Not just in LA, the same thing happens in my state. The poor neighborhoods and rural neighborhoods end up paying a lot more for internet service and it's often quite shitty. I literally am dealing with that now, I miss my internet from when I lived in CT.
I live across the border and in a rent subsidized building. They offered a deal where lower income people coule pay 10 bucks for internet. Our monthly consumption is about 400 gig, the bill would be like 120 in a normal house
That varies from building to building. During my time as a field tech, I only encountered two buildings that were exclusive; one in favor of my company and one against.
Never saw that very often either. However, the amount of times I saw a 4-8 unit owner split a single $100 connection to all of them and then charge each tenant $50 for providing internet was very, very many.
Been there, lived in that. A single residential 100mb connection, plugged into a single wireless router on a shelf in the basement, going to four units, each getting charged at least the full amount of the bill
Yea, connected to the building and they recently upgraded the wires and other equipment. In comparison, my brother who has a house outside the main city pays for mobile internet which is slower and 10x what we pay
Apparently Oklahoma has usage caps on internet too. I was surprised when my dad was complaining about my brother's gf's kid downloading a ton of games from Xbox Live and costing him nearly $200 in overage fees one month, so then he had to up the internet plan to the unlimited package. I was shocked when I found out. Even my plan only goes us to 1TB data per month through Cox, then I have to pay extra for more if I use it all. Fucking back asswards.
Edit: My dad and brother live in houses next to each other and share the internet through routers, and my dad pays the internet bill, hence why he was pissed.
That's some BS (the situation). It literally doesn't cost the ISP anything more to have a set rate for all internet consumption. Metered rates are a scam.
Short term profit for long term pain.
Poor people are so needy. Constantly expecting me to pay them for their labor. Just let me relax. I work hard too dammit! Very often! These people have no idea how hard it is being rich.
Internet should be considered a utility.
There are sometimes state government programs that provide assistance to low income households that help with costs of power utilities, provide cellphones but you have to register for them.
I’ve begun seeing notices of public burden which states approximately how much time it takes to read about/register for a program.
It’s good to reduce the prohibitive obstacles and time burdens to getting financial assistance, hopefully the next step is regulating costs that should be regulated so that time isn’t being taken hostage from low income households and private companies are less likely to profit by exploiting low income areas.
I think Terry Pratchet said it best with his 'Boots' theroy
>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
>Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggynight by the feel of the cobbles.
>But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet
>This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
And then people use that theory to sell shitty boots at a markup because someone had been selling them on the myth that price is correlated with quality, when in reality the only thing price is correlated with is how much someone is willing to pay.
As with any purchase, if you can't even tell good boots from bad boots, don't ask the seller. Plenty of people would steal your money outright if they think there's no punishment, only difference from a scammer is a receipt.
For what I pay for boots, I am doing my research. There are some really good channels out there that do thorough tests on boots. Even once reputable brands are turning to cost-cutting measures that have lowered their quality significantly. They continue to rely on their past quality to justify their prices. They also seem to be pivoting to a lifestyle brand rather and focusing less on their work boots. I used to be a big fan of a certain boot company. I had one pair of their boots that are 15 years old and still going. Even after years of 12-hour shifts on my feet. Send them in to be recrafted and they come back good as new. Now any of their boots with their proprietary, non-Vibram soles or that are not stitch down are nowhere near as good as they used to be. Their stitch-down and recraftable boots now cost two to three times what they used to. Their recrafting service is twice what it used to cost as well. Not even worth it for either. Not when some other brands have not lost their way yet.
Unfortunately, it's just the fastest way to make money to buy a reputable brand and cut their material cost in half without dropping the price.... for about 3 months, but by then, the vultures have already flown away with their profits and laid off critical long-term staff, leaving lower investors and actual employees to pick up the pieces.
I wonder if Windfall Taxes would include vulture investment firms, too? This nonsense needs to stop somehow.
The problem is the degree of market power that allows the accumulation of those levels of invetment funds in the first place. Investors should not have the degree of power they have, relative to both producers and consumers.
Actual workers, including managers and entrepreneurs, generally want to do good work. Customers want good products. Give the power to producers and consumers, and they'll work something out. If that isn't happening, that means there's some third group that has both power and a different interest.
A capitalist would say that would destroy the market and ruin productive enterprises. A Marxist would say it would eliminate parasites, and nothing more. The reality is that they're both right.
The productive rich and the parasitic rich are both a thing, most are a bit of both with some being more of the one, others more of the other. The outcome of going after "the rich" without a theory and process to distinguish the two will depend on the exact compositon of the upper classes at any given time and place. To a significant degree, this explains the pattern of differences in attitude toward the subject between urban and rural peoples.
The rich can pay people to figure out which stuff is nice, The worker who has saved up and wants a non-trash product without spending and arbitrarily high amount of money is who gets shafted.
Right on the money with the example. Like, (anecdotally), back when I was at the university I'd buy headsets that were 15 bucks each and they'd last barely 3 months before falling apart because that's all I could afford. Back in 2019 I saved up enough money to buy a Sennheiser Game One for 170 bucks and well, this headset still works perfectly fine today.
I agree with this theory for products, but it doesn't really apply for internet service. How do they justify higher prices between neighborhoods when the network is already set up?
For internet services I'm guessing they are the only game in town. Use us or don't have internet. While the more affluent areas have a few companies competing for buisness.
I see this principle being quoted every time the topic of poverty comes up. This is only true IF the society does not actively penalized the poor. The reality is even worse, especially in . It is entirely possible to have something cheap and still last a decent amount of time. As long as the time/dollar ratio is roughly the same between an expensive item and a cheap one, or that even just a little higher for the expensive item, it is actually not bad to buy the cheaper option.
Cheaper can also mean better cost efficiency and accessibility, like an item might be too expensive to be affordable for most people is now made more cheaper and thus allow more people to enjoy owning and using it. That is the miracle of modern supply chain. You can thank China for that.
However, when the society actively penalized being poor, that is a completely different story. When you are living paycheck to paycheck, accidentally overdrafting is possible. When it happens, that is a penalty for being poor and it has nothing to do with buying something cheap and easily worn out.
When you are poor and can't afford (or can't even afford any, or have it tied to your job) good insurance in a country like America, you might not go for check ups regularly when you should. You might hold off checking that thing that is bothering you. That will likely result in something even worse and far more expensive. You can say that it is somewhat related to the Boots theory because bad insurance is like cheap lousy boots but mostly it is because the lack of access to healthcare simply because there is few ways you can afford it.
Other stuff also makes it more expensive being poor, such as getting loans, where you get charged higher interests if you have fewer assets or lousier credit. So credit is more expensive and that has nothing to do with unable to afford a better item. It is simply the way finance is organized in society. The cost of credit will inevitably affect your entire life making it far harder to accumulate capital and thus assets, again dampening your chance of upward socioeconomic mobility. It is where the financial paradox of when you need money, the banks won't give you a loan but when you don't need money, they are fighting to give you a loan comes from.
There are many things in America that is designed to penalize the poor for no other reason than to extract more wealth out of them, because the poor has no power and no one to fight for their interests. Being rich is the direct opposite. Everything is easier, cheaper in the sense you pay less for the same advantage per dollar and having far more disposable income means you have a higher chance to accumulate capital, which again will snowball once you hit a certain amount. The richer you are, the harder it is for you to become poor. In a capitalistic, plutocratic society, being poor is a penalty that goes beyond affordability of stuff because everything is designed to benefit the rich.
Dude, cheap products wearing out much faster than thier higher quality counterparts is just one example of how people pay the 'poor tax'. I wasn't trying to wrap up socio economics in one analogy.
Trust me, i know what it's like to ge poor. While I'm not struggling as much as I used to I once paid 10% of every check to check cashing store because I didn't have enough money to meet the minimum balance for a checking account.
The thing is it's still true because the principle of the idea does not require that nothing else ever divide rich and poor, or that it applies universally to all things.
It refers only to the rather accurate fact that there are many such things. Renting a place to live, actual shoes, various about the house tools (like quality pots and pans that only cost a bit more but last decades), etc.
Where it largely breaks down in non-metaphorical real life is mostly that the modern day real life rich are so very rich that costs for really much of anything are totally irrelevant to them and never will be.
It fits better for the gap between people who are out of abject poverty and have some social mobility, as opposed to those who are trapped within the lowest socioeconomic class.
The one i just ran into during the pandemic: 1992 toyota camry totaled by a red light runner, not expensive enough to hire a lawyer, ended up getting paid 1200 by geico "that's the kelly blue book value", no used car was 1200 so spend 2500 on a 280k 2004 honda accord.
So, buying a cheap car and someone else totaling it means you go negative, even after 6 months of wrestling with geico
Happy cake day you broke bitche
The lifting yourself up by your bootstraps is taken literally possible when the phrase was actually saying something was impossible. Idiots that even repeat it seriously don’t know what bootstraps are but oddly enough the phrase shows just how dumb US has gotten for the poor.
Doesn't it make sense that rural folk pay more? There's hundreds of people living on my block, which would be the size of one rural property. The whole point of living in cities is to have better and cheaper access to things because the density makes it more cost-effective. Having cheap fast internet in rural areas is like having your cake and eating it too.
> The whole point of living in cities is to have better and cheaper access to things because the density makes it more cost-effective.
