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Fnord666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

It's no secret that ISPs can make more money from network upgrades in wealthy neighborhoods than low-income ones, and a new analysis of Cleveland, Ohio, by broadband advocacy groups appears to show that AT&T is following that strategy. The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and a Cleveland-based group [connectyourcommunity.org] called Connect Your Community alleged in their report [digitalinclusion.org] today that "AT&T has systematically discriminated against lower-income Cleveland neighborhoods in its deployment of home Internet and video technologies over the past decade."

Last year, the NDIA brought attention [arstechnica.com] to AT&T's refusal to provide $5-per-month Internet service to poor people in areas where the company hasn't upgraded its network. When the Federal Communications Commission approved AT&T's purchase of DirecTV in 2015, the FCC required AT&T to provide discount broadband to poor people as condition of the merger. But the condition apparently allowed AT&T to charge full price in areas where maximum download speeds were less than 3Mbps. After the NDIA spoke out, AT&T announced it would stop exploiting the loophole and instead provide discount Internet to poor people in all parts of its network.

Today's followup report from the NDIA and Connect Your Community analyzes FCC data on AT&T Internet deployments in Cleveland, where many residents were initially declared ineligible for the discount broadband service.

"Specifically, AT&T has chosen not to extend its 'fiber-to-the-node' VDSL infrastructure—which is now the standard for most Cuyahoga County suburbs and other urban AT&T markets throughout the US—to the majority of Cleveland Census blocks, including the overwhelming majority of blocks with individual poverty rates above 35 percent," the report said.

In the Ohio suburbs, AT&T customers routinely get speeds of at least 18Mbps and sometimes up to 1Gbps, while high-poverty neighborhoods in Cleveland are stuck on speeds of 768kbps to 6mbps, the report said. The FCC defines broadband speeds as 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream.

"When lending institutions have engaged in similar policies and practices, our communities haven't hesitated to call it 'redlining,'" the advocacy groups wrote. "We see no reason to hesitate to call it 'digital redlining' in this case."

Source: ArsTechnica [arstechnica.com]

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