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AT&T's Slow 1.5Mbps Internet In Poor Neighborhoods Sparks Complaint To FCC (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: AT&T is facing a complaint alleging that it discriminates against poor people by providing fast service in wealthier communities and speeds as low as 1.5Mbps in low-income neighborhoods. The formal complaint filed today with the Federal Communications Commission says that AT&T is violating the Communications Act's prohibition against unjust and unreasonable discrimination. That ban is part of Title II, which is best known as the authority used by the FCC to impose net neutrality rules. But as we've explained before, Title II also contains important consumer protections that go beyond net neutrality, such as a ban on discrimination in rates, practices, and offerings of services.
"This complaint, brought by Joanne Elkins, Hattie Lanfair, and Rachelle Lee, three African-American, low-income residents of Cleveland, Ohio alleges that AT&T's offerings of high-speed broadband service violate the Communications Act's prohibition against unjust and unreasonable discrimination," the complaint says. AT&T is not immune to the ban on discrimination "merely because its discrimination is based on investment decisions," the complaint also says.
"This complaint, brought by Joanne Elkins, Hattie Lanfair, and Rachelle Lee, three African-American, low-income residents of Cleveland, Ohio alleges that AT&T's offerings of high-speed broadband service violate the Communications Act's prohibition against unjust and unreasonable discrimination," the complaint says. AT&T is not immune to the ban on discrimination "merely because its discrimination is based on investment decisions," the complaint also says.
Bwahaaaaaaaa-hahaaaaaaaa
Go get a job and buy better internet!
The complaint is that they *can't* buy better internet. Being a rich white guy in an area where 1.5M is the fastest available, I feel their pain. No reasonable amount of money can get me faster internet. Less than 5 miles away, I can get 100M but it would costs 10s of thousands if not 100s of thousands for me to personally have a line ran. There *might* be some esoteric solutions. My brother was in a similar situation and put a 100 foot tower at his in-town office and beamed internet to a 100 foot tower at his house in the country several miles away but this cost him several thousand dollars and is out of the price range of even most middle class people.
Poor people can't just "get" a job. There aren't any jobs. None. Rich people have all the money and they don't feel like paying poor people to do jobs. Rich people still advertise plenty of jobs to keep the HR departments busy. All the jobs are fake though. Every job application gets deleted immediately. Fake jobs are never filled but the same jobs get posted every month so they look like they're still open. But really there aren't any jobs. Poor people just waste their time applying to fake jobs until they starve to death.
there's lots of folks who learn by watching and video makes that possible for them to learn on the cheap. My brother's a lousy guitarist and while he probably never would have been great he coulda been a lot better if he had youtube back in the day. And that's just something kinda frivolous. I learned angularjs from videos because the written stuff I'd found was kind of a mess.
It's kinda tough to get tough to do all that at 1.5mbps, especially if you're sharing a connection. How many geniuses have we lost out on because they didn't have knowledge in their formative years. Despite what you want to believe adversity doesn't really make people better, it gives them PTSD. Support and nurture makes people better.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
No, but there is an issue if you walk into the local Lexus dealership with enough to buy an LS600 and they will only sell you an ES350 used because of your zip code.
Is there a law that requires Lexus to sell you cheap cars? Do buyers of cars pay a special fee that should go towards subsidizing the purchase of Lexus cars by poor people?
No? Then your analogy is inappropriate and a waste of space.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Lexus does not have a contract that gives them exclusive rights to your area on the condition that they sell to everyone in the area, not just the poor.
If you insist on getting a monopolistic contract with conditions, then you damn well better abide by those conditions, even if costs you some money.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
$250,000 right now in Seattle is literally a shitty ass shack considering the current housing market there. (and yes, I'm local to the area too)
But seriously, I came in to bitch about CenturyLink too. For the longest time, they'd only offer 3mbps service to my location. Luckily, for a very short period of time, they offered their gigabit fiber service to my location, I signed up, and still have it over a year later. Even after ALREADY HAVING IT INSTALLED, a couple months later, they claimed I could only get 3mbps in my area. It is total bullshit how they discriminate against certain neighborhoods.