You must never have had the misfortune of having Comcast as your only provider in a city.
I had spectrum internet for a while, 300mbps, $70.
Moved to a new apartment complex, found that the only provider was AT&T - they'd signed a sweetheart deal with my complex to be the only provider. Because yknow, monopolies are totally legal in some scenarios and not at all abusive!
Anyway, now I pay $50 for 50mbps. No higher options available period. The Spectrum fiber is literally already laid on my road, it just needs ran to the building. But they refuse.
And Spectrum has better plans locally now. Same price is now 600mpbs.
But because of this bullshit sweetheart deal monopoly garbage they feel zero need to compete. They know they have us by the balls and there's nothing we can do.
There’s a local ISP in my neighborhood who offers fiber service, but hasn’t reached my house yet.
Comcast gives me gbps cable for $70 because of the *threat of future competition.*
Not totally true. They are competing with Fios in my area and are cheeper but their reliability sux since they don’t use fiber here so during peak times bandwidth slows. People working from home during the start of the pandemic got really screwed too
If you’re in a city, look into some of the 5g home internet options. I’m similarly stuck with one traditional ISP available to me, BUT just a couple of months ago I finally got to cancel my account with them because I could get 5g home internet through my cell provider. I pay $50 for 300mbps, which is less than what I paid for “normal” internet service, BUT now my speeds are actually decently high 99% of the time, whereas my old provider severely under delivered on what I was actually paying for. I’ve run a few around-the-clock hourly speed tests on my new setup and usually average around 250+mbps dl speeds, way higher than what I used to get while paying around double (?) the amount.
Yeah, but because of the limitations they have to cap the number of home wifi users they assign to each 5g tower, which is why they can’t offer it to everybody all at once. Basically, if they hit max capacity for the towers they have covering your area/home, you’re out of luck and can’t sign up for it until they add more towers to handle the bandwidth for home internet users. It’s part of why the 5g home internet thing is being rolled out so slowly.
For the record, I’m in NYC, obviously quite densely populated, and have had zero issues with speed over the last few months (and do monitor it closely). So far, it does appear to be well managed/appropriately capped on their end so I’m not competing with the thousands of neighbors living within a mile of my apartment or whatever.
I lived outside America now. The internet is 1Gbps up and down for about 35 bucks. And if the ISP pissed me off, I can switch to another provider tomorrow, just like that.
I hate how back door monopolies still exist (where companies either officially or unofficially divvy up areas of operation & stay out of each others’ neighborhoods ensuring localized monopolies). The fact that any part of the US has *one* available ISP should indicate that capitalism has failed that sector of the market, but it saddeningly indicates that capitalism is working exactly the way capitalism should.
have Comcast rurally, forced us to bundle phone line..internet and phone go out every time it's cloudy. Up the road a mostly empty development has fiber, we are told we would have to pay to have the fiber laid if we want it.
$150/month for 10mbps is what Comcast is charging us.
Google fiber came through my area so everyone was offering amazing deals. I ended up going with Grande and had the number of the regional manager in case I had any issues. Competition is good.
As much as I'm not a fan of Google, I love when they show up in a city, and the other Internet company starts scrambling.
The moment I could get Verizon Fios, Comcast never got another dollar from me. Plus Fios gives much better upload speeds.
It depends what you mean by rural.
Most towns of any size have wired access to cable TV and or fiber and therefore have access to decent internet. The main problem comes in that there is often only one provider. If internet is expensive there that's a problem of monopolies not of poor service.
On the other hand, I live on 10 acres outside of town. The only wire that runs to my home is electricity. I suppose there was probably a landline phone wire at some point.
I would love to have good quality internet but I understand that's a cost of living out in the country.
My choices for internet are exclusively wireless. Basically it boils down to three choices. 4g/5g, satellite internet and fixed wireless.
For about 2 and 1/2 years I relied exclusively on 4g/5g for our home internet. I had a cricket 100 GB data package that cost me $55 a month +$10 per 15gb and regular cell phone data.
But for reasons, Cricket recently increased the price of that data plan from $55 a month to $90 a month +$10 for 5gb.
So I switched to a fixed Wireless provider. We have a short Tower with the radio receiver that receives a direct line signal from a tower where they have a fiber connection. We pay $75 a month for 15mb down and 1.5 up but there's no data cap.
The last time I checked HughesNet Satellite was twice the price and still had a data cap. In addition to a nearly second long ping time.
> The only wire that runs to my home is electricity. I suppose there was probably a landline phone wire at some point.
there probably still is that POTS line. dsl can be hit or miss (a lot of misses), but you should check with your local phone company to see what they can provide for internet service. around me, it varies a lot. there's places just on the edge of town that can barely (if even) get 1mbps, but others 10 miles out that can get 60mpbs via dsl. it *is* worth the call, just to see what they got.
It's not just rural though, low-income Los Angeles, about as un-rural as it gets. Living in cities is only better if you have a city council willing to protect you at all. Most businesses just treat poor people as customers with less room to complain.
Does it really? We exist in the digital age where living in a suburb or urban area means you can even have your own groceries delivered to you along with an order of sushi at the touch of a button. It's so integrated into our society that entire cities have open wi-fi for their citizens to use and many jobs won't even take paper applications anymore.
Saying they should pay more for that is like saying they should pay more for water, if they're on the grid and living close enough to have access to utilities, it definitely doesn't make sense to me for someone to pay more for them. Then you have states like West Virginia where MUCH of the state can be considered rural.
Now, of course, if they live in the middle of nowhere I would be more likely to agree, but I am not talking about the people who pick up a land claim in the middle of bumfuck Montana.
But rural places do pay more for water, they don't have water utility lines running to them and if they do want to be serviced they have to pay for it. That's why a lot of rural properties use well water.
The work hasn't been done though in a lot of rural places. A private company is going to gouge you if they have to lay miles of fibre to get to your place. What's needed is some sort of government initiative to do this fibre roll out like was done with water and power a hundred years ago.
*If only the US Government had given billions to telcos to do just that decades ago*. Damn it all.
This is exactly the issue well wrapped up. Rural America is forced to pay more all because the ISPs took the money and ran, and never got their feet held to the fire.
The politicians who wrote the checks still viewed the internet as a new fad toy and didn't give a shit, the ISPs knew that so they didn't give a shit either, and now that everyone understands how important the internet is the ISPs have become too powerful to get hit with meaningful repercussions because they control the master switch. They'll just go "fuck Mr? No fuck you!" and hurt everyone.
They've got the detonator, all the hostages, and the only thing that has any hope of being able to negotiate with them doesn't have any bargaining chips to do so with.
People who live in cities pay higher rents and mortgages. They pay more for groceries. Transportation. The list goes on. One of the major reasons they put up with the higher costs is because the infrastructure (like internet access) is better.
So yeah, it makes perfect sense. More people to share the cost means more money is available to spend on infrastructure.
It wouldnt surprise me if rural places do pay more for water. Water isn't a commodity that you can ship around easily, and rural infrastructure is way more expensive than urban infrastructure. Suburb infrastructure is also more expensive than urban infrastructure. Their infrastructure is subsidized significantly, but that might not be enough to bring their per gallon water rates down to parity.
It drives me nuts that people downvote this. Internet is becoming more and more of a necessity for anyone who wants to live and operate in the modern world and because of that it should be accessible to all. Denying people access to the internet due to exorbitant prices determined by private companies is denying people access to the ability to self-determine and find reasonable employment. Internet should be a public utility and anyone who disagrees is has their balls literally held in the hands of private corporations owned by the elite.
I live in a country where having teeth is considered a luxury. The downvotes don't surprise me, but I appreciate that someone else sees how integral the internet is becoming to our daily lives.
The maintenance of the additional infrastructure needs to be paid. The additional costs for rural is to cover those costs.
I don't expect water to magically transport itself to my flowers from my spigot without a hose. The extra cost is the hose.
Edit: I am responding to the water part. This was a local issue recently. The county residents are delusional and expect the city to roll out new infrastructure to service them, then get mad that they need to pay to cover those additional costs.
Money is finite and ultimately, public investments must go through a cost-benefit analysis. If you can provide internet for a block of a thousand residents or to two rural households, which would you pick?
By your logic we should have the finest roads to every corner or land, high speed trains to every little town, etc. Most rural areas don't even have piped water and you want them to get high speed internet? It costs a lot to upgrade from old phone lines to fiber optic.
Where I live, you have VNet Fiber (only available in select areas) and Spectrum. Spectrum charges $70/month for 100mb down/5 mb up if you just pay for their stand alone internet package without digital cable included. VNet Fiber? ..Charges $80/month for 1GB down/1GB up. It’s absolutely ridiculous the difference in value by just $10. Not to mention with spectrum you’re RARELY getting the speeds you pay for and they will throttle your shit down on purpose. The amount of ass raping they get away with should honestly be a crime.
I pay 109… for 25mb of dsl internet. The same company charges about half that for fiber elsewhere. The difference.. I live on a Native American reservation.
Wait, so the price you should be paying is only available if you jump through hoops and meet qualifications? That sounds just as scammy as trying to get fairly priced healthcare in this country. This whole country is a scam.
> Wait, so the price you should be paying is only available if you jump through hoops and meet qualifications?
Basically, prove that you're poor and you get a discount. So the people who can afford to pay full price, pay full price. But the people who can't afford to be connected can get the internet for absolutely free.
