Like any good telecom, AT&T is interested in one thing and one thing only—their money. They are willing to spend money to make money. Unfortunately, they are mostly willing to “spend” money on anti-consumer protections in order to make money the old-fashioned way—by being a monopoly. Whenever companies like AT&T are pressed on how unfettered capitalism helps consumers, they usually say something pretty lazy and then wait for (mostly) Republican legislators to bail them out. AT&T is special amongst the telecoms as they have pretty openly confrontational about providing meaningful internet service to low-income areas. A couple of months ago they were found to be using a loophole in order to wiggle out of their responsibility to offer affordable internet services to some extremely low income areas. Now a new report has come out showing that AT&T is clearly discriminating against the poor when it comes to broadband upgrades.
"Specifically, AT&T has chosen not to extend its 'fiber-to-the-node' VDSL infrastructure—which is now the standard for most Cuyahoga County suburbs and other urban AT&T markets throughout the US—to the majority of Cleveland Census blocks, including the overwhelming majority of blocks with individual poverty rates above 35 percent," the report said.
In the Ohio suburbs, AT&T customers routinely get speeds of at least 18Mbps and sometimes up to 1Gbps, while high-poverty neighborhoods in Cleveland are stuck on speeds of 768kbps to 6mbps, the report said. The FCC defines broadband speeds as 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream.
"When lending institutions have engaged in similar policies and practices, our communities haven’t hesitated to call it 'redlining,'" the advocacy groups wrote. "We see no reason to hesitate to call it 'digital redlining' in this case."
With new FCC chair Ajit Pai at the helm, AT&T and others are pushing forward on huge mergers that promise more control over their industry. The new order of the day is to become too big to be taken apart. When asked about this AT&T says that they do all kinds of great stuff. Of course, that’s not what is being asked of them at this point.