Comcast Internet Essentials brings low-cost Internet to more than 5,700 Philly families, up from 463 last year

Local participation in Comcast‘s low-cost “Internet Essentials” program has drastically improved from last year, according to data from a recent Comcast release. The company took a bruising for a lackluster launch for the initiative.

More than 5,700 families in Philadelphia are using the service, up from a mere 463 families at around this time last year. We’ll note that this isn’t a completely fair comparison because Internet Essentials had only been launched for four months when it reported that 463 families had activated the service. Still, the growth is and suggests that Comcast changed its outreach tactics following that early report. Comcast launched the second year of the federally-mandated program last September.

Philadelphia still lags behind other cities in adoption, said Comcast executive vice president David Cohen, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer. That’s evidenced by the numbers: last year, we reported that more than 150,000 families in Philadelphia were eligible for Internet Essentials. That number can only have increased because Comcast expanded its eligibility requirements to include students from private and parochial schools, as well as home-schooled students. This changed added about 300,000 more eligible families nationally, the Inquirer reported.

In Pennsylvania, more than 7,800 families are using Internet Essentials, according to the recent report. Nationally, that number jumps to 150,000 families. Read the whole report here.