Would these communities get higher bandwidth by using 3G or 4G? Sounds like an opportunity to do some mesh networking if ATT could care to spin this, at least, for the PR value.
My first broadband was 1M/100Kb and I could study and do lots of things, even start a small business, then again this was 2006 and the web was lighter and simpler. It was worth the time to leave most videos buffer for a bit on Youtube, you could get content!
Now I have 60/40 Mb fiber and while I really appreciate the upload speed, the reality is that it has only served me to download games and ISOs faster than I could possibly need, also my latency increased 30%. I'd say 5/2Mb should be the very minimum for the web today.
You probably took the ONLY gigabit-capable node, the cheap bastards, so they can't offer anything faster than 3mbit.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
...but AT&T's poor service also affects wealthier people who live near these neighborhoods. This article hits close to home, since I encouraged my parents who live in the near suburbs and are pretty well off to go with AT&T, since my experience in the outer suburbs was so fantastic. Boy, that was a mistake. There is not question that AT&T treated their outer suburban customers with first class care, even same day service, while totally hosing their customers closer to the city. It was like night and day. Whereas I could get someone out to my property on the same day, my parents took a week. Whereas they replaced a mile of copper transmission wire for me, my folks' squirrel chewed line was deliberately left in place. Yes, the infrastructure in the city is older, but they had no issue replacing it out here when it was needed. It's definitely willful discrimination and there is no reason for it. It's not like they are charging less for those who live closer to the city. The rates are the same. Why is the service so bad closer to the city? The plaintiff has a legitimate complaint. AT&T is a publicly regulated utility and is required to treat everyone fairly as a condition of operation,
Wycliffe didn't say he couldn't afford it. Rather he stated the price. That's the best way I know of to stay rich: Don't assume that everything you can afford is worth the price.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
God you are dumb.
Lexus wouldn't do that but rental agents, real estate agents, and companies like AT&T (allegedly) do.
That's what the entire case is about.
Jiminey Cricket.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
None worth going to.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
56K!? Seriously, you had 56K! You lucky SOB! In my day we felt lucky to be able to cradle our handsets into 300 baud modem. The data had to climb uphill, in the snow, both ways.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Really? Any of those sites worth visiting?
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
drop a single windows 10 system on that "barely faster than a t1" line and watch it fucking DIE.
source: have had 1.5mbit dsl for 18 years. never has been a problem or 'too slow' until microsoft started butt raping the public with windows 10.
56K!? Seriously, you had 56K! You lucky SOB! In my day we felt lucky to be able to cradle our handsets into 300 baud modem. The data had to climb uphill, in the snow, both ways.
300 baud modem? When I was your age we had to "transfer data" over a radio using the NATO phonetic alphabet and we liked it! No respect, I say, you kids got no respect!
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Wycliffe didn't say he couldn't afford it. Rather he stated the price. That's the best way I know of to stay rich: Don't assume that everything you can afford is worth the price.
You need to think about utility theory here. If you are truly rich fast internet is worth the price because your time has value.
Low Income -> low Bandwidth
or is it :
Low Bandwidth -> low Income
aaaaaaa
ALL the telecom oligopolies suck puss-filled maggots. Jail all the f#cking bastards! As far as AT&T, they have telespammed me approximately 50 times in the last 2 years. They only stopped when I started answering with Trump impressions. And I won't even start on their screwy billing practices. We were forced to use some of their services because the other choice sucks more. We are in a relatively big town, but our choices are strangely limited.
Table-ized A.I.
It depends on how happy people are with third world infrastructure.
They might be less happy if they knew that many of these internet companies had taken billions in public subsidies for better networks, pocketed the money and not done the work.
"300 baud is the hotness"???
