New York State’s project to expand broadband Internet access to all residents is moving into the next phase after the federal government approved its plan to use $664 million from the Broadband Equity Access and Deployment Program.
According to New York’s now approved plan, the more than half a billion dollars, along with private investments from internet service providers, will be used to bring high-speed broadband internet to the predominantly rural areas of the state that currently do not have it. The focus is on building high-speed fiber optic and mobile networks.
“Today we celebrate an important milestone for New York in this process: the Biden-Harris administration has approved New York’s plan,” said Samantha Silverberg, deputy assistant to the president who is working on infrastructure implementation.
She said New York’s connectivity program is specifically geared toward improving affordability and working to close the connectivity gap, which aligns perfectly with the Biden administration’s promise to grow the economy with a focus on low- and middle-income people.
“I want to thank the team at ConnectALL for recognizing that internet networks must be affordable for the people and communities they connect,” she said.
In New York, the program is led by Empire State Development and its ConnectALL Office, which focuses exclusively on expanding broadband access in New York. That office identified 114,377 unique addresses that are considered unserved or underserved by broadband internet and determined that connecting all of those addresses to fiber optic networks would cost $1.9 billion. These addresses are scattered across the state—a map of the ConnectALL survey results identifies small lots in nearly every region of the state as “unserved,” meaning there is no broadband access there, and smaller lots as “underserved,” meaning there is only one broadband option there. In addition, data is unavailable for large swaths of the northern part of the state, particularly at Fort Drum and in and around Adirondack Park, because there are no addresses to serve there.
As part of a five-year action plan, the goal is to provide broadband to every household and business in the state by 2030 and to expand mobile coverage in rural areas every year between 2025 and completion in 2030.
Affordability is also a goal of New York’s plan: by 2030, at least 100,000 addresses in affordable and public housing will have access to affordable connectivity. New York also hopes to create at least 2,000 new jobs specifically for low-income New Yorkers by 2030 through expanded internet access.
The state has pledged to contribute at least $50 million to a statewide Digital Equity Plan that aims to make internet access significantly more accessible to rural and low-income residents through at least five different “innovations.”
In a press conference on Tuesday, Joshua Breitbart, senior vice president of the ConnectALL program, said that while 98 percent of New Yorkers have access to broadband internet through at least two sources, it is difficult to close the remaining 2 percent gap.
“The remaining 2% is the hardest to reach,” he said. “This includes many of New York’s most rural and remote areas, and connecting these places would be nearly impossible without our federal partners at the National Telecommunications Information Administration and the members of our congressional delegation who made this funding possible, as well as the White House.”
Breitbart said he was excited about the prospects that BEAD funding offers for New York and the path forward.
“It’s about ensuring that from Buffalo to Montauk, from my hometown of Brooklyn to the northern Adirondacks, every resident can fully participate in our digital economy and society,” he said.
The BEAD program, part of the Biden administration’s bipartisan 2021 infrastructure bill, authorized $42.5 billion in federal spending to expand broadband access nationwide. Under that plan, subject to federal approval, states submitted applications detailing how they plan to use their BEAD program allocations. The plans are designed to close their digital gaps as quickly as possible.
Efforts to get internet coverage in New York have been the subject of bipartisan attention for several years, and some local officials have said that maps created by state and federal agencies to show which areas still need internet coverage are not as accurate as they could be, mislabeling both covered and uncovered areas.
Breitbart said he and federal officials working on the project are aware that some of the maps used to identify areas that need attention are not perfect, but that by working closely with local authorities, that gap has been filled.
“We’ve been working with the federal map, but we’ve gone through our state appeals process, which is almost complete, and we’re taking those inputs and ultimately being able to incorporate them into the list of sites that we submit to NITA,” he said. “We’ve heard that (the maps aren’t perfect), but because of the local partnerships we have, particularly in the north country and across the state, and after the NITA process, we’re confident that the sites we’re going to reach out to will accurately reflect the need across the state.”
