Missed Connections
The Broadband Divide Between DC’s Ward Lines
Local governments often tout internet broadband initiatives as a means of economic development, or attracting businesses and creating jobs. But do low-income communities benefit? Internet service providers are notorious for denying high speed broadband to rural and low income areas.
In Washington, D.C. — the second-most gentrified city in the United States — it is not a coincidence that broadband adoption rates are lower in the lower income wards.
D.C. has one of the highest broadband connectivity rates in the country, with 99 percent of residents connected to 100 megabytes per second (mbps)or higher. Most of the city, then, is well-connected. But for the remaining one percent, many — in fact 6,000 — are without access to a wired connection capable of at least 25 mbps download speeds. Another 3,000 don’t have any wired internet providers available where they live. Most of those residents are in Wards 5, 7, and 8, where the median income rates are lowest.
Internet service is no longer a luxury. It’s now a necessity — especially for people striving for upward mobility. 90 percent of people in the U.S. who have looked for a job in the last 2 years looked online. 97 percent of students are required to use the internet to complete homework assignments.
The digital divide is a detrimental barrier to economic equality that is growing both online and between geographical lines. A survey of the city’s efforts so far reveals shortcomings. Some programs put their emphasis on serving tourists, not residents, and there’s little appetite for addressing inequities of physical infrastructure for broadband. But there are also successes that point the way towards a District where the digital divide is, if not closed, greatly diminished.
DC Targets “Anchor Institutions” for Internet
In an effort to “Bridge the Digital Divide” in 2010, the government of the District of Columbia received more than $17 million in federal grants from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) Broadband Technology Opportunities Program (BTOP) to build DC Community Access Network (DC-CAN) in an effort to offer broadband services to the city’s “neediest areas.”
The Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO) took the lead on distributing grant funds to different initiatives. They indicated they would attempt to bridge the digital divide by both increasing the number of hot spots throughout the city, and bringing WiFi to “anchor institutions” (public access areas such as charter schools, libraries, police stations, and health clinics).
OCTO also stated in its last Annual Progress Report that it had initiated four agreements with local internet providers to provide broadband internet to low-income homes. But OCTO has focused its services more to serve the 20 million tourists that visit DC every year, and less in areas where residents need it. Since 2010, DC-Net (the city government’s network) has publicized how its deployment of hotspots in “outside areas” has enhanced the public’s experience at events including Presidential Inaugurations, the Marine Corps Marathon, the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, the US Science and Technology Festival, and many more.
How to Fight Redlining ISPs
As last mile networks (networks that have the resources to deliver the “last mile” of telecommunications infrastructure directly to the home or business), internet service providers (ISPs) have the sole ability to offer broadband internet directly to private homes.
However, ISPs have demonstrated a tendency to redline areas out of high speed internet. In 2016, NDIA released a groundbreaking report showing that AT&T redlined Cleveland’s low-income neighborhoods out of its fiber improvement plan, leaving its residents with extremely slow or no access to internet. In 2008, Verizon’s offer to roll out a much faster fiber optic network plan in Washington, D.C. was initially rejected by a local councilwoman (Mary Cheh of Ward 3) because Verizon was not going to serve parts of the city it did not calculate were worth the investment.
Fiber to the home, or FTTH, is the gold standard of residential internet connections. FTTH is the installation and use of optical fiber from a central point directly to individual buildings. Fiber optic networks offer superior internet speeds compared to DSL and cable, but they require a labor intensive deployment process by internet providers; the cost of laying fiber as high as $80,000 per mile. In densely populated cities, it costs ISPs an average of $34,000 to connect just one anchor institution to fiber optic internet speeds. This is why internet providers are particular about the areas they choose to build fiber optic networks in.
A counterbalance to digital redlining would be government spending. According to Jameson Zimmerman from BroadbandNow (a broadband research website), “There’s well over $1 billion doled out every year to ISPs to incentivize them to serve rural areas and economically depressed areas — and update their services overall.” However, “in practice, the big providers exploit this and there’s no evidence they spend the (grant) money as directed.”
The District of Columbia government received a $17.5 million grant in 2010 (through OCTO) by the NTIA to bridge the digital divide through infrastructure projects. The District also received another $4 million in federal grants for a Broadband Initiative. The last annual performance report on the progress of the broadband infrastructure projects is from 2013. The report indicates that DC-CAN (a city-wide project run by OCTO to educate residents on internet services and to help connect anchor institutions to internet) had spent about $8 million of the grant installing a network of fiber lines. However, DC-CAN is a middle-mile network and therefore cannot deliver direct service to residents and businesses; only service providers like AT&T and Comcast have the ability to provide broadband services directly to homes. But, as Zimmerman noted, local government can incentivize ISPs to expand their services through grants.
The 2013 annual report also stated that OCTO executed four agreements with local high speed internet service providers “to provide last mile services to individuals and corporations.” OCTO’s website states “interested last mile service providers can partner with the District government to bring affordable broadband to residents and businesses in the city.” Yet neither the project abstract nor the application mentions anything about an explicit effort to improve access to high-speed internet in the homes of economically distressed areas with internet.
The last performance progress report on the Broadband Initiative grant that OCTO submitted to NTIA in 2014 shows that the majority of funds were spent on data collection and technical assistance to public institutions. Subcontracts exist with technical assistance agencies, and even with the DC Public Library, but there were no contracts (mentioned in the report) with internet service providers.
However, according to a direct quote from OCTO, they have agreements with Verizon, Comcast, and RCN which allows OCTO to “overlash aerial fiber or pull fiber through underground carrier conduit.” The question is, is OCTO following through — and who benefits from these agreements?
A Matter of Outreach, or Infrastructure?
