I'm guessing the reasoning for offering worse service is not because the ISP's are actually mustache twirling racists, but because there are economic factors that make it more profitable to do so. Anyone know what those might be?
It gets lost in the culture wars, but as I understand it, the whole point of the concept of “structural racism” was that mustache-twirling racists aren’t required for modern laws and policies to have a targeted, negative effect on specific minorities. A legacy of historical racism can set the stage for the intended effects to metastasize and remain as generational problems.
ISPs are some of the biggest monopolists in the US market and bribe and lean on politicians to keep out competitors. Relative to other industries, they thus lean on the infrastructural status quo (and all the inequity baked into that) to make the most money at the lowest cost to themselves, so your argument doesn’t really track.
That’s laughable. I can get one bad broadband provider, one incredibly low-speed DSL provider, or bad coverage, data capped 5G service in my neighborhood in LA. Fiber isn’t available at all and when I asked if they had any intent to expand coverage to where I live they straight-up said “no.”
Having a reliable, fast internet connection is (almost) as critical for modern life as electrical service.
IMO, it falls into the same bucket as other utilities - water, power, etc an should be heavily regulated to ensure adequate and reasonably priced access.
Honestly it should just be something run by local governments or non-profit utilities.
This isn't a typical consumer product you buy at the store where I'm worried that the government will be bad at responding to consumer tastes, what consumers what out of their internet access is extremely simple: fast and reliable internet, that's basically it. It's not something where's a lot of questions of exactly how and where to advance things and give different offerings, like a smartphone or brand of yogurt or whatever.
You say that it's simple, but it's not like electricity where you can just measure it and see if it's the right voltage and frequency throughout the day.
How many and which upstreams to connect to makes a big difference. What technology is used for the last mile access network makes a big difference. Who to peer with and who to let run CDN appliances in the network makes a big difference. Oversubscription ratios in various parts of the network make a big difference. Address policies make a big difference.
Now, if the municipality wants to run last mile and hand it off to whatever ISPs want to take it in some central locations? That makes the municipal job simpler: they just need to measure quality on their network, and anything that happens after the handoff to the ISP is not their problem. But that's a more complex product for users than a single provider to blame for everything.
> the whole point of the concept of “structural racism” was that mustache-twirling racists aren’t required for modern laws and policies to have a targeted, negative effect on specific minorities
You cannot have a targeted negative effect without mustache-twirling racists; what you have instead is an incidental negative effect. I discussed this elsewhere in the thread, but the "disparate impact" clauses of various civil rights legislation attempt to deal with precisely this -- cases when in the absence of any intent to discriminate along protected lines, nevertheless an outcome arises that impact those protected groups differently.
I posit that this part of civil rights legislation is fundamentally flawed, because it is basically not impossible that any policy or action, public or private, impacts all subgroups of a population in equal measure. Make a law regulating taxis? There's a disparate impact on men, who are 85% of all cab drivers. NFL negotiates player pay? There's a disparate impact on black people, who comprise over half of the players. Covid policies close ski resorts in Colorado? There's a disparate impact on white people, who are the overwhelming majority of both people who work at ski resorts as well as those who visit. In none of those cases is there an intent to cause protected groups to be affected differently, but they are.
I was thinking about this too. Could it be these neighborhoods have older infrarstructure with slower speeds and when companies price products its standardized on pricing across a region based on tiering and not the actual throughput? Like Tier 1 in new infrarstructure is faster than Tier 1 on old infrarstructure. Along those lines, maybe it just costs the same amount to support an old DSL connection as it does to support a modern fiber/cable hookup?
I don't have an answer to the problem but I am not sure forcing pricing standards is the answer. Seems like it would be better to just handle it locally and build city owned internet as well.
Basically, the providers don’t want to build new infrastructure where they may not recoup their costs.
From the original report:
“They’ve made a decision that those neighborhoods are going to be treated differently,” said Callahan. “The core reason for that is they think they don’t have enough money in those neighborhoods to sustain the kind of market they want.”
Why is why the correct solution here is wired fiber internet being a taxpayer funded utility.
But as I mentioned in another comment, this might manifest in higher taxes for the top percentiles, whereas a policy of requiring the business to help the poor allows the burden of the subsidy to be paid by the middle income deciles via higher prices for the business’s services.
The city of Los Angeles has a perhaps surprising, non-compact boundary [1], and the local conditions vary significantly.
Some areas are served by underground utilities which means change is much more expensive. For AT&T which is called out specifically, there's a lot of different access technologies, and wireline distance and quality and quantity of lines is a major factor in service quality. There's a lot of older neighborhoods in the area, which have had increased density over time and may not have enough good wiring in the street / on the poles to offer dual pair services. Running new wires or fiber is expensive, and is only economical if the take-up rate will meet some minimum. Servicing multifamily buildings is more expensive/difficult because the utility needs to coordinate with the building owner and wiring from the units to the utility area may not be sufficient for newer technology.
AT&T's access technology needs more outside equipment, and it's harder to find locations to install it in denser areas where buildings are often built closer to lot lines, especially in older areas with small sidewalks and no grass frontage strips.
Might have to do with demand in those neighborhoods. An financially-constrained person living in a major city in 2024 will have two main choices for an Internet-connected device: laptop or smartphone. These days, the smartphone is the obvious choice. Paying for cell service lets you use the phone around town and at home, whereas paying for home internet is quite restricted.
An ISP usually has a neighborhood hub where local lines connect and feed into the broader infrastructure. I'm betting that ISPs have a pricing model using a "neighborhood utilization ratio" factor, calculated as houses-served-in-neighborhood over total-number-of-houses-in-neighborhood. To cover known network infrastructure expenses (equipment replacement, technician labor costs, etc.), the pricing needs to work out, but low service demand in a given service area for the same infrastructure requires those fixed costs be borne by the few people using the service.
Many infrastructure services typically are more expensive in a rural area, presumably due to this effect but spread over a larger geographic area because population density is lower.
I feel like it could be as simple as people poorer neighborhoods trying to buy the cheapest data/tv plan. In some countries this would be considered a necessity like electricity/sewer/water so from that perspective LA perhaps should force the ISPs to provide the same service all over the city.
I'd imagine that people living in lower-income neighborhoods generally pay for lower-tier services, which lowers profitability for any given provider, and also lowers the incentive for other providers to come in and compete, which would lower prices for everyone.
One I'm willing to guess is the monopoly / duopoly of ISP providers in nearly all US neighborhoods means its less profitable to provide better service when there aren't alternatives to begin with
A simple resolution would be that the physical infrastructure in some area does not support the same speed as in other areas, and it more economically feesable to upgrade in area where the average bill is higher than in area's where the overage bill is lower. The ROI is clear
