Is 4%-5% of your entire income a reasonable price to pay for home Internet access?
That’s the “broadband issue” for two out of every five Cleveland households who survive on annual incomes below $20,000.
As we detailed in our last post, AT&T is now billing its home customers about $65 a month for wireline broadband access at any download speed from 6 Mbps up to 100 Mbps. That adds up to $780 a year… the same price charged by Charter Spectrum for its 100 Mbps service, the cheapest it offers.
So the monthly cost of standalone Internet service from one of the city’s two home wireline providers is either:
- $55 a month for a very slow connection from AT&T (download speed between 768 Kbps and 5 Mbps), or
- $65 a month for any faster connection — from 6 Mbps up to 100 Mbps — from either AT&T or Charter Spectrum.
Are there cheaper wireless alternatives? Nope. Satellite Internet is more expensive, not less, and has serious data limits. Using a mobile data connection to provide home wifi, if you use 20 Gb or more of data per month (and you will!), costs as much or more.
40% of all Cleveland households had incomes below $20,000 in 2016. 31% had incomes below $15,000.
Paying $780 a year for broadband would take at least 4%-5% of those households’ total incomes.
That’s on top of all the traditional necessities — gas, electric, voice telephone, etc.
Helps explain why we’re one of the nation’s worst connected cities, doesn’t it? And why the map of home broadband access in Cleveland looks like this?
Let’s say you live on the East Side of Cleveland and because of 
