NYC’s Once Bold Broadband Plan Now A Jumbled Mess Of Half-Measures
from the more-of-the-same dept
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.
Filed Under: Affordable Connectivity Program, big apple connect, broadband, competition, digital divide, eric adams, fcc, fiber, high speed internet, natural monopolies, nyc, open access, telecom
Companies: charter communications
Comments on “NYC’s Once Bold Broadband Plan Now A Jumbled Mess Of Half-Measures”
The check is in the mail.
The government is here to help.
Yeah baby I pulled out.
Humans, I’m starting to think y’all enjoy being fscked over by the same serial abusers over & over.
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As much as it will apparently hurt you on levels both physical and mental to say as much, you’re one of us, too, meatbag. You ain’t above getting fooled and fooled again.
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Nope… Immortal Sociopath here.
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If you want to roleplay as Elon Musk, please do it somewhere else.
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Oww… rude.
So the typical story: distract people with an unbalanced focus on “addressing” the symptoms, while making any actual threat to the root cause it quashed. And of course if “addressing” the symptoms can be made to line the root causes’ pockets, that’s even better.
Also hope a 3rd party will scream “Look! A distraction!” in the mean time.
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And they will keep getting screwed over because that’s what they deserve.
At least until everyone realizes that this is utter bullshit and does something, like take a page out of Lenin’s revolution playbook.
No, the revolution will have to be messy and violent. I highly doubt there will be any other way unless you tell me that protesting, rioting, and boycotts will eventually work, but the foe will adapt to these eventually.
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The most common outcome of a revolution is to install a dictatorship that is as bad as or worse than the government that is replaced.
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And I’m well aware of the history.
But I will also say this, the other options don’t seem exactly convincing to me. I doubt Verizon or the other asshole company is gonna bow down to a bunch of boycotts and while municipal broadband is great and all, it also relies on an open fiber infrastructure to work, or the “benevolence” of a corp like Google to start laying down infrastructure.
And you know how those go.
Revolution should ideally be the last resortt, but unless municipal broadband can start resisiting the underhanded bullshit Big Telecom and theiir captured regulators, we will need to start considering if we have to “break the glass”, so to speak.”
Does anyone else feel like this breakdown isn’t as “full” a claimed? I don’t see that it explains much at all. Like, “The city put over $160 million in the budget to make this happen, … But not a nickel of it was spent. The challenge we had, that there were no resources”—was the problem that the city promised money they had no intention to provide, or that nobody could get their shit together to hire people and make purchases?
Or “it proved daunting to build public infrastructure after relying on private companies who have no obligation to share their resources”—well, why? It says Verizon isn’t required to sell access to their networks. Didn’t everyone know that going in? For “last mile” connections, it’s been that way for like 15-20 years, as I recall. But Techdirt’s pointed out, repeatedly, that ISPs have been claiming Title II status for at least parts of their fiber networks. Does that have any impact? The story doesn’t mention it at all.
“it became clear that the city was still grappling with this idea of having a city-owned fiber backbone”—again, why, and to what effect? Who was “grappling”, and how much of this did they need to understand? Were they somehow blocking the implementation? Were they unable or unwilling to delegate this to competent contractors? Did anyone investigate backbone-free models, e.g. running fiber to a cabinet in each neighborhood, connecting the cabinets via empty conduits or dark fiber (to be leased by ISPs), and making policies to lay conduit/fiber whenever roads are (re-)constructed?
“These challenges put the Internet Master Plan in a vulnerable place at the start of 2022, when Mayor Adams took office. … During a City Council hearing in May, chief technology officer Matthew Fraser said the Internet Master Plan was under review”—how much power do the the mayor and CTO have, and what did they do? Can they and did they unilaterally put this “under review”, and if so, can city council override them? Or was it council that paused the rollout?
Really, I don’t feel like I learned much at all from the article. It seems to raise more questions than it answers, and is more like a general bitching about politics and monopoly power than a serious investigation. What actionable data does it provide? We already knew the process was politically difficult and would be opposed by incumbent ISPs. But that’s true everywhere, and other areas—including in the USA—have successfully built open-access municipal networks or effective programs for third-party access to incumbent infrastructure. Yet the closest the article comes to hinting at the existence of life outside NYC is the description of this as the “first [such] effort by a large U.S. city”.
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Oops. Once again I beseech the people running Techdirt to make the Preview button work again.
