Pandemic Reveal: Wifi Unequal. Fixable

In a house in Fair Haven, Natima Adote dropped out of her virtual social studies classroom at Edgewood School as her internet failed.

In a house in Westville, Elsa Holahan finished her virtual class at James Hillhouse High School without interruptions.

The two situations are part of a deeply flawed internet system in New Haven that is easily fixable, according to tech serviceman and internet accessibility advocate Mark LeBlanc.

“It’s not overly hard to accomplish all this. What boggles my mind is why it’s not being done,” LeBlanc said.

New Haven Public Schools has nearly closed the digital divide between its affluent and low-income students since the Covid-19 pandemic started and classes moved online only. There are enough laptops and tablets for every student, paid for with Covid-19 relief and state and philanthropic initiatives.

Internet access was always a smaller problem than distributing learning devices. While 70 percent of New Haven students did not have a laptop or tablet at home at the start of the pandemic, around 15 percent did not have internet. To help that remaining group, the district has distributed 1,200 Kajeet hotspot devices (which connect to phone carriers) and connected families with an income-qualifying internet service through Comcast. The district has built WiFi hubs on top of public schools to beam internet into neighboring blocks of houses.

But having an internet option and having consistent, high-quality internet are two different stories.

When The WiFi Drops

According to Natima’s mother, Nicole Beverley, Natima and her 7‑year-old sister Marlou (all three pictured above) attend roughly 70 percent of their virtual classes. Inconsistent internet on both the student and teacher sides is a major obstacle to higher attendance.

Natima attends Edgewood Creative Thinking Through STEAM Magnet School. Marlou goes to King/Robinson Interdistrict Magnet School.

“On some days, the teacher might not have internet, depending on where the teacher lives. It’s tough. It’s tough for everyone,” Beverley said.

Beverley estimated that her daughters’ internet connections drop during their virtual classes roughly once a day. Usually they get through two to three classes and then something happens. Natima is watching her social studies teacher play a news clip over Google Classroom and the screen freezes. On the teacher’s end, the box representing Natima’s face disappears from the Google Classroom.

Natima tries to email her teacher that she can’t get in anymore and the email won’t go through. She stares at the little dinosaur on the ​“No internet” Google Chrome page.

Sometimes it takes her an hour to log back into class. Sometimes she misses the rest of the school day.

The family has a Kajeet hotspot from the school district as well. It tends to work better in other neighborhoods. Natima noticed that her signal is fine when she visits a friend’s house and when the sisters accompany their mother to medical appointments.

Natima has become a WiFi wizard, acutely aware of each and every factor affecting her connection: locations in the house, interference from objects and passing police cars, the weather …

“If it’s bad weather, the internet won’t work. If it’s sunny outside, it’s good,” the 12-year-old said.

The family moved into their apartment in Fair Haven this fall from the Beth-El Shelter in Milford, where they were waiting for a housing assistance voucher. They signed up for Comcast Internet Essentials to get internet in their new home. The first two months of the deal were free, and now Beverley is paying $9.95 per month.

The deal beats the alternative, signing up to add $35 per month to Beverley’s phone bill to use it as a hotspot. But the quality of the 25 Mbps Comcast connection is as low as its price, according to Beverley.

“I think they gave us the lowest of the low, unfortunately,” Beverley said.

Erica Holahan, on the other hand, pays $50 a month for internet so consistent she does not have to think about it. Her family of three, including her daughter and mother, has the Standard Residential Internet, 150 Mbps package through the fiber optic company GoNetSpeed. Westville is one of a few neighborhoods in New Haven where fiber is available.

Holahan is a clinical social worker. During the pandemic, her work moved online. Rather than holding in-person meetings, she hosts virtual telehealth sessions with her clients.

“For somebody like me, who is not the most tech-savvy person, not having to think about and worry about tech [is important]. I just want to do my work and don’t want to have to worry about internet or my computer,” Holahan said.

Holahan switched from Xfinity, the internet side of Comcast, in July primarily for price reasons. Her GoNetSpeed package is a third of what she was paying Comcast. Both packages provided high quality internet, and she has not seen a difference between the two connections.

Although both internet connections worked well for her, she understands how it feels to be interrupted by technology. Her computer used to cause her video calls to drop and lag.

