Des Moines residents want fast internet, but to get it they're having to put up with an ongoing welter of construction.              Google Fiber, Metronet and Lumen Technology, formerly CenturyLink,

What to know as city of Des Moines updates residents on fiber optic cable construction

COAL TOWNSHIP — The following is a list of the first and second honors for the first marking period at the Northumberland County Career and Technology Center.

Honor Roll: Northumberland County Career and Technology Center

DUBLIN, Oct. 31, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The "Hybrid Cloud Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast 2023-2028" report has been added to ResearchAndMarkets.com's offering.

Hybrid Cloud Market Skyrockets to $104.2 Billion in 2022, Aiming for an Astounding 19.1% CAGR Growth by 2028

Since 5 p.m. Wednesday, a number of people who have CenturyLink as their internet provider have called or emailed KCCI saying their internet is out.KCCI has been looking into the reports, which come from Des Moines and surrounding areas.

CenturyLink customers looking for answers after Wednesday outage

There are more issues for CenturyLink customers, but this time in central Iowa. The company said a fiber was cut on Wednesday night, putting thousands of people without internet.

Iowa residents fall prey to CenturyLink outage, 7 Can Help continues to follow problems surrounding company

The initiative was launched by the city’s Office of Information Technology and Innovation (ITI) in partnership with ConnectLA to help the city reach its goal of eliminating the digital divide by 2029. “We know the internet is not available or not ...

What’s New in Digital Equity: Pennsylvania Directs Internet Funding to Coal Communities

Since 5 p.m. Wednesday, a number of people who have CenturyLink as their internet provider have called into or e-mailed KCCI saying their internet is out. KCCI has been looking into the reports, which come from Des Moines and surrounding areas.

Services restored after CenturyLink outage in central Iowa

Bank branches did not extend much beyond cities, in spite of RBI's efforts towards financial inclusion. The cost of branch based banking services was high and was only feasible to extend services to the urban middle class, which had sizable deposits in ...

India's Digital Transformation and What It Means to Banking

The IT services giant says GenAI will transform ... how last month’s Ryder Cup tested out technology to improve how fans digitally consume the event, and find out how Zurich Insurance has ...

Information technology (IT) in Italy

cloud services and contact centers to his new role. He has held positions with MCI, AT&T, and CenturyLink (now Lumen). During his tenure, he has received several awards for successfully assisting clients with multiple technology innovations. He attends 10 ...

Lexair Announces Chris Terrell Will Lead Their New Network Services Division

CenturyLink

centurylink

How to Find Out If You're Paying for Slow Internet

Hi, I’m Aaron Sankin, and I’m a reporter here at The Markup. Over the past year, I’ve focused on investigating and what you (other than shoot dirty looks at your modem, which doesn’t really care about your opinion). why the internet connection at your house is slow can do about it Tucked deep in the , signed by President Joe Biden in 2021, is a short provision giving the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) broad leeway to fundamentally reshape how America connects to the internet. Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act Under a section titled “Digital Discrimination,” the legislation tasks the FCC with adopting “rules to facilitate equal access to broadband internet access service, taking into account the issues of technical and economic feasibility presented by that objective, including … preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin.” The section itself is short—under 400 words—and relatively light on detail, leaving it largely up to the FCC to decide how much power it wants to grab for itself to close the digital divide. Various actors have rushed into that void of legislative ambiguity, forcefully advocating for their own agendas. On one side are advocacy groups and some local governments who hope the FCC will take the opportunity to aggressively hold internet service providers (ISPs) to account for what they see as generations of inequitable broadband infrastructure deployment across the country. Some propose levying fines on ISPs guilty of discrimination or, as the agency did when it approved a merger between Charter Communications and Time Warner Cable in 2016, companies build out high-speed infrastructure in new areas. mandating On the other side are ISPs, the industry groups representing them, and ideologically aligned pro-business think tanks. They want nothing more than for the FCC to merely supplement its historic light-touch regulation of the broadband industry with generous subsidies—that make investing in high-speed internet infrastructure in marginalized communities more beneficial to the companies’ bottom lines. The crux of this fight is over a concept called “disparate impact” and whether the FCC should use it to identify whether an ISP has engaged in discrimination. The idea behind disparate impact is that discrimination isn’t always explicit. So, if an institution’s policies have created a situation where certain protected groups experience markedly worse outcomes than others, this impact matters just as much as any intentionally biased practices. For example: A company’s CEO decides that people should always physically look up to their managers, so only people over 6 feet, 3 inches get promoted to managerial roles. As a result, the management staff is entirely male, since men tend to be taller on average. Did the company engage in gender discrimination? Under a disparate impact standard, yes. But, under a standard where intent prevails, this discrimination is a lot harder to prove, because the rules that resulted in a management team where everyone can dunk said nary a peep about gender. “From my point of view, disparate impact is really just discrimination through the back door,” said John Yinger, a professor of economics and public administration at Syracuse University, who has disparate impact and wrote a about discrimination in mortgage lending. studied book “If you have a system that doesn’t recognize and address disparate impact, you allow people to, either on purpose [or] by accident, engage in a lot of discrimination.” The problem, Yinger noted, is that to assess disparate impact, the first step is determining which allocation of a certain scarce set of resources—be it broadband access or corporate promotions—is fair, and then determine if different groups’ receipt of that resource violates that standard of fairness. Intentions Matter, or Do They? Consider an we published last year showing how a quartet of ISPs consistently gave the worst deals for internet service to households in low-income, less-White, and historically redlined neighborhoods in major cities across the country. investigation When we were reporting that story, we certainly were curious these disparities existed, but that was less important than the fact that we could prove they existed in the first place. why why Last year, when we reached out to CenturyLink, one of the companies we found consistently charging high prices for sluggish service in marginalized areas, spokesperson Mark Molzen insisted at the time that the company was committed to anti-racism. “While we can’t comment on behalf of other providers, we can say we do not enable services based on any consideration of race or ethnicity, and the methodology used for the report on our network is deeply flawed.” Molzen never pointed to any specific inaccuracies in our data collection or analysis. The “flaw” he identified was in an inference the company read into the story about its motives. Our October 2022 investigation showed absolutely zero evidence that CenturyLink had partitioned cities into geographic areas based on race and used that to determine where to deploy high-speed internet infrastructure. And, honestly, it would be pretty wild if it actually had. Nevertheless, we found that CenturyLink offered addresses in the least-White parts of Des Moines, Iowa, slow-speed internet service 19 percentage points more frequently than the Whitest parts of the city—and all for the same price. In Las Vegas, Nev., that gap was 31 percentage points. In Omaha, Neb., 33 percentage points. A comment within a June 2022 FCC with Lumen, CenturyLink’s parent company, mentioned the company’s expectations “to deploy fiber to approximately one million new locations in 2022 and around 1.5 to 2 million new locations in 2023.” digital discrimination proceeding However, there wasn’t any specificity regarding how many of these new fiber deployments would go to low-income or predominantly non-White areas. When it comes to the FCC’s responsibility, the question is whether the FCC will look at the levels of access that different racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups have to affordable, blazing-fast internet, find substantial