5 ms·

Low-income homes drop Internet service after Congress kills discount program

64 points by LinuxBender 2y ago

mdanger007 2y ago
With class curriculums increasingly going digital, our most at risk students are given Chromebooks but are cut off at home because of the 'wasteful' internet. Suppose you're a teacher, already tight on time, and your lowest performing students say they can't get on to Google classroom because their internet was cut off: do you have to create a separate lesson plan or cut Chromebooks out of your lessons entirely?
- akira2501 2y ago
  Is there some evidence that Chromebooks benefit the student? Or are they purely there to benefit overworked administrators?
  - massysett 2y ago
    There’s no difference: students benefit if school administrators work more efficiently, both because the administrators will do their jobs better, and because the schools will then need fewer administrators.
    - akira2501 2y ago
      > because the administrators will do their jobs better I do have a bridge to sell you.. if you're interested.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  Chromebook == unnessesary complexity
- ndriscoll 2y ago
  Cut chromebooks out. Unironically, looking over the feature comparison[0], I see no purpose to Google Classroom that couldn't be fulfilled just as well with LibreOffice. Half of it is security features that wouldn't need to exist in the first place without their cloud crap. And most schoolwork should be pencil/paper anyway. 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/editions/compare-editions/ https://edu.google.com/intl/ALL_us/workspace-for-education/e...
metadat 2y ago
If someone can't afford $30-50/mo for Internet, how does one pay rent or mobile phone bills? 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.
- Loughla 2y ago
  Rent is subsidized in many places. 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.
- mdanger007 2y ago
  Most low income people can't afford rent. You should spend no more than 30% of your income on it and yet the majority of low income people do. So how do they 'afford' it? Mountains of debt. The better question to be asking is how do we lift low income kids out of poverty if we're cutting them off from the information they need to get an education?
  - akira2501 2y ago
    > if we're cutting them off from the information they need to get an education? 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.
    - mdanger007 2y ago
      Homework? Have you tried using a Google Chromebook without the internet?
mikeInAlaska 2y ago
Tethering to 5G and LTE enabled cell phones in this situation is very common. They are certainly getting rid of their broadband fiber, cable or DSL before their discounted cell services.
- s3p 2y ago
  I think 5G cell plans would cost the same as home internet, minus the ACP $30/month discount. So the home internet would be more affordable.
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
  Excepting tethering in the US often has unfathomably low data-transfer limits before the carrier seriously kneecaps the speed or even cuts you off entirely. AT&T, for example, defaults to a 5GB limit: https://www.att.com/plans/tethering/ 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.
  - silisili 2y ago
    I have a feeling the overlap of people who truly need a subsidy to afford internet access, and Netflix subscribers, has to be pretty empty. 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?
    - gruez 2y ago
      >I have a feeling the overlap of people who truly need a subsidy to afford internet access, and Netflix subscribers, has to be pretty empty. "people who truly need a subsidy to afford internet access" could be using someone else's subscription.
  - the_third_wave 2y ago
    > the same effective right to watch Netflix as anyone else. 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.
fxd123 2y ago
This is just a subsidy for big ISPs. Good riddance
- engineer_22 2y ago
  Democratic party is the party of Big Business
- s3p 2y ago
  What? ISPs did not change their prices when ACP was released. And they're not changing their prices now that ACP is gone.
janalsncm 2y ago
> an FCC survey found that 77 percent of participating households would change their plan or drop Internet service entirely once the discounts expired 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.
- pas 2y ago
  well, something is happening[0] for the paltry sum of 42B USD, it's just _ridiculously_ slow, and this targets those whose vote is worth a bit more than those who live in more economically serviceable areas. 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.) [0] https://jabberwocking.com/39961-2/ https://jabberwocking.com/39961-2/
  - nota_hacker 2y ago
    BEAD is the third 5bi rural broadband corporate hand out. First was spent by ATT and Verizon, with zero results. Second went entirely to Verizon's pocket, again with nothing to show. Giving 5bi out for rural broadband that turns into nothing is becoming an american tradition.
p1esk 2y ago
I’m guessing most of these poor people have smartphones with internet connection, so they haven’t really lost their internet access, have they?
- Mountain_Skies 2y ago
  Pretty much every free Lifeline (what some call Obamaphones despite dating back to Reagan) plan includes data service. It varies by company but typically includes 5GB of data before throttling down the speed. That's not a lot of data for streaming video or gaming but is plenty for most everything else.
  - paulmd 2y ago
    If we’re throwing out suggestions to improve society, the FTC should ban the practice of injecting latency into connections. 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.
- fulafel 2y ago
  Depends on what you call internet access, it might be just NAT. Hosting your server at home is probably out.
chung8123 2y ago
I wish we just used NASA and the FCC dollars to build out our own Starlink. Subsidies for big companies should come with equity. These numbers we are talking about between the rural build out and the low-income subsidies probably come close to our own system.
- kmbfjr 2y ago
  These are areas with established internet access, why would we ever fund such a scheme? 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.
- rlt 2y ago
  You think NASA could have built Starlink as cost effectively? Hah
trappist 2y ago
This was a subsidy paid to participating providers in high-cost areas to support the discount. Charter, a participating provider, said it lost customers when the discount ended. That is not the same as saying those customers lost access to the internet.
- fragmede 2y ago
  With the unregulated monopoly that ISPs have, yes it is.
  - trappist 2y ago
    I can't even count the number of ISPs I can choose from, because my city, county and state have no "franchise agreements" i.e. licensing programs i.e. monopoly grants for ISPs. Cable, DSL, fiber... I have multiple choices for each. A few years back I lived in a very rural area and the situation was less enviable but qualitatively similar: At least one national rural broadband provider, and at least half a dozen smaller local providers, had microwave antennas on the local (private, as it happens) water tower. Regulation isn't needed to prevent or break up monopolies in this space, it just needs to stop actively creating and protecting them.
hindsightbias 2y ago
It's not surprising Charter doesn't pay the lobbyists enough or make big enough campaign contributions. But I do wonder what Charter does actually spend their money on.

