New York’s Broadband Report is Driven by Ideology, Not Evidence

A new report from the New York City Public Advocate’s office purports to investigate the state of broadband in New York City. Unfortunately, the report contains almost no relevant metrics to evaluate its claims. Instead, the report uses selective, stale data and gerrymandered snapshots to mount a politically motivated case for government-owned networks. The result is a policy agenda that would leave New York broadband policy detached from reality and worse for consumers.

The report begins by lamenting a “lack of competition across large parts of the city” and, on that basis, diagnoses the Bronx and Brooklyn as exhibiting unfair prices. But the report’s own dataset shows the opposite: more than 93 percent of locations in the Bronx and Brooklyn have at least two high-speed ISP options. And, in each of the five boroughs, at least 88 percent of locations have a choice of high-speed providers.

But so keen is the report to find inequities that it invents an arbitrary speed benchmark of 900 megabits per second (Mbps) to allege that some parts of Brooklyn and the Bronx are left out. Beyond the fact that alleged gaps are from 2022 data and so have likely shrunk in the last four years, that speed benchmark is arbitrarily high. A 900 Mbps connection is enough for 60 simultaneous 4K video streams or 225 simultaneous HD video calls. Even heavy Internet users won’t approach 900 Mbps. To use it as a guide for policy is like saying New Yorkers can’t bring their groceries home because they don’t own dump trucks: Sure, a dump truck will do the job, but it’s unnecessary and the bulk of its capacity will go unused.

The report’s evidence also fails to convince when it comes to pricing itself. The pricing data is a snapshot that compares prices between boroughs without reference to directional trends or whether prices are affordable for most New Yorkers. The internationally accepted standard for whether broadband is affordable is 2 percent of a household’s income. The data the report uses to paint a pessimistic affordability picture shows all five boroughs have broadband prices at or below this level. Moreover, broadband prices overall are on the decline without widespread government-owned networks, so the conclusion that New York needs government-owned networks to lower prices is without support.

To be clear, low-income households do face affordability challenges for broadband just as they do for other necessities. But whether someone can afford broadband is a separate question from whether high-quality service is available at their address. The report’s policy recommendations are disproportionately focused on infrastructure, as though just having government-owned infrastructure, subsidizing favored ISPs, or imposing more regulations will solve affordability gaps. They won’t.

The right solution for low-income households is targeted support to enable them to afford market-rate service. Targeted outreach directly addresses affordability without confusing it with a lack of infrastructure. It’s also better than rate regulation, which has already hurt broadband competition in New York. Rate regulation makes low-income areas bad investments for potential competitors while also subsidizing well-off customers who don’t need help.

The Public Advocate desires broadband “designed for the public, not for profit,” but the policies in the report will achieve neither. Rather than following the evidence, the report moves the goalposts to paint the right picture for its ideological ends. It is uninterested in consumers’ experience with their broadband connections and which speeds and technologies New Yorkers actually need to use the Internet as they choose. It’s a mishmash of claims that aren’t supported by the data to reach policy recommendations that won’t solve the real problems facing New York.