Having a fast internet connection at home has become a near-requirement for many Americans, especially with the rise of remote education and working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic
to help cover cellphone bills, which also qualify, rather than home internet costs. Connectivity advocates told The Markup that it's hard to get people to jump through the bureaucratic hoops needed to sign up for the program when service is slow.
EarthLink, which doesn’t own internet infrastructure in the examined cities but rather rents capacity from other providers, did not provide an official comment despite repeated requests. Las Vegas is one city where large swaths of CenturyLink’s offers were for slow service. Almost half didn’t meet the current federal definition of broadband. These fell disproportionately on Las Vegas’s lower-income and least white areas.
“I think it’s unfair knowing that it is slow service that we’re paying for that is not commensurate with the faster speeds that they have in the other parts of the city that are paying the same price,” Diaz said. “It just breaks my heart to know we’re not getting the best bang for our buck.” “They’ve made a decision that those neighborhoods are going to be treated differently,” said Callahan. “The core reason for that is they think they don’t have enough money in those neighborhoods to sustain the kind of market they want.”under a provision of the 2021 infrastructure bill aimed at"preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin.
It also asked for subsidies to build high-speed internet in lower-income neighborhoods because, as AT&T asserted in its letter to the FCC, “most or all deficiencies in broadband access appear to result not from invidious discrimination, but from ordinary business-case challenges in the absence of subsidy programs.”
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