On November 20, the Federal Communications Commission approved an order outlining its final rules for identifying, correcting and preventing “Digital Discrimination” by Internet service providers against certain consumers in their service areas, as required by Section 60506 of the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The rules took effect on March 22.

The new rules include a definition of “digital discrimination of access,” as that term is used in Section 60506, encompassing both “disparate treatment” and “disparate impact” standards.  Under the statute, Internet providers may not discriminate in the broadband access they offer on the basis of “income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin.”  The FCC’s “disparate impact” standard means that digital discrimination can be shown to occur when a provider objectively fails to offer lower-income neighborhoods (or Black, Latino or Muslim neighborhoods) the same service options as others, even where there’s no direct evidence of the provider’s subjective intent to deny equal service for economic (or racial, ethnic or religious) reasons.

A few days before its Digital Discrimination order, the Commission released a third, improved version of its much-publicized Broadband Map, along with detailed data files from the Broadband Data Collection (BDC) on which the map is based. The data in those files, submitted by the providers themselves, is supposed to be current as of June 30, 2023.

BDC data provides a straightforward, authoritative source for comparing the broadband technologies and speeds currently offered by each provider to specific “broadband serviceable locations” (BSLs) in its service area.  Along with Internet provider and service details for each location, BDC data files include a standard 15-digit U.S. Census geoidentification number (“FIPS code”) which specifies that location’s Census tract, block group and block.  The Census generally provides demographic statistics, such as household income, race and ethnicity, for block groups (which average a few hundred households) and tracts (which average a few thousand).  The BDC  allows us to break out a provider’s stated technology and speed offerings for each of a group of Census tracts or block groups — for example, for each of the tracts in a county — and associate them with the respective economic, racial or ethnic characteristics of those tracts or block groups.

So if, for example,  a provider’s current deployment creates a pattern of slower data speeds or less reliable technology available to service locations in low-income areas compared to those in better-off areas,  BDC data combined with Census data should make that pattern readily identifiable to anyone with basic spreadsheet and mapping tools.

1. CYC’s earlier analyses: Digital redlining

Since 2017, Connect Your Community has repeatedly documented AT&T’s failure to upgrade the home wireline Internet service it offers to thousands of homes in certain lower-income Cleveland neighborhoods, especially (but not only) in the historically Black northeast side of the city.

Fiber to the node / VDSL. CYC’s March 2017 analysis, AT&T’s digital redlining of Cleveland, which we co-published with the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, showed this pattern  of inequitable service in the deployment of AT&T’s “fiber to the node” (FTTN) upgrade, which took place between 2007 and 2013.  This upgrade involved the extension of fiber optic lines from most of AT&T’s urban and suburban central offices to neighborhood Video Ready Access Device (VRAD) cabinets, where “very-high-bit-rate digital subscriber line” (VDSL) switches converted optical to electronic data and sent it on to nearby customers via copper wires.  The new FTTN/VDSL system, which AT&T branded “U-Verse”, enabled the company to offer Internet and cable video services at download speeds between 25 and 100 Mbps — much faster than the all-copper “asymmetric digital subscriber line” (ADSL) technology it replaced.  

However, as our analysis of FCC data revealed, AT&T chose to exclude four Cleveland central offices and their service areas from its FTTN/VDSL upgrade — three COs serving the city’s entire northeast, and one serving the near West Side.  The excluded neighborhoods have some of the highest poverty rates and lowest average household incomes in Cleveland, and include many of the city’s historically Black communities.  As a consequence of AT&T’s failure to upgrade, their residents were stuck with second-class AT&T Internet access — obsolete ADSL connections with maximum download speeds as slow as 768 Kbps, and seldom faster than 10 Mbps.

We concluded: “The maps… show a clear and troubling pattern: A pattern of long-term, systematic failure to invest in the infrastructure required to provide equitable, mainstream Internet access to residents of the central city (compared to the suburbs) and to lower-income city neighborhoods. When lending institutions have engaged in similar policies and practices, our communities haven’t hesitated to call it ‘redlining’. We see no reason to hesitate to call it ‘digital redlining’ in this case.”