inequality, and then do something about it. Or, as the telecom industry would prefer, will the agency only intervene after finding direct evidence of an ISP making inequitable decisions about where to deploy infrastructure explicitly based on characteristics like race or ethnicity? “ ” In Some Circumstances, It Can Be Profitable The legal theory behind disparate impact goes back to , a 1971 Supreme Court case about how a company required all employees to pass a pair of intelligence tests if they wanted to move into higher-paying roles. Black people were far less likely to pass those tests, which were unrelated to the jobs’ responsibilities. Griggs v. Duke Power Co. The court ruled that these tests—which the company just so happened to implement on the very day the 1964 Civil Rights Act—prohibited race-based employment discrimination, and were illegal due to the effect they had on Black employees’ career advancement. The use of disparate impact to identify discrimination grew in the ensuing decades and was finally into law in 1991. “Because individual motives may be difficult to prove directly, Congress has frequently permitted proof of only discriminatory impact as a means of overcoming discriminatory practices,” reads a U.S. Department of Justice on the subject. codified manual “The Supreme Court has, therefore, recognized that disparate impact liability under various civil rights laws ‘permits plaintiffs to counteract unconscious prejudices and disguised animus that escape easy classification as disparate treatment.’ ” During the administration of President Donald Trump, who famously settled a in the 1970s over his family’s real estate company’s practice of not renting properties to Black tenants, the Department of Housing and Urban Development dramatically the government’s ability to use disparate impact, but the rules were shortly after President Biden took office. lawsuit weakened reinstated While disparate impact has been used by the government to regulate employment and housing, it hasn’t yet been used to assess the role ISPs are playing in the digital divide. As a result, when the FCC went about implementing the digital discrimination rules mandated by Congress, the agency specifically that the public weigh in on whether the standard should be used and, if so, how. requested The responses the agency received on the issue largely fell into two categories. The telecom industry argued in favor of using as a metric, which holds that discrimination occurs when people are explicitly divided up by a protected category (like race) and then treated worse as a result. Digital inclusion advocacy groups argued that is the only feasible metric. disparate treatment disparate impact “Rational, profit-seeking actors will discriminate because, in some circumstances, it can be profitable to do so. Whether this is intentional or not is beside the point,” argued the National Digital Inclusion Alliance and Common Sense Media, two nonprofit advocacy groups, in one . comment “The point … is that discrimination occurs and will continue to occur unless providers’ incentives are changed.” The groups’ comment urges the FCC to look for disparate impact in a plethora of ISP practices ranging from the prices customers are charged for a service, and under what contract terms, to the actual speeds different areas receive and how companies prioritize network maintenance. “For decades, the disability community has noted that discrimination occurs unintentionally and often results from seemingly neutral policies,” the American Association of People with Disabilities in another comment. concurred “Too often, disabled people experience discrimination not because of malicious intent or explicit exclusion within programs or policies but because the disabled people were simply not considered in the first place.” The Greenlining Institute, a California-based nonprofit that for digital inclusion efforts, insisted in its that applying disparate impact to broadband would be consistent with how it has been used across the government for decades. advocates comment “Adoption of the disparate impact standard in the wake of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 allowed for a whole-of-government approach that targeted discrimination in public goods such as education and housing,” Greenlining asserted. “It would be consistent to apply this similar treatment to digital public infrastructure and services such as broadband internet.” The tenor of comments from folks who might theoretically be held accountable if their actions were found to have treated some communities worse than others was, unsurprisingly, markedly different. A primary industry worry is that requiring ISPs to constantly weigh equity concerns may dissuade them from deploying new infrastructure widely in the first place. “Adopting a disparate impact test would cause carriers to choose between prioritizing deployment based on closing the digital divide, as required by Congress, and paralyzing deployment for fear that a regular, common business decision may disproportionately affect a minority community,” asserted the Lincoln Network, a free market think tank, in its . comment Another industry argument is that Congress didn’t really mean for the FCC to use disparate impact to identify “discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin.” Verizon, for example, that the phrase “based on” in the legislation specifically means that discrimination has to be a direct result of company decisions made because of protected demographic characteristics of a particular area. asserted For its part, AT&T asserted in its that, even if a disparate impact standard were applied, the broadband industry wouldn’t be found to have delivered less connectivity to historically marginalized areas. comment While there have been localized studies showing inequitable deployment in places like , , , and , the company said that the only way to accurately assess deployment would be to look at a comprehensive, national picture of everywhere every single ISP offers service. Cleveland Dallas Oakland Los Angeles AT&T to an analysis from former FCC chief economist Glenn Woroch that showed that “broadband availability rates for census-based ‘non-white’ households are higher than for white households and that availability rates for households above and below the poverty line are nearly identical.” pointed Woroch’s research relies on data from a broadband availability map produced by the FCC that is supposed to show what service ISPs offer across the country. While a footnote in Woroch’s comment insists his data source doesn’t skew the results, that map has been for inaccuracies, and a 2020 Princeton found that “the FCC’s data disproportionately overstates coverage in rural and minority communities.” widely criticized study The FCC released a last year designed to rectify those issues, but that map has its own set of and is still effectively in its beta testing phase. As a result, obtaining data accurate enough to meet the standards pushed for by AT&T remains a tall order. new map profound accuracy problems The battle over the FCC’s potential use of disparate impact hasn’t been limited to the public comment process. In a recent , The Wall Street Journal’s historically laissez-faire editorial board used the specter of disparate impact to lobby against Public Knowledge’s co-founder Gigi Sohn, whom Biden unsuccessfully nominated to lead the agency, but withdrew following telecom industry opposition. op-ed “Public Knowledge, the outfit that Ms. Sohn co-founded and led from 2001 to 2013, has urged the FCC to interpret its regulatory mandate broadly to micromanage broadband competition and development,” the editorial charged. Now would be the time to mention that The Markup does, in fact, have a pack of dogs in this fight. Our newsroom is based on the idea that if you evaluate the inputs and outputs of a big, complex technical system, you can identify serious problems in how it treats different groups without having to know the precise intentions of the people who developed it. The technology does not yet exist to do a regression controlling for the vagaries of the human heart. In March, Markup reporter and freelance data journalist used data analysis to determine that an algorithm for deciding which patients got life-saving liver transplants people in a handful of states, almost all of which were in the South and Midwest. The day after that story was published, the Department of Health and Human Services major reforms to that very system. Malena Carollo Ben Tanen systematically disadvantaged announced One thing I’m working on—along with my colleague, investigative data reporter —is a step-by-step guide showing everyday people how they can evaluate whether ISPs have left a digital divide in their towns. It should be dropping sometime in the next few weeks. Leon Yin We’re hoping that if people use the guide and find something interesting, they can tell the FCC about it. And, who knows, depending on how this disparate impact proceeding goes, maybe the agency will even do something about it. Sincerely, Aaron Sankin Investigative Reporter The Markup By Aaron Sankin Also published here Photo by on Annie Spratt Unsplash

