NYC’s Once Bold Broadband Plan Now A Jumbled Mess Of Half-Measures

Back in 2020, New York City officials unveiled an aggressive plan to revolutionize broadband in the city. The centerpiece of this Internet Master Plan involved building a $156 million open access fiber network that competitors could easily join at low cost, driving some much needed competition - and lower rates, faster speeds, and better coverage - to New York City residents.

It wasn't meant to be.

Earlier this year, new incoming Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city would be pausing" the initiative. In reality, folks who'd been working on the project for years told me that the most ambitious portion of the plan - actively challenging the city's telecom monopolies with an open access fiber network - was killed off without any consultation with the experts who crafted it.

Instead, the city embraced a number of digital divide" programs partnering with the very companies that have caused competitive problems in the city for decades. Again, without consulting any of the folks who worked for years on the original plan to disrupt the uncompetitive logjam:

While Next City's reporting underscores that the new administration did not consult with the original Internet Master Plan team, it also points to a larger issue. The community-based providers that the city had tapped to help build neutral host" infrastructure have been left high and dry - in favor of a partnership with two major companies the master plan would have challenged.

(The full breakdown of what went wrong in New York City is worth a read).

Instead, the city embraced a program dubbed Big Apple Connect. Under Big Apple Connect, the city partnered with regional cable giant Charter Communications to give free broadband temporarily to around 400,000 folks living in public housing around the city. The program will cost about $30 million a year and run for at least three years, after which those users are likely out of luck.

The problem: like so many digital divide" initiatives, Big Apple Connect doesn't directly challenge the monopoly power responsible for high prices in the first place. Charter's service has been so abysmal, the company was almost kicked out of New York State in 2018. The city also sued Verizon in 2017 for failing to live up to citywide fiber deployment promises.

The broadband problem in New York City, as it is in most cities, is a story of unchecked monopolization. Big Apple Connect does help people, temporarily. But it does so by glossing over the real cause of the problem in partnership with the same, select, giant companies that helped create it. It's political theater designed to look like the city is fixing the problem... without actually fixing the problem.

Some former city leaders also suggest Big Apple Connect is a redundant waste of money. As part of the federal infrastructure bill, the government embraced the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP). ACP already doles out a $30 discount to all low-income residents for broadband. Only 500,000 of the estimated 2 million New Yorkers who qualify for the program have actually signed up for it.

So the city could have worked on boosting awareness and access to the ACP program for (mostly) free. That freed $90 million would have gone a long way in building at least part of the original open access network plan, which would have driven prices down for everybody in range... permanently... through physical, real world competition among truly local providers and groups.

We've talked a lot about how U.S. telecom policy could easily challenge monopoly power through cooperative, utility, and municipal open access fiber networks (we just published a big report on this very subject). We don't want to do that with any consistency, because telecom monopolies are not only politically powerful, they're routinely tied to our intelligence gathering and first responder networks.

Instead, we tend to embrace a lot of half-hearted feel good measures that usually involve throwing even greater subsidies at the regional monopolies responsible for killing off competition in the first place, then standing around with our hands on our hips wondering why things don't really improve.

The potential was there to create an open access network in New York City that streamlined access to essential city real estate and numerous, discordant agencies, creating an inspirational model for other major cities facing the same problem. Instead, Adams did what many politicians do when it comes to broadband and the digital divide: embraced a bunch of safe, half-cooked, half measures.