US battle over broadband heats up
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 75pc, 80pc, 90pc...’” Mitchell, Director of Youth Nonprofit Maryland Out of School Time Network, said in a phone interview.
“It felt like we were being held hostage’’, said Mitchell, who was working from home in Baltimore, Maryland alongside her husband and their two children attending school online.
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 (TB) of data are charged $10 for every additional 50 gigabytes, up to a maximum of $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 30pc 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 in a phone interview.
“This decision to add a data cap is particularly harmful to Black and brown people, and poor people, who are already living paycheque to paycheque and can’t afford additional fees.”
A Comcast company spokesman said that only about 5pc 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 (BDEC), 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 highschool senior and a member of the group Students Organizing a Multicultural and Open Society (SOMOS), 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 lowincome customers that costs $9.95 per month.
That service caps download speeds at 25 megabytes per second (MB) and uploads at 3 MB, speeds that meet the basic federal definition of “broadband”.
This decision to add a data cap is particularly harmful to Black and brown people, and poor people, who are already living paychequeto paycheque and can’t afford additional fees
ZEKE COHEN Baltimore city councilman