Update: After 56,000 signed the petition, Comcast upgraded speed and added seniors to the digital inclusion program. We won!
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“Comcast Increases Internet Speeds for No Additional Cost for Majority of Customers” blares the headline at corporate.comcast.com
A cause for celebration, right?
Not necessarily.
The free 50 megabits of speed – an increase of as much as 300% for many Xfinity and Triple Play broadband subscribers in 14 states – aren’t for everybody.
If you’re a subscriber to Internet Essentials – the low-speed, low-cost service Comcast designed for poor families when it bought NBC-Universal – and which it used as a prime selling point in its failed attempt to buy Time Warner Cable – there’s no upgrade for you.
You’re stuck with a measly 5 megabits per second – just one fifth of the basement definition of broadband according to the Federal Communications Commission. 5mbps is less than 4% of the new speed of Comcast’s Blast! service.
Recent reports show that one in four people in America are offline at home – almost exclusively rural residents, low income communities, people of color, and seniors.
If Comcast can provide 50mbps increases in speed for free – why can’t it upgrade low-income consumers struggling to stay online by a lousy 5 megabits per second – just ten percent of the free upgrade for their most affluent customers?
Comcast created Internet Essentials as a sweetener for their big mergers. The service has been criticized by the youth and families that use it as too slow and too hard to access with an onerous sign-up process. The California Public Utilties Commission mandated huge changes to the Internet Essentials program in their recommended conditions to compensate destructive impact of the merger with Time Warner Cable – and every one of those changes was objected to by Comcast.
The company has also backed off earlier statements that it would abide by net neutrality regulations passed by the FCC – and is now a full participant in industry efforts to overturn net neutrality rules in court and in the federal budget process.
Comcast wants a lot of things from policy makers. Merger after merger, no competition, automatic franchise renewals, data caps and high-cost service tiers. But they don’t seem to want to give very much.
That’s got to change.
Click here now to tell Comcast: Free increases in speed for low income consumers too!