Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

Whenever Comcast raised my rates, I would call and ask for a lower price or lower tier. In recent years, they always tried to get me to sign up for this. One rep claimed that I qualified because a student (my elementary aged child) lives in the home. Another claimed that I qualified because my child receives free lunch at school (as do all students at California public schools). He said that it was common in his experience for people to sign up under such pretenses.

I don’t know to what extent this program is being abused, but it’s surely happening. The government is basically enabling the cable companies to keep upping their base price, knowing that any customer who is desperate enough for a discount will just find a way to qualify themselves for this program.

I think being able to have internet at home is important. But there should have been limits put in place to ensure that this program was only being used for its intended purpose. Some lobbyist got rich off this thing, for sure.

It's interesting that we're talking about helping people reduce costs, instead of penalizing companies that raise rates for something that should be a utility and has close to fixed costs to operate.

They are increasing speeds and increasing rates alongside. This would be less objectionable in my mind if they maintained the lower tier offerings. Instead they are selling us up our indifference curves, as an economist would say.

When rolling out the fiber network in Australia, NBN Co (government owned) kept the ownership of the fiber optic but on-sells capacity to retailers. It would take a lot of money to buy out the American incumbents, but perhaps this would be an option.

Very similar thing happened to me, except with Spectrum. Called to complain after they increased my bill. The only option they gave me was to sign up for ACP, which they said I was automatically eligible for strictly based on my address. They would not let me switch to a lower-tier plan ...unless I signed up for ACP.

I didn't feel right about it, so I cancelled my service, switched to AT&T, and filed a complaint with the FCC. The FCC then forwarded my complaint to Spectrum, who more or less claimed everything was hunky dory. Nothing really came of it at all as far as I know.

IIRC Spectrum has the biggest piece of this pie, and they use an in-house eligibility verification system. There's probably a relationship between those two facts.

Unlike you, I didn't report my issues at the time, but since this whole thing has blown up in the news (and unfortunately become politicized) I have submitted letters detailing my experience. Hopefully they'll get to the bottom of things and find a way to throw out the bathwater without the baby.

You were eligible..to apply. Spectrum or any ISP doesn’t determine your eligibility. Only Affordableconnectivity.gov (federal government website determines that)

One of the ISPs, I believe Spectrum, was using an internal eligibility verification system. They had the largest share of the ACP customers, IIRC.

Regardless, the reps make it seem like it's very easy to qualify if your kid gets free/reduced lunch. I assume that if you get handed over to a govt website an you click the "my kid gets free/reduced lunch" checkbox, that's all you have to do. This elides the detail that your kid gets free lunch because all CA schoolchildren do, which the ISP rep told you isn't a disqualifier. So at the very least, they're priming the pump for people to fill out forms incorrectly.

A salesmen selling door-to-door for Verizon said the same thing to me. “You have kids, so you qualify.” I just told him that was not right, but kudos to you for filing a complaint with the FCC.

> I don’t know to what extent this program is being abused, but it’s surely happening.

It's non-zero, sure. And although the GAO identified fraud risks, no fraud assessment has been done. A humane response to this would've been to perform a fraud assessment and allow the FCC to take action against identified risks. This will hurt poor families by widening the digital divide, impact family education and employment, and reduce access to services.

Spectrum offered me this package and I have no kids. There is no doubt that rampant abuse is ongoing.

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