10 Jun 2019
Cleveland • CYC Blog • Digital divide -- Cleveland

East Cleveland Cable taken over by small provider… from Nebraska

East Cleveland Cable TV, the only cable broadband and TV provider for most of East Cleveland’s 8,000 households, has been taken over — not by Charter Spectrum or another Big Cable company, but by a new, independent LLC headquartered in rural Nebraska.

The new owner is called Windspeed Broadband (not to be confused with Windstream.) The ECC TV website has been redesigned with the Windspeed brand.

This transaction took place very quietly over the last few months. As far as we can tell, this is the first public “story” about it, other than the unexplained name change on the ECC TV website. Read more

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18 Apr 2019
CYC Blog • Digital divide -- Cleveland • Digital divide -- Detroit

Will AT&T’s discount rates for poor households end in 12 months?

“Access from AT&T”, AT&T’s $5-to-$10 Internet service for households enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), will no longer be required by Federal Communications Commission order and may well come to an end in April 2020.

Ironically, this may happen just as AT&T’s surprise deployment of fiber infrastructure in low income Cleveland and East Cleveland neighborhoods  could make Access service much more valuable to eligible households in those neighborhoods. Read more

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18 Apr 2019
CYC Blog • Digital divide -- Cleveland • Uncategorized

AT&T mum on fiber in redlined areas, including East Cleveland

Three weeks after it was revealed by CYC in this blog post, AT&T’s big new fiber broadband deployment in the “digitally redlined” neighborhoods covering most of the northeast and near West Side of Cleveland has yet to be publicly acknowledged by the company, or covered (as far as we know) by any news media.

Yes, folks, it’s still a CYC scoop!.. despite the fact that we confirmed it with knowledgeable sources immediately, and the additional fact that all that new fiber on AT&T’s poles in Glenville, Fairfax, Hough and Clark-Fulton is visible to the naked eye of anyone who chooses to look.

Meanwhile, CYC has confirmed (by driving around and looking) that AT&T’s new fiber build includes areas of the city of East Cleveland.  Cleveland’s smaller neighbor has been even more digitally redlined than Cleveland; AT&T service in most of East Cleveland is limited to slow ADSL2 technology, while high speed cable modem Internet is close to nonexistent. Spectrum offers service only in some fringe neighborhoods, and “high speed Internet” from East Cleveland Cable TV — whose future is in question — tops out at a nominal 25 Mbps.

We hear that AT&T is planning to break its silence around the last week of April. Stay tuned.

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