Disparate Impact: Who's Afraid of It?

অসম প্রভাব: কে এটা ভয় পায়?

Unterschiedliche Auswirkungen: Wer hat Angst davor?

Impacto dispar: ¿quién le teme?

Impacts disparates : qui en a peur ?

असमान प्रभाव: इससे कौन डरता है?

異質な影響: 誰がそれを恐れるでしょうか?

이질적인 영향: 누가 그것을 두려워하는가?

Impacto díspar: quem tem medo disso?

Несопоставимое воздействие: кто этого боится?

Farklı Etki: Kim Korkar?

Tác động khác nhau: Ai sợ nó?

不同的影响：谁害怕它？

Let's learn about via these 71 free stories. They are ordered by most time reading created on HackerNoon. Visit the to find the most read stories about any technology. The Markup /Learn Repo 1. We Ought to Get Better at Recognizing Dark Patterns Companies advertising online have developed a series of unethical practices that some describe as Dark Patterns, which can mislead consumers on the internet. 2. Facebook Crypto Scammers are Imitating Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos The ads, until recently available for view in Facebook’s public ad library, were frauds that slipped through Facebook’s content moderation process... 3. Does Amazon Follow the Law? Amazon lists its own brands and exclusives above competing products with better ratings. 4. What Happens When you Try to Opt Out of Personalized Ads The Digital Advertising Alliance has a website that you can use to opt out of personalised ads. The problem is, it doesn't really work like it is supposed to. 5. A Letter from TheMarkup.org President Nabiha Syed My dad brought home a computer when I was 3 years old. He hoped that it would teach me things — and it did. I learned to spell in English by playing Reader Rabbit and the Fabulous Word Factory. 6. Who Can Spy on My Kids Online? What the United States’ children’s privacy law does and doesn’t do 7. Hey Google, Show me Non-Discriminatory Job Ads Google's advertising system as allowed employers and landlords to discriminate against nonbinary and some transgender people by excluding them from ads. 8. What Is “Suckers List” And Why Texas Drivers Sued Its Creator A joint investigation by The Markup and Consumer Reports was cited in a lawsuit over discriminatory car insurance rates 9. The Markup Investigation: Congressman Says that Google engineered a “Walled Garden” Comment comes as part of big tech CEO grilling by antitrust committee 10. Is There a Valid Cause for Using Facial Recognition Tools in Schools The deployment of facial recognition technology in a school in the US marks a disturbing trend with the protection of identity and the safety of students. 11. Are Time Clock Machines With Fingerprints Legit? You don’t always have to give your boss the finger 12. Are Students Being Entrapped by Fake Test Answer Sites? There are fake test answer websites that are being used to entrap students looking for answers during online tests. 13. What is Causing the Worrisome Increase in Ransomware Ransomware has become a much more common crime online in recent days. But why is this the case and what can people even do about this massive problem? 14. Does Anonymization of Data Guarantees Privacy? Anonymization of data isn’t enough to guarantee privacy 15. Facebook Peeked at Your Info When You Applied for Student Aid Online For millions of prospective college students, applying online for federal financial aid has also meant sharing personal data with Facebook, unbeknownst to them. 16. Can I Avoid Facial Recognition At The Airport? Technically, yes, but it is not always easy 17. A Letter from TheMarkup.org Editor Julia Angwin Dear Readers, 18. Life360 to Stop Selling Precise Location Data Life360, a safety app, claims it will stop selling precise location data. 19. Many Minneapolis Uber and Lyft Drivers Were Victims of Reported Carjackings Last Fall A lot of ride-share drivers were victims of carjacking in Minneapolis last fall. Here is what spokespeople, the police, and the drivers have to say about it. 20. Online Unemployment Systems Are Showing Signals of Strain Newly laid-off workers face crashes, long load times, and messages offering phone callbacks as states struggle to adjust 21. How Unemployment Benefits Systems Are Failing During The Pandemic Long wait times, passwords sent by mail, and shutdowns thwart applicants 22. How Are Gig Workers Coping During the Crisis Workers fight for hazard pay, protective equipment, and better sick leave 23. Over 50 U.S. Gig Workers Murdered on the Job in the Past Five Years A new study says more than 50 gig workers have been murdered in the U.S. over the past five years. 24. Could There Eventually Be a Ban on Behavioral Advertising? Could behavioral advertising be on its way out? 25. Why One State's Testing Procedures Vary From a Neighbor's? We want to know the ways one state’s testing procedures may vary from a neighbor’s, and the reasons why. 26. What Do U.S. Politicians Have to Say About Mortgage Discrimination Against Minorities? American politicians react to The Markup's findings that minorities are getting discriminated against when they apply for a mortgage. 27. The Concerning Results of Investigation Into Google’s YouTube Ad Placement Blocklist An investigation by The Markup has shown that YouTube has been surpressing Black Lives Matter-related ads while doing nothing to prevent white supremacist ads. 28. Are You Paying 400 Times More for Your Internet Than Your Neighbor? You Might Be AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink disproportionately offered lower-income and least-White neighborhoods slow internet service for the same price... 29. Why Are Prices On Amazon So Insanely Volatile? Dynamic pricing algorithms on Amazon aren’t just about supply and demand 30. Official Retailers Dragged Into Battle In April 2019, fans of the makeup influencer Jaclyn Hill noticed her new eyeshadow palette, normally $38, on Walmart.com for the unbelievably low price of $16.39. Many rushed to buy; others were skeptical: Hill had announced that the palette would be available only through certain retailers, and Walmart wasn’t one of them. 31. What To Do if Denied Housing or Apartment Due to Inaccurate Background Report Getty Images and Ali Wijaya 32. Access to Coronovirus Testing Will Depend On Your Location Five scenarios that show the differences in states’ testing algorithms 33. Pitfalls Of Court Hearings On Zoom Court hearings are going virtual in response to COVID-19. Studies show they can lead to harsher outcomes for defendants 34. What To Do if The Bank Mistakenly Reported You as Deceased Investigate, complain, and maybe sue 35. Already Struggling with School? The Pandemic Made it Worse. The Pandemic Didn’t Start Educational Disparities—but It Has Made Them Worse. Vulnerable students get hit the hardest via online learning. 36. Algorithmic Auditing: Can We Actually Eliminate Algorithm Bias Algorithmic auditing got press recently when HireVue, a popular hiring software company used by companies like Walmart and Goldman Sachs faced criticism. 37. Can You Tell What Products On This List Are Prohibited On Amazon? Amazon is the largest retailer in the world, but a majority of the sales on the site come from third-party sellers. Along with toasters and mops, the site’s a target for people trying to sell dangerous and illicit products. 38. This Online Abortion Pill Provider Used Tracking Tools That Gave Powerful Companies Your Data The trackers notified Google, Facebook’s parent company Meta, payments processor Stripe, and four analytics firms when users visited its site. 39. New Report Finds That Facebook Still Runs Discriminatory Ads We found discriminatory ads can still appear, despite Facebook's efforts 40. Are Your Photos Exposing You? You may be accidentally sharing personal information in your photos 41. Big Tech Vs. Big Government: The Choice is Pretty Bleak A group of bipartisan lawmakers hopes to pass antitrust legislation that takes aim at tech giants buying out the competition and hoarding data. 42. Can You Speak The Google Language, Please? The Markup obtained internal documents that coach new employees to avoid creating “very real legal risks” in using words like “market” and “networkeffects” 43. Can Robots Manage Health Benefits? In an attempt to manage soaring health care costs, some government officials and health care companies are turning to algorithms to determine how to allocate limited benefits, who to provide care to first, or whether a person should receive care at all. 44. How Tenant Screening Companies Can Use Your Speeding Ticket Against You Estimated 9/10 landlords, under pressure to ensure their properties are safe, use companies like Rentgrow to perform background checks on potential tenants. 45. The Truth About Less Biased Data-Informed Predictive Policing Critics say it merely techwashes injustice 46. How Geofence Warrants Are Affecting The Legal System Geofencing itself simply means drawing a virtual border around a predefined geographical area. Data can then be gathered on users who enter that area. 47. How To Make Millions With Unemployment Sites That Don't Work In at least one case, that same company is now getting pandemic-relatedcontracts 48. Will Google's and Apple's Contact Tracing Preserve Privacy? The proposed system is anonymous but vulnerable to trolls and spoofing 49. Reasons Why Your Internet Is Slow What’s the problem here? It might be you (sorry). It might be the infrastructure you’re working with. It might be your internet provider. 50. How Popular is Right-Wing Content on Facebook? Facebook has been criticized in the past because many believe they are allowing right-wing content to run rampant on the site. 51. How Facebook Serves Targeted Ads by Big Pharma We found drug ads targeted at users interested in everything from bourbon to therapy on Facebook, with significant implications for privacy for users. 52. Introducing a Browser Extension to Detect Amazon Brands Amazon isn't completely upfront with what brands they own or don't. That's why The Markup created a browser extension to help with this problem. 53. What Was Different About The 2020 Census And Its Challenges The count is going mostly digital for the first time. Oh, and there’s a pandemic 54. Facebook Ads Market Potentially Dangerous “Abortion Reversal” Procedure The Markup has found that Facebook is serving up ads and posts for the so-called “abortion pill reversal” procedure... 55. How Pandemic Testing Protocols Vary Across The USA To determine how testing protocols for COVID-19 vary across the United States, we sent requests under public records laws to all 50 states, New York City, and Washington, D.C. The requests were sent to health departments the week of March 16 and were identical. The database below contains responses we have received, as well as publicly available guidance from some jurisdictions. 56. Amazon's 'Essential Item' Policy Upsets Everyone Currently that appears to include a 10-pack of rubber chickens 57. Why are so Many Opposing the Right-to-Repair Laws The right-to-repair movement has drawn an unusual coalition of stakeholders, including environmentalists, libertarians, engineers, gamers, and hobbyists. 58. Testing the Perfornace and Privacy Settings of COVID-19 Vaccine Websites The government websites responsible for helping citizens get their COVID-19 Vaccines have been found to have less-than-ideal accessibility and privacy features. 59. If You're Ready To Protest Your Phone Should Be Ready Too Simple steps to take before hitting the streets 60. Allstate's Car Insurance Algorithm: How Insurance Algorithm Squeezes Big Spenders Seven years ago, Allstate Corporation told Maryland regulators it was time to update its auto insurance rates. The insurer said its new, sophisticated risk analysis showed it was charging nearly all of its 93,000 Maryland customers outdated premiums. Some of the old rates were off by miles. One 36-year-old man from Prince George’s County, Md., who Allstate said in public records should have been paying $3,750 every six months, was instead being charged twice that, more than $7,500. Other customers were paying hundreds or thousands of dollars less than they should have been, based on Allstate’s new calculation of the risk that they would file a claim. 61. How Much Exactly are Podcasts Able to Track us Traditionally, the podcast ecosystem has been tracking-resistant, in part because podcasters release their shows through RSS, free technology dating back to '99 62. Tell Me Your Secrets: How Many Workers Review Posts on Amazon? We found banned items for sale on Amazon.com 63. How Automated Background Checks Can Freeze Out the Wrong Renters Computer algorithms that scan everything from terror watch lists to eviction records spit out flawed tenant screening reports. And almost nobody is watching 64. How Many Americans Don't Have Internet Access? The COVID-19 crisis highlights the costs of the U.S. digital divide 65. Is the Data We Share with Pay Apps Private at all Using a payment app of any kind, no matter how privacy-preserving it is, always introduces a middleman: an agent that uses data to execute a demand. 66. Tech Titans Hammered By Congress At Antitrust Hearing Lawmakers allege abuse of monopoly power and political bias 67. Identifying Fake Reviews On Amazon Spotting the fakes isn’t always possible, but here are some tips 68. How We Pay For Free Websites With Our Privacy An array of free website-building tools, many offered by ad-tech and ad-funded companies, has led to a dizzying number of trackers loading on users’ browsers. 69. Allstate's Car Insurance Algorithm: How Insurance Algorithm Was Analyzed State regulators and consumer advocacy groups have scrutinized Allstate Corporation’s use of big data and personalized pricing in the way it calculates how much the company charges its private auto insurance customers. 70. There's Something Wrong With Google Search Results The search engine dedicated almost half of the first page of results in our test to its own products, which dominated the coveted top of the page 71. What Analyzing Google Search Results Revealed About Google We designed an experiment to measure the quantity and placement of
these Google-created and self-referential search results and how they compare to others. Thank you for checking out the 71 most read stories about The Markup on HackerNoon. to find the most read stories about any technology. Visit the /Learn Repo

