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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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.'"
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.