“For therapy, it’s so critical to have good internet. Disruptions really impact the session. [Delays and static] can be disruptive to what’s happening with clients, and what they’re talking about,” Holahan said.

When the family initially switched to GoNetSpeed, the connection did not reach the bedroom of Holahan’s 15-year-old daughter, Elsa. GoNetSpeed referred the family to Mark LeBlanc, who set up extender pods to improve the connection throughout the house.

Because it was the summer, Elsa was taking just one course, on social justice, online. She studied elsewhere in the house during the day and turned to non-computer activities at night. This had its own silver lining.

“It kind of forced me to go to sleep early. My mom said I didn’t spend as much time in my room,” Elsa said.

“A Car With Three Wheels”

It shouldn’t be that hard to get everyone the kind of internet connection Holahan’s family has, according to Mark LeBlanc.

As the owner of LeBlanc Tech Services, LeBlanc and his employees help clients optimize the internet connection within their home and understand the internet plans they pay for. His Simsbury-based business has turned into a passion project focused on educating consumers throughout Connecticut and bringing more modern internet providers into Comcast-only markets.

The last straw for LeBlanc was the news that Comcast is raising the fees for most of its plans by $3 a month starting in January and increasing the in-person service fee from $70 to $100.

In addition, the company is instituting a data cap, where using more than 1.2TB a month results in up to $100 in extra charges per month. Comcast was previously enforcing the threshold in many states but not yet in Connecticut.

The fee increases will not affect Comcast’s $9.95 per month Internet Essentials plan. Families can qualify for the plan if they get housing assistance, food stamps, Medicaid or free or reduced lunch through their school. New Haven Public Schools has been promoting the plan to help students access distance learning while the Covid-19 pandemic continues.

However, the data threshold will apply to Internet Essentials customers too. According to Comcast, only 5 percent of their customers use more than 1.2TB a month; those customers have the option to pay more for unlimited data.

“Rising programming costs – most notably for broadcast TV and sports – continue to be the biggest factors driving price increases for all content distributors and their customers, not just Comcast. We’re continuing to work hard to manage these costs for our customers while investing in our network to provide the best, most reliable broadband service in the country,” wrote Comcast Connecticut spokesperson Elizabeth Walden.

Comcast has also celebrated its low-cost internet package and the deals it has extended to cut the package’s cost during the pandemic.

Beverley watches her bills carefully and tries to charge her daughters’ laptops at night to save energy costs. Fortunately, the family uses between 100 and 250 GB per month, well below the 1.2TB data threshold.

To LeBlanc, the changes are unfortunate in normal times and unconscionable now.

“Now internet is a necessity. It’s how kids are getting educated and how people are making their livelihoods. Now it’s like lifeblood,” LeBlanc said.

Meanwhile, the cables and other infrastructure that make up Comcast’s network are badly in need of investment, a line item Comcast has instead cut nationwide.

“It’s like they’re charging us for a car with three wheels,” LeBlanc said.

He said that the average video call on Zoom takes only 10 megabits per second (Mbps). Yet he has customers who have purchased plans with much higher speeds who cannot finish a Zoom call without their internet failing.

He explained that this happens because units of data travel in packets, like a deck of cards. Overcrowded cables lose packets as the information travels, prompting the need to send the data again and slowing down the network speed. The speeds are also asymmetrical, with much fatter cables and faster speeds for downloading information like streaming a video than uploading one’s own video in a video call.

Fiber optic networks send light in thin glass tubes, have symmetrical upload and download speeds and lose fewer packets. Then there’s the wireless version that uses cell towers or fiber optic cables for a while and then jumps off antennas on houses.

Ideally, New Haven would have a mixture of these technologies from a variety of internet providers, according to LeBlanc. A quarter of the city could stay with cable companies, a fifth could use wireless technology, and 5 percent could use a yet-undiscovered technology of the future.

This part is not that hard to do, in LeBlanc’s view. Alternatives to Comcast, like the fiber optic company GoNetSpeed, are already interested and just need customers to justify building out the infrastructure. LebBlanc is working on an app with Fairfield University students to help connect interested customers to companies to make that investment happen.

