Nationally, internet service providers sometimes offer lower-income, less white neighborhoods slower internet service for the same price as faster connections in neighborhoods that are whiter and wealthier. That’s according to a report by The Markup, a nonprofit newsroom focused on tech accountability.
The reporting found that across the country — including in Portland and Seattle — a provider might offer speeds at or above 200 megabits per second in one neighborhood, while offering service below 25 megabits per second in others for the same price. We learn more about the findings from Aaron Sankin, an investigative reporter with The Markup.
This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with the conversation about internet speed and equity. Journalists from the nonprofit newsroom, The Markup, recently gathered and analyzed close to a million internet service offers from AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink and CenturyLink in 38 cities, including Portland. They found that all four companies routinely offer people wildly different internet speeds, even though they’re paying the same price. This is often connected to race. People in the least white neighborhoods are likely to have the worst offers. Aaron Sankin is a part of the team behind this new report. He is an investigative reporter at The Markup and he joins us now. Welcome to Think Out Loud.
Aaron Sankin: Hi, great to be here.
Miller: I wanna start with one of the stories that you tell in the article. Can you tell us about a woman named Shirley Neville in New Orleans?
Sankin: Shirley Neville is a woman who lives in New Orleans, in an overwhelmingly Black and Latino, pretty middle class area in New Orleans, and she had issues with her AT&T internet service for years. She said she had been a customer for decades. And over the last couple of years, during pandemic lockdown, she realized that her internet was not really doing what she needed it to do. She was having all these Zoom meetings. She kept getting kicked off. So she calls up AT&T and says, ‘Hey, I’m willing to pay a little bit more for faster service,’ and AT&T says, ‘We cannot give you faster service in your neighborhood. It’s just not a neighborhood for high speed.’
Now if you go on to AT&T’s website and you enter in neighbor addresses in her neighborhood, you’ll see really slow speeds. At Shirley Neville’s address, she was getting speeds that were under one megabit per second download, which to give you a sense, is not fast enough to meet the minimum benchmark for Zoom, for a group Zoom call. And AT&T was offering the same amount of money to set up a new connection at her address as they did in other parts of New Orleans. So looking at addresses on the other side of the city in richer, whiter neighborhoods, you were seeing speeds that were 400 times as fast, that AT&T was charging the same monthly based internet service price of $55. And we saw this across four different internet service providers and 38 different cities across the country, where it was this regular practice of charging the same price for slow speeds as they did for fast speeds. The folks who tended to get the worst deals broadly tended to be people living in less white areas, in lower income areas. And in every single city we examined, those disparities map pretty cleanly onto historical redlining maps that represent the historical legacy of residential housing segregation.
Miller: And just to be clear, we’re talking here about base rates, right? Not what you might get if you pay more, but just the most basic service available. That’s where you could start to see these gigantic disparities, very different speeds for the same price?
Sankin: Yeah, our analysis was largely based on the base speed. Just looking at what the cheapest speed that was available because people are just trying to get connected. And we’re looking out for lower income folks. But at the same time, one of the things we noticed was that for folks who were at addresses that generally have really slow based speeds, they often don’t have the ability to upgrade, to pay a little bit more for significantly faster service. Those upgrades were often reserved for places where the base rate was a lot higher.
For example, for AT&T, we looked at thousands and thousands of addresses all across the country, and if the base rate was under 200 megabits per second, which is your good floor to be consistently being able to do… let’s say you have multiple kids doing virtual schooling at the same time, 200 megabits per second download is where you want to be to make sure that they’re not getting disconnected. We were seeing AT&T, as one example, not offering the option to upgrade unless the base rate was above 200 megabits per second.
Essentially, it’s creating a situation where there are folks who have lots of different options in areas that are often not marginalized and they can pick the internet that works the best for them. And in these more marginalized areas, folks were saying you can either get a crummy deal or you can look for another option with another company.
Miller: Am I right that when you’re talking about under one megabit a second, that’s less than 1,000 times as fast as the gigabit speeds that we might see in ads here and there?
Sankin: Oh yeah. Those gigabit speeds, the stuff that you’ll see - your Google fiber networks, they have networks like that and like Municipal Network in Chattanooga, Tennessee - that stuff can handle pretty much anything folks want to do online and in an instant. But we talked to folks who really saw the negative consequences of these slow speeds in their day to day lives. I talked to folks in Detroit who were like ‘well, we talked to people trying to do online education, like at University of Phoenix online, and they’re really having trouble connecting folks.’ When churches closed, folks were like, ‘okay I want to do Zoom meetings to get to my weekly religious service’ and they weren’t able to do that.
I spoke with a city councilwoman in Las Vegas who was going door to door asking households what their issues were, about maybe why their kids weren’t showing up to virtual school and they were like, ‘well we just don’t have the connectivity.’ The calls kept dropping, the connections were bouncing and were inconsistent, and it just wasn’t worth it. So you see a lot of issues happening with these, as a result of these slow speeds. At the same time it’s folks being forced to pay the same amount for these crummy connections as people in other parts of cities, for something that totally met their needs.
Miller: It seems like limited pushback, specific pushback that you got from ISPs. Some of them said the analysis is deeply flawed, but as you note in the article, did not then provide any explanation for why they said it was flawed.
