AT&T fiber redlines low income communities, U.C. Berkeley study finds

21 June 2017 by Steve Blum
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Where high income households are thick on the ground, AT&T builds out fiber to the home systems, but does minimal upgrades for middle income areas and leaves low income communities with 1990s-style legacy DSL or nothing at all. That’s the top line conclusion from a study done by U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society

  • The median household income of California communities with access to AT&T’s fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network is $94,208. This exceeds by $32,297 the $61,911 median household income for all California households in the AT&T wireline footprint.
  • In contrast, the median household income of California communities for whom the most advanced broadband technology available from AT&T is its slower U-verse fiber-to-the-neighborhood (FTTN) network is $67,021, which is $27,187 (28.9 percent) lower than the median household income of fiber-to-the-home households.
  • Approximately one-quarter (27.6 percent) of households — about 2.7 million households —in AT&T’s California footprint are stuck with slow DSL. The median household income for California households for whom DSL is the most advanced broadband technology available from AT&T is $53,186, which is $41,022 (43.5 percent) lower than the median household income of fiber-to-the-home households.

There’s also a distinct urban/rural divide in AT&T’s broadband infrastructure deployment strategy. While metropolitan areas get fiber and VDSL upgrades, rural areas are ignored. According to the study, almost no homes in 14 rural counties have access to AT&T broadband at the FCC’s minimum standards of 25 Mbps download/3 Mbps upload speeds and one-third lack access at the CPUC’s minimum of 6 Mbps down/1.5 Mbps up. In its overall service territory in California, 252,000 homes do not have access to AT&T broadband service at all.

In many respects, the report’s findings are no surprise. AT&T has been very clear that fiber infrastructure would only be going into high potential areas and that it plans to rip out copper networks in rural California and replace them with wireless service.

The study recommends that policymakers, and the California legislature in particular, should demand greater accountability from AT&T and promote more equitable high speed broadband deployment. Unfortunately, the California assembly has not taken the study’s findings or recommendations to heart. It just voted to lower California’s minimum broadband speeds, specifically to accommodate the substandard technology that AT&T maintains in rural and lower income communities.