Yeah, like 40 years ago when just getting connected was really cool... But even that speed become completely outdated by about 1984 or so...
No. But lets fix this analogy.
If the only car you where allowed to buy was a Lexus, and because you lived in a garbage part of town Lexus decided you can only buy a Lexus bicycle, then yes there would be a problem.
This is a case about abusing service monopolies and is another datapoint in the increasingly obvious case that the internet market is broken and needs some serious intervention to restore fair competition.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
That's partially because it usually ends up costing the telco MORE money to provide slow DSL than faster DSL. If the fastest available at any price is 768k/128k, you're already running on the bleeding edge of what ADSL can handle at that distance... your line is going to require more tweaking to get working, and is probably going to require more follow-up service over the long run compared to someone with 18mbps/1.5mbps U-verse VDSL2 from a VRAD that's 500 feet away.
That's part of the reason why AT&T used to not allow people who were too far from the CO to qualify for 1.5mbps/128kbps g.LITE ADSL to get it AT ALL... they didn't want to deal with people bitching about how they were paying the same amount for 420kbps/80kbps that others were paying for 1.5mbps/128kbps. So if AT&T said 'no', but you were technically close enough to get 420kbps/80kbps, your basically had three options:
a) go around AT&T and pay a company like Northpoint roughly $200/month to lease a "dry pair" of wires from AT&T and wire it up to their DSLAM (at the time, AT&T hadn't yet installed a DSLAM at MY local central office, so the only way to get anything faster than ISDN or dialup was to pay Northpoint to connect me to the next-nearest CO, which had a DSLAM about a year before my own did).
b) settle for 112kbps ISDN (112kbps, because with Florida ISDN, local "voice" calls were free, but local "data" calls were 3 cents per minute per 64kbps channel... with a little tweaking, you could get the modem to fake two voice calls with 56kbps data and spend unlimited amounts of time online for free). This is what I ended up doing.
c) pay for two voice lines, use it with a shotgun modem, and pray to ${deity} the phone company didn't just throw a PairGain line concentrator on your original pair to get two useless phone lines that maxed out at ~31kbps apiece. With shotgunning, you could get about 107kbps down and 48kbps up. Thankfully, I didn't have to go with this option.
For what it's worth, NorthPoint no longer exists, I don't think anybody supports shotgun modems anymore, and given that a regular landline is now almost $50/month after taxes, I'd be afraid to even ask how much ISDN now costs per month (I think I paid around $100/month just for ISDN circa 1997, back when landline phone service cost about $30/month after taxes).
Except you're assuming that AT&T is arbitrarily discriminating rather than choosing to not invest in infrastructure where the risk of attempting to make their investment back is too great. The OP's analogy is no where even remotely similar... as you can drive your car anywhere. Using AT&T's internet connection from home requires their infrastructure to be in place... if the infrastructure is there (unlikely) and they're just choosing to sell it, that's a slightly different story. This story is about people complaining AT&T isn't willing to gamble millions on infrastructure it is unlikely to recoup its investments on.
You are not rich.
A household income of $115K will put you in the top 20%.
One can be rich without being filthy rich.
Have AT&T lobby the FCC to define 1.5Mb/s as High Speed Internet. Like they did to change the definition of high speef from 25 to 10 Mb/s.
Once enough money has changed hands, everyone will be satisfied.
Except of course the people who have to download everything they want to watch or access with a day or so wait for the download to complete.
My internet is just barely faster than a T1. How ever will I cope?!?!?
A T1 was plenty back before Youtube and Netflix, but is not enough to handle video. I need enough bandwidth so that my wife and daughter can watch two different movies and I can still get work done.
When I was your age we had to "transfer data" over a radio
You had RADIOS??? We used to dream about having a radio. We had to send our packets with pigeons. There were times when our ping times were a fortnight.
PIGEONS??? Only the rich kids had pigeons. My family were reduced to using mountain-to-mountain semaphore using flags made of rocks. #FirstWorldPigeonProblems
So then no internet is the best choice?