AT&T was a little bit different. A spokesperson for AT&T emailed you a statement that your analysis is fundamentally flawed because it quote, ‘clearly ignored our participation in the federal affordable connectivity program and our low cost access by AT&T surface service offerings.’ What is this federal program that was the first thing mentioned in this email.?
Sankin: The affordable connectivity program grew out of the 2021 infrastructure bill. And basically what it did is it allocated a big pot of money to the FCC and it gave the FCC the ability, for folks who qualify, for the government to basically subsidize low-income households’ internet to the tune of $30 a month. So if you qualify by having household income under a certain threshold or are a participant in a whole bunch of different federal anti-poverty programs, you can then qualify and the federal government will say, ‘we are going to spend $30, give you 30 bucks a month to pay for internet.’ And a number of ISPs, like AT&T and Verizon, have created their own special plans that allow them to say, ‘okay, if you qualify for this affordable connectivity program, we are going to limit your bill to be $30 a month, so your internet is effectively free to you, the end user.’
For what it does, it’s a great program, lots of people have signed up for it, but at the same time, there was a study done earlier this year that only about a third of eligible households in the top 30 major cities have signed up for ACP. We also found that in lower income areas for AT&T, over half of the connections we tested couldn’t even get 100 megabits per second download speed. I’s like, yes you can get free internet if you’re low income and you qualify, but maybe it’s not going to necessarily meet your needs. And at the same time, not every single person in these areas that are being offered these slow speeds, or an address that’s offered these slow speeds, qualifies for this program. So maybe those dollars might not mean as much to them as a lower income person, but they’re still not getting a particularly good deal compared to what other folks in their city would be getting.
Miller: What are the infrastructure reasons for the hardware differences, for the speeds that are being offered for the same price in different neighborhoods within a single city?
Sankin: What we’re really looking at is the decisions made by various internet service providers. Where to upgrade connections. So, your real slow connections, your ones under 25 megabits per second, which is the floor for what the FCC currently considers to be broadband. A lot of those are gonna be older, slower DSL lines which run over phone technology and the faster ones are fiber connections, that run fiber to a hub in the neighborhood and then run over copper closer to the home. But essentially what we’re seeing here is the repercussions of decisions by internet service providers as to which neighborhoods to upgrade to faster service. And it seems like, for a lot of them in a lot of these places, those decisions have been made to prioritize whiter neighborhoods and richer neighborhoods.
I think it’s crucial here to mention one of the other push backs that we got from ISPs, which is saying that there’s a good reason why they would be charging the same amount for the slow service as the fast service. And their argument is that these older networks are expensive to maintain. They break down a lot, the parts are hard to source because people or manufacturers aren’t making them. So it’s harder for them to maintain this old infrastructure. They have to be charging folks more and they’re not going to be giving households a discount for the slower service. Although that still kind of begs the question, why were there so many disparities in what places were upgraded versus which weren’t?
Miller: Did they have an answer to that? In other words, did the companies that you looked into explain their decision making in terms of where they are putting or where they have put new fiber optic cables?
Sankin: We had asked that. We didn’t get a lot of specificity around it and I know a lot of advocates in the space have been pushing for more transparency on it. But my sense is largely that these companies will do a little bit of math and say, ‘we think that we can get a certain number of subscribers in this area and that will allow us to pay back the expenses that we did to deploy this infrastructure a little faster,’ so they’ll go in those areas.
One of the things we did in our analysis is we did a test as a way to see. If you normalize, if you control for issues like population density or you control for issues like the number of current broadband subscribers in an area, we found that these disparities still largely existed, even if you control for things like the number of people who are in a specific area that would allow an ISP to hook more connections to the same kind of backbone pipe.
Miller: I’m curious about the regulation here. How is it legal for companies to charge the same exact amount for a very different good or service? In this case service?
Sankin: There isn’t really a federal regulatory scheme around internet. There is no going back, like a century. There have been regulations around telephone service and there are regulations at the local level in most municipalities around cable service, but internet has been largely left up to the industry to regulate itself, at least when it comes to these kinds of particular speed and pricing decisions.
There is at the FCC, right now, a rulemaking process which again came out of provisions of the infrastructure bill, looking at this specific issue and digital discrimination and saying, who is getting good internet and who is getting bad internet and what are, what are disparities there? That rule making process is still ongoing and based on the language of the law. It seems like the SEC has broad leeway to do kind of whatever it feels fit in here. We are still waiting for what that would be. And to get a sense of, if they will impose rules, if they’re just going to propose increased subsidy programs. We’re not totally sure, but there is a conversation about this very issue in the halls of the federal government. Trying to really get a handle on what these disparities are. Especially at a time when we’ve seen the internet becoming so essential to everyone’s lives.
Miller: Do you have a sense for the direction the FCC could go? How far reaching these rules could be because they’re very powerful players involved here. I’m wondering if they’re likely to actually change the pricing structure that you investigated, or get at this in a more fundamental way, by requiring faster internet in certain places that don’t have it now?
Sankin: I really don’t know. I think that’s something that we’re just gonna have to wait and see what the FCC comes up with. I will be very interested to see where they land. And also, even in the process, see what further questions they’re going to be asking about this very essential service for so many people.
Miller: Aaron Sankin, thanks very much.
Sankin: Thank you.
Miller: Aaron Sankin is an investigative reporter at The Markup.
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