[ad_1]
Within months of the start of the school year, the only thing many families have learned is how much they rely on a working internet connection to access remote classrooms. So, education equality experts who are trying to reduce the many challenges families face during the pandemic are starting out by simply trying to identify students who are not online to make sure those households have access to affordable packages.
But even though most Internet service providers, or ISPs, offer affordable plans, they refuse to say how many customers they have signed up for the programs. This is forcing some city officials and internet equality groups to take charge of data collection.
In Philadelphia, city officials struggled to get data from Comcast, one of the country’s largest ISPs and owner of NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News. The municipal authorities therefore contacted the families directly to find out if they had Internet service. Philadelphia said as of Oct. 21, after a media campaign, polls and prospecting, it had been able to put more than 11,000 families online since March. In Nashville, Tennessee, a group is starting their own census of the digital divide because they don’t rely on ISPs like Comcast and AT&T to help them.
“I don’t think we should be relying on companies to provide proprietary data,” said Fallon Wilson, co-founder of the National Black Tech Ecosystem Association. “They are not going to do this.”
It doesn’t look like ISPs are providing this information anytime soon. Five of the country’s largest ISPs, including Charter (also known as Spectrum), AT&T, Verizon and Lumen (formerly CenturyLink), in addition to Comcast, have all declined to provide information on the number of low-income customers who had enrolled in their programs. They all said the information was proprietary.
But it quickly becomes clear that providing information works. Cox, an ISP that serves Las Vegas, Phoenix, Atlanta and other cities, is providing the information, and school officials have already seen more students getting coverage.
As the number of coronavirus cases rises and more children switch to distance learning, educators and elected officials are feeling a greater urgency to access information.
“This is important at the moment,” said Angela Siefer, executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, who expressed frustration that ISPs will only tell the number of people they have helped during the course. years since they started offering affordable internet instead of coronavirus. pandemic. “It doesn’t matter for the duration of the program.”
Limited data
Many big ISPs, including Comcast and Charter, started offering affordable programs because the government told them to. The Federal Communications Commission has required ISPs to provide such services to low-income households as a condition of business mergers. However, while they disclose the numbers privately to the FCC, they then redact the numbers for the public. A spokesperson said the FCC still considers the data to be proprietary.
Comcast said it provides services to more low-income families than all of its competitors combined – more than 8 million through its Internet Essentials program over the past decade. But he did not provide details on how many people he actually signed up for during the pandemic.
“We are not reporting active subscribers but rather lifetime connections,” Charlie Douglas, vice president of Comcast, said via email, saying such a measure is an “industry standard” in companies from telecommunications.
Long-standing fights
It’s a battle public interest groups were fighting long before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, said Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, an advocacy group that works on broadband issues. He said it was time for federal and state government agencies to step in.
“The FCC and states should require broadband companies to submit basic data on these matters and it should be made public,” he said via email. “Public interest groups have argued for this for years, but vendors often claim that this is all proprietary data that they cannot tell their rivals.”
But educators and advocacy groups have started pushing for the data, especially as some districts that had reopened for in-person learning are closing again.
In California, advocacy groups including United Ways of California and other education-focused organizations sent a formal letter to the state’s Closing the Digital Divide Task Force to get better data from large companies that serve the state, including Comcast and Spectrum. About a third of all students in the state do not have access to an Internet connection or digital device, according to data tracked by California’s Public Policy Institute.
“Although the state publishes broadband reports, they are not specific enough to those who are not connected and / or under-connected; and, just like ISP reports, they focus on access and adoption rates, but there just isn’t enough comprehensive data. on the obstacles facing existing and potential subscribers, ”the letter said.
Take charge
In Philadelphia, where Comcast is headquartered, local leaders have repeatedly asked it in meetings to disclose Internet Essentials usage levels and have sent out letters and emails. But the company said the figures were confidential and proprietary.
Without the information from Comcast or the other major ISPs that serve Philadelphia, the city had to do its own research, said Mark Wheeler, the city’s chief information officer. This is the only way to determine where to direct municipal efforts, a process that is slower and more complex without the numbers.
“We would love that kind of data. It would be extremely helpful for us in terms of knowing who is and who is not a subscriber,” Wheeler said. “Where do we do our outreach? We don’t have unlimited sums.”
In the meantime, Wheeler said, the city is trying to directly reach families who can benefit from the Internet Essentials program in Comcast’s hometown as part of the city’s new PHLConnectED program, which streamlines the registration process for families in the city. the need.
As part of this program, the city succeeded in registering nearly 8,000 households. But the city still doesn’t know who else Comcast has already signed up for Internet Essentials.
“Since the city is the sponsor (in terms of Comcast) of the service contract, we are only getting exact numbers on the number of subscribers in this service contract for PHLConnetED,” Wheeler said in an email. “We’re not getting the number of Internet Essentials subscribers that exist across the entire city limit.”
Wilson, from the National Black Tech Ecosystem Association, is working on creating a census of the digital divide in Nashville because she wasn’t convinced ISPs would share this information with her in the first place. Comcast and AT&T are the big suppliers, and they won’t disclose such numbers. While Google Fiber also serves Nashville, it doesn’t offer any low-cost options. But he provided a $ 50,000 grant to the Nashville Public Education Foundation. Wilson therefore hopes to eventually create a “digital inclusion commission” – a municipal body responsible for monitoring information.
Digital feedback
When ISPs provide the data, education advocates are able to identify those in need of Internet service much faster. Cox, which is a major supplier in cities like Las Vegas and Phoenix, serves 140,000 low-income families as part of its Connect2Compete plan, spokeswoman Shana Keith said. More than a tenth of Cox’s low-income nationwide connections are in Clark County, Nevada, where Las Vegas is located.
Cox’s disclosures, combined with the state’s efforts to release information, have offered much better results. Nevada even maintained an online dashboard where anyone can see how a given district is performing in terms of connectivity and get clear instructions if the remaining families need technical assistance. The results were astounding: Melinda Malone, a spokesperson for the Clark County School District, said 18,355 families were connected, “most of which are through Cox Connect2Compete.”
This means that in the Clark County School District, fewer than 1,000 of the more than 315,000 students remain disconnected, and the relationship between the ISP and the school district has been much stronger.
“Cox has been a great district partner,” said Malone. “Cox helped us resolve any issues we encountered.”
[ad_2]
Source link