AT&T’s Digital Redlining of Dallas: New Research by Dr. Brian Whitacre
In 2017, Dr. Brian Whitacre was approached by Attorney Daryl Parks, who was preparing to file a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission based on the National Digital Inclusion Alliance's study of AT&T’s Digital Redlining of Cleveland (OH). Parks asked Whitacre to conduct an expert assessment of NDIA’s Cleveland research and provide sworn testimony about his findings, which he did. Parks also asked Whitacre to conduct a similar analysis of AT&T broadband services in Dallas County (TX). This analysis – based, like the original NDIA Cleveland report, on FCC Form 477 data — was completed in early 2018, but not used by Parks in connection with his FCC complaint.
Whitacre's bottom line:
The analysis for Dallas demonstrates that AT&T has withheld fiber-enhanced broadband improvements from most Dallas neighborhoods with high poverty rates, relegating them to Internet access services which are vastly inferior to the services enjoyed by their counterparts nearby in the higher-income Dallas suburbs…Because the patterns revealed by this analysis result from a decade of deliberate infrastructure investment decisions, I argue that they constitute strong evidence of a policy and practice of “digital redlining” by AT&T — i.e. income-based discrimination against residents of lower-income urban neighborhoods in the types of broadband service AT&T offers, and in the company’s investment in improved service.
[Dr. Brian Whitacre is a professor in the Agricultural Economics Department of Oklahoma State University who specializes in research on broadband access and use. This work was performed as an independent project and does not reflect the opinions of Oklahoma State University.]
AT&T’s Digital Redlining of Dallas: New Research by Dr. Brian Whitacre