20K is poor by standard of bay area, yet this will make you in the top percentage in many other countries. What count is not the absolute value of your earning, but what do you earn compared to the standard of living of your local region. So $115K could be actually not that much, if after tax you still have to pay $4K rent.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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visit randi.org
Not really. Ubiquiti sells some pretty affordable stuff and it works great. I've been using their long range communication equipment to beam my network to my home. It works. Keep it mind, this is a permanent solution, so even several thousand dollars is worth the hassle, considering the downside of having to pay $1800 a month for 10mbit internet versus my own.
I can confirm this. My neighbor has telepacific (Or whatever they're called now, shitty service, shitty connection, shitty prices). Bring in Windows 10, nobody can get emails anymore because Windows 10 decides to upgrade everyones computer at the same time.
I am going to be a little tougher, those end users, well, they are poor and poor people do not own houses, they rent them. Now those houses are owned by investors and crappy internet services devalues a house by quite a lot. Best internet to worst internet is now some thing like 5% to 10% drop in property value. Now that loss is being created purposefully by the service provider as a choice to save money, regardless of the losses incurred by property owners (not occupiers, owners). Those owners have every right to consider legal action against those companies provided degraded services which devalue the properties and we are talking tens of thousands of dollar per property. Interesting thing here, is no contract and hence no arbitration clauses and so class action law suit by property owners as a result of the purposefully provision of degraded internet services which in turn devalue a property, due to reduce market access, having to compete with properly provisioned properties with actual high speed internet access. They are choosing to attack the value of peoples assets by purposefully providing degraded services.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Everybody has different priorities. Some people would pay extra to live in an area where the social culture isn't such that an extremely fast internet connection is a top priority.
I started out with a 300 baud acoustic coupler, but it was attached to a 110 baud printing terminal. BBSes that had long login screen sequences would burn through a lot of paper. Slowly.
This is probably in a poorly run city as well, where the roads literally have to be dug up to add fiber. I've noticed that this completely moronic setup is extremely common in left coast township municipalities. They bury the lines, but dont have anyway to access it one buried. On the east coast these same sort of townships have everything on telephone poles where adding/upgrading just isnt an issue.
Meanwhile some posters are complaining about Seattle w/Centurylink in particular. Do these fucks even know who is in the Seattle town council? Based on their posts here, my guess is that no, they have no idea at all, because they are always talking about a federal solution to their wholly local issues that is enabled by their complete ignorance of local political matters.
"His name was James Damore."
We competed in High School to get on the 300 baud terminal. It was faster than the 110 teletypes. It also has lower case. You couldn't save your program by punching it to paper tape, though.
Poor people nowadays don't have home computers - they have cell phones.
Which, even for the lowest-price plans, have better data speeds than 1.5 mbps. And no, they're not all bandwidth-starved.
(I was in a crappy part of New Orleans recently and was getting 50 mbps on my phone... which didn't need that much to stream videos, by a long shot.)
The north east doesnt have this issue, the east coast in general not having much issues.
National broadband map Enable all of the top row items to see the real issue. The left coast just doesnt have the infrastructure over very wide swaths. Its all local problems in States whose people that think the Federal government should solve all their local problems for them. I dont know a single left coast person that knows jack about local politics.
Meanwhile in the north east clear through to Chicago just about everyone over the age of 60 is involved in local political matters on some level often in combination with local church matters, and this activity and knowledge transfers to their children and grandchildren based on the issues. People in the north east know when their local cable franchise agreements are up for re-issue, as well as when things like liquor licenses are going to be issues or renewed. North east people are politically active on a local level. They are an active part of their community. Dont know anyone on the left coast like that.
"His name was James Damore."
Well, history is not really siding with you on this. Usually, before they die, they kill the rich instead.