71 Stories To Learn About The Markup

267 Stories To Learn About Internet

We found that AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink disproportionately offered the worst internet deals to neighborhoods that were formerly redlined, whose residents are lower income and have a higher concentration of people of color than other parts of the city. We examined actual internet offers to more than 800,000 addresses in 38 cities across the country. See our data here. GitHub People in disadvantaged neighborhoods would be offered plans as high as $100 per megabit per second, while those in more affluent areas that have more White residents and had the best historical redlining scores were offered plans for less than $1 per Mbps. The ultimate effect of these practices went beyond fairness: Those in disadvantaged neighborhoods were offered speeds so slow that they were denied the ability to participate in remote learning, jobs, and even family connection and recreation that are ubiquitous to modern life. A recent , for example, showed 90 percent of respondents saying the internet has been “essential or important for them personally during the coronavirus outbreak.” Pew survey Background The Markup collected 848,618 internet service offers made to addresses in 38 major U.S. cities. The top-line finding is that four companies—AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink—offered blazing fast internet plans (200 Mbps download speeds or above) at the same price they offered slow internet plans (under 25 Mbps, which is below the Federal Communications Commission’s floor for labeling a connection “broadband”). Some researchers have looked at broadband availability, and one, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, published a report saying some internet providers were advertising varying speeds for the same price, which it called “ .” tier flattening Our investigation is the first examination of actual offers to U.S. addresses, which were gathered from the providers’ lookup tools. Some of the pricing disparities were extreme. CenturyLink’s offers ranged from $100 per megabit per second (for 0.5 Mbps plans) all the way down to 25 cents per megabit per second (for 200 Mbps plans) in all 15 cities served by CenturyLink that The Markup examined. The federal government does not regulate internet pricing, so providers can charge whatever they want. However, the FCC is in rulemaking concerning “digital discrimination”  that could potentially govern this type of behavior. currently engaged The Data We used automated techniques to enter millions of addresses across 45 major U.S. cities into each of the four internet service providers’ websites and to save the advertised speed and price offers for each address. We collected data between April 15 and Oct. 1, 2022. Cities that offered uniform speeds (Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Providence, and Wilmington) were filtered out. The remaining offers in 38 cities were merged with socioeconomic data: median household income and race/ethnicity from the 2019 five-year American Community Survey, and historic redlining grades from the University of Richmond’s . Mapping Inequality project In 92 percent of the cities we examined, the areas offered the worst deals were lower income. In two-thirds of cities, the worst deals went to the least-White areas. In every city where there was enough data to do the analysis, the worst deals went to areas that had been historically redlined. The Markup found at least one of these disparities (income, race/ethnicity, or historical redlining grades) in every city except for Boise and Fargo. In , for each of the following cities, you’ll also find a breakdown of speeds offered to a representative sample of addresses in that city, as well as interactive, address-level maps. You will also find summaries about how internet speeds vary across socioeconomic areas, and code that can be used to reproduce our data-intensive investigation: our Github repository Albuquerque, N.M. ( ) CenturyLink, EarthLink Atlanta, Ga. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Billings, Mont. ( ) CenturyLink, EarthLink Boise, Idaho ( ) CenturyLink, EarthLink Charleston, S.C. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Charlotte, N.C. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Cheyenne, Wyo. ( ) CenturyLink, EarthLink Chicago, Ill. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Columbus, Ohio ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Denver, Colo. ( ) CenturyLink, EarthLink Des Moines, Iowa ( ) CenturyLink, EarthLink Detroit, Mich. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Fargo, N.D. ( ) CenturyLink, EarthLink Houston, Texas ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Huntsville, Ala. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Indianapolis, Ind. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Jackson, Miss. ( ) AT&T Jacksonville, Fla. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Kansas City, Mo. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Las Vegas, Nev. ( ) CenturyLink, EarthLink Little Rock, Ark. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Los Angeles, Calif. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Louisville, Ky. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Milwaukee, Wis. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Minneapolis, Minn. ( ) CenturyLink Nashville, Tenn. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink New Orleans, La. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Newark, N.J. ( ) Verizon Oklahoma City, Okla. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Omaha, Neb. ( ) CenturyLink, EarthLink Phoenix, Ariz. ( ) CenturyLink, EarthLink Portland, Ore. ( ) CenturyLink, EarthLink Salt Lake City, Utah ( ) CenturyLink, EarthLink Seattle, Wash ( ) CenturyLink, EarthLink Sioux Falls, S.D. ( ) CenturyLink, EarthLink Virginia Beach, Va. ( ) Verizon Washington ( ) Verizon Wichita, Kan. ( ) AT&T, EarthLink Based on which company serves the city you’re investigating, look at the interactive, address-level maps we created to help journalists do further reporting: Map for AT&T Map for CenturyLink Map for EarthLink Map for Verizon You can use the search bar to quickly travel to specific addresses or cities. If you know the areas, this will be immediately useful. However, if you would like an overlay of any socioeconomic factor in our investigation (median household income, the percentage of non-Hispanic White residents in the area, or redlining grades) we can produce them by request. These maps should be viewed alongside . summaries of how speeds vary across each city and between areas For a detailed breakdown showing precisely how we conducted our analysis, along with the full results, check out our . methodology Reporting Tips and Story Ideas Where are the clusters of slow connections? Talk to people on the ground in those communities to see what challenges they’ve faced in getting internet service and how it’s affected their lives. Look at the maps of connection speeds in your city. Use this to explore the hidden dimensions of housing segregation. For example, Kansas City, Mo.’s Troost Avenue is both a historical dividing line for racial segregation and an obvious inflection point separating a big cluster of fast connections from a big cluster of slow ones. Does the geographic divide between slow and fast neighborhoods in your city fall along any historical markers of segregation? Many of them have likely seen firsthand the effects of internet providers charging high prices for slow service in marginalized communities. A good resource for finding these groups in your city is to contact any local affiliates of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, a nonprofit that works with groups across the country helping get people online. You can find their affiliates list here: . Reach out to local organizations that have been working to get people in your community online. https://www.digitalinclusion.org/affiliates/ This data can tie into conversations about the nexus of digital equity and education, especially in areas with lots of slow connections. How do local school districts and teachers’ unions view the way online connectivity in their community affects the remote learning experience? Principals of schools that serve marginalized communities and PTA leaders there may also be good sources on how the lack of access affected students during the pandemic. During the transition to remote schooling, many students and teachers experienced how slow, inconsistent internet connection made learning difficult—if not impossible. Local Stories Using Our Data If you’re interested in using our data for your own coverage but need some more help, here are a few examples of how journalists have used our data in their own stories: Sarah Alvarez, Outlier Media: “ ” Detroit is paying big money for slow internet Becky Z. Dernbach, Sahan Journal: “ ” CenturyLink offers slower internet service to Black and brown neighborhoods in Minneapolis, new report claims Lina Tran, WUWM: “ ” Poor, historically redlined neighborhoods in Milwaukee pay more for slow internet Jacob Munoz, 89.3 WFPL: “ ” Report: Internet providers offer Louisville residents unequal speeds for similar prices Zoë Jackson and Jeff Hargarten, Star Tribune: “ ” In Minneapolis, disparities in internet package speeds can depend on address Alayna Alvarez, Axios Denver: “ ” Denver's low-income areas offered slower internet for higher costs Natalie Wallington, Kansas City Star: “ ” Some in KC’s least-white, lower income neighborhoods pay high prices for slower internet Kaylee Tornay, InvestigateWest: “ ” Poor and diverse areas of Seattle and Portland offered slower and more expensive internet Jacob Steimer, MLK50: Low-income Memphians receive worse internet service for the same price Updated March 16, 2023 This story has been updated to include examples of local journalism using our data. As we add new articles, we’ll update the date here. By and Leon Yin Aaron Sankin First published here Photo by on Alina Grubnyak Unsplash

How to Investigate Which Neighborhoods in Your City Are Offered the Worst Internet Deals

