The students at Greendale are delighted about having access to low-cost Internet — or at least they would be if Comcast hadn’t pushed them off of prime-time TV.
Internet Essentials offers qualifying subscribers a lower-cost way to get home Internet Access, but the program has previously been criticized for its restrictive eligibility requirements. Until recently, Essentials was only available to families with at least one child eligible for the national subsidized school lunch program. Families with no kids, kids that were too young or too old, were not eligible.
In a blog post today, Comcast exec David “Don’t Call Me A Lobbyist” Cohen explains, for those of us who may not be aware, that education “doesn’t just end after high school.”
Following that great revelation, Comcast has decided that community college students in Colorado in Illinois can qualify for Essentials so long as they are receiving federal Pell grants to help pay for their school.
According to Comcast, that would make around 40% of community college students in these states eligible for Essentials. Even though Comcast doesn’t service the entirety of both states, it estimates that upwards of 130,000 students could get access to Essentials.
Earlier this summer, Comcast — which recently argued against California regulators’ attempt to loosen the eligibility requirements for Essentials — began offering the program to low-income elderly customers in select markets.
Again, we point out that Comcast is not testing any of these expansions in one of the markets that needs it most: its home city of Philadelphia, which has one of the worst broadband adoption rates of any major city in the U.S.
by Chris Morran via Consumerist