especially when all the rates are 'up to'
David Lang
On Sat, 22 Oct 2022, David Collier-Brown wrote:
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 <[email protected]>
Reply-To: David Collier-Brown <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
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 <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
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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