We Discovered Disparities in Internet Deals: Here's How We Did It

An investigation by The Markup found that AT&T, Verizon, EarthLink, and CenturyLink disproportionately offered lower-income and least-White neighborhoods slow internet service for the same price as speedy connections they offered in other parts of town. Credit: Joel Eastwood and Gabe Hongsdusit. Sources: The Markup analysis of AT&T, CenturyLink, Verizon; U.S. Census Bureau This Article Is Copublished With A.P. News Read on our collaborator's site A couple of years into the pandemic, Shirley Neville had finally had enough of her crappy internet service. “It was just a headache,” said Neville, who lives in a middle-class neighborhood in New Orleans whose residents are almost all Black or Latino. “When I was getting ready to use my tablet for a meeting, it was cutting off and not coming on.” Neville said she was willing to pay more to be able to Zoom without interruption, so she called AT&T to upgrade her connection. She said she was told there was nothing the company could do. In her area, AT&T only offers download speeds of 1 megabit per second or less, trapping her in a digital Stone Age. Her internet is so slow that it doesn’t meet Zoom’s minimum for group video calls, doesn’t come close to the FCC’s of broadband, currently 25 Mbps, and is worlds below median home internet speeds in the U.S., which 167 Mbps. recommended definition average “In my neighborhood, it’s terrible,” Neville said. But that’s not the case in other parts of New Orleans. AT&T offers residents of the mostly White, upper-income neighborhood of Lakeview internet speeds almost 400 times faster than Neville’s—for the same price: $55 a month. The vast gulf between the quality of service AT&T offered these neighborhoods for the same cost is not a fluke. The Markup gathered and analyzed more than 800,000 internet service offers from AT&T, Verizon, Earthlink, and CenturyLink in 38 cities across America and found that all four routinely offered fast base speeds at or above 200 Mbps in some neighborhoods for the same price as connections below 25 Mbps in others. The neighborhoods offered the worst deals had lower median incomes in nine out of 10 cities in the analysis. In two-thirds of the cities where The Markup had enough data to compare, the providers gave the worst offers to the least-White neighborhoods. These providers also disproportionately gave the worst offers to formerly redlined areas in every one of the 22 cities examined where historical maps were available. digitized These are areas a since-disbanded agency created by the federal government in the 1930s had deemed “hazardous” for financial institutions to invest in, often because the residents were Black or poor. Redlining was outlawed in 1968. By failing to price according to service speed, these companies are demanding some customers pay dramatically higher unit prices for advertised download speed than others. CenturyLink, which showed the most extreme disparities, offered some customers service of 200 Mbps, amounting to as little as $0.25 per Mbps, but offered others living in the same city only 0.5 Mbps for 400 times as much—$100 per Mbps. Residents of neighborhoods offered the worst deals aren’t just being ripped off; they’re denied the ability to participate in remote learning, well-paying remote jobs, and even family connection and recreation—ubiquitous elements of modern life. “It isn’t just about the provision of a better service. It’s about access to the tools people need to fully participate in our democratic system,” said Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the ACLU. “That is a far bigger deal and that’s what really worries me about what you’re finding.” Christopher Lewis, president and CEO of the nonprofit Public Knowledge, which works to expand internet access, said The Markup’s analysis shows how far behind the federal government is when it comes to holding internet providers to account. “Nowhere have we seen either the FCC nor the Congress, who ultimately has authority as well, study competition in the marketplace and pricing to see if consumers are being price gouged or if those service offerings make sense.” None of the providers denied charging the same fee for vastly different internet speeds to different neighborhoods in the same cities. But they said their intentions were not to discriminate against communities of color and that there were other factors to consider. The industry group USTelecom, speaking on behalf of Verizon, said the cost of maintaining the antiquated equipment used for slow speed service plays a role in its price. “Fiber can be hundreds of times faster than legacy broadband—but that doesn’t mean that legacy networks cost hundreds of times less,” USTelecom senior vice president Marie Johnson said in an email. “Operating and maintaining legacy technologies can be more expensive, especially as legacy network components are discontinued by equipment manufacturers.” AT&T spokesperson Jim Greer said in an emailed statement that The Markup’s analysis is “fundamentally flawed” because it “clearly ignored our participation in the federal Affordable Connectivity Program and our low-cost Access by AT&T service offerings.” The Affordable Connectivity Program was launched in 2021 and pays up to $30 a month for internet for low-income residents, or $75 on tribal lands. “Any suggestion that we discriminate in providing internet access is blatantly wrong,” he said, adding that AT&T plans on spending $48 billion on service upgrades over the next two years. Recent looking at 30 major cities found only about a third of eligible households for the federal subsidy, however, and use it to help cover cellphone bills, which also qualify, rather than home internet costs. research had signed up the majority Connectivity advocates told The Markup that it’s hard to get people to jump through the bureaucratic hoops needed to sign up for the program when service is slow. Greer declined to say how many or what percentage of AT&T’s internet customers are signed up for either the ACP or the company’s own low-cost program for low-income residents. In a to the FCC, AT&T insisted its high-speed internet deployments are driven by “household density, not median incomes.” letter But when The Markup ran a statistical test controlling for density, it still found AT&T disproportionately offered slower speeds to lower-income areas in three out of four of the 20 cities where we investigated their service. “We do not engage in discriminatory practices like redlining and find the accusation offensive,” Mark Molzen, a spokesperson for CenturyLink’s parent company, Lumen, wrote in an email. He said that The Markup’s analysis is “deeply flawed” without specifying how. He did not respond to requests for clarification. EarthLink, which doesn’t own internet infrastructure in the examined cities but rather rents capacity from other providers, did not provide an official comment despite repeated requests. Internet prices are not regulated by the federal government because unlike telephone service, internet service is not considered a utility. As a result, providers can make their own decisions about where they provide service and how much to charge. The FCC declined a request to comment on the findings. The investigation is based on service offers collected from the companies’ own websites, which contain service lookup tools that list all available plans for specific addresses, using a method pioneered by researchers at . Princeton The Markup analyzed price and speed for nearly 850,000 offers for addresses in the largest city in 38 states where these providers operate. https://themarkup.org/still-loading/2022/10/19/dollars-to-megabits-you-may-be-paying-400-times-as-much-as-your-neighbor-for-internet-service?embedable=true#in-most-cities-poorer-neighborhoods-were-offered-worse-internet-plans-more-often Las Vegas is one city where large swaths of CenturyLink’s offers were for slow service. Almost half didn’t meet the current federal definition of broadband. These fell disproportionately on Las Vegas’s lower-income and least-White areas. Las Vegas councilwoman Olivia Diaz said that in the summer of 2020, she approached families where children had stopped showing up to virtual lessons the previous school year to find out what went wrong. City schools were preparing to begin their second school year marked by COVID-19 lockdowns. “We kept hearing there were multiple children trying to connect in the household, but they weren’t able to,” said Diaz, who represents a district that’s predominantly Latino and on the lower end of the city’s income spectrum. More than 80 percent of CenturyLink’s internet offers in her district were for service slower than 25 Mbps. Education advocacy group Common Sense Media recommends at least 200 Mbps download speeds for a household to reliably conduct multiple, simultaneous video conferencing sessions. “I think it’s unfair knowing that it is slow service that we’re paying for that is not commensurate with the faster speeds that they have in the other parts of the city that are paying the same price,” Diaz said. “It just breaks my heart to know we’re not getting the best bang for our buck.” Diaz said city officials have asked CenturyLink to expand high-speed service in her district, but the company declined, citing the prohibitive cost of deploying new infrastructure in the area. CenturyLink did not respond to emails asking about this request. Some officials told The Markup they’ve been yelling for years about bad service for high prices. “If I was paying $6 a month,” Joshua Edmonds, Detroit’s director of digital inclusion, “well you get what you’re paying for.” But he objects to people being asked to pay premium rates for bad service. “What I pay versus what I get doesn’t really make sense.” In a 2018 , Bill Callahan, who runs the online accessibility organization , coined the term “tier flattening” to describe charging internet customers the same rate for differing levels of service. report Connect Your Community He said The Markup’s findings show how much of America’s internet market is based on the “basic unfairness” of internet service providers deciding to deprioritize investing in new, high-speed infrastructure in marginalized areas. “They’ve made a decision that those neighborhoods are going to be treated differently,” said Callahan. “The core reason for that is they think they don’t have enough money in those neighborhoods to sustain the kind of market they want.” The FCC under a provision of the 2021 infrastructure bill aimed at “preventing digital discrimination of access based on income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin.” is currently drafting rules A coalition of 39 groups led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Center for Accessible Technology to take aggressive action rectifying broadband inequality by examining the socioeconomics of the neighborhoods getting the slowest speeds and the prices they pay—regardless of whether the companies intended to discriminate. urged the FCC https://themarkup.org/still-loading/2022/10/19/dollars-to-megabits-you-may-be-paying-400-times-as-much-as-your-neighbor-for-internet-service?embedable=true#in-most-cities-households-in-the-least-white-areas-were-offered-the-worse-internet-plans-much-more-often AT&T insisted in filings with the agency that the standard for discrimination should be explicit, deliberate efforts to avoid building infrastructure in areas that are populated by people of color or lower-income residents. It also asked for subsidies to build high-speed internet in lower-income neighborhoods because, as AT&T asserted in its to the FCC, “most or all deficiencies in broadband access appear to result not from invidious discrimination, but from ordinary business-case challenges in the absence of subsidy programs.” letter Advocates say that’s just not true. “There are very few places in the country where it is not economically feasible to deploy broadband,” said Brian Thorn, who served as a senior researcher for the Communication Workers of America, a union representing telecom employees, which has been vocal on the issue and to the FCC. filed its own comment (Full disclosure: The CWA is the parent union of The NewsGuild-CWA, which represents The Markup’s employees.) He said members are tired of seeing their employers make inequitable infrastructure deployment decisions. “We would hear from members all the time that they’re out laying lines on one side of the neighborhood and not on the other,” he said. In a to the FCC, the coalition asserted that “broadband users are experiencing discriminatory impacts of deployment that are no different than the impacts of past redlining policies in housing, banking, and other venues of economic activity.” letter The term “redlining” derives from efforts by the federal government to stem the tide of foreclosures during the Great Depression by drawing up maps, with the help of real estate agents, to identify areas that were safe for mortgage lending. Predominantly White neighborhoods were consistently rated better than less-White neighborhoods, which were shaded in red. Echoes of these maps still reverberate today in things like and . rates of home ownership prenatal mortality on the historical map explaining why one part of Kansas City, Mo., was redlined cited “Negro encroachment from the north.” Notes In that same area, AT&T offered only slow service to every single address The Markup examined. Across Kansas City, AT&T offered the worst deals to 68 percent of addresses in redlined areas, compared to just 12 percent of addresses in areas that had been rated “best” or “desirable.” https://themarkup.org/still-loading/2022/10/19/dollars-to-megabits-you-may-be-paying-400-times-as-much-as-your-neighbor-for-internet-service?embedable=true#2022-broadband_kansas_city_redlining Redlining maps frequently tracked neatly with the disparities The Markup found. Addresses in redlined areas of 15 cities from Portland to Atlanta were offered the worst deals at least twice as often as areas rated “best” or “desirable.” Minneapolis, which is served by CenturyLink, displayed one of the most striking disparities: Formerly redlined addresses were offered the worst deals almost eight times as often as formerly better-rated areas. Pamela Jackson-Walters, a 68-year-old longtime resident of Detroit’s Hope Village, said she needs the internet to work on her dissertation in organizational leadership at University of Phoenix online and to virtually attend church services. The slow speeds AT&T offered were a constant annoyance. “They still haven’t installed the high-speed internet over here,” she said. “How do we get it? Are we too poor of a neighborhood to have the better service?” Hope Village has a per capita income of just over $11,000 and is almost entirely Black. To add insult to injury, last fall, AT&T internet service across Hope Village went down for 45 days before being restored. This summer, Jackson-Walters’s internet went down again, this time for four weeks, she said. Jeff Jones, another longtime Hope Village resident, noted a bitter irony amid all the service problems. “To add to the insult, I can look out my bedroom window literally, maybe 150 yards, is the AT&T service facility,” he said with a weary laugh. “I’m like, please help me! You’re right there! How can you ignore this problem that is just right in front of your face?” Until The Markup told Hope Village residents its findings about AT&T’s pricing practices in Detroit, they didn’t know that lower-income areas were more often asked to pay the same price for slower internet. “That’s the big piece,” said Angela Siefer, the executive director of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance, which advocates for broadband access. “Folks don’t know that they’re being screwed.” Credits: & Leon Yin Aaron Sankin Also published here Photo by on Thomas Jensen Unsplash

