Digital Divide

Attorney Daryl Parks has filed a formal Federal Communications Commission complaint against AT&T on behalf of three African American low-income residents of Cleveland (OH) alleging digital redlining. The complainants--Joanne Elkins, Hattie Lanfair, and Rochelle Lee--allege that "wealthier and predominantly white areas have gotten premium upgradable high speed broadband access at bullet speed," while the three complainants "receive slow speeds at a rate as low as 1.5 mbps downstream or less, although they pay AT&T for high speed access."

They say that is unjust and unreasonable discrimination in violation of the Communications Act. They also allege that is part of a pattern of discrimination by AT&T nationwide, relying on a study by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance. The parties say they met with AT&T in July, which "flatly" denies that it is redlining, hence the suit. The complaint concedes AT&T offered to expand a 5G wireless broadband pilot program, but says that is not sufficient. Parks and company want the FCC to investigate the charge, including holding a hearing, which would likely be before the FCC's Administrative Law Judge, and they want damages.

[Commentary] It took the death of a young woman at the hands of one of the neo-Nazis she was protesting to force the ever-expanding media universe to face a question it has been evading for years: Where’s the line?

Unlike the last big communications revolutions — brought about with radio and then television — this one came with no barrier to entry in terms of expensive equipment like towers and studios. There have been no governmental limits like broadcasting standards and licensing requirements. But as the downsides of informational democratization become more evident — the opening it has provided for nefarious state actors, terrorists and hate mongers — those who have some control over the web’s content stream have had a hard time figuring out where to build some much-needed dams. The trouble has come in finding the line between what some may find offensive and what is objectively dangerous speech. But at this point, if we can’t set a line at neo-Nazis and white nationalists inciting hatred and violence, can we set any line at all?

Seattle is upping its financial contribution to a program that for the past 20 years has helped community groups provide technology, as well as the skills needed to use technology, to residents who are traditionally underserved and often left behind. The program is called the Technology Matching Fund, and the Seattle City Council recently voted to award $430,000 through it to 15 local groups.

This year the fund is expected to help more than 6,000 residents of Seattle in underserved or underrepresented communities, including those of immigrants and refugees, seniors, at-risk youths, and people with disabilities. The resources will help these residents by being put to use through a wide range of social groups, including the Boys and Girls Club, LaunchCode, the West African Community Council and many others. The matching facet of this program is a simple one: For every dollar the city gives, an organization will match it with 50 cents of its own money then being put toward tech. What the money is used for varies from organization to organization, but in a broad sense it all will go to one of the three priorities that have been established by Seattle’s digital inclusion planning: increasing connectivity throughout the city; fostering better digital skills among residents; and providing devices and other technology to those who do not presently have access to it.

Comcast Corporation announced that its acclaimed Internet Essentials program, the nation’s largest and most comprehensive high-speed Internet adoption program, has now connected more than four million low-income Americans, in one million households, to high-speed Internet service at home. The State of Florida is second to California with the most connected households in the country, having connected more than 120,000 low-income households benefitting nearly 500,000 Floridians.

The company also announced three key program enhancements:
For the fourth time in six years, Comcast will increase the program’s Internet service speeds, this time from 10/1 Mbps to up to 15/2 Mbps.
To help family members connect to the Internet on the go and save money on their wireless bills, Internet Essentials customers will now enjoy 40 hours of free out-of-home WiFi access per month to the company’s growing network of 18 million Xfinity WiFi hotspots.
Comcast is also expanding its pilot program for low-income senior citizens from five cities and metropolitan areas to 12, including today in Miami-Dade County (FL).

Sprint plans to support 180,000 low-income high school students with free wireless devices and connectivity. About 70% of America’s high school teachers assign homework that requires online connectivity, yet low-income students often don’t have the broadband at home that they need to complete their schoolwork. It’s a problem known as the “Homework Gap” that affects more than 5 million families.

As part of the 1Million Project, the Sprint Foundation is ponying up to supply service and equipment for up to four years while the kids finish high school. The first year of the five-year project kicks off this week, to encompass more than 1,300 schools across 32 states. The initiative should impact 180,000 students. Over the course of the program, the hope is to help up to 1 million high schoolers who lack internet access at home.

[Commentary] A new Broadband Access Coalition of internet service providers has joined forces with consumer, schools and health care advocacy groups to petition the Federal Communications Commission to open up the airwaves for spectrum best suited to a new, superfast broadband service for the whole of America.

This new approach does not rely solely on fiber, which is costly and difficult to deploy, but instead harnesses wireless broadband. This technology can be deployed at up to one tenth the cost of laying new fiber cabling to homes, with far fewer disruptions and project delays. It can also bring new superfast Wi-Fi services to areas that have no or little choice over their broadband provider. 94 percent of our internet traffic traverses Wi-Fi and home or business broadband connections – not more expensive cellular airwaves. The coalition’s petition proposes to open up new wireless spectrum for improving broadband services cost-effectively. This spectrum can provide great coverage in underserved rural areas, and can stimulate new competitive Internet Service Providers to enter the market and connect dense suburban areas. Unfortunately, the mobile industry is lobbying to secure this new spectrum band for its own exclusive use. The new wireless approach means consumers no longer have to be tethered to any physical infrastructure. Unlike challenging other traditional utilities, action doesn’t require consumers to overhaul their homes – all they have to do is make their voices heard.