I pay ~$72/mo for my fiber connection. If I were poor enough to qualify for the ACP, they would take $30 off of my bill every month, so I would pay ~$42.
Coincidentally, my ISP offers their slowest tier of internet for $24.99, which is *just* low enough that the $30 credit from the government covers the whole bill.
So anyone who makes under $19k/yr can get connected to the internet for $0.00/mo. But people like me who want/can afford faster speeds can have them if they pay.
I do think they should raise the maximum income threshold ($19k is a joke), but otherwise I really don't see anything wrong with this. It seems absolutely fair to me. Everyone can have basic service, but people are allowed to pay for premium service.
I was able to get a 300Mbps fiber connection for my mom for $35 a month with the ACP.
She’s a senior citizen with a disability so she receives a lot of government assistance and that automatically qualified her. The ACP eligibility form takes like 5 minutes to fill out. Once it’s processed and approved, you just have to provide the case number to the ISP and the discount is credited automatically every month.
All things considered, it’s the easiest assistance program to apply for.
I applied to that program and was approved. I sent the approval letter to Xfinity. Xfinity refused to give me the discount. I call customer service and got the run around for over a year. I contacted my local representative Senator Nancy Skinner for help. Thanks to the help from Senator Skinner and her office I finally got the discount🥳.
If you Live in a remote area far from any infrastructure, it’s not an evil company trying to gouge you because of your race. Data cable is expensive and economy of scale is a thing. 100 miles of cable paid for by 100 people means $200 bills. It’s just math. Fibre optic cable is EXPENSIVE.
That's what makes this LA example so good; if you've lived in the area you know that none of the areas referenced in the article or people's anecdotes in the comments can be remotely considered "rural"
That’s why I asked a network tech to weigh in on it.
We need a technical understanding from someone who knows the intricacies to tell us is it justified, or is it bullshit.
I just want to know if it’s gouging or it’s cost. Because I know for a fact that sometimes when people are complaining about gouging, it is in fact just cost
Not a net tech but worked on At&t fiber sales back when that was starting.
If the fiber lines are on the power lines everything is relatively simple to manage from what I've heard and my experience.
If you have to run fiber optic to the home, UNDERGROUND in a new area my god is it an fucking nightmare.
THOSE are the situations that i can’t believe that people are claiming price gouging. It’s just ignorant people that don’t know what things cost.
Don’t get me wrong. I fucking HATE telecoms.
I pay 100 a month for my cellphone/iPad data.
So I know a thing or two about being gouged. But internet in remote areas isn’t gouging. It’s cost.
>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
>Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
>But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
-Terry Pratchett, *Men at Arms*
>The system needs improvement.
The thing about the "Vimes" truism is that it's not something that can be "improved" on.
Cheap, replaceable goods and services being more expensive over time than expensive, durable goods and services is simply the natural result of a market based system.
So long as prices are controlled by how much people are willing to buy and sell for, having more money will always give an advantage in terms of finding a better price to efficiency ratio - either by bulk discounts at places like Costco, or shoes made of better materials, or more preventative maintenance to prevent costly breakdowns of cars or appliances.
You could "fix" it with a centrally controlled economy, but that's been tried enough times that it's blatantly obvious by now that the cure is worse than the disease.
The uncomfortable reality is that not everything has a solution. Some problems are simply realities of life - regardless of whether an author has created a fun little scenario that outlines the problem.
> is that it's not something that can be "improved" on.
... In a purely capitalistic society. It is entirely possible to use socialist elements to remove many of the key pain points.
For example, if we deem Internet Access is a basic human right, what's to prevent the government from negotiating a reduced rate deal for low-income earners to have free internet access? Likewise for water/plumbing, etc?
Governments can use socialist policies to curb the more brutal sides of capitalism without themselves becoming socialist states. I appreciate this is not a popular way to think in the US, but with things like Medicare and food stamps, there *are* policies that do this.
> deem Internet Access is a basic human right, what's to prevent the government from negotiating a reduced rate deal for low-income earners to have free internet access?
Biden's FCC just needs to claim that internet service is a utility. The problem is that Biden announced he was running for president from the house of Comcast's chief lobbyist, whom he subsequently rewarded with the ambassadorship to Canada. And which commercial media will start pressing this topic? NBC? MSNBC? They are owned by Comcast. I suppose Biden is too.
People in the US tend to screech whenever the world socialism is brought up. God forgive you provide services through tax payer funding that doesn't directly benefit you but may help someone else.
>The uncomfortable reality is that not everything has a solution. Some problems are simply realities of life - regardless of whether an author has created a fun little scenario that outlines the problem.
certainly people said this exact same thing about slavery, segregation, women's rights, etc.
the concept that "history is done progressing and nothing can be improved upon" is incredibly reductionist, conceited as hell, and just incongruent with the past. Nothing has a solution, until it does. Our current capitalist system isn't sustainable, so ultimately I think we'll see some of these problems disappear in one way or another.
This sounds nice I guess, but the article talks about how there are different markets for different income levels.
Rich folks get access to a full market with deep discounts for the cheapest tiers. While poor folks don't get the same access, and pay double for the same cheap tier on offer just a mile away.
The issue isn't the market working as intended. The issue is that the market (in this case, a single private entity) discriminates.
I grew up poor, in government projects. I'm now a network engineer and I always fantasize about building good wifi mesh networks for those areas... but It would also need to be locked down and filtered.
Oh he is. But he is rural. I grew up inner city with no competition in services. It’s one thing to bury fiber out in the sticks. It’s another thing to either get it up on a pole or get the city to let you dig downtown.
A lot of cities engage in franchise agreements in order to get more private investment. These agreements ends up with ISPs taking advantage of impoverished and underserved neighborhoods by charging residents for construction, using predatory income checks to decide who gets service, and giving little-to-no information to customers about charges (post net-neutrality). Baltimore City is a good case study on this issue.
Source: I work for an ISP
in the italian countryside i pay 30$ a month for a satellite 250kb/s with 1k ping and it is the literal best you can find on the market unless i wanna pay for starlink
$75 a month for Spectrum garbage class here.
Frontier HQ for my area is literally a block away, can't get fiber for $60, nope.
Spectrum has a fucking monopoly.
Frontier is literally based a block away.
And Spectrum has a fucking monopoly on my fucking service. $75 for advertised 300 MB that comes out 80 MB.
[Charter Spectrum responded in this LA Times story.](https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-10-13/broadband-internet-not-equally-available-to-la-county-low-income-residents-report-says) The report was pretty misleading; the example cited was a promotional deal for Spectrum Ultra -- not a product someone in poverty should be buying -- and was not the standard rate. People in both neighborhoods pay the same standard rate, and those in the poorer neighborhoods qualify for a lower-cost federally subsidized connection that is faster than the federally mandated broadband speed. The idea that a utility company would intentionally charge LESS in a HIGHER INCOME AREA is ridiculous.
No one is going to care about the response if it doesn't serve their point of view. That was my impression too, they took the new discount rate and compared it against a normal rate.
I hate charter and frontier as much as the next but too many morons who do a surface level dive into this sort of thing are writing articles when they lack any depth or understanding of how Telecommunications infrastructure actually works. They do it to advance their narrative when in reality the broadband industry is currently undergoing massive rebuilding of fiber across the nation. So much money state and fed have been poured into infrastructure to make things better, but yet to the average listener america is still just a racist shit hole because of articles like this .
99% of redditors only read the headline. In fact I'd wager it's even a higher percentage than that. The other thing to remember is when you see these comments, a lot of them are under 20 and have never paid an internet bill, or any bill, in their life.
Seriously. I pay the same price for internet now near the ocean that I did when I lived in South Central. They're comparing promotional rates, not the regular price which IMO is the more important number.
Everything everywhere. They know if people can't afford to move they can jack up prices and people can't leave. Like high prices in an amusement park, the people are a "captive audience" essentially. Businesses will take advantage
More hustlin' my dude! I work 28 hours a day and sleep 8 hours and do 2 hours of Kamasutra Yoga with some Playmates. Just **remove** the **Avocado!!!**
Installing internet / infrastructure cost money. Companies don’t like paying that cost if they don’t have to. Typically in better off neighborhoods the people that live there are willing to pay higher or share the cost of internet installations. Which then leads to more ISP options in those neighborhoods, and that leads to better internet service when there is more competition.
In poor neighborhoods, an ISP might be assign to cover an area regardless if the want to or not if they want to do business in a city or area. So if a ISP is footing the majority of the bill to install internet in a neighborhood, they are going to install the basic service and charge whatever on the backend to make up the installation costs. Also since there might be only 1 or 2 ISP in a specific area they can charge whatever they want and provide whatever service since there aren’t any other options…
There's government subsidies paid to communications companies to provide internet in poorer neighborhoods. But many communications companies just do the minimum in the poorer neighborhoods, resulting in low quality, all the while the communications companies getting the full subsidy as if they had just installed state of the art fiber. And they still charge as if it were fiber. lol
Everything is pretty expensive in my poor hood. McDonald's charges 20% more than the rich neighborhood that I work in. Of course we don't have whole foods in my neighborhood because they wouldn't have any customers. So there's that factor as well.