Are You Paying 400 Times More for Your Internet Than Your Neighbor? You Might Be

We’ve all been there: very politely asking the internet for a video of a cat engaging in some wacky antics. And then … the internet pauses, seeming to consider the request. What’s the problem here? It might be you (sorry). It might be the infrastructure you’re working with. It might be your internet provider. Let’s explore some causes and solutions together. What Is a “Good” Internet Speed? Step one is to conduct a so-called speed test. Jonathan Schwantes, senior policy counsel at Consumer Reports, who works on the organization’s , which is collecting consumers’ internet bills and speed test results as part of its advocacy work, suggests using a pair of tests, one from and another from . Fight for Fair Internet initiative Ookla MLab Each uses slightly different methods, so Schwantes recommends trying both to make sure they’re consistent. The tests show two important results: download speed (how quickly you’re receiving data from the internet) and upload speed (how quickly you’re sending data out to the internet), measured in megabits per second. A bit of data is a single unit of information, expressed in the binary code that computers can understand as either a one or a zero. A megabit is one million bits of data. If a speed test says your download speed is 100 megabits per second, your connection is pumping 100,000,000 ones and zeros into your device each second, and short kitty antics videos . should stream fine What qualifies as a “good” internet speed depends on what you’re using it for, however. If you have multiple users and need stable connections (think kids doing online schooling while you work in the next room), education advocacy group Common Sense Media recommends speeds of 200 mbps download and 10 mbps upload. Those recommended speeds can be high relative to available levels across much of the United States. For February of this year, Ookla median speeds in the U.S. for wired broadband connections at 146 mbps download and 20 mbps upload; speeds on mobile internet—63 mbps download and 9 upload—were far slower. pegged Amina Fazlullah, the organization’s director of equity policy, insists that stable video conferencing connections are crucial for things like virtual school. “What does it mean when a 7-year-old has an interruption?” Fazlullah said, noting that 25 mbps download and 3 mbps upload will technically work but likely with frequent service disruptions. “How long can you wait for them to get back up to speed? Will they be able to get back on track after those interruptions?” Netflix, on the other hand, a mere 15 mbps download speed for streaming content in 4K/Ultra HD. recommends What speed is available to you at home depends on the infrastructure available: the tubes through which your desired digital data flows. That infrastructure may seem intangible, but it exists both inside the walls of your home and in a corporeal series of tubes transmitting data across the globe. Understanding those factors, and how they work together, is crucial to understanding how the modern internet works—and how to get that cat video faster. Is the Slowdown Coming from Inside the House? When Schwantes gets a slow speed test result, his first suspicion is usually along the lines of “Something is up with my router.” If you’re reading this on a device connected to Wi-Fi, the first connection you have to the larger internet are your modem and wireless router or your modem/wireless router combo beaming out Wi-Fi to the immediate area. The first two things to try if your internet is slow are restart the router and get your device closer to the router. Like a computer, routers store information in their memory, and sometimes an error gets saved mistakenly. Restarting is a way to shake out the cobwebs. And Wi-Fi signals degrade the farther they travel. If distance is slowing your speed, consider your options: Your Wi-Fi router may offer the choice between a 2.4 GHz connection and a 5 GHz connection; 5 GHz offers faster speeds over shorter distances, and 2.4 GHz provides slower speeds over longer distances. The 2.4 GHz frequency can also get congested with traffic from other wireless networks in the area, so sometimes switching to 5 GHz will provide a less obstructed path for your cat video. If your device has an ethernet port, you can also plug directly into the router and avoid the Wi-Fi issue altogether. Around the start of the pandemic, Schwantes noticed his internet slowing down. In this case, the problem was him. He was using a decade-old wireless router. After replacing it, he said, his speeds improved dramatically. What’s Happening on the Other Side of the Wall? The biggest speed variances come from the different ways data flows through the tubes directly outside your home. Data can travel on different types of tubes—fiber optic, coaxial cable, and copper wire, and even on wireless cellular networks—each providing very different speeds for uploading and downloading. Sometimes the technology that leads to your home is too out of date to support faster speeds. The effects of this fall more on communities of color and poorer residents, an . AT&T, Verizon, Earthlink, and CenturyLink charged customers in 38 cities the same price for sluggish DSL connections as they did for zippy fiber connections. investigation by The Markup found In 36 of those cities, the worst deals tended to go to households located in neighborhoods that were lower-income, less-White, or historically redlined. Fiber optic cables consist of a core of ultra-thin glass surrounded by a reflective coating that transmits information as pulses of light at the speed of, well, light traveling through glass. The fastest internet connections available today are termed “fiber to the home” because the fiber optic cables begin where you live and run all the way to where they join the larger maze of fiber optic tubes making up the internet. (There are also systems called “fiber to the node” or “fiber to the curb,” where fiber runs to a connection hub somewhere in your neighborhood, and then the signal moves to slower wires the rest of the way.) If the internet is a road, fiber is like an expressway with five lanes in each direction and a 75 mph speed limit. Not everyone in the United States even has access to fiber internet. According to a study released in January by the Fiber Broadband Association, of U.S. homes have that option. less than half At the other end of the spectrum, copper wire is like a one-lane road where you can’t go above 25. Not only can Fiber Expressway get you home faster than Copper Lane, but it can also handle far more traffic without congestion, which is important because your data runs through the same tubes as those of your neighbors who use the same ISP. The longer you can stay on fiber before having to turn off to something that’s not fiber, the faster your connection. What is copper wire? DSL, which stands for Digital Subscriber Line, operates on the same copper wires that phone companies use for traditional telephone service—so-called landlines—albeit on a higher frequency range that doesn’t necessitate tying up a phone line the way dial-up service does. ( .) Kids, ask your parents Phone lines were built to transmit voice, which doesn’t require a whole lot of data, so they tend to be s‑l‑o‑w. DSL speeds are dependent on the distance from where they hook into the fiber connections leading to the internet’s backbone. They need to be boosted frequently to push data over longer distances. In the middle is cable internet, which is generally slower than fiber but can provide relatively high speeds. Copper wire is like a one-lane road where you can’t go above 25. Cable internet is piped through coaxial cables carrying signals on a copper conductor surrounded by layers of plastic and metal coating to shield it from interference (an improvement over DSL). Since the coaxial cables were originally developed to transmit cable TV, which is fairly data-intensive video and audio information, they can move a lot of data. Since cable TV is traditionally a one-way broadcast medium, cable connections generally have faster downloads than uploads. A relatively new entrant to the residential broadband market is fixed wireless. As the name implies, this type of connection doesn’t involve a tube running directly into your home. Getting a fixed wireless connection typically involves installing a receiver pulling in cellular service that is then converted to Wi-Fi. Fixed wireless home service across the country, but some services advertise speeds that can give cable connections a run for their money. isn’t universally available For remote locations, where it’s not feasible for ISPs to install any kind of wired connection between the internet’s fiber backbone and your home, satellite internet, which allows data to be transmitted up to a satellite and then beamed down to an antenna at your residence, is an option. Satellite internet is generally not as fast as fiber or cable internet. Ookla found the median speed for SpaceX’s Starlink, the fastest satellite internet available in the U.S., was around 100 mbps download and 13 mbps upload. Can I Just Switch to a Different Provider and Get Faster Internet? You can certainly give it a shot! However, a dearth of competition in the broadband market across the United States may make that tricky. “The U.S. market for internet service is dominated by just four companies: AT&T, Charter, Comcast, and Verizon,” reads the 2020 edition of the Open Technology Institute’s Cost of Connectivity about the state of the U.S. broadband market compared to that in other developed countries. report “In most cities, there were only, like, two providers, and there are large swaths of addresses that only had one provider,” said Claire Park, one of the report’s authors. A 2020 from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance found that 83.3 million Americans are only able to purchase broadband internet from a single provider. report PSA: If your household income is lower than , you may qualify for the (ACP), which was created by the 2021 infrastructure bill and provides a $30 monthly subsidy for internet service. these guidelines Affordable Connectivity Program That subsidy increases to $75 for folks living on tribal lands. If you’re already signed up for free and reduced lunch for your dependent at school, the , , , or a number of other public-benefit programs, you . Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Medicaid Supplemental Security Income likely qualify (But hurry: An analysis by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance suggests that the pool of money Congress allocated for the ACP as soon as 2024 if it is not replenished.) could run out Many ISPs have created their that would allow households that qualify for the ACP to effectively get monthly internet service for free when combined with the governmental benefit. own reduced-cost internet plans Even if you can afford your internet bill, you can still shop around to see if you can get faster and/or cheaper service. To check your options, enter your address into the to see which ISPs serve your address. FCC’s National Broadband Map What’s listed as available for every address isn’t always accurate, so after seeing your search results, go to each ISP’s website, search for your address and see what prices and speeds they offer you. Maybe, just maybe, you can get an upgrade that will get you that cat video a whole lot faster. Update This story has been updated to include the findings of an investigation by The Markup. Written by: Aaron Sankin Also published here Photo by on Pascal van de Vendel Unsplash

Reasons Why Your Internet Is Slow

Razones por las que su Internet es lento

Raisons pour lesquelles votre Internet est lent

कारण आपका इंटरनेट धीमा क्यों है

インターネットが遅い理由

Razões pelas quais sua Internet está lenta

Lý do tại sao Internet của bạn chậm

互联网速度慢的原因

Photo by on Regina Valetova Unsplash I’m going to show you how to t̶u̶r̶n̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶f̶u̶n̶k̶ ̶m̶o̶t̶o̶r get started with on an development board. In this part of this tutorial, I’ll show you how to: MicroPython Espressif ESP32 first Get up & running with on the ESP32 MicroPython Connect to WiFi Upload scripts to the board Read the ambient temperature (everyone loves that, right?) In the forthcoming second part of this tutorial, I’ll show you publish the data you’ve collected with . MQTT This guide expects you to possess: …familiarity with the command-line …basic experience interfacing with development boards (like Arduino) …a basic understanding of programming in Python If I’ve glossed over something I shouldn’t have, please ! let me know Before we begin, you will need some stuff. Bill of Stuff You need Stuff in the following categories. Hardware Not necessarily stuff, but same idea. Photo by this Alexandra Cárdenas One (1) ESP32 development board such as the (any kind will do; they are all roughly the same) SparkFun ESP32 Thing One (1) digital thermometer ( ) in its TO-92 package DS18B20 datasheet One (1) 4.7kꭥ resistor Four (4) jumper wires One (1) 400-point or larger breadboard One (1) USB Micro-B cable do so. If you need to solder header pins on your dev board: these typically have the resistor built-in, so you won’t need it. You need to figure out which pin is which, however. If you have a DS18B20 “breakout board”: will Software You will need to download and install some software. Some of these things you may have installed already. Other things may need to be upgraded. This guide assumes you . ain’t got jack squat I apologize that I don’t have much information for Windows users! However, I assure you that none of this is impossible. VCP Driver If you’re running macOS or Windows, you may need to download and install a Virtual COM Port (VCP) driver, if you haven’t done so already. Typically, the USB-to-serial chip on these boards is a or ; check the datasheet for your specific board or just squint at the IC near the USB port. CP210x FT232RL Newer Linux kernels have support for these chips baked-in, so driver installation is unnecessary. Here’s an example of a CP2104 on an ESP32 dev board of mine: A SiLabs CP2104. Thanks, macro lens! To assert the driver is working, plug your dev board into your computer. If you’re on Linux, check for : /dev/ttyUSB0 $ ls -l /dev/ttyUSB0crw-rw---- 1 root dialout 188, 0 Dec 19 17:04 /dev/ttyUSB0 Or on macOS: /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART $ ls -l /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUARTcrw-rw-rw-  1 root  wheel   21,  20 Dec 19 17:10 /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART Serial Terminal A free, cross-platform, GUI terminal is . Linux & macOS users can get away with using on the command line. More purpose-built solutions include , which ships with Python 3, and can be launched via , and . CoolTerm screen miniterm python3 -m serial.tools.miniterm minicom Python, Etc. You will also need: Python v3.6.x For extra libraries, a clone or archive of ( micropython/micropython-lib git clone [https://github.com/micropython/micropython-lib](https://github.com/micropython/micropython-lib%29) ) How you install these will vary per your installation of Python: To flash the board, (version 2.2 or newer) esptool To manage files on the board, adafruit-ampy You could try . This worked for me on macOS with ; YMMV. You might need to preface that with if not using Homebrew. pip3 install esptool adafruit-ampy Homebrew sudo MicroPython Firmware Finally, you’ll need to download the . latest MicroPython firmware for ESP32 Now that our tools are at hand, we can begin by flashing the ESP32 board with MicroPython. Flashing MicroPython & First Steps Unless MicroPython is installed on your ESP32, you will want to start by connecting it to your computer via USB, and erasing its flash: already In the below examples, replace with the appropriate device or COM port for your system. /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART $ esptool.py --chip esp32 -p /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART erase_flashesptool.py v2.2Connecting........___Chip is ESP32D0WDQ6 (revision 1)Uploading stub...Running stub...Stub running...Erasing flash (this may take a while)...Chip erase completed successfully in 4.6sHard resetting... Now, we can flash it with the we downloaded earlier: firmware $ esptool.py --chip esp32 -p /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART write_flash \  -z 0x1000 ~/Downloads/esp32-20171219-v1.9.2-445-g84035f0f.binesptool.py v2.2Connecting........_Chip is ESP32D0WDQ6 (revision 1)Uploading stub...Running stub...Stub running...Configuring flash size...Auto-detected Flash size: 4MBCompressed 936288 bytes to 587495...Wrote 936288 bytes (587495 compressed) at 0x00001000 in 51.7 seconds (effective 144.8 kbit/s)...Hash of data verified.

