Low-income homes drop Internet service after Congress kills discount program
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I see a huge difference between downgrading and cancelling. If someone gave me a subsidy I might upgrade to a better plan, but I already have internet.
On the other hand, it’s pretty ridiculous that we can afford trillions in corporate handouts but can’t give people internet in the 21st century.
the sprawlophilia is strong with the US. (though by now it would have been made sense to throw some fiber on poles here and there ... so probably a lot of anti-competitive fuckery also helped to keep folks on uber-expensive ADSL and whatnot.)
Giving 5bi out for rural broadband that turns into nothing is becoming an american tradition.
I do have a bridge to sell you.. if you're interested.
Classroom analytics with BigQuery? "Limit data to the United States or Europe, or distribute globally, with data regions"? The fact that anyone would even put these things sets off incompetence bells for me.
I know when I was still in college a little over 10 years ago and they started introducing these LMS things, literally every single student despised them. They're way more annoying to use than a teacher posting homework on a public web page, and at least at the time, they did a horrible job accepting correct answers that weren't in the precise format they expected, which meant you had to have everyone sit in a room and do the homework together, letting different people try out answers (so as not to use up your finite guesses/lower your grade) until someone figured out what it wanted, and then everyone copied that.
[0] https://edu.google.com/intl/ALL_us/workspace-for-education/e...
Regulation isn't needed to prevent or break up monopolies in this space, it just needs to stop actively creating and protecting them.
AT&T, for example, defaults to a 5GB limit: https://www.att.com/plans/tethering/ - you could easily hit that limit from watching a couple hours' of Netflix.
And to preempty classist pearl-clutching: I maintain people on low-income assistance programs should/must have the same effective right to watch Netflix as anyone else.
I'm not necessarily against subsidies, FWIW. Schools near me have all but mandated you have Internet at home. If that's going to be the case, it needs to be available. Maybe a bare minimum speed(few mbps?) free tier?
"people who truly need a subsidy to afford internet access" could be using someone else's subscription.
That would be "no right" then because there is no such thing as a "right" to a commercial service. It is a privilege which can be acquired by paying for the service. I do not pay for Netflix nor for any other such service so I can not watch it.
I don’t care about being throttled to 3G speeds. I do care about being throttled to 3G latency and beyond. Sure, my bandwidth is lower but that also doesn’t explain why my requests take 30-60 seconds to start returning data, assuming they ever do at all and don’t just flatly time out.
That’s blatant false advertising too.
Starlink et al are compelling alternatives, but they are in no way a suitable substitute for gigabit fiber. I wish people could stop trying to play space ranger and just help the poor compete. They are members of our society, they deserve not to be stuck as beta testers for inferior service.
I am sympathetic to low income folks, and also genuinely curious how one affords rent when it's ~20x the Internet bill ($1300-2500/mo for a modest residence). Roommates? Can everyone chip in for Internet?
Living on the edge is rough by modern standards.
No one is being "cut off." They're simply no longer receiving a subsidy. Presumably they would still have Internet access through school or public libraries. At worst we are inconveniencing them. And people became educated well before the Internet ever existed.
> how do we lift low income kids out of poverty
You can't. You can create really efficient pipelines to keep them in poverty for the rest of their life if you're not careful, though.
What are my priorities? Education or work?
> cuz you don't have a driver's license
How did I get to work?
> pack yourself a snack because you're going to be hungry and after school
Not exactly a herculean chore. I mean, I'm hungry every day, it comes up as a problem often.
> Cancel all engagements with your friends.
What are my priorities? Education or social engagements?
> Your library closes at 6:00.
School is out at 3, though. Or am I working between 3 and 6?
> But you need to finish this report and it's going to take all night
I have to have internet the entire time I'm writing a report?
> Should I go on?
With less hyperbole?
Meanwhile, you want me to believe that a $30 subsidy is all it takes to erase this, and you don't think this strange imbalance doesn't describe a fundamental problem with our entire model for education and internet costs in literally any other life context?
Even within your own example.. how did I get a job without having constant internet access at home?
You think I'm trying to be mean to poor kids. Instead I'm suggesting you stop using them as an excuse to transfer funds and instead solve the actual problems they're going to face for their entire lives.