Nothing is more dangerous than a mob with nothing to lose if you do have something to lose.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nope. In my experience, the average legal content is far less useful than the average illegal content.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I live in a small one-street rural village in Germany. All houses along the street are privately owned, meaning not a poor neighborhood by any means.
I can get 448/96 kbps ADSL at best. Complaining about only getting 1.5 mbps boggles my mind.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Joanne Elkins, Hattie Lanfair, and Rachelle Lee, three African-American, low-income residents of Cleveland, Ohio
Aren't facebook and farmville loading fast enough?
You need to think about utility theory here. If you are truly rich fast internet is worth the price because your time has value.
Then again, the time wasted making use of high-speed internet may be a net drain for some, making it a matter of choice to not purchase it. That is the same reason that I have not had cable for approaching 20 years: I could easily afford cable, satellite, or any number of online TV subscription services, but I value my time too much to just sit there watching TV for endless hours.
As a result, I am judicious about what I watch (usually on DVD/BD from my local library or RedBox, or BlockBuster when they were still a thing). I limit my entertainment consumption because there are far more productive things I would rather do with my time. If I were paying for a constantly there TV service of some kind it would either go to waste or tempt me to watch it even when it is not worth watching.
And I can think of no better way to spend that valuable time than watching streaming videos!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Correction, lucky LPB
Perhaps you're new here. Otherwise, I can't think how you'd have missed countless articles about telecoms providers lobbying heavily to prevent and prohibit municipalities - i.e. groups of local property owners - from competing by offering internet services to their community.
And many apartment complexes do just that. If you find a complex, often it will boast 20/20 or 100/100 internet services (around here at least) even though TWC only gets me to 20/1 if I pay a lot of money.
They contract with Level3 or another fiber company and invest the $100k to get it hooked up.
If I owned section 8 housing, I wouldn't do it either, it doesn't matter how much your property is or isn't worth, you get a stipend from the state for it and hope it burns out so you can collect the insurance.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
That's not what's happening though, in your analogy they only offer the cheaper model because they know nobody will buy the more expensive model.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
That's the best way I know of to stay rich: Don't assume that everything you can afford is worth the price.
No, the best way to stay rich is to have a significant stream of income. A saving mentality helps allow middle class individuals maintain a more risk free life and a comfortable retirement, but it doesn't make them rich. I know rich is a subjective term, but at least in my mind if someone thinks a $100k home improvement project is unreasonable they are not rich. A rich person may not think it is important enough to do, but they wouldn't call the price unreasonable.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
While AT&T is picky about where it deploys its high speed services*, if this lawsuit happens, where do you draw the line ?
Do you sue X for not building a local store in your neighborhood ?
Perhaps Y for not having local franchises of your favorite restaurant ?
*AT&T is picky about where it deploys high speed services because they know that the number of households that will be able to afford or will use said service will not justify the cost of its deployment in the first place. Contrary to popular belief, the magic fiber fairy doesn't just show up, wave her wand and presto, fiber is now in the ground ready for use. The infrastructure required to support it is insanely expensive so you HAVE to be picky about where it's deployed.
It would be like building a Whole Foods Market in the worst / poorest neighborhood of any city, then wonder why that particular store has poor sales numbers.
That said, I don't see where they can call it ' unjust ' or ' unreasonable ' discrimination. There is a very justifiable / reasonable explanation as to why companies don't spend ridiculous amounts of money to bring high end services to neighborhoods that are unlikely to utilize them.
If you want to have utility protections and perks you don't get to make decisions like that. I used to work in water. Every neighborhood got water, whether they were rich and spent 5k a season filling their pools and watering their lawns, or if they were poor and were constantly having shutoffs done. If they are in the service area, you serve them, full stop. Same water, same infrastructure.
I just close tab their f them
love is just extroverted narcissism
Except you're assuming that AT&T is arbitrarily discriminating rather than choosing to not invest in infrastructure where the risk of attempting to make their investment back is too great.