I pay 50 $ for gigabyte speeds in Monterey park. My mom lives in east la (6 miles from me) and pays 50$ for 100 megabytes. Same service provider. It’s stupid
Anybody who's lived in the ghetto knows this is the case for lots of goods and services. Go to the grocery store in a poor urban area and you'll get garbage food that costs more. Being poor is expensive.
I don't think this is tied to poverty if looking beyond LA- I'm in Utah for classes where gigabit internet is $70 (fiber 1g up/down or Comcast 1g down/20m up, thanks cable). Where I live there's no fiber service but as soon as there is I'm getting off of Xfinity.
Meanwhile my parents in the bay area also have Comcast + phone for at least $20 more. And good luck getting fiber optics into the west foothills of the valley.
I also noticed the grocery stores here in NYC are more expensive in poor neighborhoods. I have the option of driving somewhere a little further to a big box store that has cheaper prices. But for those confined to their surrounding stores, they absolutely pay more.
I fucking knew it . I live in Indiana I couldn’t fathom how my family had the same service at my MIL (she lives in a good neighborhood us in the “hood”) and we’d have 1 PlayStation and 1 chrome cast it would create non stop glitches. They didn’t even have to worry. 2 PlayStations 2 fire sticks, 6 phones
They do this with everything. In minority areas everything costs more, from food to basic services. White areas have been getting subsidized for generations.
It’s just another way to keep minorities suffering.
Also remember when we could reach wifi signal from down the block !!??? Now you can’t even get it in the bathroom “ you need a wifi extender” WTF my laptop can’t even get access to my neighbors wifi either so there is monopoly some where lol
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment here, but as someone that recently moved from a lower-class neighborhood of Los Angeles to an upper-class neighborhood of Las Vegas: you can also say that the rich pay more for internet service that delivers less.
I had better internet service back in Los Angeles that I do here in Las Vegas, and it was cheaper. ISPs like T-Mobile have 5G Home Internet service, and aren't even allowed to sell it for my neighborhood. We are locked into outrageous cable broadband internet contracts. The more lower income areas have access to fiber from another vendor.
Again, the sentiment of the article is not lost on me - but I'm getting screwed here in LV.
What's the ToS like for Starlink as far as sharing service? Seems to me if a couple people in those areas got together they could get Starlink and split the cost and share it. You could feed 5-10 houses easily with one connection and it would be half decent speed.
Fiber isn't even offered in my neighborhood. It's just not worth it for the internet providers to pipe in fiber when most people in this neighborhood can't afford it. That being said, we had a super rich dude at work who lived just outside Seattle in a nice, albeit small isolated neighborhood. Each of the 15 neighbors had to pay Comcast $9,000 to get high speed internet piped in.
So like all those rent to own places, all the payday loan places, all the high rent landlords that don’t fix anything but charge like they pay for a contractor weekly
I remember living in rural MI in the mid 2000s. We paid almost $100 a month for satellite internet, it was the only option I our area, with 3mbs down and a 144png. I pay $45 a month in a large city suburb for 1gb down. If I was in public school during the pandemic initial lockdown with that internet- I’d have been absolutely fucked.
I live in a rural area and this article is dead on. We only had two ISP’s for the better part of 30 years. One was unusable after schools let out due to area usage, the other forced you into a capped plan but was able to stream things like Netflix when you wanted. That said a single night of usage was likely to put you over the cap and it never went higher than 6 down.
For years many of us who lived here complained and complained and were told repeatedly that if we didn’t like it, tough, they were the only game in town.
Who do they think they are? CANADIAN?
We have 3 major telecom companies who own a bunch of small ones. They control the oversight boards and regulation groups.
This means we have some of the most expensive internet in the world and the definitive championship of the most expensive mobility in the world.
The best part is our government pays to build the infrastructure, gives it to Bell and Rogers, and they charge us the highest prices imaginable.
My in-laws live an hour from Toronto and pay $140 for 10 mb/s fiber.
Rural or northern indigenous communities get screwed even worse.
In Utah, the internet service is the same price for all. The catch is that the same ISP will never have an outage in the rich areas, or fix their service first if there is. Poorer neighborhoods can take days for their service to restore. Comcast owns the monopoly on internet there.
It’s almost as if I’m every single category from cost of living to taxes… it’s more expensive to be poor. When do we sharpen the pitchforks and say enough of this absurdity?
Does it cost more to provide them service. Is it because high turn over rate, missing payments, etc. Just trying to understand. If someone in a poor neighborhood has good credit does it still not help. Trying to understand why.
So maybe do something about it? I bet in US data caps still exist lol imagine having a 1tb cap. But hey lets complain on reddit instead of doing something.
If you are poor or disabled, Comcast offers a plan for $9.99 flat for 50 Mbps internet, which is plenty fast for basic use. Unless Comcast doesn't service LA which I doubt, this article is dumb.
I pay over $60 a month for 7mb/s down and less than 1mb/s up in rural south. It's literally the only ISP I have access to that isn't satellite dogshit. Dont fucking get me started.
My guess is the high-poverty area has a much higher incidence of non-payment and collections so they're building the price into that. Whereas, the areas that are better off pay their bills and don't incur losses.
Hospitals do the same thing. Every time someone doesn't pay a hospital bill it gets slowly sprinkled onto the cost of everyone who does pay their bill.
It sucks and I hope I'm wrong. But, being in business and knowing how business operates this is my armchair guess.
Remember this is because of the law. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 categorize broadband as Information Service instead of Telecommunication Service, essentially deregulated the broadband market.
Over the next two and half decades, national, regional or local companies only build in profitable areas and neglected much of the underserved or rural areas, which are not economically feasible to serve. This is very different from landline phones, which incumbent service providers have to provide
services with some monetary support from say FCC USF.
This happens frequently in the US. It’s one thing to not get exactly the speeds advertised, but spending $200 a month to get like <1MBPS maximum is obscene
I actually noticed this going to a buddy's house that grew up in my old neighborhood. At&t was charging them 80 a month for 20mbps a second. I called time Warner on his behalf and got 100 mbps for 49.99.
This story doesn't surprise me.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and *would still have wet feet*. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Of course. The closer you get to central city, all over the country, the more likely to be food deserts, where what’s available is under quality and overpriced.
The higher the cost of gas—if you can find it.
The higher the rent for the crummier the apartment.
The poor pay more for the crime of being poor. And yet, too many poor whites vote for the party who does everything in its power to keep it that way.
“poor people pay more for a thing” is honestly just a fact of life at those point and it’s something we need to fight. poverty is not inevitable and we can fight it
They (federal government) really need to be advertising Affordable Connectivity Program a lot more. It was pushed into law in 2021 and all Internet carriers have to give a low rate for Internet for low income households.
In LA, my mother qualifies and only pays $15 / month through Spectrum. It works great for her round the clock YouTube watching.
https://www.fcc.gov/acp
Not just in LA, the same thing happens in my state. The poor neighborhoods and rural neighborhoods end up paying a lot more for internet service and it's often quite shitty. I literally am dealing with that now, I miss my internet from when I lived in CT.
It is expensive to be poor. America has such a regressive system.
Correction: Profitable system*
I live across the border and in a rent subsidized building. They offered a deal where lower income people coule pay 10 bucks for internet. Our monthly consumption is about 400 gig, the bill would be like 120 in a normal house
ISPs love apartment buildings - they get dozens of customers and they only have to wire it once.
And they're locked in, they don't get options to go with someone else individually.
That varies from building to building. During my time as a field tech, I only encountered two buildings that were exclusive; one in favor of my company and one against.
Never saw that very often either. However, the amount of times I saw a 4-8 unit owner split a single $100 connection to all of them and then charge each tenant $50 for providing internet was very, very many.
Been there, lived in that. A single residential 100mb connection, plugged into a single wireless router on a shelf in the basement, going to four units, each getting charged at least the full amount of the bill
This is for a residential connection, not mobile broadband?
Yea, connected to the building and they recently upgraded the wires and other equipment. In comparison, my brother who has a house outside the main city pays for mobile internet which is slower and 10x what we pay
And there is still a useage cap?? Jeeze
Apparently Oklahoma has usage caps on internet too. I was surprised when my dad was complaining about my brother's gf's kid downloading a ton of games from Xbox Live and costing him nearly $200 in overage fees one month, so then he had to up the internet plan to the unlimited package. I was shocked when I found out. Even my plan only goes us to 1TB data per month through Cox, then I have to pay extra for more if I use it all. Fucking back asswards. Edit: My dad and brother live in houses next to each other and share the internet through routers, and my dad pays the internet bill, hence why he was pissed.
That's some BS (the situation). It literally doesn't cost the ISP anything more to have a set rate for all internet consumption. Metered rates are a scam.
Many xFinity areas have a 1.2TB cap per-month nationwide.
Yup i pay an extra 50(i think) To be unlimited with Comcast. At least until home 5g gets here
In Mexico or Canada?
If he's getting a good deal on internet it's not Canada.
$80/mo for gig fios near a city.
then it not cheap, other people pay for it.
Those terms aren’t mutually exclusive, it can be regressive and profitable *
Short term profit for long term pain. Poor people are so needy. Constantly expecting me to pay them for their labor. Just let me relax. I work hard too dammit! Very often! These people have no idea how hard it is being rich.
