National Digital Inclusion Alliance

In recent years AT&T and Verizon have eliminated their cheaper rate tiers for low and mid-speed Internet access, except at the very slowest levels. Each company now charges essentially identical monthly prices – $63-$65 a month after first-year discounts have ended – for home wireline broadband connections at almost any speed up to 100/100 Mbps fiber service. This policy of upward “tier flattening” raises the cost of Internet access for urban and rural AT&T and Verizon customers who only have access to the oldest, slowest legacy infrastructure.

Using data from the 2016 American Community Survey (ACS), released in September 2017 by the US Census Bureau, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance ranked all 185 US cities with more than 50,000 households by the total percentage of each city’s households lacking fixed broadband internet subscriptions. Note that this data is not an indication of the availability of home broadband service, but rather of the extent to which households are actually connected to it.

On February 27 and 28, in partnership with the Benton Foundation, three digital inclusion innovators, joined NDIA's Angela Siefer for a round of meetings in DC. Amina Fazlullah, NDIA’s Policy Advisor and a Mozilla Tech Policy Fellow, made arrangements for four visits to senate offices and two visits to FCC commissioner offices, in addition to a meeting with Mozilla Tech Policy Fellows and an update on potential infrastructure legislation from SHLB Coalition’s John Windhausen. Thanks to Susan Corbett, we also met with Senator Angus King (I-Maine).

The second Charles Benton Digital Equity Champion Award will be presented in May at Net Inclusion 2017 in St. Paul (MN) by the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA). This is a call for nominations for candidates for the award.

Digital Equity is a condition in which all individuals and communities have the information technology capacity they need for full participation in our society, democracy and economy. Digital Equity is necessary for civic and cultural participation, employment, lifelong learning, and access to essential services. Named for Charles Benton, the founder of the Benton Foundation, the award was created by NDIA to recognize leadership and dedication in advancing digital equity: from promoting the ideal of accessible and affordable communications technology for all Americans, to crafting programs and policies that make it a reality.

The deadline for nominations for this year’s award is midnight (Eastern Daylight Time) Friday, April 14, 2017.

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 Federal Communications Commission's March 31, 2016 Order that modernized Lifeline to include broadband service included references to the FCC working with the Universal Service Administrative Company (USAC) when implementing the National Verifier (an online platform that will verify eligibility) "to provide Lifeline providers with guidance and procedures for creating aggregation projects and for enrolling subscribers in aggregation projects".

A footnote on page 55 of the Order states "USAC will not fund consumer outreach efforts but may provide administration and expertise to community-based organizations, housing associations, and institutions seeking to coordinate the aggregation of benefits." The National Verifier will not be ready for multiple years. Until then, Internet Service Providers of Lifeline Broadband and community-based organizations, housing associations and institutions may develop agreements to cooperatively aggregate eligible households of Lifeline Broadband service.

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.