We paid them to do it. They took our money, they failed to build out high-speed broadband to the entire country like they promised, and in the same year we gave them the money, they paid out extra-large bonuses to their executives. They simply stole our money and split it up between them. They're not arbitrarily discriminating, they're discriminating against the customers they think are least likely to fight back against their theft.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Once they're upgraded, they can now mark their ethernet connection as a metered connection. Those updates can be downloaded off-site and brought in when actually needed.
Everyone, no matter what, should have a fast connection. Other Countries do! But us, our country, being the greedy depraved mind, keeps on hounding after the all mighty buck. Just like caught crabs trying to get out of a bucket they will pull the higher one down in attempts to get out.
Form a community like us
http://www.wafreenet.org/Home
My neighbors and I have been discussing exactly this. Getting a shared tower installed.
"No reasonable amount of money can get me faster internet. Less than 5 miles away, I can get 100M but it would costs " So why don't you just move less than five miles away? Are you really this dumb that you don't take internet connections into account when choosing a house? Because if you are, you deserve what you get.
I like where I live. I live on 4 acres and there is a state park between me and the city 10 minutes away. I wish I could get faster internet but it's not a deal breaker. That buffer zone is why I can't get faster internet but is also why I moved here in the first place.
"Being a rich white guy"
"No reasonable amount of money"
You are not rich.
Just because I think the price is unreasonable doesn't mean that I couldn't afford it if I really wanted. There are very few people rich enough where price is no object and those people don't tend to stay rich for long. I currently use cellular hotspots for internet which is faster than what I can get on a hardline and it suits my needs just fine.
you get paid what you're worth
No, you get paid what people are willing to pay you for the work you've done. The intrinsic value of the work you've done is actually often divorced from how rewards are distributed for the work that was done. CEOs aren't paid loads of money because nobody else could do their job. Post-doc science grads who are supporting cutting-edge services are. The world is weird that way.
you get the services you pay for
If that were true there would be no reason for false advertising lawsuits to exist and contractors of roughly equal skill would never attempt to undercut each others prices. What you've said is demonstrably false.
I find this all curious simply for the reason that I live in what could be described as a non-fancy neighborhood in a post-second world country with median income of $10k-$15k per year, a neighborhood that actually gets neglected by telcos for the very simple reason of being a ("commercially uninteresting") several kilometers long "noodle" between two larger agglomerations, and even *I* get access to a line with a ~10 Mb/s capability. I have no idea what you Americans are doing. I can understand that rural settings can be different but even the US, despite the low population density, is already highly urbanized. Most people simply shouldn't have these kinds of problems.
Ezekiel 23:20
Ever notice that $5 or so "internet recovery fee" on your bill. It's not for the govt taxes. It's for AT&T's shareholders. But it's not part of the advertised price even though it is part of the price. It's supposed to be for upgrading the network but that isn't happening. They should be forced to give back 20 years of internet recovery fees.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
but this cost him several thousand dollars and is out of the price range of even most middle class people
If a few thousand measly, inflated dollars are outside your price range, you're no longer middle class.
I have no idea what you Americans are doing.
I suspect the DSL problem in the US is that many central offices were consolidated in the early era of Electronic Switching System (ESS) deployment, and this is the reason for our crazy long local loop lengths that average 4.25 km. Works fine for voice, horrible for DSL speeds above a few Mbps.
But you try and tell the young people today that... and they won't believe ya'.
The telecoms, do this for financial reasons, understandably. A low income neighborhood is less likely to be able to afford the higher tiers of internet. However, the government knows this, and has enabled massive subsidies for decades for just this reason. The number of incentives, fees, tax.
The telecoms benefit from the extra $$$ but rarely put any good faith into the efforts.
And *MOST* people simply don't have these issues in the US. Those that do are usually well aware of why they are having these issues -- usually because they chose a location that is far away from other people or surrounded by undeveloped land.