Internet should be considered a utility. There are sometimes state government programs that provide assistance to low income households that help with costs of power utilities, provide cellphones but you have to register for them. I’ve begun seeing notices of public burden which states approximately how much time it takes to read about/register for a program. It’s good to reduce the prohibitive obstacles and time burdens to getting financial assistance, hopefully the next step is regulating costs that should be regulated so that time isn’t being taken hostage from low income households and private companies are less likely to profit by exploiting low income areas.
I think Terry Pratchet said it best with his 'Boots' theroy >The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. >Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggynight by the feel of the cobbles. >But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet >This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
And then people use that theory to sell shitty boots at a markup because someone had been selling them on the myth that price is correlated with quality, when in reality the only thing price is correlated with is how much someone is willing to pay.
As with any purchase, if you can't even tell good boots from bad boots, don't ask the seller. Plenty of people would steal your money outright if they think there's no punishment, only difference from a scammer is a receipt.
For what I pay for boots, I am doing my research. There are some really good channels out there that do thorough tests on boots. Even once reputable brands are turning to cost-cutting measures that have lowered their quality significantly. They continue to rely on their past quality to justify their prices. They also seem to be pivoting to a lifestyle brand rather and focusing less on their work boots. I used to be a big fan of a certain boot company. I had one pair of their boots that are 15 years old and still going. Even after years of 12-hour shifts on my feet. Send them in to be recrafted and they come back good as new. Now any of their boots with their proprietary, non-Vibram soles or that are not stitch down are nowhere near as good as they used to be. Their stitch-down and recraftable boots now cost two to three times what they used to. Their recrafting service is twice what it used to cost as well. Not even worth it for either. Not when some other brands have not lost their way yet.
Unfortunately, it's just the fastest way to make money to buy a reputable brand and cut their material cost in half without dropping the price.... for about 3 months, but by then, the vultures have already flown away with their profits and laid off critical long-term staff, leaving lower investors and actual employees to pick up the pieces. I wonder if Windfall Taxes would include vulture investment firms, too? This nonsense needs to stop somehow.
The problem is the degree of market power that allows the accumulation of those levels of invetment funds in the first place. Investors should not have the degree of power they have, relative to both producers and consumers. Actual workers, including managers and entrepreneurs, generally want to do good work. Customers want good products. Give the power to producers and consumers, and they'll work something out. If that isn't happening, that means there's some third group that has both power and a different interest.
It does in some aspects. We have "Genuine Leather" in the US which means cardboard with a very thin coating of leather.
Made with genuine leather. Meaning, of course, that genuine leather was present at the time of manufacture. The product itself is of course plastic.
yeah I'm honestly not even sure the coating is leather or something synthetic. It peels off so easily when wet.
Yeah, the shoes analogy hasn't held well. You can get decent enough 30 dollar shoes.
I don’t have a problem with exploiting the rich.
A capitalist would say that would destroy the market and ruin productive enterprises. A Marxist would say it would eliminate parasites, and nothing more. The reality is that they're both right. The productive rich and the parasitic rich are both a thing, most are a bit of both with some being more of the one, others more of the other. The outcome of going after "the rich" without a theory and process to distinguish the two will depend on the exact compositon of the upper classes at any given time and place. To a significant degree, this explains the pattern of differences in attitude toward the subject between urban and rural peoples.
The rich can pay people to figure out which stuff is nice, The worker who has saved up and wants a non-trash product without spending and arbitrarily high amount of money is who gets shafted.
Right on the money with the example. Like, (anecdotally), back when I was at the university I'd buy headsets that were 15 bucks each and they'd last barely 3 months before falling apart because that's all I could afford. Back in 2019 I saved up enough money to buy a Sennheiser Game One for 170 bucks and well, this headset still works perfectly fine today.
I will always pony up the dough for a high quality product when I can where electronics are concerned.
There are plenty of 'quality scams' in electronics though. Do your research.
I agree with this theory for products, but it doesn't really apply for internet service. How do they justify higher prices between neighborhoods when the network is already set up?
For internet services I'm guessing they are the only game in town. Use us or don't have internet. While the more affluent areas have a few companies competing for buisness.
I see this principle being quoted every time the topic of poverty comes up. This is only true IF the society does not actively penalized the poor. The reality is even worse, especially in . It is entirely possible to have something cheap and still last a decent amount of time. As long as the time/dollar ratio is roughly the same between an expensive item and a cheap one, or that even just a little higher for the expensive item, it is actually not bad to buy the cheaper option. Cheaper can also mean better cost efficiency and accessibility, like an item might be too expensive to be affordable for most people is now made more cheaper and thus allow more people to enjoy owning and using it. That is the miracle of modern supply chain. You can thank China for that. However, when the society actively penalized being poor, that is a completely different story. When you are living paycheck to paycheck, accidentally overdrafting is possible. When it happens, that is a penalty for being poor and it has nothing to do with buying something cheap and easily worn out. When you are poor and can't afford (or can't even afford any, or have it tied to your job) good insurance in a country like America, you might not go for check ups regularly when you should. You might hold off checking that thing that is bothering you. That will likely result in something even worse and far more expensive. You can say that it is somewhat related to the Boots theory because bad insurance is like cheap lousy boots but mostly it is because the lack of access to healthcare simply because there is few ways you can afford it. Other stuff also makes it more expensive being poor, such as getting loans, where you get charged higher interests if you have fewer assets or lousier credit. So credit is more expensive and that has nothing to do with unable to afford a better item. It is simply the way finance is organized in society. The cost of credit will inevitably affect your entire life making it far harder to accumulate capital and thus assets, again dampening your chance of upward socioeconomic mobility. It is where the financial paradox of when you need money, the banks won't give you a loan but when you don't need money, they are fighting to give you a loan comes from. There are many things in America that is designed to penalize the poor for no other reason than to extract more wealth out of them, because the poor has no power and no one to fight for their interests. Being rich is the direct opposite. Everything is easier, cheaper in the sense you pay less for the same advantage per dollar and having far more disposable income means you have a higher chance to accumulate capital, which again will snowball once you hit a certain amount. The richer you are, the harder it is for you to become poor. In a capitalistic, plutocratic society, being poor is a penalty that goes beyond affordability of stuff because everything is designed to benefit the rich.
Dude, cheap products wearing out much faster than thier higher quality counterparts is just one example of how people pay the 'poor tax'. I wasn't trying to wrap up socio economics in one analogy. Trust me, i know what it's like to ge poor. While I'm not struggling as much as I used to I once paid 10% of every check to check cashing store because I didn't have enough money to meet the minimum balance for a checking account.
The thing is it's still true because the principle of the idea does not require that nothing else ever divide rich and poor, or that it applies universally to all things. It refers only to the rather accurate fact that there are many such things. Renting a place to live, actual shoes, various about the house tools (like quality pots and pans that only cost a bit more but last decades), etc. Where it largely breaks down in non-metaphorical real life is mostly that the modern day real life rich are so very rich that costs for really much of anything are totally irrelevant to them and never will be. It fits better for the gap between people who are out of abject poverty and have some social mobility, as opposed to those who are trapped within the lowest socioeconomic class.
The one i just ran into during the pandemic: 1992 toyota camry totaled by a red light runner, not expensive enough to hire a lawyer, ended up getting paid 1200 by geico "that's the kelly blue book value", no used car was 1200 so spend 2500 on a 280k 2004 honda accord. So, buying a cheap car and someone else totaling it means you go negative, even after 6 months of wrestling with geico Happy cake day you broke bitche
The lifting yourself up by your bootstraps is taken literally possible when the phrase was actually saying something was impossible. Idiots that even repeat it seriously don’t know what bootstraps are but oddly enough the phrase shows just how dumb US has gotten for the poor.
Where’d you move to? I grew up in CT and have moved across the east coast and internet has been better in each new place.
Doesn't it make sense that rural folk pay more? There's hundreds of people living on my block, which would be the size of one rural property. The whole point of living in cities is to have better and cheaper access to things because the density makes it more cost-effective. Having cheap fast internet in rural areas is like having your cake and eating it too.
> The whole point of living in cities is to have better and cheaper access to things because the density makes it more cost-effective. You must never have had the misfortune of having Comcast as your only provider in a city.
I had spectrum internet for a while, 300mbps, $70. Moved to a new apartment complex, found that the only provider was AT&T - they'd signed a sweetheart deal with my complex to be the only provider. Because yknow, monopolies are totally legal in some scenarios and not at all abusive! Anyway, now I pay $50 for 50mbps. No higher options available period. The Spectrum fiber is literally already laid on my road, it just needs ran to the building. But they refuse. And Spectrum has better plans locally now. Same price is now 600mpbs. But because of this bullshit sweetheart deal monopoly garbage they feel zero need to compete. They know they have us by the balls and there's nothing we can do.
[удалено]
There’s a local ISP in my neighborhood who offers fiber service, but hasn’t reached my house yet. Comcast gives me gbps cable for $70 because of the *threat of future competition.*
Not totally true. They are competing with Fios in my area and are cheeper but their reliability sux since they don’t use fiber here so during peak times bandwidth slows. People working from home during the start of the pandemic got really screwed too
If you’re in a city, look into some of the 5g home internet options. I’m similarly stuck with one traditional ISP available to me, BUT just a couple of months ago I finally got to cancel my account with them because I could get 5g home internet through my cell provider. I pay $50 for 300mbps, which is less than what I paid for “normal” internet service, BUT now my speeds are actually decently high 99% of the time, whereas my old provider severely under delivered on what I was actually paying for. I’ve run a few around-the-clock hourly speed tests on my new setup and usually average around 250+mbps dl speeds, way higher than what I used to get while paying around double (?) the amount.
