Dollars to Megabits, You May Be Paying 400 Times As Much As Your Neighbor for Internet Service

Source: The Markup and The Associated Press

October 19, 2022 06:51 ET

Dollars to Megabits, You May Be Paying 400 Times As Much As Your Neighbor for Internet Service

An investigation by The Markup found that AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink disproportionately offered lower-income and least-White neighborhoods slow internet service for the same price as speedy connections they offered in other parts of town

By Leon Yin and Aaron Sankin

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In her area, AT&T only offers download speeds of 1 megabit per second or less, trapping her in a digital Stone Age. Her internet is so slow that it doesn’t meet Zoom’s recommended minimum for group video calls, doesn’t come close to the FCC’s definition of broadband, currently 25 Mbps, and is worlds below median home internet speeds in the U.S., which average 167 Mbps.

“In my neighborhood, it’s terrible,” Neville said.

But that’s not the case in other parts of New Orleans. AT&T offers residents of the mostly White, upper-income neighborhood of Lakeview internet speeds almost 400 times faster than Neville’s—for the same price: $55 a month.

The vast gulf between the quality of service AT&T offered these neighborhoods for the same cost is not a fluke.

The Markup gathered and analyzed more than 800,000 internet service offers from AT&T, Verizon, Earthlink, and CenturyLink in 38 cities across America and found that all four routinely offered fast base speeds at or above 200 Mbps in some neighborhoods for the same price as connections below 25 Mbps in others.

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Read more: https://themarkup.org/still-loading/2022/10/19/dollars-to-megabits-you-may-be-paying-400-times-as-much-as-your-neighbor-for-internet-service

AP News link: https://apnews.com/article/broadband-internet-speed-inequality-01a99247a08b355e89cc54595aecdafa