OCTO believes firmly that broadband is an issue of adoption and not of access. In fact, $500,000 of OCTO’s grant money has gone to “outreach and education” to promote the adoption of broadband.
ConnectDC is a local initiative that was launched in 2011 by OCTO that focuses on two issues related to internet access in D.C: education and adoption. ConnectDC, which has been locally funded since 2015, educates people on available web resources and how to use them.
In Wards 5, 7, and 8, the broadband adoption rate is less than 65 percent, compared to 85 percent in the other five wards. Delano Squires, the director of ConnectDC, believes internet adoption in D.C. is more an issue of education than access. According to Pew research, the two biggest contributors to low internet subscription rates in the U.S. are price and digital readiness. “After seven years in this role, I believe that even if the district did provide free broadband to every home, there would still be a lot of people who don’t take advantage of it,” Squires stated.
ByteBack, an organization that works with OCTO to educate residents in economically distressed areas on how to use the internet, suggests that strengthening digital literacy is a more cumbersome hurdle in areas with poor broadband — that this is not an either-or, but intersecting and compounding hurdles to effective Internet use. As of 2018, only 57 percent of Byte Back’s students have home internet access. According to Yvette Scorse, the communications director at Byte Back, the organization was formed in 1997 give people economic opportunity by providing them with tech skills that lead to living-wage careers. As their audience has moved with gentrification towards the suburbs, Byte Back has expanded to Maryland. “The communities we serve are being pushed further out of the District,” said Scorse.
Byte Back offers free classes to its D.C. residents, teaches different levels of computer skills, and offers career services training in all of their classrooms. Classes involve anything from learning how to send an email to advanced IT . Byte Back is doing everything in their power to level the playing field for those who want to participate in the digital economy, but the real disadvantage for students exists in the broadband disparities between ward lines. Even equipped with skills, many Byte Back students don’t have access to the same physical Internet connection that the rest of the city enjoys. 72 percent of Byte Back’s classes were taught in Wards 5, 7, 8, where more than three-fifths of Byte Back students live.
“There is definitely inequity in the physical infrastructure of D.C.,” Scorse exclaimed. A report by the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute suggests that the revitalization of some city neighborhoods by wealthy newcomers is causing pockets of poverty to grow larger, especially east of the Anacostia River, in wards 7 and 8. The larger these pockets grow, the more likely it is that ISPs will redline them out of their fiber optic deployment plan, and cheaper broadband in general.
“Students get really amazed when they learn how to copy and paste,” Scorse shared. They have good reason: According to Byte Back’s Annual report, graduates are earning $24,331 more a year than what they were making before they enrolled. Access to high speed internet and the tools necessary to use it not only affects people’s ability to obtain jobs, but the confidence needed to perform in those roles after they are obtained.
Byte Back’s students face immense hurdles.74 percent of students are unemployed, and 29 percent are homeless. “Students face a lot of life barriers,” Scorse noted; “Some students have disabilities, others are single parents and do not have a job that can support their family, for example.” Scorse said it is sometimes difficult for students to come to class when they are juggling a minimum wage job and supporting a family. 98 percent of Byte Back students are of color. While OCTO and other organizations may believe that the digital divide is more an issue of adoption than equal access, there is a depth of complex issues that exist underneath the surface of low adoption rates.
Only Connect
DC-CAN and ConnectDC can only provide high speed internet directly to public institutions, and can only do so through setting up hot spots on existing infrastructure, not by building new fiber optic infrastructure. Whatever the benefits of these programs, the availability of free access at libraries or schools cannot make up for the opportunity lost when the internet is not accessible at home, for schoolwork, job applications, registering to vote, or personal finance.
Despite DC-CAN’s initiative which stated it had initiated 4 agreements with internet service providers, ConnectDC’s Squires had heard of only one program that works in collaboration with local internet service providers. That is a nationwide effort funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development; it has zero connection to DC-NET or NTIA. “I have not seen anything in D.C as comprehensive as the Internet Essentials program,” Squires noted. Internet Essentials is a program created by Comcast that offers home internet for $9.95 per month to families living in public housing. Comcast created Internet Essentials in collaboration with ConnectHomeUSA, a nationwide program launched during the Obama Administration that aimed to bridge the digital divide for residents living in public housing. (The Internet Essentials package offers up to 15mbps/second, as opposed to 25mbps, so it is not broadband by definition.) Squires said that ConnectDC helps educate eligible residents in public housing on Internet Essentials as another way of accessing the internet, because many residents are unaware of this tool.
Without a program in D.C. that can offer residents the access that Internet Essentials does, computer literacy is just the tip of the iceberg for the majority of Byte Back students. The real disparity for DC residents of low-income areas is not within the calculatable space of a computer skills classroom, but in maneuvering the inequalities of a digital landscape where knowledge of how to use the internet does not guarantee access to the knowledge that it provides. For those with little or no digital literacy, the inequalities of broadband internet access are almost impossible to visualize.
The internet doesn’t just provide a tool to find jobs; it provides access to professional social circles and information that can open doors for job seekers before they even begin the application process. If entire areas are not provided with fiber, professionals looking to move are not going to settle in areas that do not provide the high speed internet they need to do their job, and people who live there will lack an essential tool to 21st century success.
Gentrification, displacement and redlining are no longer solely physical demarcations of a city but are a part of our digital landscape, compounding the results of deep-rooted segregation, racism, and the policies that remove the voices, agency, and equal access to knowledge from the oppressed. If there is no program that exists within D.C. that can compete with Internet Essentials, and the agreements between OCTO and ISPS are serving only public institutions, it still raises the question: who benefits the most from government broadband initiatives?
This story was updated on Tuesday, March 12 to reflect clarifications from Byte Back on their origin and the nature of their training.