Fiber to the premises. Since 2016 AT&T has carried out a second major system upgrade in the Cleveland area, deploying home fiber optic service (“fiber to the premises” or FTTP).  The first wave of AT&T’s fiber upgrade was completed in 2019 before the onset of COVID; new deployments paused in 2020, but then resumed at a slower pace and continue today. 

CYC has kept track of AT&T’s fiber expansion and its persistent avoidance of certain neighborhoods; see….

• AT&T gigabit fiber: Digital redlining again? (December 2018)
• FCC map: Cleveland blocks where AT&T speeds are still awful (and too slow for the COVID crisis!) (April 2020)
• New FCC data: Where AT&T still doesn’t offer 25 Mbps broadband in Cuyahoga County (November 2021)

To AT&T’s credit, in both the first wave and subsequent stages of its fiber upgrade, the company did invest in some areas of Cleveland that were excluded from its FTTN deployment a decade earlier. Here’s a map showing the Cleveland Census blocks whose fastest advertised technologies according to FCC data changed from ADSL in June 2016 to fiber in December 2020, and those which didn’t.  (Note that a Census block “with fiber access”, in the 2020 FCC data on which this map is based, might include ten or twenty homes of which only one or two actually have fiber service available. See next section on the limitations of Form 477 data.)

It’s reasonable to assume that that some additional “DSL-only” locations in Cleveland have seen AT&T fiber upgrades since 2020. Unfortunately, direct comparison of 2016 with post-2020 data isn’t possible due to the Census Bureau’s revisions of many block definitions and numbers for the 2020 Census.  Lacking evidence to the contrary, it’s also reasonable to assume they’re mostly in or near the areas already upgraded.

But we can see where AT&T added significantly to its fiber-served locations throughout the county between December 2022 and June 2023, using Broadband Data Collection files for those two dates. Almost all these locations were in the suburbs, not Cleveland.

Not yet included in the FCC data are at least three hundred homes in a small, previously redlined area of Glenville where AT&T added fiber access last Summer, as part of a community partnership with the Ashbury Senior Computer Community Center. Maybe there are other such efforts in the works. We certainly hope so.

But with all that said, the new data presented below show that the pattern of disparate AT&T broadband access documented by CYC and NDIA in 2016 — excluding a limited group of mostly lower-income, mostly East Side neighborhoods from the company’s mainstream broadband service — is still evident eight years later.

2. Improvements in FCC broadband deployment data

Until now, all of our analysis of AT&T’s disparate technology and speed upgrades has been based on  data the FCC collected from providers through Form 477,  its old broadband access mapping system.

Form 477 asked providers to report each technology available to serve at least one address in each Census block, and the fastest download and upload speeds offered via that technology to any address in the block.

Since an urban Census block may include dozens or even hundreds of residential addresses, this “best in the block” system often exaggerated the availability of upgraded technology and faster speeds.  It also limited the data’s usefulness for testing possible associations between broadband deployment and neighborhood demographics such as income or race.

Fortunately, the FCC’s new Broadband Data Collection system, which replaced the Form 477 system in 2023, eliminates both of these problems.

Rather than “best in the block” speed data for each of a provider’s technologies — which amounts to a single, often unrepresentative data point — the BDC includes separate technology and speed information for each and every “serviceable location”. 

In most cases this means all residential and business addresses, though residents of some multi-unit buildings may be lumped together, and some extra locations, such as random outbuildings, may get thrown in. It’s not perfect but it’s far more granular than the old system.  

In addition, the inclusion in BDC data of a 15-digit FIPS code for each location means the broadband data for those locations can easily be aggregated and analyzed at appropriate Census-geographic levels (tracts, block groups) that allow correlations with demographic data available at the same levels…. for example, the most current American Community Survey data on household incomes or population race composition.

3. AT&T’s current wireline broadband services in Cuyahoga County

Over the past three months, CYC has used data from the recent BDC release, along with the Census Bureau’s most recent American Community Survey data, to look at AT&T’s current broadband deployment throughout Cuyahoga County and the city of Cleveland in the light of Section 60506 and the FCC’s new rules to implement it.

Here’s a detailed explanation of our approach to using the Broadband Data Collection AT&T data files for the county and the city, including an explanation of AT&T’s technology and speed categories, and the total counts of serviceable locations that we found AT&T reporting for those categories.

