How Good is Low-Income Broadband?

The two biggest cable companies, Comcast and Charter, have taken lots of public bows in 2020 talking about how they are making sure that homes with students have affordable broadband during the pandemic. Comcast is serving low-income students with its Internet Essentials product. Charter has a similar product called Spectrum Internet Assist that delivers 30/3 Mbps for $14.99 with a WiFi router for $5 per month. During the pandemic, Charter has offered qualifying new subscribers two months of free service for any internet product up to 100 Mbps. While the two programs from the cable companies are inexpensive, they also provide inferior broadband. The real problem that families are having with the cable company broadband products is the slow upload speeds. Limiting upload speeds to 3, 4, or 5 Mbps is inadequate for students trying to function from home or adults trying to work from home.

The cable companies face a huge dilemma. They know the upload speeds on their network are inadequate. They also know that fixing the problem is going to incredibly expensive. At a minimum, a cable company would have to undertake what is knows as a mid-split to bring the faster upload speeds to something faster like 50 Mbps. The mid-split option has been available under the DOCSIS 3.1 standard, but few cable companies upgraded the upload portions of networks. The even more expensive upgrade to DOCSIS 4.0 will be available in a few years to bring symmetrical bandwidth. Since cable networks are already overloaded, it’s clear that the cable companies don’t want to provide full bandwidth to customers that aren’t paying full price, so they are treating low-income subscribers as second-class citizens.