It has become part of the city’s progressive conventional wisdom that there are digital deserts in neighborhoods across the boroughs, and this contributes to a widely assumed “digital divide.” However, like with so much else of the political conventional wisdom, these accepted truths have a problem. They don’t happen to reflect the actual facts.

The truth is that the city has an abundance of fiber optic cable that reaches across the five boroughs. In particular, Verizon is obligated under its franchise with the City to provide internet and cable service to just about every home in town. Altice, formerly Cablevision, which operates under the brand Optimum and is another one of the city’s cable providers also has a growing fiber optic network. The city’s third cable company, Charter Communications, operating under the name Spectrum, offers inferior copper wire internet service to a large number of New York City homes. But in addition, there are about two dozen other companies who have laid fiber around the city for purposes other than selling cable and broadband service to residential customers.

One of those is Transit Wireless, which now has a network providing mobile telephone and Wi-Fi internet service to the MTA’s underground subway stations. Transit Wireless, a division of BAI, an Australian telecommunications giant, owned in turn by Canadian pension funds, has just contracted with the MTA to provide the same services to all of the subway system’s tunnels and above ground stations (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/29/nyregion/mta-cellphone-service-subway-tunnels.html). In order to run this service, Transit Wireless will have a high-capacity fiber optic network that mirrors the subway map. 

Another is a company called Zen-Fi, which has been in the business of providing telecommunications infrastructure to the mobile telephone companies – T-Mobile and AT&T (BAI has apparently recently announced its intention to acquire ZenFi). Last year ZenFi entered into a deal with the City of New York to expand its fiber network, which included service to the LinkNYC public Wi-Fi kiosks, to a newly designed sidewalk kiosk that has the capacity to carry mobile telephone transmitters to support the latest iteration of mobile telephone technology called “5G.” Both Transit Wireless’ and ZenFi’s networks could be leveraged to provide more competitively priced home broadband service.

Fiber optic cable is pretty amazing stuff (in “Fiber,” Yale: 2018, Susan Crawford lays all of this out). Most importantly, the electronic pulses it carries are the backbone of all telecommunications transmissions for the foreseeable future. Phone calls went over copper wires for decades. Now, fiber can carry land line phone calls, cable signals, high speed broadband internet service, commercial data transmission and mobile phone service. While mobile phone service is called “wireless,” for much of its journey, mobile phone signals have to travel along a fiber optic pathway – it could be thousands of miles under vast oceans, or around the corner. But the signal goes from your phone – wirelessly to a receiver, then to a fiber cable, then to a transmitter, and then wirelessly to the destination phone (with lots of switches in between). The infrastructure is mostly wired, despite the nomenclature.

Fiber optic cable, which is made up of a bundle of thin glass strands through which light is transmitted carrying electronic information, has a couple of other nifty features. First, because there is no friction in the transmission of light through the glass strands, it doesn’t degrade. As far as we know now it lasts forever. A fiber cable may get accidentally cut (as in New York City it is either buried under streets or suspended from poles), or the insulation around it may get damaged (from water or heat), but the strands themselves stay calm and carry on indefinitely. Fiber optic cable also has a theoretically boundless capacity to carry information. A tremendous amount of information can be pushed through the fiber at the same time. What the much ballyhooed 5G mobile service is about is changing the way in which the light pulses are organized, transmitted, switched and read in the cable (and wirelessly), so that more data (including voice) can be pushed through the same amount of cable. 

Also interesting is the role that Verizon plays in all this in New York City. Verizon is the successor to New York City’s telephone company, New York Telephone – a part of the old American Telephone & Telegraph Company, the nationally regulated telephone monopoly. In addition, for many years New York City had two cable companies, Time Warner Cable (now Charter) and Cablevision (now Altice) – also somewhat regulated monopolies. The cable companies later used their copper-based cable signal transmission system to provide internet service, as that became a thing (Remember when you used to call AOL over the phone to get on the internet?). The cable companies replaced that function – and over time some upgraded their systems to provide high speed broadband service). About twenty years ago, Verizon successfully petitioned the City to get into the cable and internet provider service. The City made Verizon’s entry into the market conditional upon its providing their service to every home in the city, in order to create some level of competition for Time Warner and Cablevision, each of which had an obligation to provide service to a designated potion of the city (and between the two of them provided service to the entire city). 

Verizon initially competed on internet service with what was called Digital Subscriber Line service (DSL) which used its pre-exiting copper wire phone system to provide internet service. The legacy cable providers transmitted their signals over a coaxial cable system. A coax system still uses copper as the transmission medium, but coaxial cable is specially built with a metal shield and other components engineered to block signal interference and is generally faster than DSL. But neither is a patch on fiber optic cable, and at some point Verizon decided to switch it’s entire system to fiber in order to be able to advertise and provide real broadband service at faster speeds than the cable companies.

That turned out to be a terrific business decision, because of the versatility of fiber. As Verizon expanded its mobile telephone business (a complicated story in itself), it found itself with a competitive advantage because in New York City it was already building the city’s most extensive system of fiber optic cable that could be used as the backbone for its mobile telecom system. Ultimately, it also began eliminating its copper wires and even sending land line transmissions over its fiber cable. Therefore, Verizon is a highly efficient user of its fiber lines. No other competitor is in a position to make such extensive use of its fiber optic network. The gold standard for high-speed broadband service is a fiber network that goes right to a users’ front door (Altice and Charter generally deliver fiber to an apartment building, and then distribute the signal within the building via aging copper wire). Verizon is rapidly attempting to provide fiber to the home over its entire system.

