T-Mobile has agreed to improve the home internet service it sells to low-income New Yorkers after the state Attorney General’s office found the company drastically capped speeds for participants in a state-mandated affordable program — and buried the plans where almost nobody could find them, as Gothamist reported Monday.
The case turns on New York’s Affordable Broadband Act, which requires home internet providers to offer qualifying households reduced-cost plans: no more than $15 a month for 25 Mbps download speeds, or $20 a month for at least 200 Mbps. Eligibility runs through government benefits like Medicaid, SNAP and HEAP — precisely the households for whom a home connection to school, work and benefits matters most.
What the Attorney General’s investigators found reads like a lesson in compliance theater. Just 15 households statewide were enrolled in T-Mobile’s Affordable Broadband Act plans, according to a spokesperson for Attorney General Letitia James. The company had coded its website so information about the plans would not appear in search engine results, despite the law’s requirement that providers make an effort to promote them. And for the few who did sign up, speeds collapsed after 50 gigabytes of monthly use — reduced by more than 97%, to 650 kilobits per second, a limit the office estimated a typical user would exhaust in about four days.
“Reliable and affordable internet service is a basic need for all New Yorkers, but T-Mobile flouted the law designed to help vulnerable New Yorkers access it,” James said. Her office estimated the throttled service effectively stranded subscribers at dial-up-era speeds while they paid for what the law promised.
Under the agreement, T-Mobile will remove the data caps for Affordable Broadband Act subscribers, deliver the download speeds required by law, expand its offerings to more areas of the state, and make the plans easier to find and sign up for. A company spokesperson said the deal “provides more clarity around the company’s offering and makes the plan available to more customers.” The agreement avoids a finding of liability, and T-Mobile is not paying a publicized penalty; the remedy is behavioral.
For New York’s other internet providers, the message is that the state’s enforcement of the Affordable Broadband Act — passed in 2021, upheld by courts after industry challenge, and now being policed by the Attorney General — has moved from paper to practice. Advocates for low-income households have long argued that the statute’s reach depends on exactly this kind of scrutiny, because the eligible population rarely knows it exists: a plan that is legal on the books but invisible in search results functions, in practice, as no plan at all.
New Yorkers who receive Medicaid, SNAP or HEAP benefits can check their eligibility for $15 and $20 plans with any major provider, and the state is pushing enrollment through its broadband office. Whether the market’s cheapest tiers now actually deliver the speeds the law promises will be measured, as always, one throttled evening at a time.
