Comcast, Dell work to improve digital divide in Houston
Comcast on Friday launched a series of initiatives to help chip away at the digital divide in Houston, including teaming with Dell Technologies to give away free computers and help with funding for two local senior learning centers.
Comcast also plans to provide $175,000 in grants for Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Complete Communities program to provide digital literacy programs in underserved areas of the city.
The announcements come after Comcast earlier in the week said it was expanding its eligibility requirements for its low-income Internet Essentials online access service. Participants in more government aid programs are now eligible.
The company said more than 600,000 Texans have signed up for the Internet Essentials program since it launched in 2011, with 400,000 of them in Houston, making it the city with the most partici
pants nationally. Comcast said it has signed up more than 2 million households with 8 million people to Internet Essentials.
Round Rock-based Dell is working with Comcast to give away 2,500 notebook computers across the country to seniors, veterans, students and adults who can’t afford to buy one. Comcast also makes refurbished desktop and mobile computers available to Internet Essentials users at a discounted cost of $150.
Dell will be providing funds to upgrade computer labs in two senior community centers in Houston. Overall, Dell is helping to upgrade 15 nonprofit computer labs around the U.S. as part of its partnership with Comcast.
During a Friday afternoon interview at the Houston Chronicle, Comcast Senior Executive Vice President David. L. Cohen said Internet Essentials is designed to attack the biggest reasons people aren’t connected to the internet: cost of service, access to necessary equipment and a “complicated bucket” of lack of digital literacy, fear of the internet and not understanding why having internet access is important.
“If you are going to bridge the digital divide, you have to attack all of these barriers,” Cohen said.
In its original incarnation, eligibility for Internet Essentials required a family’s participation in the federal school lunch program. But on Tuesday, Comcast announced that participants in 11 federal aid programs could now apply.
Cohen said that in schools where 40 percent or more of students are on the federal lunch program, the entire school is considered eligible for Internet Essentials. That means every student in the Houston Independent School District is eligible, according to Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas.
Chris Lewis, president and chief executive of Public Knowledge, which advocates for internet access for rural and underserved communities, said Comcast is to be applauded for expanding eligibility to anyone who is on any type of government assistance.
“When they first rolled out the program, it was very limited,” Lewis said. “This is a big expansion. First it was just kids, but there are many households without kids that are in need. To expand it to anyone with a low income is a big deal.”
Internet Essentials also requires that customers be in a Comcast service area, not have had any type of Comcast internet service within the last 90 days and not have an outstanding Comcast balance that’s less than a year old.
Lewis said he would like to see Comcast remove the 90-day restriction. There are likely to be many low-income households, he said, that would otherwise qualify but are struggling to keep up with payments for internet access at Comcast’s regular rates.
Internet Essentials provides online speeds of 15 megabit downloads and 2 megabit uploads for $9.95 a month, plus taxes and fees. That falls below the Federal Communications Commission’s formal definition of broadband internet service of 25 Mbps downloads and 3 Mbps uploads.
The program was started as part of Comcast’s agreement with federal regulators when the company acquired NBCUniversal. At the time, the download speed was only 1.5 Mbps.
Cohen said Friday that Internet Essentials had been in the works for two years before it was offered as a “give” to regulators for the acquisition. It was set to expire in 2014 but Comcast decided to keep it going.
The eligibility requirements have been expanded 40 times since the program launched, he said.