Menu
ALBANY — A goal of stretching high-speed internet connections to all New Yorkers by 2018 has hit speed bumps – to the growing frustration of smaller communities.
“We’re not just disadvantaged, we’re discriminated against, just because we choose to live in a rural area,” said Niagara County Legislator David Godfrey, R-Wilson.
Godfrey’s been working with Orleans County Legislator Lynne Johnson, R-Yates, for the past five years to lobby state officials to get broadband extended to their region.
The state has announced recent strides in an sweeping plan to make those connections, including a deal with Charter Communications to extend broadband to 145,000 households.
But the state has given Charter four years to do the work, and the final 37,000 households aren’t scheduled to come online until 2020. That’s two years later than the state’s original target to expand broadband.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration insists that it has made significant steps in getting broadband to 2.5 million unserved households.
On Aug. 3, the state announced $54.7 million in grants to broadband installers to hurry along connections. That’s about 11 percent of the $500 million that Cuomo has said will be made available for the expansion.
Jeffrey Nordhaus, vice president of broadband and innovation for Empire State Development, a state authority controlled by Cuomo, said the plan so far has been a “tremendous success.”
“These broadband projects are removing long-standing barriers to growth, creating jobs and economic opportunity in every corner of the state,” he said.
For many, they cannot come fast enough.
Local leaders say they hear almost daily complaints about lack of internet access or slow speeds. Children in rural schools are hampered in doing their homework assignments, local officials report, and businesses are loathe to expand into areas without robust internet bandwidth.
Assemblywoman Janet Duprey, R-Plattsburgh, said students in rural areas often miss out playing on sports teams because they have to devote afterschool hours to going to a local library, which often is the only source of internet connectivity in their community.
“It’s become an incredibly difficult situation for many families,” said Duprey. “We have dozens of these pockets without service here in the North Country. Having high-speed internet is no longer a luxury.”
Cuomo originally announced the state’s goal of extending broadband to all households in October 2014. He highlighted the effort in his State of the State speech the following January, and brought it up again in his address this year.
To drive the plan, the state is making available $500 million from legal settlements to pay telecommunications companies to run fiber optic cable or install wireless transmission towers in places lacking the service.
Glenn Faulkner and Jason Guzzo, two telecommunications executives who serve on the state’s Broadband Availability Task Force, said an initial round of applications for grants was greatly restricted.
State officials narrowed areas where money could be spent in the first round.
If just one household in a given Census tract had broadband, the area was ruled out for funding. Only those areas with no broadband were considered eligible.
Meanwhile, the state isolated areas served by Time Warner due to uncertainty about the company’s plans in light of its purchase by Charter.
The state program requires broadband providers to make matching investments in order to get the money. But would-be bidders said they first need to crunch numbers to determine the financial risk.
“The business models are pretty thin when you get down to the very rural areas,” said Faulkner, who is general manager of Margaretville Telephone Co.
Building a network might cost $30,000 or $35,000 per mile to deliver broadband speeds, for example. Each mile might only connect six or eight homes, Faulkner said.
Getting grants to cover 50 or 60 percent of the initial cost is “great,” he said. “But you still need to get the financing for the company’s investment.”
Cuomo’s goal is to deliver internet speeds of at least 100 megabits per second, though the state will make grants to operations with speeds of as low as 25 mbps in the state’s most unserved regions.
The Federal Communications Commission currently defines broadband as having download speeds of at least 25 mbps.
Guzzo, general manager of Hudson Valley Wireless, said his company is eyeing areas that could have fast download speeds through wireless connectivity, with signals beamed from towers.
He said speeds could rival those of fiber optic connections.
Companies also need to figure out maintenance costs before pushing into an unserved area, said Jim Becker, president of the Middleburgh Telephone Co.
“Equipment becomes obsolete in 7 to 10 years, so you have to have enough money to reinvest in the network,” he said.
State officials said the next round of awards will expand areas eligible for grants. Officials said they expect to ladle out more money after reviewing the next round of applications, due Nov. 30.
The third and final rounds of grants are slated to be allocated next year.
Getting broadband to all New York households can’t come soon enough, said Brian Napoli, supervisor for the Niagara County town of Ridgeway.
He said he was deeply disappointed his region was left out of the first round of state awards, even though thousands of households in the county can’t get broadband.
“What your internet speeds are is one of the big questions companies will ask before they go to a town,” said Napoli, who has been clamoring for increasing internet availability for severn years. “If you don’t have broadband, you’ll never hear from them again.”
Joe Mahoney covers the New York Statehouse for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Reach him at jmahoney@cnhi.com
