Comcast is doubling download speeds and increasing upload speeds for the $ 10 per month Internet Essentials plan it sells to low-income subscribers.
Comcast faced criticism for keeping the plan’s speeds at 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up during the pandemic, although even those speeds have increased from the 15 Mbps / 2 Mbps offered through March 2020. In today’s announcement, Comcast said it is “doubling the program download speed on the Internet to 50 Mbps and increasing the upstream speed to 5 Mbps for all new and existing customers at no additional cost.”
The speed update “will be released nationally starting March 1,” said Comcast.
Low-income users still face Comcast’s 1.2 TB data limit, which adds $ 10 to a monthly bill for each additional 50 GB block. But surplus data limit charges are limited to $ 30 per month for Internet Essentials subscribers, while extra charges can reach $ 100 for other customers.
Information on how to qualify for Internet Essentials is available here.
Students complained about low speeds
Although former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Ajit Pai, still insists that 25 Mbps / 3 Mbps speeds are good enough for home Internet users in the United States, at least some Comcast Internet Essentials customers disagree.
“While remote learning dragged on until 2020, the coronavirus pandemic pitted Comcast against an unlikely adversary: a group of teenagers,” wrote BuzzFeed last week. “Since last spring, Baltimore-based student activists have been campaigning for faster Internet speeds and arguing that the telecommunications giant’s Wi-Fi offering to low-income families, Internet Essentials, is not always fast enough for successful distance learning. “
In a family with multiple children doing remote learning, the upload speed of 3 Mbps can be an issue. Kimberly Vasquez, a high school veteran, “said it is normal for her to refresh the page several times before she even joined Zoom,” according to BuzzFeed. “Once she is in, she is often driven out because of the low speed.” The student told BuzzFeed that “I needed to talk to my teachers about my situation with Wi-Fi and make sure that I would not be penalized for that”.
Councilors in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Detroit also asked Comcast to speed up the low-income plan last summer, the Baltimore Business Journal reported at the time.
More pressure came from former Comcast sales agent Chase Roper, who tweeted on January 11 he “just stopped working for Xfinity / Comcast” and wants families to know that Internet Essentials does not offer “adequate speed for children to do their online class work ‘Zoom’ live”. He followed up with a blog post in which he asked: “How can students learn equally in this situation, when some families can pay for multiple 1,000 Mbps bills on the Internet at an address for each of their students, while others cannot pay until even the minimum upload speed that really works well with the provider available to them? Why remove all data limits and excessive charges at the start of the pandemic, but when the next remote school year begins, continue with the data limit policy and extra charge? “
Comcast defends low-income program
Comcast started Internet Essentials about 10 years ago to secure government approval for its acquisition of NBCUniversal, and continued the program after the merger condition expired in 2014. Comcast defended its treatment of the program in its update announcement. speed today, calling Internet Essentials “the largest and most comprehensive low-cost Internet adoption program for low-income Americans.”
The new speed increase “is the sixth time in 10 years that Comcast has increased broadband speed for Internet Essentials customers while keeping the cost of the service at $ 9.95 a month,” said the company. Since the start of the pandemic, Comcast has offered two months free to new Internet Essentials customers and has said it will keep this business open until June 30, 2021.
Comcast was praised by consumer advocates at the start of the pandemic, when it first offered the two months free and increased Internet Essentials speeds to 25 Mbps / 3 Mbps. But Comcast sparked controversy again this month, expanding its data limit to all parts of its territory that were not previously covered. Comcast later agreed to defer application of the data limit in newly limited areas until August 2021, after pressure from lawmakers, including a group of Massachusetts lawmakers who are trying to ban the data limit for the rest of the pandemic.