Bill Callahan

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance has asked the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (“OCC”), the US Treasury Department agency which serves as the Federal regulator for many of the nation’s banks, to allow those banks to seek Community Reinvestment Act credit for their financial support of community digital inclusion programs serving low and moderate income (LMI) households in their lending areas. In the comments, NDIA Executive Director Angela Siefer said:

This guidebook has a twofold purpose. It is a practical guide for digital inclusion practitioners -- local community-based organizations, libraries, housing authorities, government agencies, and others working directly with community members in need of affordable home broadband service. This guidebook also contains recommendations for policymakers and internet service providers to improve current offers and establish new offers.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) has called on the Federal Communications Commission to prove its commitment to “closing the digital divide” by adding home broadband affordability, the broadband adoption rates of low income households, and the digital redlining of urban neighborhoods to the issues covered by the agency’s upcoming 2019 Broadband Deployment Report.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) has submitted comments to the US Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS), urging the agency to treat affordability for lower-income rural residents as a key factor in implementing its E-Connectivity Pilot, a new grant and loan program for financing broadband projects in rural areas that lack “sufficient” broadband access. NDIA’s comments recommend the following:

[Commentary] In Feb 2018, the Federal Communications Commission released its most recent Broadband Deployment Report, which bases its analysis on 2016 data delivered by all Internet providers. At first glance, improvements in broadband coverage are noticeable; a national summary of the accompanying map indicates that over 95 percent of all Americans now have access to the official broadband threshold (25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream). The intuitive “fixed” technologies (DSL, Cable, Fiber) made up over 95% of all 25/3 entries in the 2014 and 2015 records.

Earlier in Feb the National Digital Inclusion Alliance and Connect Your Community, a Cleveland (OH) based organization, published a report indicating that AT&T had “systematically discriminated against lower income Cleveland neighborhoods in its deployment of home internet and video technologies over the last decade.” The analysis shows that AT&T has failed to upgrade its network in low income neighborhoods, including most of the City of Dayton, while deploying a high-speed fiber based network in wealthier suburban areas.

“The company has upgraded areas around the City to its mainstream technology (Fiber to the Node, VDSL) but has failed to do that in Dayton, leaving those neighborhoods with an older, much slower technology (ADSL-2),” said Ellis Jacobs, senior attorney with Advocates for Basic Legal Equality, Inc. According to Jacobs, “this has all the appearances of ‘digital redlining,’ discrimination against residents of lower income urban neighborhoods in the type of infrastructure AT&T installs and the type of broadband service it offers. High-speed internet is a critical modern day utility. Without it, residents and businesses are at a distinct disadvantage.”

A mapping analysis of Federal Communications Commission broadband availability data, conducted by Connect Your Community and the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, strongly suggests that AT&T has systematically discriminated against lower-income Cleveland (OH) neighborhoods in its deployment of home Internet and video technologies over the past decade. Our analysis, based on newly released FCC Form 477 Census block data for June 2016, provides clear evidence that AT&T has withheld fiber-enhanced broadband improvements from most Cleveland neighborhoods with high poverty rates.

This analysis is part of a six-month effort that began when CYC and NDIA learned that residents of many Cleveland neighborhoods were being declared ineligible for AT&T’s “Access” discount rate program, solely because they couldn’t get AT&T connections at the 3 mbps download speed that was then the program’s minimum requirement. After analyzing previous FCC Form 477 data releases, along with City construction permits and other information, we’ve come to believe that the ultra-slow AT&T Internet speeds available to those Access applicants reflect a larger problem: AT&T’s failure to invest to upgrade most of its Cleveland network to the company’s mainstream technology.

The National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) launches Digital Inclusion Trailblazers, a resource for tracking local government digital inclusion leadership and programs. With the support of Mobile Citizen, a provider of low-cost mobile Internet exclusively to nonprofits, educational entities and social welfare agencies, NDIA has developed a public inventory of local government initiatives across the US that promote digital literacy and broadband access for underserved residents.

“Our goal is to create a powerful advocacy and promotional tool for local, state and national digital inclusion leadership, and an easy-to-access database of examples and contacts for communities interested in taking similar steps themselves,” said NDIA Director Angela Siefer. The inventory includes information on key indicators of municipal and county government leadership on digital inclusion, along with online references and local contacts.