The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) and an organization called Connect Your Community (CYC) published a report using FCC data to highlight AT&T’s unwillingness to improve poor areas of Cleveland. The organizations state that AT&T is just refusing to improve to VDSL across the majority of Cleveland Census blocks, “including the unusual majority of blocks with individual poverty rates above 35%.”
The groups claimed that compiled FCC data in map form, like the whole to the left, speaks for itself.
Now AT&T is suffering a looming trial over its alleged “redlining,” and a new charge filed with the FCC on the part of three low-income African American citizens of Cleveland.
The three complainants state that “affluent and predominantly white areas have gotten excellent upgradable high-speed broadband path at bullet speed,” while the three complainants “receive slow rates at a rate as low as 1.5 Mbps downstream or less, although they pay AT&T for high-speed access.” They’re petitioning for a hearing at the FCC in front of a Governing law Judge.
AT&T, as you might suspect, insists it has done zero wrong.
“The statement does not explicitly reflect the expense we’ve made in delivering faster internet to urban and rural areas beyond the U.S.,” an AT&T spokesperson said when the original allegations were leveled. “While we are spending in broadband, we’re also spending in technologies that will decrease some of the infrastructure limitations.”
The groups found AT&T’s delay in low-income areas when investigating the company’s “Access,” program, a state of its DirecTV merger purportedly giving discounted $10 broadband to low-income cities. But there too the organizations say AT&T over-promised and under-delivered, deliberately refusing to give the discounted option to users on DSL lines moderate than 3 Mbps in order, purportedly to restrict the total volume of possible applicants.
That said, a different study out of California several periods ago also argued that AT&T’s making the same thing in that situation when it comes to its deployment of next-generation gigabit-capable fiber.
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