Leaving...Hard resetting... If you’re feeling dangerous, you can increase the baud rate when flashing by using the option. --baud If that worked, you should be able to enter a MicroPython REPL by opening up the port: # 115200 is the baud rate at which the REPL communicates$ screen /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART 115200

>>> Congratulations, is your REPL prompt. This works similarly to a normal Python REPL (e.g. just running with no arguments). Try the function: >>> python3 help() >>> help()Welcome to MicroPython on the ESP32!

For generic online docs please visit http://docs.micropython.org/

For access to the hardware use the 'machine' module:

import machinepin12 = machine.Pin(12, machine.Pin.OUT)pin12.value(1)pin13 = machine.Pin(13, machine.Pin.IN, machine.Pin.PULL_UP)print(pin13.value())i2c = machine.I2C(scl=machine.Pin(21), sda=machine.Pin(22))i2c.scan()i2c.writeto(addr, b'1234')i2c.readfrom(addr, 4)

Basic WiFi configuration:

import networksta_if = network.WLAN(network.STA_IF); sta_if.active(True)sta_if.scan()                             # Scan for available access pointssta_if.connect("<AP_name>", "<password>") # Connect to an APsta_if.isconnected()                      # Check for successful connection

Control commands:  CTRL-A        -- on a blank line, enter raw REPL mode  CTRL-B        -- on a blank line, enter normal REPL mode  CTRL-C        -- interrupt a running program  CTRL-D        -- on a blank line, do a soft reset of the board  CTRL-E        -- on a blank line, enter paste mode

For further help on a specific object, type help(obj)For a list of available modules, type help('modules') If you’ve never seen this before on an MCU: , crazy, right? I know You can type in the commands from “Basic WiFi configuration” to connect. You will see a good deal of debugging information from the ESP32 (this can be suppressed, as you’ll see): >>> import network>>> sta_if = network.WLAN(network.STA_IF)I (323563) wifi: wifi firmware version: 111e74dI (323563) wifi: config NVS flash: enabledI (323563) wifi: config nano formating: disabledI (323563) system_api: Base MAC address is not set, read default base MAC address from BLK0 of EFUSEI (323573) system_api: Base MAC address is not set, read default base MAC address from BLK0 of EFUSEI (323593) wifi: Init dynamic tx buffer num: 32I (323593) wifi: Init data frame dynamic rx buffer num: 64I (323593) wifi: Init management frame dynamic rx buffer num: 64I (323603) wifi: wifi driver task: 3ffe1584, prio:23, stack:4096I (323603) wifi: Init static rx buffer num: 10I (323613) wifi: Init dynamic rx buffer num: 0I (323613) wifi: Init rx ampdu len mblock:7I (323623) wifi: Init lldesc rx ampdu entry mblock:4I (323623) wifi: wifi power manager task: 0x3ffe84b0 prio: 21 stack: 2560W (323633) phy_init: failed to load RF calibration data (0x1102), falling back to full calibrationI (323793) phy: phy_version: 362.0, 61e8d92, Sep  8 2017, 18:48:11, 0, 2I (323803) wifi: mode : null>>> sta_if.active(True)I (328553) wifi: mode : sta (30:ae:a4:27:d4:88)I (328553) wifi: STA_STARTTrue>>> sta_if.scan()I (389423) network: event 1[(b'SON OF ZOLTAR', b"`\xe3'\xcf\xf4\xf5", 1, -57, 4, False), (b'CenturyLink6105', b'`1\x97%\xd9t', 1, -96, 4, False)]>>> sta_if.connect('SON OF ZOLTAR', '<REDACTED>')>>> I (689573) wifi: n:1 0, o:1 0, ap:255 255, sta:1 0, prof:1I (690133) wifi: state: init -> auth (b0)I (690133) wifi: state: auth -> assoc (0)I (690143) wifi: state: assoc -> run (10)I (690163) wifi: connected with SON OF ZOLTAR, channel 1I (690173) network: event 4I (691723) event: sta ip: 10.0.0.26, mask: 255.255.255.0, gw: 10.0.0.1I (691723) network: GOT_IPI (693143) wifi: pm start, type:0

>>> sta_if.isconnected()True Cool, huh? Now that we know we can connect to WiFi, let’s have the board connect every time it powers up. Creating a MicroPython Module To perform tasks upon boot, MicroPython wants you to put code in a file named , which is a MicroPython module. boot.py Let’s create with code modified from , replacing where indicated: boot.py the MicroPython ESP8266 docs def connect():    import network    sta_if = network.WLAN(network.STA_IF)    if not sta_if.isconnected():        print('connecting to network...')        sta_if.active(True)        sta_if.connect('<YOUR WIFI SSID>', '<YOUR WIFI PASS>')        while not sta_if.isconnected():            pass    print('network config:', sta_if.ifconfig()) We can also create a function to disable debugging output. Append to : boot.py def no_debug():    import esp    # this can be run from the REPL as well    esp.osdebug(None) These functions will be at boot, but not called automatically. Let’s test them before making them automatically execute. defined To do this, we can upload . You’ll need to close the connection to the serial port. If you’re using , type , then to confirm; otherwise disconnect or just quit your terminal program. boot.py screen Ctrl-A Ctrl-\ y Uploading a MicroPython Module Though there are other ways to do this, I’ve found the most straightforward for the ESP32 is to use , a general-purpose tool by . Here’s what it can do: ampy Adafruit $ ampy --help

Usage: ampy [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  ampy - Adafruit MicroPython Tool

  Ampy is a tool to control MicroPython boards over a serial  connection.  Using ampy you can manipulate files on the board's  internal filesystem and even run scripts.

Options:  -p, --port PORT  Name of serial port for connected board.  Can                   optionally specify with AMPY_PORT environemnt                   variable.  [required]  -b, --baud BAUD  Baud rate for the serial connection (default                   115200).  Can optionally specify with AMPY_BAUD                   environment variable.  --version        Show the version and exit.  --help           Show this message and exit.

Commands:  get    Retrieve a file from the board.  ls     List contents of a directory on the board.  mkdir  Create a directory on the board.  put    Put a file or folder and its contents on the...  reset  Perform soft reset/reboot of the board.  rm     Remove a file from the board.  rmdir  Forcefully remove a folder and all its...  run    Run a script and print its output. MicroPython stores files (scripts or anything else that fits) in a very basic filesystem. By default, an empty should exist already. To list the files on your board, execute: boot.py $ ampy -p /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART lsboot.py Using the command will echo a file’s contents to your shell (which could be piped to a file, if you wish): get $ ampy -p /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART get boot.py# This file is executed on every boot (including wake-boot from deepsleep) We can overwrite it with our own : boot.py $ ampy -p /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART put boot.py And retrieve it to see that it overwrote the default : boot.py $ ampy -p /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART get boot.pydef connect():    import network    sta_if = network.WLAN(network.STA_IF)    if not sta_if.isconnected():        print('connecting to network...')        sta_if.active(True)        sta_if.connect('<YOUR WIFI SSID>', '<YOUR WIFI PASS>')        while not sta_if.isconnected():            pass    print('network config:', sta_if.ifconfig())