You're assuming that in that person's mind "not important enough to do" at that price is not synonymous with unreasonable. If you don't feel that it is possible to get $100k utility (whatever that utility may be in your mind) out of a home improvement project, that price is unreasonable regardless of whether you can afford to pay the price or not.
Correct, I am assuming that. And I would bet I'm right. Maybe Wycliffe is worth $50M but still decides to live in an area where he cannot get the electric / gas / phone / internet utilities he wants, but I doubt it. He is probably an upper middle class individual living in a working / middle class area.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
My internet is just barely faster than a T1. How ever will I cope?!?!?
I don't know why most of the replies to you imply that you must be joking, or that's not sufficient anymore. I came here expecting to find most people saying that.
Way way back, nearly 2 decades ago, I had lost my cable internet service. My cell phone, a motorola flip phone through nextel, had the ability to hook to the computer as a serial device, and you could dial out that way. Using a special prefix got you a modem bank at Nextel. For 3 months, I did all my home browsing using that. It was stuck at a max of 9600 baud.
That sucked, but I was still able to work fine (ssh), and browse the internet, and even browse photo galleries (albeit slowly.. open up a bunch of them, go do something, come back a bit later when they start completing). It wasn't acoustic coupler slow (it was enough I could still do work over ssh without much of an issue), but it was as slow as was manageable at the time. A T1 would have been a dream, and would have been way faster than my cable at the time.
If they're actually delivering T1 speeds, and its priced accordingly, I don't see an issue. That's enough to watch normal video online anywhere, and do all the normal online activities people do. It's only not enough for edge cases (Oh no, 12 people can't all watch different videos at the same time). I doubt they're actually getting 1.5Mbps though (if they are, I might revisit ADSL and sign up as a backup link to my cable, which flops several times a day).
You're kidding me! get out of town!
You mean people in poor neighborhoods didn't get 3" water mains while people in rich neighborhoods were served by normal 12" water mains?
And they were not restricted to 5 gallons a day while people in rich neighborhoods got all the water they wanted each day?
That's just crazy talk headw1nd!
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This is hardly mysterious. Before something exists, there aren't many applications for that thing that most people need. People got along fine back in the day without computers, networks, mobile phones, and GPS. It doesn't mean you'd get by today, because what's expected of you has grown with what's available to you.
I downloaded Debian 0.91 over a 300 baud modem and put it on a stack of 35 three inch floppies. It took all day. The latest release of Debian is 60x larger.
It takes 3 MB/s dedicated to get Netflix in SD; and that's going to be typical of any video streaming service, not just entertainment. In a neighborhood with 1.5 Mb/s service a household is going to be practically limited in its access to information.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I don't think my local supermarkets and restaurants post "help wanted" signs in their windows to keep HR busy.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
this seems like redlining.
And that has cost some banks money. Let's see if this meets the courts' tests for redlining, and how much they may force AT&T to both build out and actually offer/provide equally capable services to all customers regardless of location... Fining them is not a solution, and being forced to build is a tacit fine, not allowing them to use excessive fees for inadequate services and poor physical plants to subsidize services in apparently more affluent locations.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Poor people can't just "get" a job. There aren't any jobs. None. Rich people have all the money and they don't feel like paying poor people to do jobs. Rich people still advertise plenty of jobs to keep the HR departments busy. All the jobs are fake though. Every job application gets filed away and ignored immediately. Fake jobs are never filled but the same jobs get posted every month so they look like they're still open. But really there aren't any jobs. Poor people just waste their time applying to fake jobs until they starve to death.
FTFY. Gotta stay in the category of following gov't regulation, you know, just in case you're investigated.
I don't think my local supermarkets and restaurants post "help wanted" signs in their windows to keep HR busy.
I don't think it's legal (or maybe it is, just bad tact) to say, "Part-time help with no benefits wanted".
One place I worked it cost $18,000 for us to run fiber about 1/4 of a mile. We had to bore underground because the incumbent power company wanted to charge so much in attachment fees that it was cheaper to go underground, despite the fact that this was on private property and the poles serviced no other customers. Extrapolating out, it would be ballpark $288,000 to $360,000 for your 4 to 5 mile loop. But of course, every situation is different.
