Why New York City Should Not Build a Municipal Broadband Network
muni-broadband
New-York
policy
Here’s part 1 in a series explaining why New York City should reject calls to build a municipal fiber network and should instead invest in bolstering broadband adoption rates and enhancing digital literacy.
Key Takeaways
- The New York City Public Advocate recently released a plan that calls for the city to spend well over $2 billion to build and operate a city-owned municipal fiber network.
- The Plan omits recent data and is devoid of rigorous analysis. It also includes a variety of extreme proposals, like studying how the city might seize the assets of a private utility to support this initiative, and shrugs off the considerable fiscal headwinds facing the city in the coming years.
- The Plan echoes the tabled Internet Master Plan (IMP), which was released in 2020 by a prior mayor and called for similarly far-reaching and unnecessary interventions into the local marketplace. The city’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is required by law to issue his own “master plan” later this year.
- Municipal fiber networks are inherently risky and costly ventures. These risks and costs are compounded exponentially in the country’s most populous and diverse city, where it is challenging to build anything at scale, let alone a sprawling fiber network. The logistics and costs of such an endeavor are dizzying and would likely take many more years to build and cost much more than current estimates.
- In this first installment, the ACLP provides essential context for evaluating the Public Advocate’s Plan and understanding the dynamics at play as Mayor Mamdani begins to formulate his own broadband plan.
The New York City Public Advocate’s Office recently released an “Internet for All” Plan that, among many other things, recommends spending more than $2 billion of scarce public resources to build a city-owned open-access municipal fiber network across the five boroughs. The Plan also suggests that the city explore ways to potentially seize infrastructure owned by a private electric utility, Con Edison, via eminent domain to support this initiative.
These are among the more outlandish proposals in a Plan that, at any point in the past, would be easy to dismiss as far outside the mainstream and not reflective of the broadband connectivity challenges facing the city. However, the Public Advocate’s Plan comes at an interesting time in New York City.
In late 2025, the New York City Council passed a law requiring the mayor to develop an internet master plan. This would be the second time an NYC mayor issued such a plan. In January 2020, then-mayor Bill de Blasio released his own Internet Master Plan (IMP), which recommended spending upwards of $2.1 billion to deploy a citywide public fiber network, like what the Public Advocate is now calling for. The IMP was shelved by de Blasio’s successor, Eric Adams. The law requires the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to release a draft broadband plan by November of this year and a final version by May 1, 2027.
Since his election, there have been increasing calls for Mayor Mamdani to revive the IMP. The Public Advocate’s Plan offers the latest and highest profile effort to date to amplify these calls to action. As such, this Plan, for all its many flaws, cannot be dismissed out of hand.
Over the next few months, the ACLP will publish a series of analyses evaluating broadband connectivity in New York City from key supply- and demand-side vantages. The overarching goal will be to ensure that the forthcoming discourse about broadband in NYC is informed by data and grounded in reality.
For this first piece, data support three high-level contextual points that, respectfully, should inform the discourse in NYC going forward.
- Broadband availability is not an issue in New York City, which has one of the most vibrant and competitive broadband markets in the country.
- Municipal broadband projects are always fraught with risk. The complexity and uniqueness of NYC introduce numerous additional risk factors.
- Broadband challenges in NYC exist almost exclusively on the demand-side. Supply-side initiatives will not solve them.
Broadband availability is not an issue in New York City, which has one of the most vibrant and competitive broadband markets in the country.
A central flaw of the Public Advocate’s Plan is its reliance on outdated and incomplete data. Indeed, the Plan draws primarily on data cited in the IMP, which was drafted in 2019, and does not otherwise seriously engage in new data collection or analysis.
The following chart provides a succinct summary of the latest data about broadband availability in NYC.
| Area | Housing units | 1+ wireline 100/20 | 2+ wireline 100/20 | 2+ wire/FWA 100/20 | 900+ Mbps | Any fiber |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| New York City | 3,933,390 | 97.9% | 73.7% | 94.1% | 98.4% | 75.6% |
| Bronx | 576,288 | 99.7% | 73.9% | 96.1% | 99.7% | 88.9% |
| Brooklyn | 1,172,940 | 97.2% | 68.6% | 92.8% | 98.0% | 80.1% |
| Manhattan | 1,003,792 | 96.4% | 66.6% | 95.8% | 97.3% | 54.1% |
| Queens | 979,972 | 98.8% | 83.8% | 92.7% | 99.0% | 80.3% |
| Staten Island | 200,398 | 99.2% | 90.2% | 93.7% | 99.2% | 94.3% |
The data are clear: broadband availability and competition in the city is incredibly robust. Nearly every household in the city can access 900+ Mbps connections from a variety of providers, and fiber is widely available. In addition, the current landscape also includes a new platform, fixed wireless access (FWA), that is available across the city from Verizon and T-Mobile, providing customers with additional choices. When the IMP was released, FWA was still nascent. Now, almost every New Yorker can choose from at least three fixed (i.e., non-mobile) broadband options. And when 5G mobile service is included, broadband access is effectively universal across the city.