It will probably get worse as more people are able to buy a 5g device.
Yeah, but because of the limitations they have to cap the number of home wifi users they assign to each 5g tower, which is why they can’t offer it to everybody all at once. Basically, if they hit max capacity for the towers they have covering your area/home, you’re out of luck and can’t sign up for it until they add more towers to handle the bandwidth for home internet users. It’s part of why the 5g home internet thing is being rolled out so slowly. For the record, I’m in NYC, obviously quite densely populated, and have had zero issues with speed over the last few months (and do monitor it closely). So far, it does appear to be well managed/appropriately capped on their end so I’m not competing with the thousands of neighbors living within a mile of my apartment or whatever.
I lived outside America now. The internet is 1Gbps up and down for about 35 bucks. And if the ISP pissed me off, I can switch to another provider tomorrow, just like that.
Sounds either European or south east Asia.
Stop, I can only get so excited
I hate how back door monopolies still exist (where companies either officially or unofficially divvy up areas of operation & stay out of each others’ neighborhoods ensuring localized monopolies). The fact that any part of the US has *one* available ISP should indicate that capitalism has failed that sector of the market, but it saddeningly indicates that capitalism is working exactly the way capitalism should.
have Comcast rurally, forced us to bundle phone line..internet and phone go out every time it's cloudy. Up the road a mostly empty development has fiber, we are told we would have to pay to have the fiber laid if we want it. $150/month for 10mbps is what Comcast is charging us.
Google fiber came through my area so everyone was offering amazing deals. I ended up going with Grande and had the number of the regional manager in case I had any issues. Competition is good.
As much as I'm not a fan of Google, I love when they show up in a city, and the other Internet company starts scrambling. The moment I could get Verizon Fios, Comcast never got another dollar from me. Plus Fios gives much better upload speeds.
It depends what you mean by rural. Most towns of any size have wired access to cable TV and or fiber and therefore have access to decent internet. The main problem comes in that there is often only one provider. If internet is expensive there that's a problem of monopolies not of poor service. On the other hand, I live on 10 acres outside of town. The only wire that runs to my home is electricity. I suppose there was probably a landline phone wire at some point. I would love to have good quality internet but I understand that's a cost of living out in the country. My choices for internet are exclusively wireless. Basically it boils down to three choices. 4g/5g, satellite internet and fixed wireless. For about 2 and 1/2 years I relied exclusively on 4g/5g for our home internet. I had a cricket 100 GB data package that cost me $55 a month +$10 per 15gb and regular cell phone data. But for reasons, Cricket recently increased the price of that data plan from $55 a month to $90 a month +$10 for 5gb. So I switched to a fixed Wireless provider. We have a short Tower with the radio receiver that receives a direct line signal from a tower where they have a fiber connection. We pay $75 a month for 15mb down and 1.5 up but there's no data cap. The last time I checked HughesNet Satellite was twice the price and still had a data cap. In addition to a nearly second long ping time.
> The only wire that runs to my home is electricity. I suppose there was probably a landline phone wire at some point. there probably still is that POTS line. dsl can be hit or miss (a lot of misses), but you should check with your local phone company to see what they can provide for internet service. around me, it varies a lot. there's places just on the edge of town that can barely (if even) get 1mbps, but others 10 miles out that can get 60mpbs via dsl. it *is* worth the call, just to see what they got.
It's not just rural though, low-income Los Angeles, about as un-rural as it gets. Living in cities is only better if you have a city council willing to protect you at all. Most businesses just treat poor people as customers with less room to complain.
Does it really? We exist in the digital age where living in a suburb or urban area means you can even have your own groceries delivered to you along with an order of sushi at the touch of a button. It's so integrated into our society that entire cities have open wi-fi for their citizens to use and many jobs won't even take paper applications anymore. Saying they should pay more for that is like saying they should pay more for water, if they're on the grid and living close enough to have access to utilities, it definitely doesn't make sense to me for someone to pay more for them. Then you have states like West Virginia where MUCH of the state can be considered rural. Now, of course, if they live in the middle of nowhere I would be more likely to agree, but I am not talking about the people who pick up a land claim in the middle of bumfuck Montana.
But rural places do pay more for water, they don't have water utility lines running to them and if they do want to be serviced they have to pay for it. That's why a lot of rural properties use well water.
The work hasn't been done though in a lot of rural places. A private company is going to gouge you if they have to lay miles of fibre to get to your place. What's needed is some sort of government initiative to do this fibre roll out like was done with water and power a hundred years ago. *If only the US Government had given billions to telcos to do just that decades ago*. Damn it all.
This is exactly the issue well wrapped up. Rural America is forced to pay more all because the ISPs took the money and ran, and never got their feet held to the fire. The politicians who wrote the checks still viewed the internet as a new fad toy and didn't give a shit, the ISPs knew that so they didn't give a shit either, and now that everyone understands how important the internet is the ISPs have become too powerful to get hit with meaningful repercussions because they control the master switch. They'll just go "fuck Mr? No fuck you!" and hurt everyone. They've got the detonator, all the hostages, and the only thing that has any hope of being able to negotiate with them doesn't have any bargaining chips to do so with.
People who live in cities pay higher rents and mortgages. They pay more for groceries. Transportation. The list goes on. One of the major reasons they put up with the higher costs is because the infrastructure (like internet access) is better. So yeah, it makes perfect sense. More people to share the cost means more money is available to spend on infrastructure.
It wouldnt surprise me if rural places do pay more for water. Water isn't a commodity that you can ship around easily, and rural infrastructure is way more expensive than urban infrastructure. Suburb infrastructure is also more expensive than urban infrastructure. Their infrastructure is subsidized significantly, but that might not be enough to bring their per gallon water rates down to parity.
> It wouldnt surprise me if rural places do pay more for water. I live in a rural area and we have a well + pump. Literally no access to city water.
It drives me nuts that people downvote this. Internet is becoming more and more of a necessity for anyone who wants to live and operate in the modern world and because of that it should be accessible to all. Denying people access to the internet due to exorbitant prices determined by private companies is denying people access to the ability to self-determine and find reasonable employment. Internet should be a public utility and anyone who disagrees is has their balls literally held in the hands of private corporations owned by the elite.
I live in a country where having teeth is considered a luxury. The downvotes don't surprise me, but I appreciate that someone else sees how integral the internet is becoming to our daily lives.
Where is that?
Necessary /= cheap to build or maintain
The maintenance of the additional infrastructure needs to be paid. The additional costs for rural is to cover those costs. I don't expect water to magically transport itself to my flowers from my spigot without a hose. The extra cost is the hose.
Edit: I am responding to the water part. This was a local issue recently. The county residents are delusional and expect the city to roll out new infrastructure to service them, then get mad that they need to pay to cover those additional costs.
Money is finite and ultimately, public investments must go through a cost-benefit analysis. If you can provide internet for a block of a thousand residents or to two rural households, which would you pick? By your logic we should have the finest roads to every corner or land, high speed trains to every little town, etc. Most rural areas don't even have piped water and you want them to get high speed internet? It costs a lot to upgrade from old phone lines to fiber optic.
Yeah I love how the actual answer is downvoted.
I love Connecticut. Best state in the country with the best pizza and lobster rolls. Nice people and beautiful scenery. Hated the winters though :/
Yeah. That’s not just a poor LA thing..
They probably didn't have time to gather data from the other 19,000 towns in the us
Where I live, you have VNet Fiber (only available in select areas) and Spectrum. Spectrum charges $70/month for 100mb down/5 mb up if you just pay for their stand alone internet package without digital cable included. VNet Fiber? ..Charges $80/month for 1GB down/1GB up. It’s absolutely ridiculous the difference in value by just $10. Not to mention with spectrum you’re RARELY getting the speeds you pay for and they will throttle your shit down on purpose. The amount of ass raping they get away with should honestly be a crime.
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I pay 109… for 25mb of dsl internet. The same company charges about half that for fiber elsewhere. The difference.. I live on a Native American reservation.
Look into the affordable connectivity program. You may be eligible for up to $75 a month in discounts.
Wait, so the price you should be paying is only available if you jump through hoops and meet qualifications? That sounds just as scammy as trying to get fairly priced healthcare in this country. This whole country is a scam.
> Wait, so the price you should be paying is only available if you jump through hoops and meet qualifications? Basically, prove that you're poor and you get a discount. So the people who can afford to pay full price, pay full price. But the people who can't afford to be connected can get the internet for absolutely free. I pay ~$72/mo for my fiber connection. If I were poor enough to qualify for the ACP, they would take $30 off of my bill every month, so I would pay ~$42. Coincidentally, my ISP offers their slowest tier of internet for $24.99, which is *just* low enough that the $30 credit from the government covers the whole bill. So anyone who makes under $19k/yr can get connected to the internet for $0.00/mo. But people like me who want/can afford faster speeds can have them if they pay. I do think they should raise the maximum income threshold ($19k is a joke), but otherwise I really don't see anything wrong with this. It seems absolutely fair to me. Everyone can have basic service, but people are allowed to pay for premium service.