Chart 1 summarizes those location counts.

As the chart shows, there’s a significant difference between Cleveland and the rest of Cuyahoga County in the percentages of locations affected by AT&T’s recent system upgrade to home fiber optic service. The data shows only 48% of Cleveland locations with access to AT&T fiber service, vs. 57% of locations in the rest of the county.  More strikingly, 34% of Cleveland locations have been skipped by both of AT&T’s big upgrades over the past sixteen years — and still only have access to 2005-vintage ADSL service —  compared to just 8% of locations in the rest of the county.

The map below shows the Census tracts in Cuyahoga County where AT&T’s fiber deployment through last June is concentrated. The darkest shades indicate tracts where the largest percentages of all AT&T serviceable locations had home fiber service available as of June 2023; the lightest shades indicate the tracts with the lowest percentages of locations with fiber access. (Click on the map for a larger version).

 

For those not familiar with the area, here’s the outline of the city of Cleveland within the outline of Cuyahoga County. The large concentration of tracts with little or no fiber in the top center of the map above is part of Cleveland’s northern East Side and Near West Side.

 

 

A similar cluster of Cleveland tracts emerges when we map the county’s tracts by the  percentages of all AT&T serviceable locations with maximum advertised speeds slower than 25 down and 3 Mbps up… meaning they’ve been bypassed by both of AT&T’s big upgrades, and are still using twenty-year-old ADSL technology which doesn’t meet the FCC’s working definition of “broadband”. (Click on the map for a larger version).The concentration of  AT&T’s “ADSL only” locations in certain neighborhoods of Cleveland is even more apparent when we isolate the tracts where they constitute 75% to 100% of all locations. Out of fifty-four such tracts in the county, forty-seven are in Cleveland, four are next door in low-income East Cleveland, and only three are in other communities. (Click on the map for a larger version).

Here’s a more granular view of the most concentrated “ADSL-only” areas of the city of Cleveland: Census blocks where 95%-100% of AT&T’s serviceable locations only had access to  ADSL connections with  download speeds below 25 Mbps as of last June. (Click on the map for a larger version).

Let’s review what the chart and maps tell us.

• Over the last two decades, AT&T has invested in two major upgrades to the broadband technologies and speeds that it offers to homes and businesses throughout Cuyahoga County.
• In the June 30, 2023 Broadband Data Collection, AT&T reports on 409,000 broadband serviceable locations in the county.
• At that date, the more recent of the two big upgrades — to gigabit or multi-gigabit fiber-to-the-premises technology — had reached about 221,000 of those locations.  Locations in the city of Cleveland were significantly less likely (48%) than those in the rest of the county (56%) to be among them.  Large areas of the city’s northeast and near west sides had barely been touched.
• Another 124,000 locations weren’t upgraded to fiber service, but were included in AT&T’s 2007-2013 upgrade to fiber-to-the-node technology, and thus had advertised download/upload speeds between 25/5 and 100/20 Mbps… slower than fiber but still fast enough to qualify as real broadband according to the FCC’s current standard.  The percentage of Cleveland locations in this category was 18%, compared to 36% for the rest of the county. The same northern East Side and Near West Side areas of the city that had little or no fiber investment were also largely bypassed by AT&T’s FTTN deployment.
• That left about 64,000 serviceable locations in the county which had been passed over by not one, but two system-wide AT&T upgrades between 2007 and 2023.  AT&T’s wireline Internet service to these locations remained limited to obsolete ADSL technology at speeds below 25/3 Mbps, the FCC definition of broadband.  (The majority are actually limited to speeds slower than 10/1 Mbps.)
• Near two-thirds of these “ADSL-only” locations were in the city of Cleveland, with many others in neighboring low-income East Cleveland. As the maps show, they were heavily concentrated in the the city’s historically Black, lower-income northern East Side neighborhoods (notably Glenville, Hough, St. Clair-Superior, Fairfax and Central).

Is AT&T planning to upgrade more of its serviceable locations in these underserved neighborhoods?

AT&T’s fiber upgrades in Cuyahoga County are continuing, so it’s fair to ask whether it’s only a matter of time before all these gaps in upgraded technologies and speeds will get filled in.  Only AT&T can really answer this question, of course.