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I was left disappointed reading that too. The best I can figure, by reading between the lines:
1.) Much time and effort was spent studying the problem and creating a plan, but then no money actually got spent on installing a network.
2.) The original plan involved giving money to smaller providers, but for some reason it couldn’t be accomplished. Perhaps they didn’t have the manpower for installations? Or maybe the small companies demanded to own the fiber? It doesn’t explain exactly why, but the bottom line is that the money didn’t get to the boots on the ground.
3.) Apparently the only way to actually lay down the fiber line was to go with the larger providers that insist on monopoly control of the build-out in their contracts, leaving the city with the same old monopoly system as before.
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One of the links in this post suggests that New York State has the power to “kick out” ISPs, and insist on contractual terms. So, if ISPs think they can boss the city around, what was the State doing?
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Being Big Telecom’s bitches, that’s what.
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Knowing who the current and previous governor are, they’re less the word you used and more like “willing accomplices”.
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“Embracing half-hearted feel-good measures” is what liberals always do.
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As opposed to the “let everything crumble, then blame the libs for not doing anything even while we had all the power” approach of modern American conservatives.
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The American public are nearly united in their disdain for large ISPs. I see little reason to bring up partisan bickering from either direction, and few notable successes from either.
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While that is true, ISPs have bought off Republicans and corporate Democrats. I still think that’s worth mentioning.
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Sure, point out when some party or politician is doing something good or bad with regards to internet access. But don’t pretend it has much to do with being liberal or conservative, or that those terms have any real meaning when used by politicians.
Switching between two parties that have basically the same policies regarding broadband and corporatism doesn’t do anything, so neither does arguing about which is worse. Voters don’t see this as a partisan thing.
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Cutting Through the Noise
Here is a look into how the mirage reality of world events is constructed:
“The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media.”
—Former CIA Director William Colby
I was taught to lie, to betray and not to tell the truth to the public.
…
I ended up publishing articles under my own name written by agents of the CIA and other intelligence services, especially the German secret service.
…
Most journalists from respected and big media organisations are closely connected to the German Marshall Fund, the Atlantik-Brücke or other so-called transatlantic organisations…once you’re connected, you make friends with selected Americans. You think they are your friends and you start cooperating. They work on your ego, make you feel like you’re important. And one day one of them will ask you ‘Will you do me this favor’…
…
We’re talking about puppets on a string, journalists who write or say whatever their masters tell them to say or write. If you see how the mainstream media is reporting about the Ukraine conflict and if you know what’s really going on, you get the picture. The masters in the background are pushing for war with Russia and western journalists are putting on their helmets.
…
When I told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Ulfkotte’s newspaper) that I would publish the book, their lawyers sent me a letter threatening with all legal consequences if I would publish any names or secrets — but I don’t mind. You see, I don’t have children to take care of.
—Udo Ulfkotte, German Journalist in 2017, Now Dead
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So what the actual fuck does this have to do with MUNICIPAL ISPS, REGULATORY CAPTURE, AND HOW FUCKED BROADBAND IS IN THE US?
Because the whole thing is entirely self-inflicted, by cable monopolies who care only about fleecing the American public by scamming them.
While China and Russia might exploit this, they clearly aren’t casuing the problem YET.
and as per usual, no one of any authority who could take these tossers to task will do a fucking thing! let’s face it, the telecoms companies have more power than anyone else, anywhere, including in government, so why would they give a shit? they’ll keep taking the funding that’s thrown at them for completing certain upgrades/new builds, will do about 25% of what they should, then wait for the next load of funding!
Eric Adams
Here’s something you should know about Eric Adams: He’s a cop, and he’s quite conservative. I would bank on the “pausing” (more like scrapping) of the broadband plan had as much to do with ideology as it had to do with the potential consequences of taking on the modern-day equivalents of Ma Bell.
Forget 'insanity' this goes straight into 'open corruption' territory
‘We’ve thrown a bunch of money to the current companies in the market and what we got in return was so abysmal that we decided it was worth it it to do it ourselves, however we’re having some difficulties with that, who should we get to help?’
‘Oooh, how about the very same company that our network will be competing with, I’m sure if we throw tens of millions at them they’ll provide a stellar service in no way compromised by the massive conflict of interest that anyone with two brain-cells to knock together can see!’
‘Brilliant, make it so!’