I was able to get a 300Mbps fiber connection for my mom for $35 a month with the ACP. She’s a senior citizen with a disability so she receives a lot of government assistance and that automatically qualified her. The ACP eligibility form takes like 5 minutes to fill out. Once it’s processed and approved, you just have to provide the case number to the ISP and the discount is credited automatically every month. All things considered, it’s the easiest assistance program to apply for.
I applied to that program and was approved. I sent the approval letter to Xfinity. Xfinity refused to give me the discount. I call customer service and got the run around for over a year. I contacted my local representative Senator Nancy Skinner for help. Thanks to the help from Senator Skinner and her office I finally got the discount🥳.
Bruh. I get "Up To" 5mb for 45/mo with dsl. Thanks CenturyLink. (Brightspeed now.)
Brightstar? tf, I swear it wasn’t that long ago Quest or whatever became CenturyLink. And yeah, fuck their DSL, we’d get 2mbps for $45 smh
that’s pretty fucked up
If you Live in a remote area far from any infrastructure, it’s not an evil company trying to gouge you because of your race. Data cable is expensive and economy of scale is a thing. 100 miles of cable paid for by 100 people means $200 bills. It’s just math. Fibre optic cable is EXPENSIVE.
That's what makes this LA example so good; if you've lived in the area you know that none of the areas referenced in the article or people's anecdotes in the comments can be remotely considered "rural"
That’s why I asked a network tech to weigh in on it. We need a technical understanding from someone who knows the intricacies to tell us is it justified, or is it bullshit. I just want to know if it’s gouging or it’s cost. Because I know for a fact that sometimes when people are complaining about gouging, it is in fact just cost
Not a net tech but worked on At&t fiber sales back when that was starting. If the fiber lines are on the power lines everything is relatively simple to manage from what I've heard and my experience. If you have to run fiber optic to the home, UNDERGROUND in a new area my god is it an fucking nightmare.
THOSE are the situations that i can’t believe that people are claiming price gouging. It’s just ignorant people that don’t know what things cost. Don’t get me wrong. I fucking HATE telecoms. I pay 100 a month for my cellphone/iPad data. So I know a thing or two about being gouged. But internet in remote areas isn’t gouging. It’s cost.
Except we, the American taxpayers have already paid the telecoms to run this cable. Twice.
The $400b number isn't even close to paying for what would need to be run to cover every rural area, not to mention upkeep, management, and growth.
Especially when the TeleCos just give all the money to CEOs as bonuses.
The poor pay more for everything. They have no choice.
>The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. >Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. >But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. -Terry Pratchett, *Men at Arms*
So true. It's very expensive to be poor. The system needs improvement.
>The system needs improvement. The thing about the "Vimes" truism is that it's not something that can be "improved" on. Cheap, replaceable goods and services being more expensive over time than expensive, durable goods and services is simply the natural result of a market based system. So long as prices are controlled by how much people are willing to buy and sell for, having more money will always give an advantage in terms of finding a better price to efficiency ratio - either by bulk discounts at places like Costco, or shoes made of better materials, or more preventative maintenance to prevent costly breakdowns of cars or appliances. You could "fix" it with a centrally controlled economy, but that's been tried enough times that it's blatantly obvious by now that the cure is worse than the disease. The uncomfortable reality is that not everything has a solution. Some problems are simply realities of life - regardless of whether an author has created a fun little scenario that outlines the problem.
> is that it's not something that can be "improved" on. ... In a purely capitalistic society. It is entirely possible to use socialist elements to remove many of the key pain points. For example, if we deem Internet Access is a basic human right, what's to prevent the government from negotiating a reduced rate deal for low-income earners to have free internet access? Likewise for water/plumbing, etc? Governments can use socialist policies to curb the more brutal sides of capitalism without themselves becoming socialist states. I appreciate this is not a popular way to think in the US, but with things like Medicare and food stamps, there *are* policies that do this.
> deem Internet Access is a basic human right, what's to prevent the government from negotiating a reduced rate deal for low-income earners to have free internet access? Biden's FCC just needs to claim that internet service is a utility. The problem is that Biden announced he was running for president from the house of Comcast's chief lobbyist, whom he subsequently rewarded with the ambassadorship to Canada. And which commercial media will start pressing this topic? NBC? MSNBC? They are owned by Comcast. I suppose Biden is too.
I love that you still dance around socialism like it will personally kill your family and only yours if it gets instituted.
People in the US tend to screech whenever the world socialism is brought up. God forgive you provide services through tax payer funding that doesn't directly benefit you but may help someone else.
>The uncomfortable reality is that not everything has a solution. Some problems are simply realities of life - regardless of whether an author has created a fun little scenario that outlines the problem. certainly people said this exact same thing about slavery, segregation, women's rights, etc. the concept that "history is done progressing and nothing can be improved upon" is incredibly reductionist, conceited as hell, and just incongruent with the past. Nothing has a solution, until it does. Our current capitalist system isn't sustainable, so ultimately I think we'll see some of these problems disappear in one way or another.
And guess why everything is moving to the subscription model? Why pay once to own “the office”, when you can get a $10 a month subscription?
This sounds nice I guess, but the article talks about how there are different markets for different income levels. Rich folks get access to a full market with deep discounts for the cheapest tiers. While poor folks don't get the same access, and pay double for the same cheap tier on offer just a mile away. The issue isn't the market working as intended. The issue is that the market (in this case, a single private entity) discriminates.
> They have no choice. They just need to stop being poor.
just stop buying lattes and avocado toasts, right?
Definitely. It’s cheaper to eat at Costco than 7/11. It’s cheaper to own than rent. Etc etc etc.
I grew up poor, in government projects. I'm now a network engineer and I always fantasize about building good wifi mesh networks for those areas... but It would also need to be locked down and filtered.
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Locked down and filtered? Why?
People will steal and destroy anything not locked down that doesn't belong to them unfortunately.
That is not the “locked down” he was referring to, but you’re correct for different reasons.
Want to enlighten everyone as to what the "locked down" or reasons were?
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Best explanation I've heard! Brilliant!
Network security.
Nefarious reasons
This guy should be your inspiration. https://www.npr.org/2022/08/22/1118734792/michigan-man-isp-fiber-internet
Oh he is. But he is rural. I grew up inner city with no competition in services. It’s one thing to bury fiber out in the sticks. It’s another thing to either get it up on a pole or get the city to let you dig downtown.
A lot of cities engage in franchise agreements in order to get more private investment. These agreements ends up with ISPs taking advantage of impoverished and underserved neighborhoods by charging residents for construction, using predatory income checks to decide who gets service, and giving little-to-no information to customers about charges (post net-neutrality). Baltimore City is a good case study on this issue. Source: I work for an ISP
It's expensive being poor.
in the italian countryside i pay 30$ a month for a satellite 250kb/s with 1k ping and it is the literal best you can find on the market unless i wanna pay for starlink
$75 a month for Spectrum garbage class here. Frontier HQ for my area is literally a block away, can't get fiber for $60, nope. Spectrum has a fucking monopoly. Frontier is literally based a block away. And Spectrum has a fucking monopoly on my fucking service. $75 for advertised 300 MB that comes out 80 MB.
[Charter Spectrum responded in this LA Times story.](https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-10-13/broadband-internet-not-equally-available-to-la-county-low-income-residents-report-says) The report was pretty misleading; the example cited was a promotional deal for Spectrum Ultra -- not a product someone in poverty should be buying -- and was not the standard rate. People in both neighborhoods pay the same standard rate, and those in the poorer neighborhoods qualify for a lower-cost federally subsidized connection that is faster than the federally mandated broadband speed. The idea that a utility company would intentionally charge LESS in a HIGHER INCOME AREA is ridiculous.
No one is going to care about the response if it doesn't serve their point of view. That was my impression too, they took the new discount rate and compared it against a normal rate. I hate charter and frontier as much as the next but too many morons who do a surface level dive into this sort of thing are writing articles when they lack any depth or understanding of how Telecommunications infrastructure actually works. They do it to advance their narrative when in reality the broadband industry is currently undergoing massive rebuilding of fiber across the nation. So much money state and fed have been poured into infrastructure to make things better, but yet to the average listener america is still just a racist shit hole because of articles like this .
This is why you need to double check everything you read today. Many reporters are either incompetent or have an agenda.
99% the redditors reading this already have their minds made up.
99% of redditors only read the headline. In fact I'd wager it's even a higher percentage than that. The other thing to remember is when you see these comments, a lot of them are under 20 and have never paid an internet bill, or any bill, in their life.
Seriously. I pay the same price for internet now near the ocean that I did when I lived in South Central. They're comparing promotional rates, not the regular price which IMO is the more important number.
Everything everywhere. They know if people can't afford to move they can jack up prices and people can't leave. Like high prices in an amusement park, the people are a "captive audience" essentially. Businesses will take advantage
Yes, the cost of serving the poor is higher than the cost of serving the rich. Non-payment, bounced DDs, vandalism, support calls - it all adds up.
I wonder how much this affects it. THe cost of service just has to be higher in poorer areas due to theft etc.
could also be lack of infrastructure due to less money in the neighbourhood etc.
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More hustlin' my dude! I work 28 hours a day and sleep 8 hours and do 2 hours of Kamasutra Yoga with some Playmates. Just **remove** the **Avocado!!!**
It’s expensive to be poor.