In addition, it is essential to point out that the leading telecommunications financial analyst, Moffat Nathanson (https://www.moffettnathanson.com/research.aspx), has opined that fiber optic networks are natural monopolies and that given their capacity and expense, only one fiber optic network can be profitable in any given market.  New York has multiple such networks, some of which are quite extensive. 

All of that being said, why isn’t high speed broadband service ubiquitous? I have come to the conclusion that there are two reasons. First is the obvious one that many low-income families find highspeed broadband service too expensive. While there are some national programs to provide lower quality service at lower prices to low-income families, those programs have not been widely adopted. Layered on top of that appears to be a consumer preference among low-income families to access the internet via their mobile devices. During COVID, this turned out to be a problem for families with children accessing school via the internet from home. Participating in Zoom and doing homework from a cell phone is far from optimal (particularly with multiple children in the household). Interestingly, just prior to the COVID pandemic, Altice offered families with school age children in their service area (all the of the Bronx and parts of Brooklyn) a free tablet and $15 per month high speed broad band service. Only a few hundred families accepted the highly publicized deal.

In addition, we don’t really know how many families don’t have high speed internet service. The information used in the City’s Internet Master Plan (https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/cto/downloads/internet-master-plan/NYC_IMP_1.7.20_FINAL-2.pdf) (all of which was extensively rewritten and edited by me before its publication), comes from Federal Communications Commission data, which I believe to be badly flawed (FCC data is based on aggregated information by census tract from the internet service providers that appears on its face to be inaccurate. The City has an incomplete, but far more accurate, set of fiber optic cable network maps showing the extent of the networks.). I suspect, based on my experience, that the number of families without high-speed internet access is much lower than that advertised in the Internet Master Plan. And this is the source of the apparent misinformation about a digital divide. 

In addition, City Hall in the De Blasio administration had a highly antagonist view of the cable companies, particularly Verizon. In fact, during that administration, the City brought a law suit against Verizon, which failed to fulfill its obligation to provide ubiquitous city-wide service (although is service was quite extensive, there were blocks where it proved expensive to wire including, surprisingly, on the Upper East Side, that Verizon decided not to provide infrastructure for)( https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/nyc-vs-verizon-complaint.pdf). Two years ago, the City settled that suit after years of unproductive litigation.

The Mayor’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer was focused on doing an end run around the cable companies by creating its own network of internet service providers – ideally through community-based organizations. The CTO’s position was that the cable companies’ internet service was too expensive, unreliable and of insufficient speed. In my opinion, given the already extensive network of fiber optic cable, that was an idea that was both inefficient and impractical. It hasn’t happened, and it is never going to happen. The real solution is finding a way to use the existing network, buy down the cost of high speed internet for low-income families, and engage in an extensive community-based campaign to get broader adoption of high speed home internet.

One example of the combination of misinformation and resistance to adoption was the lack of service in the buildings of the New York City Housing Authority. The CTO’s office went to great trouble and expense to create a high-speed internet service at           Queensbridge Houses, NYCHA’s largest development. That project was a technical, market and economic failure. What my team and I found when trying to get NYCHA wired up was opposition from residents and staff to having Verizon technicians in NYCHA buildings for reasons running from a lack of trust in anyone coming into residents’ apartments to sheer bureaucratic obstructionism on the part of NYCHA facilities staff. Thanks to increased cooperation between NYCHA and Verizon arising out of the settlement of the litigation, most of NYCHA’s facilities will have fiber to the home. But that still leaves the issues of price and adoption.  

However, as a result of the American Rescue Plan adopted by the Federal government in response to the COVID pandemic, that problem should be mostly solved under its Affordable Connectivity Program.

“The Affordable Connectivity Program is an FCC benefit program that helps ensure that households can afford the broadband they need for work, school, healthcare and more. The benefit provides a discount of up to $30 per month toward internet service for eligible households and up to $75 per month for households on qualifying Tribal lands. Eligible households can also receive a one-time discount of up to $100 to purchase a laptop, desktop computer, or tablet from participating providers if they contribute more than $10 and less than $50 toward the purchase price.”

The eligibility for the program includes families receiving a range of Federal assistance, including the widely accessed school lunch program. Almost no low-income family should be left behind.

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, very few New York families know about the availability of this subsidy. The customer service staff at the City’s technology agency who deal with cable customers and complaints have not been trained to encourage residents to sign up for the program. I frankly fail to understand why the City and State aren’t shouting about this program from the rooftops, and enlisting staff to encourage New York City residents to sign up. It may have something to do with the fact that the program is designed to utilize the services of the disfavored existing cable providers, who will be paid by the Federal government to deliver the service. [The Adams administration just implemented a version of buying down free internet service for NYCHA residents at two of its sites. https://www.optimum.com/big-apple-connect. It does not take advantage of the Federal funds].

While in rural areas, getting fiber optic service into remote homes may be prohibitively expensive, in New York City almost every home has access to at least two internet service providers, one of which has infrastructure that provides high speed fiber to the home in the street. Access to high-speed internet service in New York City for low-income families can be a near-term reality.