[Fink is the CPO and Co-Founder of Mimosa Networks]

At a recent panel convened by the Wireless Future Project at New America, Ellen Satterwhite, of the American Library Association, noted that 40 percent of libraries cannot meet the minimum speed requirements set by the Federal Communications Commission (100Mbs for small libraries and 1Gbs for large ones) because of high costs or lack of access. We need only look at Idaho to get a glimpse of this absurd pricing: One library there pays $1000 per month for 5Mb service, while another pays $650 per month for 40Mb service.

So how can we ramp up connectivity in these areas? One potential solution that has shown promise is fixed wireless internet. This, in a nutshell, involves beaming internet access from a broadcasting tower directly into people’s homes via a small receiver on their roof. These sorts of point to multi-point (P2MP) fixed wireless services are becoming increasingly popular, particularly in Middle America, in part because of the relative ease of deployment and the ability to provide gigabit-level speeds. You might be wondering, then, how we can encourage fixed wireless. At the panel, advocates and industry leaders discussed the possible benefits of expanding, or sharing, wireless spectrum access in the 3.7-4.2GHz band to wireless internet service providers, or WISPs. This would be a boon to rural WISPs like Jeff Kohler’s Rise Broadband. Kohler noted that companies like Rise are starting to “feel the squeeze” on the spectrum they’re currently allowed to operate on. He also noted that the cost per customer is considerably less as well, often being roughly $250 for someone using fixed wireless, where the average rural fiber consumer could be upwards of $1,000. In fact, the overall cost of deploying “wireless fiber” for his company was roughly one-tenth of the price of standard fiber.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai has a theory. He believes that accessing the Internet through a smartphone is just as good as having high-speed Internet access in your house. In fact, he appears to believe this so strongly that he is looking into changing his agency's guidelines so that any place in the U.S. that has sufficient mobile coverage will be considered "connected," even if people living there have no option to receive broadband access in their homes. That theory forms the essence of a new Notice of Inquiry that the FCC has just put out.

The notice is a first step toward a potential policy change with respect to how the agency measures broadband deployment in the US. If Pai's idea somehow becomes the new official credo for the FCC, it would be a disaster for efforts to improve access to connectivity in America—a country that has, as we have noted several times in just the last year, a persistent, embarrassing digital divide. Mobile broadband access isn't the same as connectivity at home. The screens are smaller, data caps on mobile bandwidth are much tighter (and overages far more expensive), and speeds are slower—something the agency seems to acknowledge in the notice, when it suggests that "mobile broadband" be defined at 10Mbps of download speed and 1Mbps upstream. For the record, that's less than half the 25Mbps/3Mbps threshold necessary for a home connection to qualify as "broadband."

[Commentary] More than 15 million comments have been filed with the Federal Communications Commission on its Restoring Internet Freedom docket, which focuses on the concept of net neutrality, and specifically Title II regulations imposed in 2015 under the previous administration. While this colossal number includes many sentiments – including an unsettling number of foreign and some 6 million fake comments – it does not contain significant representation from poor, minority and senior Americans. Media and communications scholars have documented that online activism is the province of the digital elite and largely aligns with race and class. Herein lies an unsettling problem.

"Digital democracy" has been promoted to enable underrepresented consumers to become more politically involved. This seems intuitive, but the reality is that digitization can, if anything, exacerbate the problem of these individuals not participating. The reality is that Title II ignores and hurts underserved communities. It prohibits a free market for data which allows these individuals to enjoy free and reduced price content and offerings. It has cost the nation some $35 billion annually in lost participation from content-side actors and advertisers which would otherwise support internet access to these groups. It is also responsible for deterring the creation of some 750,000 jobs.

[Roslyn Layton is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute’s Center for Internet, Communications, and Technology Policy.]

The internet’s global expansion is entering a new phase, and it looks decidedly unlike the last one. Instead of typing searches and e-mails, a wave of newcomers—“the next billion,” the tech industry calls them—is avoiding text, using voice activation and communicating with images. They are a swath of the world’s less-educated, online for the first time thanks to low-end smartphones, cheap data plans and intuitive apps that let them navigate despite poor literacy. Incumbent tech companies are finding they must rethink their products for these newcomers and face local competitors that have been quicker to figure them out.

Mr. Singh, 36, balances suitcases on his head in New Delhi, earning less than $8 a day as a porter in one of India’s biggest railway stations. He isn’t comfortable reading or using a keyboard. That doesn’t stop him from checking train schedules, messaging family and downloading movies. “We don’t know anything about e-mails or even how to send one,” said Mr. Singh, who went online only in the past year. “But we are enjoying the internet to the fullest.”