City Starts To Think About Broadband

Should the city partner with an existing internet service provider to boost broadband? Or set up its own network and side-step telecom monopolies? 

Those questions are at the center of a revived city effort to at least think about how to bring faster and more reliable internet to all of New Haven.

City economic development officials and city-hired consultants discussed that quest Thursday evening during an hourlong ​“community meeting” about high-speed internet access in New Haven. 

Thanks to the Zoom webinar-hosted format of the meeting, only two members of the public wound up raising their virtual hands and chiming in. The rest of the event featured city officials and consultants talking at the anonymous viewing public.

The hourlong event nevertheless shed light on how the Elicker Administration plans to make this latest city push for ​“affordable, accessible, reliable broadband for all New Haven residents,” as city Deputy Economic Development Administrator Carlos Eyzaguirre put it.

While hundreds of other cities have implemented or started working on some version of this plan, New Haven is at step one of the process: Spending money on another study. It has hired a firm called Magellan Advisers to spend the next six months conducting a ​“broadband feasibility study” to better understand current internet access in the city, and to recommend specific steps the city should take to improve that network.

The hiring of Magellan Advisers to undertake such a study comes half a year after the alders approved $1 million in the city capital budget to help kickstart a municipal broadband pilot program and master planning process.

It also comes nearly a decade after the then-Harp Administration tried in vain to craft a statewide fiber-optic pilot that would provide faster and less expensive internet service than offered by the cable and phone companies. In her final weeks in office in 2019, her administration released a 16-page blueprint for pursuing a ​“digital inclusion strategy.” All the while, all across the country, telecom lobbyists have succeeded time and again in getting states to block municipal broadband plans and protect their monopolies.

Eyzaguirre acknowledged Thursday that the city has taken many looks at expanding high-speed internet access in town during his years in city government. 

“It’s a complicated issue,” he said. He said this latest try feels to him like ​“the farthest we’ve gotten, in my experience.”

Six-Month Study Underway

The news at the center of Thursday’s meeting was that the city has hired Magellan to conduct the six-month ​“broadband feasibility study.” 

According to city economic development staffer Dean Mack, Magellan is one of the top companies in the country in ​“helping cities figure out how to expand broadband to as many residents as possible.” 

Magellan Project Lead John Honker said that his company has worked with 400 cities, counties, and regional governments across the U.S. on these very types of projects.

So, what does a ​“broadband feasibility study” mean? And what exactly will Magellan and the city be doing over the next six months?

Honker broke the project up into several steps:

• Getting a detailed understanding of the current local internet landscape by interviewing residents, business owners, and staffers at universities, libraries, public schools, hospitals and other ​“key institutions.” Honker said this survey will ask questions like: what kind of internet service do you currently get? How reliable is it? Are you getting a service you think is commensurate to what you pay for? Does it get the job done for work, school, doctor’s appointments, family check ins, etc? 

• Meeting with local internet service providers — like Comcast and Frontier and the fiber-optic startup GoNetSpeed — about what their current plans are for ​“expanding and increasing speeds and reliability” in the city. Do they plan on building out any new infrastructure for broadband? How are they ​“modernizing their networks,” if at all?

• Studying what comparably sized cities across the country are currently doing to address these same issues of improving internet speed, access, and reliability for residents and businesses.

• Assessing all of that information, and then putting together a plan with proposed solutions for how exactly the city can ​“improve the local broadband environment.” 

Those could include having the city work with existing providers, Honker said, or policy changes that would make ​“building networks easier,” or new internet affordability programs, or even a ​“potential investment in broadband where it’s needed.”

Click here to read more about the planned study.

An early look at New Haven’s internet landscape shows that the ​“Hartford/New Haven metro” area is pretty middle of the pack, Mack said, ranking 59th in the nation with an average download speed for residential customers at 90 megabits per second (Mbps).

“These speeds are not necessarily what people actually experience on the ground,” he conceded. ​“I personally do not experience 90.6 Mbps of internet access at home.”

Limited Choices For 2/3rds Of City

As far as what kinds of internet service are available where in the city right now, Honker said, 99.8 percent of New Haven homes are in areas where DSL internet service with speeds of up to 100 Mbps down and 10 Mbps down is available. 