However, the BDC data strongly suggests that AT&T’s continuing fiber upgrade efforts are focused elsewhere in the county.  Here’s another look at the map of Census tracts where AT&T added at least one hundred fiber-served locations between its BDC reporting dates in December 2022 and June 2023.  (Click on the map for a larger version).

Only three of these tracts are in Cleveland.  Two of those — in the west side Old Brooklyn neighborhood — had already had extensive fiber installed on top of previous FTTN/VDSL upgrades.

So no, the BDC data does not suggest a near-term commitment on AT&T’s part to upgrade tens of thousands of locations to fiber service in its worst-served neighborhoods.

Are there legal or engineering obstacles preventing AT&T from upgrading its services to locations in all parts of the county, especially the city of Cleveland?

All the data we’ve discussed so far refers to AT&T’s own accounting of services available to “broadband serviceable locations” within the company’s state-recognized service territory as an Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier, i.e.  the historic landline telephone monopoly.  AT&T’s monopoly (and universal service obligations, and close oversight by the Public Utilities Commission) are a thing of the past. But they still own the poles and service lines that put them within drop-wire distance of almost all potential home and business customers in the county, the perpetual easements in which most of those poles are located,  thirty “central office” buildings anchoring all those network assets, and all the middle mile and regional fiber going in and out of those buildings.  Under Ohio law, no state agency or local government has any regulatory authority over AT&T’s use of these assets to provide Internet services.  Aside from the minimal local permitting needed to install new fiber lines or cabinets in public rights of way,  AT&T is legally free to overlash fiber to its existing copper wire on its wholly owned poles — or replace the copper with fiber, if it prefers — and offer connections to that fiber to homes and businesses anywhere in Cuyahoga County, as it sees fit.

Would extending fiber to homes in Glenville, Woodhill or Hough pose special engineering issues that aren’t present for homes in Westlake, Cleveland Heights or Euclid?  Again, there’s little infrastructure to design or build; the main network assets are in place, wholly owned by AT&T, and essentially identical to those where fiber has already been deployed.  We’re talking about upgrading a network in place, not constructing a new one. There would be some middle mile fiber capacity to add to existing poles or conduits, and maybe some new electronics cabinets to install on tree lawns. This all costs money, of course, but it’s heavily standardized.

So to the outside observer, there are no obvious legal or engineering issues that would explain AT&T’s persistent failure to upgrade its services in certain neighborhoods.

4. Digital discrimination of access 

Do the disparities outlined above constitute “digital discrimination of access” tied to income or race, as that term is used in Section 60506 of the Infrastructure Act and the FCC Digital Discrimination Order?

To simplify a discussion of this question, let’s create some shorthand definitions.

• • We’ll refer to broadband serviceable locations for which AT&T still offers wireline Internet access only in the form of legacy ADSL technology as “ADSL-only locations”.
  • We’ll refer to Census areas (tracts and block groups) where 75% to 90% of locations are ADSL-only as “mostly ADSL”, and to Census areas where more than 90% of locations are ADSL-only as “ADSL-only”.  When we lump these two groups together we’ll refer to them as “ADSL-dominated“.  There were fifty-four ADSL-dominated Census tracts in Cuyahoga County in June 2023.
  • We’ll use the term “low income“ to indicate Census areas (tracts, block groups) with median annual household incomes below $35,000, and the term “lower income” for areas with median annual household incomes between $35,000 and $50,000, according to the most recent American Community Survey (2018-2022 ACS 5-Year Estimates, Table B19013).  Each of these definitions includes roughly a fifth of the 417 Cuyahoga County tracts for which the 2022 ACS provides median household incomes: ninety (22%) are “low income”, and eighty-one (19%) are “lower income”.
  • We’ll use the term “non-White“ to indicate Census areas (tracts, block groups) where fewer than 25% of the population are “White only, not Hispanic or Latino”, according to the most recent American Community Survey (2018-2022 ACS 5-Year Estimates, Tables B01001/B01001H).  This definition includes 114 (27%) of the 422 Cuyahoga County tracts where the ACS found persons residing.