Within this environment, broadband prices have barely grown over the last decade. ACLP analysis of federal pricing data shows that, in real terms, what people actually pay for broadband has grown at a much slower pace than inflation. Further, broadband prices, as a share of household expenses on essential items like electricity, gas, and water, are minute compared to those other costs, which have risen much more sharply.
In short, the supply of broadband in NYC is not an issue, though some readers of the Public Advocate’s Plan who lack knowledge of these trends might draw the opposite conclusion. This is why it is imperative that broadband discussions in New York City (and elsewhere) be grounded in objective data, rather than outdated assumptions (and data). Otherwise, these dialogues, and the policy proposals that stem from them, will be shaped by other, more subjective forces.
Municipal broadband projects are always fraught with risk. The complexity and uniqueness of NYC introduce numerous additional risk factors.
Municipal broadband remains exceedingly rare in the U.S. Out of more than 90,000 local governments across the country, only about 400 localities have chosen to build their own broadband networks. This works out to less than one-half of one percent, a vanishingly small share that speaks for itself.
This is not an accident. It reflects two basic realities. First, broadband is widely available across the country, rendering such extreme government intervention unnecessary. Second, municipal broadband projects carry significant financial and operational risks, making them unattractive to most cities, many of which face a growing array of public infrastructure challenges, increasing financial pressures, and other pressing priorities.
The risks involved with pursuing municipal broadband revolve around the intertwined factors of: (1) the very high capital costs associated with building, operating, and upgrading the network; and (2) the need to generate enough revenue to cover those costs. Even networks that are non-profits still need to make money to cover expenses. This involves convincing enough customers to switch from their current ISP to the public offering, a difficult proposition in markets that are already well served by established service providers, who tend to compete fiercely to retain their customers.
When municipal broadband systems fail to attract enough customers to grow or even sustain the minimum required investment, the economics unravel quickly. Revenues fall short, bills pile up, debt obligations remain, and the project can enter a downward financial spiral. At that point, cities are often left with two bad options: subsidize the failing network with taxpayer dollars or sell it off after sinking substantial public resources into a failed experiment. Many municipalities have already learned this lesson the hard way (the ACLP has documented many municipal broadband failures here).
Unfortunately, the inherently risky nature of these ventures is often glossed over or omitted entirely in municipal broadband discussions, including the Public Advocate’s Plan. Missing from these conversations are the dozens of public broadband projects that have struggled or failed outright. That omission is especially striking in New York City, which has already seen two notable public broadband failures: NYCWiN, a failed public safety wireless network, and LinkNYC, which has encountered countless problems across several iterations (the ACLP has discussed these NYC failures previously, including in testimony before the NYC Council in 2025, and will revisit these and other failed muni broadband initiatives in subsequent parts of this series).
Instead, the Public Advocate’s Plan points to the municipal fiber network in Chattanooga, TN, to bolster its recommendation that NYC build something similar. The ACLP has written extensively on the uniqueness of Chattanooga’s municipal fiber network and how unlikely it is that any city of any size can replicate it. Chattanooga is among the largest cities in the country to deploy a municipal fiber system. Even so, it is still a relatively small city whose population is similar to that of the Upper East Side of Manhattan or Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn. Put differently, NYC is 44 times bigger population-wise than Chattanooga.
This goes to an important point overlooked by the Public Advocate and many others who continue to talk about building a municipal broadband network in New York City. Looking anywhere other than the city for evidence that something might work here is unwise. There is no place like New York City – it is a large, sprawling metropolis with an incredibly diverse population living in high-rises in Midtown, low-rises in Bed-Stuy, and single-family homes in Whitestone. Doing anything here at scale is complex and expensive and time-consuming, and when government does it, it usually takes even longer to complete and costs more than expected. That the Public Advocate fails to grapple with the cost impacts of his proposal is particularly egregious given the widening out-year budget gaps and mounting obligations across housing, public safety, and social services that the city faces. More immediately, the city is facing a significant cash crunch, further underscoring its financial precariousness.
