New York shakes up broadband marketplace with choice of new partners

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced what he called “the largest step of any city in American history” towards providing affordable broadband for all and reversing digital redlining that has left communities of colour in particular disconnected.

Following a Request for Proposals (RFP) for its Internet Master Plan, the city will leverage a US$157 million investment to build publicly owned, open-access broadband infrastructure, reaching up to 1.6 million New Yorkers over the next three years.

The city has also selected several companies to provide new connectivity options to an additional 70,000 New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) residents and 150,000 others in the surrounding communities by early 2022. This is in addition to the 30,000 residents announced in May.

New vendors

Disparities in connectivity are especially concentrated in areas such as the South Bronx, Upper Manhattan, Southeastern Queens, and Central Brooklyn, which experience some of the city’s highest rates of neighbourhood poverty. New Yorkers in these neighbourhoods have fewer internet options, which can lead to less affordable service as long-serving incumbent providers are disincentivised to compete for customers, a statement from the city said.

Aaron Meyerson, New York’s Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Broadband, told Cities Today: “What we are trying to do through this work is not only create more equitable access for New Yorkers, but also create a more equitable marketplace. It’s the marketplace that needs to be shaken up as well.

“The new vendors that we’re bringing to the table truly are small and medium-sized enterprises – half of them are minority-led or MWBE [minority- and women-owned business enterprises] themselves, and so they’re able to take advantage of new opportunities.”

Vendors selected through the RFP include BlocPower, Flume, Honest Networks, NYC Mesh, Silicon Harlem, Sky Packets, The Smart Community, Initiative, Inc, Starry, T-Mobile, Skywire Networks, and Younity.

Varied approach

Conversations with vendors are ongoing so full details are not available yet but Meyerson said the open-access infrastructure will vary by neighbourhood and even building type.

“There will be a number of deployment topologies from different vendors in different neighbourhoods. No two neighbourhoods are the same and different areas of the city include different levels of infrastructure already,” he commented.

Deployments will include fibre, fixed wireless on rooftops, public Wi-Fi and building-wide Wi-Fi.

“These allow New Yorkers to get connected but in different ways,” said Meyerson. “We see them as pieces of a larger puzzle that over time we’ll be able to use to fill in the gaps that we identify throughout the city.”

All of the selected vendors have committed to adhering to the broadband principles in the Internet Master Plan: equity, performance, affordability, privacy and choice. They must provide broadband speeds as defined by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) at 25 Mbps download and 3 Mbps upload, though many are offering services that are much faster, Meyerson said.

On whether the city will generate revenue from the infrastructure, as other cities plan to, Meyerson commented: “At this point in time, we don’t have anything to announce about that but in the RFP we certainly were open to hearing from vendors about this and are thinking about ways to ensure that the infrastructure that we build today is useful for the long term.”

The Internet Master Plan involves using assets from over 18 different city agencies.

Main image: Colton Duke on Unsplash