In your mind this is an "excuse" to transfer funds. So in your mind, what is the real reason for the fund transfer? The people who benefit from them directly don't have the power to do the transfer, so who is benefited?
T-Mobile's Project 10 Million where they offer capped & throttled data service that is significantly worse than what their cheapest postpaid plan offers certainly isn't a reasonable broadband replacement either, it is clearly a pile of crap T-Mobile is forced to offer to meet the 10% educational usage requirement of their Educational Broadband Service (EBS, 2.5Ghz spectrum running LTE & 5G) licenses.
So what are the kids to do? Get bent, sucks to be poor! Seems to be the current answer our society has chosen.
A quick trip to Wikipedia illustrates that education is indeed an implication of digital divide, and that quite often teachers have homework requiring internet access: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_divide
I would speculate it is easy for such gaps to exist because it is easy to assume internet access is widespread.
Perhaps, as it is no longer the 90s, and with interest in human progress and easier living for all, we could aspire to not trap our lower classes in a decade now 24 years old and counting, with institutional knowledge on how to support techniques of that era fading to time.
Your Wikipedia article also notes
> In a reverse of this idea, well-off families, especially the tech-savvy parents in Silicon Valley, carefully limit their own children's screen time. The children of wealthy families attend play-based preschool programs that emphasize social interaction instead of time spent in front of computers or other digital devices, and they pay to send their children to schools that limit screen time.
Wealthy, tech-savvy parents are exactly the group that intentionally send their kids to schools that act like it's still the 90s. Technology exists, but modern computers are not at all tailored toward being tools for their owners. In fact they mostly work against you if you don't go out of your way to replace all of the software on them. One must be very judicious about using them in something like an educational setting.
> You can't. You can create really efficient pipelines to keep them in poverty for the rest of their life if you're not careful, though.
You absolutely can. We have endless examples and they pretty much always revolve around education and opportunities that normally are unattainable due to financial limitations.
No, it's actually because I grew up poor, and we didn't receive any help because our family would have refused it out of weird pride.
> and the nearest library is 10 miles away
What kills me about these discussions is people have to invent, what are to them, these "extreme circumstances" just to demonstrate their points.. without once detailing or even imagining how many students this could possibly be true for. If public transport isn't an option then I would suggest a bicycle. How are they getting to school in the first place?
> You absolutely can.
Would you be willing to define this for me? When is a child "lifted out of poverty?" What does that look like and how is it being measured currently?
> and they pretty much always
You're saying things that would be nice to believe in but when you qualify them like this it makes me wonder what causes you to believe them?
It's beyond "inconvenient" for them, it's a major obstacle to their academic success.
They pass around software that works this way and I've seen some pretty sophisticated teen thumb drive workflows lol. But the library IT dept here has cop mentality and they don't like to see anything that looks too much like "real" software so it's a constantly evolving situation they have to navigate.
Ahh yes, the old "pulled myself up by the bootstraps".
>What kills me about these discussions is people have to invent, what are to them, these "extreme circumstances" just to demonstrate their points.. without once detailing or even imagining how many students this could possibly be true for. If public transport isn't an option then I would suggest a bicycle. How are they getting to school in the first place?
So you didn't grow up poor? Or at least didn't grow up poor and rural - because if you had, your response would be "that sounds like pretty much every small town in America". A bicycle down county roads to get to the library to get on the internet 10 miles one way? Ignoring the part where most of the poor kids I grew up with didn't have a library card much less a bicycle, the odds of their parents allowing them to ride to town to get on the internet is pretty much 0.
>Would you be willing to define this for me? When is a child "lifted out of poverty?" What does that look like and how is it being measured currently?
Sure - a child who grows up and doesn't fall below the poverty line as an adult. How is it measured? Census data? I can't tell if you're claiming to be technically literate but completely confused how we would get to such numbers or just intentionally attempting to be condescending. This isn't some black art.
>You're saying things that would be nice to believe in but when you qualify them like this it makes me wonder what causes you to believe them?
And when you tell me you grew up poor but then think that it's a completely fabricated scenario of kids living too far from a library or school to be able to get to them every day for regular school work makes me wonder if you're just projecting.
