Families that can’t afford to pay from $30 per month for Comcast’s Internet access services now have a less expensive alternative. The cable provider launched a new plan dubbed Internet Essentials, which will cost low-income families only $10 per month for Web access.

The new service is part of Comcast’s bid to comply with regulators who required the company to help poor families connect to the Internet in exchange for approval of the acquisition of NBC Universal.

The low-cost connection will feature a paltry 1.5 Mbps download speed, and up to 384 Kbps upload, Comcast said, and the option will be available in the 39 states the cable provider currently serves. Comcast won’t charge for the activation costs or equipment rental fees either, and the company guaranteed no price increases on the $10 monthly fee.

Who is Eligible

Families have to meet four different criteria in order to benefit from Comcast’s Internet Essentials. One of the children has to be enrolled in the National School Lunch Program; families have to be in one of the 39 states Comcast serves; they can’t have had Internet service from the company 90 days prior to joining the program; and can’t have any overdue Comcast bills or unreturned equipment. Once enrolled, Comcast also offers vouchers towards a budget computer worth $150.

The new Comcast scheme for low-income families is expected to begin in September at the start of the 2011–2012 school year, and the initial concept is to keep families enrolled for three years. The Miami Herald estimates that a family of four making $29,055 a year would qualify for the deal. About 60 percent of the 300,000-plus students in Miami-Dade County Public Schools would qualify.

Source: PCWorld.com

What is Net Neutrality?

As its name indicates, net neutrality is about creating a neutral internet. The basic principle driving net neutrality is that the internet should be a free and open platform, almost like any other utility we use in our home (like electricity). Users should be able to use their bandwidth however they want (as long as it’s legal), and internet service providers should not be able to provide priority service to any corner of the internet. Every web site (whether it’s Google, Netflix, Amazon, or UnknownStartup.com) should all be treated the same when it comes to giving users the bandwidth to reach the internet-connected services they prefer. Your electric company has no say over how you use your electricity—they only get to charge you for providing the electricity. Net neutrality aims to do something similar with your internet pipes.

Those against net neutrality—commonly including internet service providers (ISPs), like Comcast or AT&T—believe that, as providers of internet access, they should be able to distribute bandwidth differently depending on the service. They’d prefer, for example, to create tiers of internet service that’s more about paying for priority access than for bandwidth speeds. As such, in theory, they could charge high-bandwidth services—like Netflix, for example—extra money, since their service costs more for Comcast to provide to its customers—or they could charge users, like you and me, extra to access Netflix. They can also provide certain services to you at different speeds. For example, perhaps your ISP might give preferential treatment to Hulu, so it streams Hulu videos quickly and for free, while Netflix is stuck running slowly (or we have to pay extra to access it).

What are the Arguments For Net Neutrality?

Proponents of net neutrality don’t want to give the ISPs too much power because it could easily be abused. Imagine that Verizon or AT&T don’t like the idea of Google Voice, because it allows you to send text messages for free using your data connection. Your cellphone carrier could block access to Google Voice from your smartphone so you’re forced to pay for a texting plan from them. Or, they see that a lot of people are using Facebook on their smartphone, so even if they have the bandwidth to carry that traffic, they decide to charge you extra to access Facebook, just because they know it’s in high demand and that they can make a profit.

Image via Reddit. Hit the link for the full image.

Similarly, Comcast recently got in a tiff with Netflix over its streaming video offerings, essentially telling Netflix’s partners that they’d need to pay if they wanted their content delivered on their network. Comcast argued that streaming Netflix is a huge traffic burden, and if they’re going to provide that service they’ll need to update their infrastructure. Netflix’s argument was that Comcast provides the internet, and it’s Comcasts users that have requested that extra bandwidth for the services they want.

Another way to look at it: Comcast also has their own On Demand service which directly competes with Netflix—and if Comcast is allowed to divide up their service as they please, the option to give preferential treatment to their own service isn’t exactly fair just because they’re the internet provider. And, with Comcast and NBC looking to merge, the waters can get even murkier. The resulting superpower could give preference to all of NBC’s content too, thus leaving other content providers out in the cold.

Another problem here is that while big services like Netflix could, in theory, afford to pay Comcast for using extra bandwidth, the small, lesser-known services—that could be big one day but aren’t yet—can’t. Really great web sites or internet services might never gain popularity merely because ISPs would have control over what kind of access users like you and me have to that service. That could greatly stifle innovation, and we’d likely miss out on a lot of cool new services. (more…)

Here is a basic explanation of how the Internet works: