Folks in Minnesota who have been interested in broadband for a long time will remember the issue of redlining when ISDN was all the rage and only certain parts of the Twin Cities were going to get it. Here’s a quick snapshot of the issue from an historical document from Mike O’Connor who was instrumental in changing the situation in 1995…

US West has told the Public Utilities Commission that they will not offer tariffed ISDN services to people who aren’t served by ISDN-capable equipment.

This means that if you are located in the right part of town your cost for ISDN would continue to be roughly $80/month. If you are located in the wrong part of town your cost for ISDN would be around $300/month.

Turns out the situation hasn’t really changed that much in terms of equal access to technology in various communities -or parts of communities. Susan Crawford spoke about this issue in a recent article…

Late last month, CTC Technology & Energy, an independent consulting firm that had been retained by the state of Connecticut, released a report that included some shocking stories about business connectivity in Hartford, the capital of the state. Connecticut has the highest per capita income of all fifty states. Hartford is largely black (38%) and Hispanic (43%). Connecticut as a whole is mostly white (69%).

CTC found that high-quality fiber and cable high-speed Internet access services did exist close to the business locations in Hartford that the firm visited. But close doesn’t mean connected. And the businesses CTC talked to said that they’d have to pay sky-high amounts to Comcast to get hooked up — and after that it would cost them enormous monthly fees to have a persistent connection.

For example, Comcast has service 100 feet away from a business incubator run by the Conference of Churches in Hartford. Right now, the incubator — ready to house 200 people who should be able to connect simultaneously — has to use DSL service from Frontier that has an upload speed of 0.89 Mbps when no one is using it. But when multiple people do want to use it, that Frontier connection often fails completely.

Similarly, Scotts’ Jamaican Bakery has to rely on awful DSL service from Frontier that collapses if you try to use it for voice or video (and costs $290/month). Comcast has a fiber node on the street where the bakery has its office, but the company told the bakery owner that connecting to that node would cost $600,000. Not possible.

Turns out that Comcast disagrees with the report…

Comcast’s response to all of this? The company dismisses CTC’s report out of hand, saying it has a great network in Connecticut, “delivering the fastest, most reliable speeds from 3 Mbps up to 2 Gigabits per second for residential customers and up to 10 Gigabits for business customers.” Notice that Comcast never says that the facts in the CTC report are wrong — a remarkably tone-deaf response from the company. Instead, the company’s claim is that the CTC report isolates some “one-off exceptions”to a great high-speed Internet access situation in Connecticut. Similarly, Comcast says that it will be launching 2 Gigabit service in the “greater Chicago region.”

You can imagine the frustration of the folks who are so close geographically yet so far economically (or politically) to better broadband. In fact I know many readers can imagine it since it’s the case in many rural areas too. Sometimes the fiber is just across the field – but it’s on the other side of the railroad or a carrier that doesn’t serve the business in question or grant or loan didn’t (or couldn’t) cover your census tract. Or it just doesn’t seem to make economic sense for the provider to extend the network.