Comcast draws ire over its hiked data caps
In January Ellie Mitchell started getting a barrage of texts and emails from her Internet service provider, warning her she was running out of data.
“The messages kept coming: ‘You’ve used 75 percent, 80 percent, 90 percent,’” said Mitchell, director of youth nonprofit Maryland Out of School Time Network.
“It felt like we were being held hostage.”
Comcast Corp, one of the largest Internet providers in the United States, announced in November it would be capping data usage for residential customers not on an unlimited plan in several cities in the northeast.
Customers who use more than 1.2 terabytes of data are charged US$10 for every additional 50 gigabytes, up to a maximum of US$100.
The move drew the ire of elected officials and digital rights activists in Baltimore, who have been calling on the company to make broadband accessible for all students during the pandemic.
With millions forced to work and learn from home, COVID-19 has laid bare the digital divide across the country, with technological inequality disproportionately affecting poor and minority communities.
Some 16 million children, or 30 percent of all US public school students, lack either an Internet connection or a device at home adequate for distance learning, according to the Boston Consulting Group.
“We see (the Comcast cap) as preying on people’s vulnerability,” Baltimore city councilman Zeke Cohen said.
“This decision to add a data cap is particularly harmful to poor people, who are already living paycheck to paycheck and can’t afford additional fees.”
A Comcast company spokesman said that only about 5 percent of its customers would regularly go over the 1.2 TB limit, adding that it had a policy of working with customers on payment plans if they could not afford their bills.
On January 26, Cohen, two other council members and the Baltimore Digital Equity Coalition, sent a letter to Maryland’s Attorney General, requesting he investigate Comcast for price gouging.
When Baltimore’s public schools first went remote in March 2020, Aliyah Abid was a high-school senior and a member of the group Students Organizing a Multicultural and Open Society, which pushed Comcast to make broadband quicker and cheaper.
“These days, the Internet is how you access your education — so, with Comcast we are being asked to pay for a public education that’s supposed to be free,” she said. “And not everyone is privileged enough to just not think about that.”
In July, SOMOS launched a petition asking Comcast to ensure students in the city could get online for free during the COVID-19 crisis.
Chief among their demands was improving the speed and lowering the cost of the “Internet Essentials” program, a discounted plan for low-income customers that costs US$9.95 per month.
That service caps download speeds at 25 megabytes per second and uploads at 3 MB, speeds that meet the basic federal definition of “broadband.”
“What we are hearing from students is that the speed is abysmal for Essentials,” said Adam Echelman, BDEC co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Libraries Without Borders.
“This is a real problem right now, because you can’t write an essay on your smartphone — you need a good Internet to stay in touch with your teachers.”
Kristerfer Burnett, a Baltimore city councilman, who co-signed the letter to the Attorney General demanding the Comcast investigation, said his office was fielding a barrage of complaints from families struggling to get online.
“We are getting bombarded with upset families who are saying that only one of their children can be on the Internet at a time,” he said.
Comcast said it would be increasing the Essentials speed.
“We’re continually improving our Internet Essentials program and have increased speeds multiple times, including today to 50 MB (and) 5 MB, all while keeping the price at US$9.95/month for the last decade,” the company said in an emailed statement.
“These speeds support multiple concurrent video conferencing sessions and enable family members to learn and work from home.”
Comcast also cited research from nonprofit CableLabs and Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy group, indicating that the previous Essentials speed should be able to accommodate video conferencing.
AT&T, another major Internet service provider, previously suspended its data coverage charges through the end of 2020, and announced it would waive the data caps it places on its low-income plans through June 2021.
Like many American cities marred by residential segregation, the distribution of Internet to homes in Baltimore is highly unequal, said John Horrigan, a senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC.
In his research, Horrigan has found that 206,000 African-American households in Maryland state were without a wireline broadband connection in 2020.
A report he published in May 2020 showed that in Baltimore alone, more than 40 percent of households did not have a fixed line connection, with many homes using their phones to access the Internet.
“Having good Internet is extremely important to people’s emotional wellbeing at this time — not having access leads to both economic and social exclusion,” he said.
The primary reason families lack broadband, he said, is that they cannot afford the monthly bill.
