanning entire cities, with LTE used to be able to get people who are further away.
But who cares about decent access to the Internet? Company quarterly profits uber Alles is the motto of these times.
if we weren't paying them billions and billions of dollars in both tax and direct subsidies to bring high speed internet to the everyone; especially the poor. Fuck them. They built none of the infrastructure they profit from. They're rent seeking parasites. Take it away from them and nationalize it. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Anything more important than a twinkie shouldn't be left in the hands of private industry.
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Richer areas often newer areas. Not always, of course, there's plenty of "old money" areas but you also see plenty of cases of new development particularly for middle and upper middle class. They want nice new homes, those homes are built in new developments.
Now why's that matter? Well when you are building a new development, you usually use the most current technology which often means FTTH, or at the very least higher quality category cable and fiber out to the box. That lets them offer higher speed. The big cost is running the lines, not the material used so you do it with better materials. You have to spend the money to lay the lines, or you can't offer service.
However in old development, well that has old shit. It can be replaced, of course, but that is a lot of money. It can cost more than a new run because tearing shit up in a developed area can be pretty costly. So they are reluctant to do it.
This of course goes double if you are talking areas that are poorer. The improved infrastructure would allow them to offer faster speeds, but the reason they want to do that is because they can get more money. People who live in poorer areas are not as likely to want to spend more money and will just elect to keep slower speeds. A good number of them might not even be on the fastest speed available to them already because they wish for something cheap.
Thus it makes sense why it happens like that. The reason cable companies offer faster speeds is it is generally much easier for them particularly with DOCSIS 3. All they really have to do is put more channels on their CMTS. It isn't free, but doesn't cost a ton and doesn't require redoing lots of buried cable. The coax out there is already good to a gigahertz, maybe more.
You even see it in middle class neighborhoods. I live in a decent condo complex, and right next to me is some pretty upscale housing. However, both here and in the houses, 6ish mbit DSL is all you can get. Reason is it is old construction, 1970s. So the telephones are all copper, straight to the CO, and not very high grade cable. The cable company will sell you 300mbit though, no problem. That said the same cable company offers fiber in new developments, many of which cost less than the houses near me.
It is just what we are going to see with for profit companies. If we want an "equal speeds for all, don't worry about the costs" setup then it is going to have to be publicly funded and run.
> They built none of the infrastructure they profit from.
> They're rent seeking parasites.
Some of the cable companies are ASSHOLES. No doubt about that. Personally I've had pretty good experiences with them, but I'm Texas, where there's competition. I know that people on the coasts particularly often continue to live with the cable monopolies their government created years ago, and those monopoly providers sometimes suck, particularly, their customer service sucks and Comcast has questionable billing practices.
To be honest, however, those assholes DO each spend over a billion dollars every year upgrading their networks. Here's $300 million / year just in Chicago alone, for example:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/...
Verizon has spent $15 billion on FIOS. Goldman calculated that for Google to become a national ISP, it would cost them $140 billion.
It is honest and right to criticize their customer service, and to point out Comcast's illegal billing. It is false, and makes one appear rather uninformed, to claim that they don't invest HUGE amounts of money in building and constantly upgrading the infrastructure. When you make a claim like that which is so easily shown to be absolutely false, you appear to be either clueless or disingenuous, at which point people stop listening to you and don't hear your legitimate complaints about customer service or other real issues.
That sounds shocking if not for the fact that everyone eligible for Social Security can start collecting at age 62 and has been able to do so for decades.
Nearly 50% of people eligible for Social Security make the choice to collect benefits at age 62, they receive a smaller check for the earlier payout.
Social Security disability payments virtually ALL go to persons under age 65 because a disability payment converts to a regular Social Security check at retirement age. So that skews the numbers lower.
Let's look at actual numbers (https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/chartbooks/fast_facts/2015/fast_facts15.pdf)
About four-fifths of all OASDI beneficiaries in current-payment status were aged 62 or older,
including 22 percent aged 75–84 and 9 percent aged 85 or older. About 15 percent were
persons aged 18–61 receiving benefits as disabled workers, survivors, or dependents. Another
5 percent were children under age 18.
Anything shock you there?
Not even sure why the age 65 thing bothers you, age 62 is when you become eligible for a reduced Social Security retirement benefit and almost half the people who become eligible elect to take smaller checks at age 62 instead of waiting till full retirement age.
You don't even provide a basis for claiming that Obama has anything to do, much less "has done everything he could to expand", with Social Security spending. As the baby boomer population ages there are more people eligible to start collecting their Social Security retirement check. Look at the chart on p 14 of the link I provided above, the number of NEW retired workers has jumped dramatically since about 2003 Obama didn't make people older and the retirement age hasn't decreased.