The crumbling state of public housing across the city is instructive. Per the New York Times, public housing “residents regularly struggle with heat outages, broken elevators and mold, and the cost of backlogged repairs has soared to nearly $80 billion.” Conditions have deteriorated to the point where the city is increasingly looking to the private sector to help finance and rebuild growing portions of its public housing stock, an explicit acknowledgement that the city is poorly positioned to build and take care of things at scale. It can’t even build public toilets in a timely or cost-effective manner.
These and other examples do not bode well for a city-run broadband system that will have to compete with faster-moving, better-capitalized private ISPs. Moreover, even under optimistic assumptions, building a citywide fiber network would take many years to complete, delaying any potential benefits while other, more pressing connectivity issues remain unaddressed. And in such a competitive marketplace, unlike private investment, municipal broadband would require ongoing taxpayer support if revenues fall short, compounding the fiscal threats looming on the horizon.
Broadband challenges in NYC exist almost exclusively on the demand-side. Supply-side initiatives will not solve them.
Broadband availability is not an issue in NYC. Nearly every resident has access to multiple choices for internet service. But not every resident has chosen to adopt broadband. Why is that?
The Public Advocate attempts to argue that broadband adoption rates are low in certain communities because the cost of service is too expensive. While this argument might be appealing from a political standpoint at a time when “affordability” remains a popular buzzword, it is incomplete and misleading. Moreover, it defies the data, which consistently show that broadband adoption decisions are much more complex and influenced by non-cost factors like not seeing broadband as relevant or useful or necessary.
Consider, for example, the following table of broadband adoption rates in New York City over the last decade. The trends are generally positive, but in-home wireline adoption (e.g., of cable or fiber) has flattened in recent years. When mobile connections are included, adoption rates continue to rise, suggesting that a growing number of people are choosing to go mobile-only. The Public Advocate downplays this trend in support of his proposal for a citywide fiber network, but the data tell a different story.
| Year | Any broadband | Wired |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 80.0% | 69.3% |
| 2017 | 82.4% | 70.8% |
| 2018 | 84.0% | 70.6% |
| 2019 | 85.1% | 71.3% |
| 2021 | 90.0% | 75.5% |
| 2022 | 89.5% | 75.0% |
| 2023 | 91.8% | 74.9% |
| 2024 | 93.0% | 75.0% |
It is also notable that in-home adoption rates have plateaued despite the wide availability of subsidies from the federal government during the pandemic – via the Emergency Broadband Benefit program (EBB) and its successor, the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) – and the city itself via Big Apple Connect (BAC). The following chart depicts this dynamic.
When combined with low-cost offerings from local ISPs like Charter and Verizon, in-home broadband subscriptions for qualifying households have been free for many years. And yet, adoption rates have barely budged. Moreover, broadband adoption rates in the Bronx have yet to recover from decreases during the pandemic despite the wide availability of free broadband.
National survey data consistently finds that the primary reason for non-adoption remains relevance, not price. Indeed, studies have found that some won’t adopt broadband even when it’s free. This might sound shocking, but as in NYC, the national broadband adoption rate barely increased during the years when substantial subsidies from the federal government were available, which could be used in tandem with ISP low-cost offerings to receive service for free.
So, spending billions to build a municipal fiber network and offer service at very low cost or even for free will not solve these lingering adoption issues in New York City. Instead, investing resources in this manner may ultimately entrench these demand-side issues because it will shift available resources away from experts on the demand-side, who have proven time and again that they know how to bring even the most reluctant people online.
The ACLP has a lot more to say about the need for the city to invest in demand-side activities. The Public Advocate omits any mention of the importance of addressing demand-side issues, which is unfortunate and reflects an incomplete understanding of how broadband adoption really works.
Heated Rivalry
The emerging discussion about the role of city government in the broadband market comes at a tense moment in the relationship between the private sector and New York City officials. This is not surprising given the rhetoric of many officials, who have expressed deep faith in the ability of government to do more on behalf of residents, while also voicing pointed critiques of the private sector. In furtherance of this agenda, city government is moving ahead with building municipal grocery stores to compete with and take business away from local shop owners. There is talk of seizing private property – apartment buildings, utility infrastructure – for public purposes. At the same time, the city has not prioritized traditional economic development programs that, for decades, sought to bolster private investment.
This is the context in which the emerging discussion about municipal broadband in New York City must take place. It is more than just a niche conversation about broadband connectivity in the five boroughs. It is part of a larger debate about the role of private enterprise in a city that is beginning to operationalize a fundamentally different economic philosophy than at any time in the recent past. Is the city comfortable potentially crowding out or chilling private investment to support this new vision for the economy?
The ACLP will soon say more on all these topics, so please stay tuned for additional parts in this ongoing series.