And 99.7 percent of New Haven homes are in areas where cable internet service with speeds of up to 1,200 Mbps down and 20 Mbps down is available. 

And 27 percent of New Haven homes are in areas GoNetSpeed’s fiber-optic speeds internet service with speeds of up to 1,000 Mbps down and 1,000 Mbps is available.

These maps represent the ​“best-case scenarios” based on publicly reported information about broadband, Honker said. 

The point of this upcoming six-month study is to understand what types of internet access New Haveners really have, and at what prices.

“In many communities, we see a vast difference between what you get and what you pay for,” he said. 

Looking at how only 27 percent of New Haven homes have more than one option for whom to buy internet service from, ​“there’s not a lot of competition out there in high-speed services.”

Mack said that a September 2021 study that the city commissioned DataHaven to conduct underscored just how critical high-quality internet access is for work and school during the ongoing pandemic — and just how much New Haveners have struggled with bad connections.

He said that, of the 500 New Haven Public Schools (NHPS) families surveyed, 73 percent of parents said their student ​“often has trouble accessing online learning due to internet connectivity problems,” and 77 percent of parents whose children had internet trouble said their kids’ learning suffered because of it.

“I became unemployed due to the pandemic,” Mack read from one of the testimonials provided by a NHPS parent who responded to the survey. ​“Since the internet is used for a lot of students needs, I feel universal internet for families of students should be necessary. Why should my kid be at a disadvantage because I cannot pay the internet bill?

Affordability? "Municipal Gain"?

Although the organizers of Thursday’s meeting clearly hoped for community feedback, the Zoom webinar format (where no one in the audience can see who else is in the room except for the presenters) and the opening half-hour presentation appeared to put a damper on any potential dialogue.

Prospect Hill/Newhallville Alder Steve Winter and Community Action Agency of New Haven staffer Bianca Bowles were game enough to raise their virtual hands and pipe in with questions that led to an illuminating back-and-forth for the latter half hour of the meeting.

Bowles asked about the steep costs of internet access — and about the importance of prioritizing affordability in whatever plan the city ultimately pursues.

Most existing fiber networks ​“are really designed for the large users in the community: Yale, the school district, large enterprises,” Honker said. ​“More fiber infrastructure has to be invested in in neighorhoods and in business parks to bring down that cost of service so that you and I can afford it at $70, $60, $50 a month.”

City Engineer Giovanni Zinn said that the city’s internet-improvement plans have to go beyond building out new networks. They also need to include talking with residents and making sure people know how to take advantage of internet subsidies that already exist. (Like this one.)

“How many people are taking advantage of that?” he asked. Likely not as many as should be the case, because too many people either don’t know such discounts exists or struggle to fill out the application forms.

Winter asked: How many places across the country have similar laws to Connecticut’s ​“Municipal Gain” laws, which allow cities to use utility poles to set up their own fiber-optic networks? ​“Is that common?”

In fact, it is, Honker said. ​“We see that in quite a few communities, where the city owns poles, whether they electric or streetlights, and there are opportunities to use that for fiber distribution.”

Palo Alto, California, for example, ​“has run 250 miles of fiber across their existing utility poles to provide broadband, mainly to businesses and large institutions,” he said. 

Tapping The Federal Flow

How do the billions upon billions of dollars flowing from the federal government thanks to the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the bipartisan infrastructure bill influence the city’s options when it comes to high-speed internet access? Winter asked.

Honker said that many cities across the country — at least 100, by his count — are either ​“considering using or actively utilizing [ARPA funding] to build their own broadband infrastructure.” That’s because that pandemic-relief bill specifically permits municipalities to spend aid on building better broadband infrastructure where internet customers suffer from reliability, speed, and affordability issues during the pandemic.

The new infrastructure bill, meanwhile, is bringing ​“another $42 billion down to local, state and regional governments to expand broadband in a similar fashion,” he continued. The federal Treasury should be providing more guidance later this year on how that can be spent.

With locally owned internet service providers (ISPs), are their often sliding scales and reduced prices for people who can’t afford a pricy new internet option? Winter asked.

Honker said that cities with comprehensive municipal broadband programs — like Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Longmont, Colorado — have ​“lifeline programs” where they offer 100 Mbps broadband connections at as little as $9.95 per month.

And, he said, ​“most city-owned services are priced 10 to 20 percent below existing provider pricing.”