64 points by LinuxBender 2y ago

With class curriculums increasingly going digital, our most at risk students are given Chromebooks but are cut off at home because of the 'wasteful' internet. Suppose you're a teacher, already tight on time, and your lowest performing students say they can't get on to Google classroom because their internet was cut off: do you have to create a separate lesson plan or cut Chromebooks out of your lessons entirely?

akira2501 2y ago
Is there some evidence that Chromebooks benefit the student? Or are they purely there to benefit overworked administrators?
- massysett 2y ago
  There’s no difference: students benefit if school administrators work more efficiently, both because the administrators will do their jobs better, and because the schools will then need fewer administrators.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    > because the administrators will do their jobs better I do have a bridge to sell you.. if you're interested.
datavirtue 2y ago
Chromebook == unnessesary complexity
ndriscoll 2y ago
Cut chromebooks out. Unironically, looking over the feature comparison[0], I see no purpose to Google Classroom that couldn't be fulfilled just as well with LibreOffice. Half of it is security features that wouldn't need to exist in the first place without their cloud crap. And most schoolwork should be pencil/paper anyway. 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/editions/compare-editions/ https://edu.google.com/intl/ALL_us/workspace-for-education/e...

metadat 2y ago

If someone can't afford $30-50/mo for Internet, how does one pay rent or mobile phone bills? 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.