This mixture of technologies and providers is one part of LeBlanc’s solution. The other part is someone to keep the companies honest. He sees government regulation as too slow to keep up with the pace of technology. Instead, he would like to see a new industry of consumer advocates like himself who could tell the elderly lady paying $300 a month for cable, internet and television — as one of his clients was — that she doesn’t need a DVR or international calling service because she doesn’t use them.

He is working on how to make his service more affordable. He is considering working it into monthly plans, the way people of all income groups have smartphones because they are built into their phone plans.

A Fiber City?

Longtime New Haven software professional Tim Holahan (yes, cousin to Erica Holahan) agreed with LeBlanc that a mixture of internet provider competitors is a good solution for the immediate future. However, he sees government investment in fiber as the ultimate solution.

Fiber optic internet has been an option since Holahan started working in tech in the early 1990s. He saw fiber installed in his neighborhood in Brooklyn and waited 15 years to see the same thing happen in Westville.

“We have had the technology for almost 30 years. The fact that it isn’t everywhere is a national disgrace,” Holahan said.

From Holahan’s perspective, Bill Clinton should have pulled a Franklin D. Roosevelt and invested in installing fiber optic cables throughout the country, as FDR did with electricity. The opportunity was there throughout successive presidencies. Instead, the federal government relied on companies like Comcast and the belief that capitalism would eventually create high-quality internet everywhere.

Harvard Law professor Susan Crawford talks about why rural electrification is a good metaphor for fiberizing the United States in her 2018 book, Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution — and Why America Might Miss It. She argues that broadband companies have largely divided up regions between themselves, so they each hold a monopoly within a particular city and kept out competitors like fiber-optic companies that could deliver better service for less money.

Over the years, neither the federal government nor the state has ensured that every household has access to the more consistent connection that fiber offers.

The main state agency that helps consumers get access to better internet connections is the Office of Consumer Counsel. The office advocates to state agencies for consumer interests and helps consumers fight legal battles when they don’t have robust internet available in their neighborhoods. However, consumers have little legal ground to stand on since 2007, according to OCC Broadband Policy Coordinator Burt Cohen.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) under the current administration does not allow the state to regulate the costs of internet services, Cohen said.

“The Office of State Broadband sincerely hopes that both federal and state lawmakers recognize that access to robust broadband service must be considered a civil right and treated with the same level of importance as electricity is given. All elements of our lives depend on the ability to connect to well served and affordable Internet access,” Cohen said.

Cohen pointed to two immediate solutions. The state needs a precise map of both unserved and underserved communities, he said. The OCC also supports implementing a federal broadband subsidy that would help individual families afford internet.

In the absence of federal or state fiber development, it’s New Haven’s turn, in Tim Holahan’s opinion. He thinks the city should invest in fiber in every single street, through a public-private partnership with a company like GoNetSpeed. It would be very expensive, but the returns for encouraging business and education would be worth it, he said. He pointed to Chattanooga, Tennessee, which built out its own fiber-optic service and has since seen business growth.

“It should be a utility. Or above that. We don’t think of roads as utilities. It’s in the city’s enormous interest to have the roads work and be open to anyone. It makes business, education and healthcare happen,” Holahan said.

And importantly, it would mean consistent internet in neighborhoods like Fair Haven where shoddy connections are common. Companies do not profit as much from low-income neighborhoods where residents watch their bills carefully and turn off their cable on months when they can no longer afford it, Holahan said.

Mayor Justin Elicker that he has seen that neighborhood disparity in internet quality and is looking into it.

“The private market doesn’t appear, at least in New Haven, to be investing in neighborhoods that have historically been underserved,” Elicker said.

He said that a team within City Hall, led by City Engineer Giovanni Zinn and development chief Michael Piscitelli, is exploring how to expand fiber within New Haven and researching how other cities did it. GoNetSpeed doesn’t seem to want to expand further within the city, Elicker said.

“Because what is clearly a significant impact on equity and economic development has been underscored by need for online education, I’ve felt like it is an important thing for our team to dig into,” Elicker said.

He was reluctant to name a timeline for the project but agreed that the public might hear whether City Hall decides to pursue the idea within the next year.

Holahan referred to Crawford’s book and her arguments about what closing the digital divide could do for the U.S.

“Closing the digital divide could close income inequality. Kids who have natural gifts to learn to code or do TikTok videos can take advantage of internet economy,” Holahan said.