  Using these shorthand terms, Chart 2 breaks out AT&T’s fifty-four ADSL-dominated Census tracts by four areas of the city (Northeast Side, Southeast Side, West Side and Downtown), the low income suburb of East Cleveland, and the rest of the county.  We define “Northeast Side” as the area of the city east of East 30th Street and north of the RTA Red Line; “Downtown” as the area west of East 30th to the Cuyahoga River; “Southeast Side” as the the rest of the city east of the river; and “West Side” as all of the city west of the river.  (Click on chart for a larger version.)

  Chart 3 shows the same broadband location numbers for the 54 ADSL-dominated tracts, along with comparable numbers for all tracts in the county.

• Based on the data presented in Charts 2 and 3 it’s clearly fair to say the following:
• 1. Three-fourths of ADSL-dominated Census tracts in Cuyahoga County are low income, non-White, or both. This is more than twice the overall countywide share of tracts that are low income and/or non-White.  42 of Cuyahoga County’s 54 ADSL-dominated Census tracts, or 75%, were non-White and/or low income.  In comparison, only 30% of all tracts in the county (127 out of 417) were low income, non-White or both.2. Low income and/or non-White Census tracts’ share of AT&T broadband serviceable locations within the county’s ADSL-dominated tracts was nearly three times as great as their share for the county as a whole.  The county’s 54 ADSL-dominated Census tracts contained 31,008 total AT&T broadband serviceable locations. 75% (23,330) of these locations were in tracts that were low-income, non-White or both.  The county’s overall percentage of serviceable locations in low income and/or non-White tracts was just 25%.

  Clearly, the impact of AT&T’s continuing failure to upgrade its broadband service is falling disproportionately on certain low income and/or non-White neighborhoods.

  But not on all such neighborhoods. The data doesn’t show that non-White and/or lower-income neighborhoods in Cuyahoga County are generally ADSL-dominated.  As Chart 3 shows,  just 31% of the county’s Census low income and/or non-White tracts, with just 25% of the AT&T serviceable locations in such tracts, were still in this situation. 

• So the data also supports these statements:
• About 25% of AT&T broadband locations in all low income and/or non-White tracts  in the county were in ADSL-dominated tracts in June 2023. The other 75% of AT&T broadband locations in low income and/or non-White tracts had faster wireline technology (25/3 Mbps or faster) available.
• ADSL-dominated low income and/or non-White tracts, and broadband locations within such tracts, were heavily concentrated in Cleveland’s East Side and the city of East Cleveland. (As the maps which follow show, “East Side” in this case mostly means “northeast side”… the neighborhoods east of East 30th Street and north of the RTA Red Line, including Central, Midtown, Asiatown, St. Clair-Superior, Hough, Fairfax, Glenville and South Collinwood.)
• This East Side concentration of ADSL-dominated tracts is aligned with the overall concentration of the county’s low income and/or non-White tracts.  70% of all low income and/or non-White tracts in the county, containing 66% of the broadband locations within such tracts, are in Cleveland’s East Side or the city of East Cleveland.  The majority are not ADSL-dominated, but a disproportionate number are — mostly clustered in the northeast.

 

• Income
• Census tracts with low average household incomes in Cuyahoga County are heavily concentrated in the city of Cleveland and nearby areas of East Cleveland.  The most recent American  Community Survey (2018-2022 ACS 5-Year Estimates) shows ninety Census tracts in the county with median household incomes below $35,000, of which eighty are in Cleveland, seven in East Cleveland, two in Euclid and one in Bedford Heights. Within those ninety low-median-income tracts, those in the city of Cleveland contain 88% of the households (according to the ACS) and 92% of the AT&T broadband serviceable locations.The red areas on this county map are those ninety tracts with median household incomes below $35,000. The yellow areas are eighty-one tracts with median household incomes between $35,000 and $49,999. Taken together, these 171 “lower-median-income” Census tracts constitute 41% of all Cuyahoga County tracts, with about 35% of all the households.  As the map shows, they cover almost the entire East Side and some of the Near West and Midwest areas of Cleveland — but not Ohio City or Tremont —  with the slightly-better-off yellow tracts extending, to a small extent, into the county’s northeast and southeast suburbs.Race