I think the argument, "You're getting Y Mbps! That ought to be enough!!" is missing the point a bit. What's going on is that an ISP offers package A. Neighborhood X has no problem keeping up with demand because the area was expected to draw bigger income earners when the fiber was laid down. Neighborhood Y has issues keeping up with demand because, to the ISP, net income in the area just makes it unattractive to lay more fiber in the area.
WARNING Personal rant below
I've got the exact same thing here where I live. Head over to a friend's house that's about seven miles down the road and their package just screams. Head back home, and I have the exact same package as friend, and my Internet is pretty much crap. We're in the same flipping city, the difference being that the area I live in is slightly cheaper housing (~$150k/unit) versus friend's neck of the woods being average of (~$300k/unit). It's irritating because you can literally see them out in his side of town laying more fiber down where I'll be doing good to get my Internet back up if lighting strikes one of the station boxes (literally took six "WORK" days before it got back up, tornado tears down one of the boxes on the other side of town and it's good as new two days later, same flipping storm!).
So yeah, I really do hope that these folks win, because it's just stupid to think "Oh I'll just get the same package that my friend has and it'll be all good" only to find out that since you decided to save a pretty penny and put the diff into your retirement and not buy one of those gaudy, super high ceiling/hard to AC properly, brick facade on only one side of the house, fully paved patio in the back, piece of crap houses that now you're doomed to have crap internet, even though you literally have the exact same thing as those who decided to buy one of those houses I just described.
If a few thousand measly, inflated dollars are outside your price range, you're no longer middle class.
The other issue is having somewhere to terminate on the other end. That would require someone in town willing to let you put a tower on it. Basically, even being firmly in the middle class, it's sometimes hard to do that last mile yourself.
One place I worked it cost $18,000 for us to run fiber about 1/4 of a mile. We had to bore underground because the incumbent power company wanted to charge so much in attachment fees that it was cheaper to go underground, despite the fact that this was on private property and the poles serviced no other customers. Extrapolating out, it would be ballpark $288,000 to $360,000 for your 4 to 5 mile loop. But of course, every situation is different.
Yeah, that sounds about right for the labor. The other problem would be actually getting permission to run fiber thru the state park and all the other properties between here and there. Other than my neighborhood of 20 houses, most of the rest of the area is farms so that would be a pretty expensive proposition for 20 houses.
My mother has AT&T internet, and the fastest she could get is 1Mbps. I expected at least 1.5Mbps but they said it wasn't available.
Hmmnm, that could explain things. I believe my country has a 1.5 km mean (and about 1.4 km median) for this. Fascinating!
Ezekiel 23:20
Lie.
You get paid only what it takes to avoid replacing you
Thus offshoring, H1-B and any other tactic to cut wages by rendering employees "redundant"
,... Being a rich white guy... it would costs 10s of thousands if not 100s of thousands for me to personally have a line ran.
I'm going to call bullshit on this person who lacks elementary English Grammar.
An Immigrant Indlish speaker MIGHT be rich and make these mistakes, but not a Citizen White Guy unless the money is all inherited.
Except that we subsidize these corporations to build out infrastructure to areas regardless of income levels. Of course, since they have paid off your politicians, they have no accountability to that promise. Cool story about poor people, though.
and some people because of their landlords don't have another choice, or worse, the other choice is TWC/Spectrum or whatever they're calling themselves.
Good luck with that. In my area ( high income, beach area ) I canceled my ATT connection because, after "upgrading" and being forced to pay for under-grounding our lines, the Internet denigrated to .01Mps.
"merely because its discrimination is based on investment decisions"
At some point this framing of the word "discrimination" sort of devalues the concept.
When even logical business decisions are pushed under that umbrella, they serve as distractions from actual cases of bigoted discrimination.