Money talks or AT&T broadband walks, CPUC study shows

25 July 2019 by Steve Blum
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Haas att broadband study

How much money you and your neighbors make determines whether or not you have access to modern broadband service and infrastructure. The network practices study released on Monday by the California Public Utilities Commission cites conclusive evidence of aggressive redlining by AT&T. It is a major – and actionable – report that makes the case against the two companies, but its conclusions come as no surprise.

A study done in 2017 by U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society found that…

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.

On the other hand, the median household income of homes served only by AT&T’s 1990s legacy DSL technology is $53,186, according to the Haas Institute. The CPUC study found the same divide between haves and have nots…

Whether deliberate or not, AT&T’s investment policies have tended to favor higher-income communities, and have thus had a disproportionate impact upon the state’s lowest income areas. For example, the weighted average 2010 median annual household income for wire center serving areas that had been upgraded with fiber optic feeder facilities to support broadband services was $72,024, vs. only $60,795 for wire centers without such upgrades Using 2010 US Census data, we find a clear inverse relationship between household income and all of the principal service quality metrics.

The report leaves it up to the reader to decide if AT&T’s income-based redlining is deliberate, but makes it clear that AT&T’s financial strategy is aimed at extracting the maximum dollars possible from communities trapped in legacy monopoly systems…

Persistent disinvestment, extensive affiliate transactions at self-serving transfer prices, extraordinarily large rate increases, and deteriorating service quality all point to “harvesting” as AT&T California’s overarching strategy for its legacy services and customers…The potential gains that AT&T California can realize by raising prices and curtailing investment and maintenance expenditures far exceed any financial penalties it might suffer from persistently poor service quality.

AT&T is not alone. I found a similar pattern in Charter Communications’ investment choices. Until the CPUC forced it to do otherwise, it held low income communities captive in analog-only systems that offered limited television service at exorbitant prices.