All that debate is missing the point: it's well-known US residential broadband price ger gigabyte is much higher than Europe, specifically because the US FCC, FTC allow regional monopolies to happen. Most of the broadband mergers of the last two decades should never have been permitted. Covid merely temporarily shone a spotlight on that. Broadband regulation is the issue, not welfare.
This on the same day Reid Hoffman donated to Democrats urging them to fire Lina Khan from the FTC.
When I first got married we lived in section 8 housing (thanks graduate School for the low low pay). The rent and necessary utilities were subsidized. The Internet was not.
I realize there are other bills as well. Just trying to make a point on the importance factor.
Not meant to come across snarky or anything. I've known people that just couldn't afford that. Some of those other bills were already subsidized.
Also you should take into account that this level of poverty in a developed nation can often be accompanied by some serious mental health issues. That can make correctly managing their money much more complicated and difficult. Also lack of education in school systems on how to properly manage your finances as well. Maybe that would have been the only place they learned that.
It is really, really rough out there for some folks.
> how does one pay rent or mobile phone bills
Often you don't. Or, you have enough money for rent but not for internet. Or, even if you can technically afford internet, it's unwise because you can't save even a pittance for minor emergencies (which maybe suggests a direct cash infusion as a better policy, but trickle-down economics with a few targeted sob stories and personas who will reap the benefits for something other than drugs are what get funding to actually materialize).
> 20x the Internet bill
(1) Your cost estimates are potentially quite low. In tons of locales, the worst Spectrum plans currently start at $50 in advertised price, that price isn't locked in for any reasonable length of time, you still have to worry about a router, and that's only if you have a bank account and are willing to use it for autopay (doing so opens you up to abuse by the ISP, abuse that usually targets people who can't afford two days off work to wait on hold or the filing fee for small claims). Many low-income individuals, for tons of reasons, are unbanked and could never qualify for that rate anyway. Not to mention that you need to renegotiate every year or two to maintain those rates, and that itself requires taking time off work. I'd be very surprised if the average, all-in cost of Spectrum internet was under ~$65/mo for a low-income household (if they paid full price).
(2) Your rent costs are potentially quite high. Not that many years ago, my studio was $385/mo in one of many states Spectrum supports. A decent 900 sq ft 2-bed 1-bath was, much more recently, $700-$800/mo. Even now I'm seeing plenty of passable apartments under $700. This change probably matters less for places like The Bay with higher minimum wages and more for the lower-density locales the federal funding was initially aiming to support.
(3) I see your point about an additional 5%, in theory, only meaning that you have to work another 5% more hours. I do think it's important to think about this in terms of hours though. $50/mo is 8hr/mo in post-tax federal minimum wage income. Suppose you are stuck in one of the places with slightly higher rent and lower wages (and I do mean "stuck" -- if you're on the edge, it takes _ages_ to save up for bus tickets or a new down payment or gas money or however you're going to actually move), with $1000/mo rent, $50/mo internet, $7.25/hr as the going wage, and $200/mo in all other expenses (food, health insurance, utilities, a used pair of shoes when you can see too many toes, ...). You're already talking about 193hr/mo to scrape by, much less improve your situation. Toss in the high interest you're probably paying on something because one month you didn't have enough saved up to handle an emergency, the higher grocery bills because you can't afford to buy in bulk, and all the other expenses of being poor, and it adds up to a major problem.
(3a) Note that my baseline in that example in (3) is an average of 193hr/mo assuming no breaks for any reason. Back when that was my life, I preferred 80hr+ weeks. Some manager decided to cut my hours to 30 so that he could still call me in last-minute without having to pay overtime, and my entire budget was shot for a little while. If you're working at some 8am-8pm business in a blue-laws state, you might only have ~80hr/week total available to you (unless you can convince somebody to let you work 8pm-10pm or something), and switching that might entail temporarily lowering your hours so that you're available for the remaining hours at a new job, or if you try to not do that then you might lose the 1st when you take the 2nd and still be down income for a little while. Circumstances vary, but averaging a large number of hours can be very different from just working an 80hr week once in awhile.
But that's the thing- they CAN afford it. They afforded it just fine before 2021 when the program started.