def no_debug():    import esp    # this can be run from the REPL as well    esp.osdebug(None) Success! This is the gist of uploading files with . You can also upload entire folders, as we’ll see later. ampy From here, we can open our REPL again, and run our code. No need to restart the board! Running a MicroPython Module In following examples, I will eliminate the command prompt ( **>>>** ) from code run in a REPL, for ease of copying & pasting. Re-connect to the REPL. $ screen /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART 115200 First, we’ll disconnect from WiFi: import networksta_if = network.WLAN(network.STA_IF)sta_if.disconnect() Debug output follows: I (3299583) wifi: state: run -> init (0)I (3299583) wifi: n:1 0, o:1 0, ap:255 255, sta:1 0, prof:1I (3299583) wifi: pm stop, total sleep time: 0/-1688526567I (3299583) wifi: STA_DISCONNECTED, reason:8 Then, we can the module. This will make our and functions available. import boot connect no_debug import bootconnect() Output: connecting to network...I (87841) wifi: n:1 0, o:1 0, ap:255 255, sta:1 0, prof:1I (88401) wifi: state: init -> auth (b0)I (88401) wifi: state: auth -> assoc (0)I (88411) wifi: state: assoc -> run (10)I (88441) wifi: connected with SON OF ZOLTAR, channel 1I (88441) network: event 4I (90081) event: sta ip: 10.0.0.26, mask: 255.255.255.0, gw: 10.0.0.1I (90081) network: GOT_IPnetwork config: ('10.0.0.26', '255.255.255.0', '10.0.0.1', '10.0.0.1')I (91411) wifi: pm start, type:0 Super. Let’s silence the noise, and try again: no_debug()sta_if.disconnect()connect() Output: connecting to network...network config: ('10.0.0.26', '255.255.255.0', '10.0.0.1', '10.0.0.1') LGTM. The IP addresses above depend upon your local network configuration, and will likely be different. Disconnect from the port (if using : , ) and append these lines to : screen Ctrl-A Ctrl-\ y boot.py no_debug()connect() Upload it again via , which will overwrite the existing . Hard reset (“push the button”) or otherwise power -cycle the board. Reconnect to the REPL and execute to assert connectivity: ampy put boot.py boot.py connect() connect() Output: network config: ('10.0.0.26', '255.255.255.0', '10.0.0.1', '10.0.0.1') You’ll notice “connecting to network…” was not printed to the console; if already connected, the function prints the configuration and returns. If you’ve gotten this far, then your board is successfully connecting to Wifi at boot. Good job! connect() We now have two more items to check off our list, unless you forgot what we were trying to do: We need to read the ambient temperature on an interval. We need to publish this information to an broker. MQTT Next, we’ll knock out that temperature reading. Temperature Readings in MicroPython As we write our code, we can use the REPL to experiment. I’m using the example . You’ll need to import three (3) modules, , and (note the ): found here machine onewire ds18x20 x import machine, onewire, ds18x20 I’ve connected my sensor to pin 12 on my ESP32. Your breadboard should look something like this: Example breadboard wiring for ESP32 dev board and DS18B20 To read temperature, we will create a -like object by passing a instance into a constructor (read about ) and finally into a constructor: Matryoshka-doll Pin OneWire 1-Wire DS18X20 pin = machine.Pin(12)wire = onewire.OneWire(pin)ds = ds18x20.DS18X20(wire) Note that if the output of the following command is an empty list ( ), the sensor couldn't be found. Check your wiring! [] Now, we can ask to scan for connected devices, and return their addresses: ds ds.scan() Output: [bytearray(b'(\xee3\x0c"\x15\x004')] returns a of device addresses in format. Yours may look slightly different. Since we only have one, we can save its address to a variable. To read temperature data, we tell the 1-Wire bus to reset via , take a short pause of 750ms (in case you're pasting this): ds.scan() list bytearray ds.convert_temp() import timeaddr = ds.scan().pop()ds.convert_temp()time.sleep_ms(750)temp = ds.read_temp(addr)temp Output: 19.875 This reading is in Celsius. If you’re like me, you don’t speak Celsius, so maybe you want to convert it to Fahrenheit: (temp * 1.8) + 32 Output: 67.775 …which is right around what I expected! Let’s take what we’ve done and create a new file, : temperature.py import timefrom machine import Pinfrom onewire import OneWirefrom ds18x20 import DS18X20

class TemperatureSensor:    """    Represents a Temperature sensor    """    def __init__(self, pin):        """        Finds address of single DS18B20 on bus specified by `pin`        :param pin: 1-Wire bus pin        :type pin: int        """        self.ds = DS18X20(OneWire(Pin(pin)))        addrs = self.ds.scan()        if not addrs:            raise Exception('no DS18B20 found at bus on pin %d' % pin)        # save what should be the only address found        self.addr = addrs.pop()

    def read_temp(self, fahrenheit=True):        """        Reads temperature from a single DS18X20        :param fahrenheit: Whether or not to return value in Fahrenheit        :type fahrenheit: bool        :return: Temperature        :rtype: float        """        self.ds.convert_temp()        time.sleep_ms(750)        temp = self.ds.read_temp(self.addr)        if fahrenheit:            return self.c_to_f(temp)        return temp

    @staticmethod    def c_to_f(c):        """        Converts Celsius to Fahrenheit        :param c: Temperature in Celsius        :type c: float        :return: Temperature in Fahrenheit        :rtype: float        """        return (c * 1.8) + 32 Disconnect from the REPL. Upload via : temperature.py ampy $ ampy -p /dev/tty.SLAB_USBtoUART put temperature.py Then we can open our REPL once again, and try it: from temperature import TemperatureSensort = TemperatureSensor(12)t.read_temp() # use t.read_temp(False) to return Celsius Seems to have warmed up a bit. Output: 68.7875 Good work! Conclusion of Part One (1) In the first part of this tutorial, we’ve learned how to: Flash an ESP32 dev board with MicroPython Use MicroPython’s REPL to experiment Connect the ESP32 to WiFi Upload and execute MicroPython scripts Read the temperature with a 1-Wire DS18B20 sensor In the forthcoming part of this tutorial, we’ll learn about MQTT, how to publish our temperature data to an MQTT broker, and likewise interface with an MQTT-based cloud “IoT platform”. second This article originally appeared January 8, 2018 on boneskull.com .

Get on the Good Foot with MicroPython on the ESP32

It’s 2017 and you’re going to buy a new house. You need to choose who will deliver the garbage on your public street, choose your electric provider that uses immobile pylons, and in some cases, sign up for the water service operated by a private utility. These are all second nature decisions you need to make to live a productive and sustainable life. Net neutrality has been the decade’s most hotly debated topic. Today, we have a White House whose attitudes represent the antithesis of the entire concept. While it’s speculated that FCC commissioner Ajit Pai formerly supported concepts of open internet, that he is publicly against it. it is well known My solution to the net neutrality issue is designed to be implemented on a local scale, based on the Clinton-Gore “ ,” a national system of government-run servers and switches to provide vital information to every American household, much like how every house receives phone, gas, electrical and sewage service. information superhighway Unless you use well water, have propane, solar panels or a septic tank, you wouldn’t buy a house or live in one that doesn’t have these components, would you? Especially a phone line, such a basic form of communication that can also transmit data ( ). albeit at slower speeds, unless using a sisgital subscriber line The Huffington Post described the “information superhighway” in detail: There is a wire that goes into your home, school or office as everyone in America is entitled to phone service. This was based on a copper wire that was put in as part of the state-based utility and most of them are controlled by what are now AT&T, Verizon and Centurylink. And these networks were aging as almost all of America had been wired for phone service by the 1960’s. Starting in 1990s, (though it varies by state), this copper wire was supposed to be replaced with a fiber optic wire, which would allow for new innovative services, not to mention cable TV and video. And it was always supposed to be an upgrade of the state-based utility known as the “PSTN”, the “Public Switched Telephone Networks”. It was also supposed to be open to all manner of competition. You, the customer, would choose who offered you Internet, cable, broadband and even phone service over that wire. Further, we learn that over the past 20 years, ISP customers and taxpayers have been paying into a system that was never going to happen through private enterprise: By the end of 2014, America will have been charged about $400 billion by the local phone incumbents, Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink, for a fiber optic future that never showed up. And though it varies by state, counting the taxes, fees and surcharges that you have paid every month (many of these fees are actually revenues to the company or taxes on the company that you paid), it comes to about $4000-$5000.00 per household from 1992–2014, and that’s the low number. The progression of my plan would be pretty simple: test it out in a few, specific, targeted places, such as a town, city or county with enough resources to deploy the network, and then expand and deploy it nationwide. Some of this is already taking place with . municipal broadband So what is the purpose of this, when there’s already plenty of competition in the marketplace today, you may ask? Well, there isn’t. Many markets across the country have near monopolies or oligopolies of service providers. Just take a look at the 2015 market share of the five major cable companies, and merge Charter with TWC. How would this work then? Isn’t it socialism? No, you’d be wrong on that front as well. This plan is about one concept, and one only: logistics. The ineptitude of the telecommunications industry and the gross persistence of their lobbies to subvert congressmen means that municipalities and governments now need to take the reins to develop innovative strategies to connect its citizens to the vital utility. Taking cues from private industry, we can look at FedEx as an example of how this would work. Within their massive distribution facilities, tens of thousand of packages move around every hour to board trailers, vans, planes and trains. Unlike UPS, FedEx does not own its ground vehicles or employ drivers (which is ), and they focus primarily on moving boxes to these vehicles. In other words, their income and profit is applied to the sophisticated sortation machines, equipment, facilities, software packages, R&D, and wages/salaries for those involved with the former. On the contrary, UPS owns all of its equipment and vehicles, not only increasing overhead costs, but also the amount of assets it needs to keep track of. controversial Another comparison can be made to the ACA open exchanges, in that customers can enter a government-run database of insurance providers and choose the best match for them. With municipal broadband, a similar dichotomy can exist. What does this have to do with (FTTP) and net neutrality? How can we build out a nationwide broadband network with this? fiber-to-the-premises First, local governments that don’t already have an FTTP system find sources to fund the construction of the lines. It could come from selling renewable energy, such as that of a nearby dam, or investing in solar projects in the area. Or, it could be as simple as a small tax that guarantees fiber will be available to all of its citizens. Next, ISPs would compete against each other to “deliver their packets” along the new utility. Just as FedEx moves boxes along the conveyors, ISPs will move packets along the fiber. If a customer finds a cheaper alternative because another ISP finds a cheaper way to get packets to them, then that option would be available. There wouldn’t be such a thing as “government run-Internet,” it would just be the government that guarantees and implements FTTP. Finally, customers can still pay for their desired speeds with their chosen ISP along the public fiber. This doesn’t mean that ISPs can slow down traffic, even if a user is on a barebones plan, because the high capacities of fiber would make such attempts futile. As it would be nothing but an attempt to dig in a customer’s wallet, local governments would have the power to sue and fine the offending ISPs in the rare case that it occurs. Even though the future of net neutrality is bleak at the moment, a bright future can exist close to home if we push for it.

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