Loughla 2y ago
Rent is subsidized in many places. 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.
mdanger007 2y ago
Most low income people can't afford rent. You should spend no more than 30% of your income on it and yet the majority of low income people do. So how do they 'afford' it? Mountains of debt. The better question to be asking is how do we lift low income kids out of poverty if we're cutting them off from the information they need to get an education?
- akira2501 2y ago
  > if we're cutting them off from the information they need to get an education? 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.
  - mdanger007 2y ago
    Homework? Have you tried using a Google Chromebook without the internet?

mikeInAlaska 2y ago

Tethering to 5G and LTE enabled cell phones in this situation is very common. They are certainly getting rid of their broadband fiber, cable or DSL before their discounted cell services.

s3p 2y ago
I think 5G cell plans would cost the same as home internet, minus the ACP $30/month discount. So the home internet would be more affordable.
DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
Excepting tethering in the US often has unfathomably low data-transfer limits before the carrier seriously kneecaps the speed or even cuts you off entirely. AT&T, for example, defaults to a 5GB limit: https://www.att.com/plans/tethering/ 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.
- silisili 2y ago
  I have a feeling the overlap of people who truly need a subsidy to afford internet access, and Netflix subscribers, has to be pretty empty. 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?
  - gruez 2y ago
    >I have a feeling the overlap of people who truly need a subsidy to afford internet access, and Netflix subscribers, has to be pretty empty. "people who truly need a subsidy to afford internet access" could be using someone else's subscription.
- the_third_wave 2y ago
  > the same effective right to watch Netflix as anyone else. 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.

fxd123 2y ago

This is just a subsidy for big ISPs. Good riddance

engineer_22 2y ago
Democratic party is the party of Big Business
s3p 2y ago
What? ISPs did not change their prices when ACP was released. And they're not changing their prices now that ACP is gone.

janalsncm 2y ago

> an FCC survey found that 77 percent of participating households would change their plan or drop Internet service entirely once the discounts expired 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.

pas 2y ago
well, something is happening[0] for the paltry sum of 42B USD, it's just _ridiculously_ slow, and this targets those whose vote is worth a bit more than those who live in more economically serviceable areas. 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.) [0] https://jabberwocking.com/39961-2/ https://jabberwocking.com/39961-2/
- nota_hacker 2y ago
  BEAD is the third 5bi rural broadband corporate hand out. First was spent by ATT and Verizon, with zero results. Second went entirely to Verizon's pocket, again with nothing to show. Giving 5bi out for rural broadband that turns into nothing is becoming an american tradition.

p1esk 2y ago

I’m guessing most of these poor people have smartphones with internet connection, so they haven’t really lost their internet access, have they?

Mountain_Skies 2y ago
Pretty much every free Lifeline (what some call Obamaphones despite dating back to Reagan) plan includes data service. It varies by company but typically includes 5GB of data before throttling down the speed. That's not a lot of data for streaming video or gaming but is plenty for most everything else.
- paulmd 2y ago
  If we’re throwing out suggestions to improve society, the FTC should ban the practice of injecting latency into connections. 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.
fulafel 2y ago
Depends on what you call internet access, it might be just NAT. Hosting your server at home is probably out.

chung8123 2y ago

I wish we just used NASA and the FCC dollars to build out our own Starlink. Subsidies for big companies should come with equity. These numbers we are talking about between the rural build out and the low-income subsidies probably come close to our own system.

kmbfjr 2y ago
These are areas with established internet access, why would we ever fund such a scheme? 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.
rlt 2y ago
You think NASA could have built Starlink as cost effectively? Hah

trappist 2y ago

This was a subsidy paid to participating providers in high-cost areas to support the discount. Charter, a participating provider, said it lost customers when the discount ended. That is not the same as saying those customers lost access to the internet.

fragmede 2y ago
With the unregulated monopoly that ISPs have, yes it is.
- trappist 2y ago
  I can't even count the number of ISPs I can choose from, because my city, county and state have no "franchise agreements" i.e. licensing programs i.e. monopoly grants for ISPs. Cable, DSL, fiber... I have multiple choices for each. A few years back I lived in a very rural area and the situation was less enviable but qualitatively similar: At least one national rural broadband provider, and at least half a dozen smaller local providers, had microwave antennas on the local (private, as it happens) water tower. Regulation isn't needed to prevent or break up monopolies in this space, it just needs to stop actively creating and protecting them.

hindsightbias 2y ago

It's not surprising Charter doesn't pay the lobbyists enough or make big enough campaign contributions. But I do wonder what Charter does actually spend their money on.