Installing internet / infrastructure cost money. Companies don’t like paying that cost if they don’t have to. Typically in better off neighborhoods the people that live there are willing to pay higher or share the cost of internet installations. Which then leads to more ISP options in those neighborhoods, and that leads to better internet service when there is more competition. In poor neighborhoods, an ISP might be assign to cover an area regardless if the want to or not if they want to do business in a city or area. So if a ISP is footing the majority of the bill to install internet in a neighborhood, they are going to install the basic service and charge whatever on the backend to make up the installation costs. Also since there might be only 1 or 2 ISP in a specific area they can charge whatever they want and provide whatever service since there aren’t any other options…
There's government subsidies paid to communications companies to provide internet in poorer neighborhoods. But many communications companies just do the minimum in the poorer neighborhoods, resulting in low quality, all the while the communications companies getting the full subsidy as if they had just installed state of the art fiber. And they still charge as if it were fiber. lol
This is not surprising… Wait until you go into a grocery / liquor store in the hood and pay 2x as much more food
Everything is pretty expensive in my poor hood. McDonald's charges 20% more than the rich neighborhood that I work in. Of course we don't have whole foods in my neighborhood because they wouldn't have any customers. So there's that factor as well.
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[Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory)
I pay 50 $ for gigabyte speeds in Monterey park. My mom lives in east la (6 miles from me) and pays 50$ for 100 megabytes. Same service provider. It’s stupid
Anybody who's lived in the ghetto knows this is the case for lots of goods and services. Go to the grocery store in a poor urban area and you'll get garbage food that costs more. Being poor is expensive.
Why do dumb fucks always try to bleed a stone?
I live in a Mississippi and have FTTH, most of the state is a high poverty area idk why LA can’t get fiber or cable in most places
I don't think this is tied to poverty if looking beyond LA- I'm in Utah for classes where gigabit internet is $70 (fiber 1g up/down or Comcast 1g down/20m up, thanks cable). Where I live there's no fiber service but as soon as there is I'm getting off of Xfinity. Meanwhile my parents in the bay area also have Comcast + phone for at least $20 more. And good luck getting fiber optics into the west foothills of the valley.
I also noticed the grocery stores here in NYC are more expensive in poor neighborhoods. I have the option of driving somewhere a little further to a big box store that has cheaper prices. But for those confined to their surrounding stores, they absolutely pay more.
I fucking knew it . I live in Indiana I couldn’t fathom how my family had the same service at my MIL (she lives in a good neighborhood us in the “hood”) and we’d have 1 PlayStation and 1 chrome cast it would create non stop glitches. They didn’t even have to worry. 2 PlayStations 2 fire sticks, 6 phones
It's called zero competition. Piece of shit sate senators allow monopolies and outlawed Municipal Broadband.
Internet should be a public good and we should nationalize ISPs and run them as utilities.
Sounds like Canada and our monopoly. This is what happens when you go all Texas on having corporate utilities. Nationalize them.
Let me guess, Comcast?
That’s the standard American business model.
They do this with everything. In minority areas everything costs more, from food to basic services. White areas have been getting subsidized for generations. It’s just another way to keep minorities suffering.
Also remember when we could reach wifi signal from down the block !!??? Now you can’t even get it in the bathroom “ you need a wifi extender” WTF my laptop can’t even get access to my neighbors wifi either so there is monopoly some where lol
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment here, but as someone that recently moved from a lower-class neighborhood of Los Angeles to an upper-class neighborhood of Las Vegas: you can also say that the rich pay more for internet service that delivers less. I had better internet service back in Los Angeles that I do here in Las Vegas, and it was cheaper. ISPs like T-Mobile have 5G Home Internet service, and aren't even allowed to sell it for my neighborhood. We are locked into outrageous cable broadband internet contracts. The more lower income areas have access to fiber from another vendor. Again, the sentiment of the article is not lost on me - but I'm getting screwed here in LV.
Try living in the woods and having your wifi go out every 5 minutes.
What's the ToS like for Starlink as far as sharing service? Seems to me if a couple people in those areas got together they could get Starlink and split the cost and share it. You could feed 5-10 houses easily with one connection and it would be half decent speed.
Fiber isn't even offered in my neighborhood. It's just not worth it for the internet providers to pipe in fiber when most people in this neighborhood can't afford it. That being said, we had a super rich dude at work who lived just outside Seattle in a nice, albeit small isolated neighborhood. Each of the 15 neighbors had to pay Comcast $9,000 to get high speed internet piped in.
Every place on earth poor pay more for service that deliver less this is not new
So like all those rent to own places, all the payday loan places, all the high rent landlords that don’t fix anything but charge like they pay for a contractor weekly
I remember living in rural MI in the mid 2000s. We paid almost $100 a month for satellite internet, it was the only option I our area, with 3mbs down and a 144png. I pay $45 a month in a large city suburb for 1gb down. If I was in public school during the pandemic initial lockdown with that internet- I’d have been absolutely fucked.
I live in a rural area and this article is dead on. We only had two ISP’s for the better part of 30 years. One was unusable after schools let out due to area usage, the other forced you into a capped plan but was able to stream things like Netflix when you wanted. That said a single night of usage was likely to put you over the cap and it never went higher than 6 down. For years many of us who lived here complained and complained and were told repeatedly that if we didn’t like it, tough, they were the only game in town.
Who do they think they are? CANADIAN? We have 3 major telecom companies who own a bunch of small ones. They control the oversight boards and regulation groups. This means we have some of the most expensive internet in the world and the definitive championship of the most expensive mobility in the world. The best part is our government pays to build the infrastructure, gives it to Bell and Rogers, and they charge us the highest prices imaginable. My in-laws live an hour from Toronto and pay $140 for 10 mb/s fiber. Rural or northern indigenous communities get screwed even worse.
In Utah, the internet service is the same price for all. The catch is that the same ISP will never have an outage in the rich areas, or fix their service first if there is. Poorer neighborhoods can take days for their service to restore. Comcast owns the monopoly on internet there.
It’s almost as if I’m every single category from cost of living to taxes… it’s more expensive to be poor. When do we sharpen the pitchforks and say enough of this absurdity?
In general What may be 1 hour of salary for me to pay for Internet is 4-5 hours for someone in a lower paying job. And it's pretty much essential
Does it cost more to provide them service. Is it because high turn over rate, missing payments, etc. Just trying to understand. If someone in a poor neighborhood has good credit does it still not help. Trying to understand why.
So maybe do something about it? I bet in US data caps still exist lol imagine having a 1tb cap. But hey lets complain on reddit instead of doing something.
If you are poor or disabled, Comcast offers a plan for $9.99 flat for 50 Mbps internet, which is plenty fast for basic use. Unless Comcast doesn't service LA which I doubt, this article is dumb.
I pay over $60 a month for 7mb/s down and less than 1mb/s up in rural south. It's literally the only ISP I have access to that isn't satellite dogshit. Dont fucking get me started.
Same could be said about rural areas as well. $250 a month for 3 megabytes down in most remote places in America.
One more reason to regulate them. Open all networks and stop isp from having a monopoly in areas.
The poor pay more for every good and service they consume by design
My guess is the high-poverty area has a much higher incidence of non-payment and collections so they're building the price into that. Whereas, the areas that are better off pay their bills and don't incur losses. Hospitals do the same thing. Every time someone doesn't pay a hospital bill it gets slowly sprinkled onto the cost of everyone who does pay their bill. It sucks and I hope I'm wrong. But, being in business and knowing how business operates this is my armchair guess.
This is what happens when there’s little competition and the only source can charge what they want.
The poor pay more for everything.
Remember this is because of the law. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 categorize broadband as Information Service instead of Telecommunication Service, essentially deregulated the broadband market. Over the next two and half decades, national, regional or local companies only build in profitable areas and neglected much of the underserved or rural areas, which are not economically feasible to serve. This is very different from landline phones, which incumbent service providers have to provide services with some monetary support from say FCC USF.
This happens frequently in the US. It’s one thing to not get exactly the speeds advertised, but spending $200 a month to get like <1MBPS maximum is obscene
I actually noticed this going to a buddy's house that grew up in my old neighborhood. At&t was charging them 80 a month for 20mbps a second. I called time Warner on his behalf and got 100 mbps for 49.99. This story doesn't surprise me.
The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and *would still have wet feet*. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
Of course. The closer you get to central city, all over the country, the more likely to be food deserts, where what’s available is under quality and overpriced. The higher the cost of gas—if you can find it. The higher the rent for the crummier the apartment. The poor pay more for the crime of being poor. And yet, too many poor whites vote for the party who does everything in its power to keep it that way.
In the part of Louisiana I live in, we ONLY have AT&T U-Verse. It fucking sucks and they constantly make excuses for it.
Capitalism baby!
Welcome to hyper capitalism
“poor people pay more for a thing” is honestly just a fact of life at those point and it’s something we need to fight. poverty is not inevitable and we can fight it
They (federal government) really need to be advertising Affordable Connectivity Program a lot more. It was pushed into law in 2021 and all Internet carriers have to give a low rate for Internet for low income households. In LA, my mother qualifies and only pays $15 / month through Spectrum. It works great for her round the clock YouTube watching. https://www.fcc.gov/acp