The new caps, he said, would further entrench the notion that data is a scarce, and expensive, resource.
Comcast is now weathering nationwide criticism of its data caps, which critics see as leveraging its dominant position in the broadband market during a crisis.
According to a 2020 report by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a group critical of major telecom firms, 22 million US customers living in Comcast service areas have no other option for broadband service.
California congresswoman Anna Eshoo sent the company a letter in December asking it to suspend all data caps until after the pandemic.
Comcast had already waived its caps on data in California and other places states until the end of the 2020 school year.
The company said that the alerts being sent now to customers will not translate into additional charges until their August 2021 bill, and the messages were only meant to help customers decide if they should change to a plan with more data.
Unless something changes, Mitchell said she will likely have to start paying the additional US$30 a month for an unlimited plan.
“This is our work lifeline, this is our education lifeline — so we either have to ration or just add another thing to our monthly budget,” Mitchell said. “It’s death by a thousand cuts.”
When six of Sarah’s dogs were stolen in December, she was left reeling. But she was not alone, as increasing numbers of pet owners have experienced similar losses across Britain.
“I can’t name one feeling because there was too many — I was basically shocked, upset, frightened because of how this happened,” said the 35-year-old, who declined to give her surname.
“(I was) obviously really, really, really worried for the dogs and it’s hard to go on with daily life because you feel guilty.”
The dogs disappeared after thieves broke into the outhouse where they slept overnight at the family’s property in a quiet village near the town of Port Talbot in south Wales.
Five remain missing but a female English springer spaniel stolen was recently found by a passerby, and a vet was able to trace her back to Sarah.
She had a nasty wound where the perpetrators had unsuccessfully tried to remove her microchip.
“Seeing the injuries that my spaniel has got, (I’m) even more worried for the dogs now,” said Sarah.
Britain has seen an explosion in the number of dog thefts since the coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdowns started early last year, as demand for pets has surged.
“It’s just as growing a pandemic as COVID itself,” said Wayne May, from DogLost, an organization that tries to reunite missing canines with their owners using its online database.
“I’ve been doing this for 30 years now and 2020 was the worst ever year,” he added, noting there had been an estimated 250 percent rise in dog thefts since last March.
Already known as a nation of dog lovers, a burgeoning number of Britons have been looking for four-legged companions during the virus lockdowns to help overcome loneliness and anxiety.
Prices for puppies in particular but also older dogs have skyrocketed, attracting greedy breeders — and the interest of criminals.
Figures from Pets4Homes, an online marketplace for sales and adoptions, showed the average price asked in around 150,000 listings from March to September was £1,883 (US$2,588).
The average price during the same period the previous year was less than half that, at £888.
Some puppies of popular breeds, such as spaniels, bulldogs, pugs and poodle crossbreeds, can be listed for more than £4,000.
Meanwhile, adoptions have also risen.
The “pets” section of the website of the animal welfare charity the RSPCA attracted 40 million views in the final nine months of 2020 — an increase of 13 million compared to 2019.
“Because there’s been such a huge demand for puppies especially, we’ve seen people start to try and meet this demand by acting illegally and illicitly,” said Sam Gaines, head of companion animals at the RSPCA.
She added that the extra demand had led to a rise in puppies being brought in from abroad.
“We do have huge concerns about how puppies are bred and reared from outside of the UK, and the really long journeys that they need to endure to actually get to this country,” Gaines said.
Organized criminal groups are now taking a growing interest in this area, alongside less coordinated thieves long active in more opportunistic dog stealing, according to DogLost’s May.
“Prior to the pandemic... it was opportunity theft, a very very small percentage was criminal gangs or specifically targeted thefts,” he explained.
“That all changed last year... we’re now getting organized gangs and groups, stealing your dogs to breed from or to look for a reward or a ransom.”
May believes only tougher sanctions can discourage the growing number of thieves.
“It’s more lucrative now to be a dog thief in the United Kingdom than to be a drug dealer, because the punishment doesn’t fit the crime,” he added, noting punishment for stealing a dog is a paltry £200-250 fine.
“The criminal gangs are willing to take that risk for such a paltry sum.”