Politicians of all political stripes can be tempted to invest government funds in enterprises that directly compete with the private sector. PPI believes that such spending is rarely a good idea, especially in the highly competitive area of broadband communications. Too often, well-intentioned municipalities blindly go down the road of believing that they can build (and maintain) a complex network and provide broadband to their residents at a fraction of the cost of existing private companies. Unfortunately, past experience shows that this road is littered with wasted public resources and unhappy consumers.
That’s why we took a skeptical look at a new report from New York City’s Public Advocate, Jumaane D. Williams — one of three citywide elected officials in America’s largest city. In the report, Williams uses a purported crisis in broadband availability and affordability to call for New York to build a multi-billion-dollar “high-speed, low-cost citywide municipal internet service akin to a public utility.”
But such a costly project would be a mistake for New York City and its new mayor, Zohran Mamdani. As we show below, a closer examination of official data shows that virtually every location in the city is already served by multiple high-speed internet providers, with average prices falling or stable in a broadband marketplace that is more competitive than it has ever been. It’s hard to see what would be gained by the costly and ongoing expense of a duplicative government-owned network in the city when networks are already deployed, and prices are dropping. The city has much more important fiscal priorities than laying out billions of dollars for unneeded infrastructure that would take many years to build. Moreover, the transition to this municipal broadband network, as outlined in the report, would disrupt an existing digital equity program that is already (and successfully) providing broadband services to hundreds of thousands of low-income households in New York.
Let’s start with the data. Inexplicably, the Public Advocate report uses out-of-date affordability and availability data in its effort to justify an expensive citywide municipal broadband network and backbone. However, more recent data undercuts the Report’s justifications and conclusions. Specifically, the “2025 Report on the Availability, Reliability, and Cost of High-Speed Broadband Services in New York State,” issued by the New York State Public Service Commission (PSC), provides a more up-to-date picture of broadband affordability and availability in the city. Table 1 describes the availability of high-speed internet service in NYC, meaning at least 100 Mbps download and at least 10 Mbps upload. When taking into account recent deployment data, the first column shows nearly every location in the city is “served”, defined as at least two internet service providers with at least one provider offering high-speed internet service.
The second column shows that virtually every location in the city has more than one high-speed internet provider using wired or fixed wireless. In other words, almost everyone in NYC has a choice of high-speed internet providers. This hardly matches the broadband availability crisis painted by the Public Advocate’s report.
The more recent data also show the price of broadband in NYC is roughly in line with the rest of New York state. The first column of Table 2 reports the average price of 100Mbps internet in the five boroughs and compares it to the median of all New York state counties. We see very little difference. Indeed, the average price of broadband is falling in 4 out of 5 boroughs, and effectively flat in the fifth. The average price of high-speed internet in the Bronx, the poorest borough, has gone down by 12% over the past two years. That’s an achievement which should be lauded! When the data is considered, there’s no sign of a market failure or crisis that would justify spending billions of taxpayer dollars to create another broadband network in the city.
| Table 1: High Speed Internet Service in New York City | |||
| Percent of locations served* | Percent of locations with more than one high-speed wired or fixed wireless provider | Number of providers in the county | |
| Bronx | 99.86 | 96.5 | 11 |
| Brooklyn | 99.96 | 95.9 | 12 |
| Manhattan | 99.31 | 93.5 | 11 |
| Queens | 99.95 | 97.1 | 11 |
| Staten Island | 98.60 | 98.7 | 4 |
| Average of all New York State counties | 97.38 | 68.2 | |
| Data: 2025 Report on the Availability, Reliability, and Cost of High-Speed Broadband Services in New York State | |||
| * Served = any location with at least two internet service providers and at least one such provider offers high-speed internet with at least 100 Mbps download and at least 10 Mbps upload. | |||
| Table 2. Broadband Prices in NYC | ||
| Average price* | Percent change over the past two years | |
| Bronx | $ 69.79 | -12% |
| Brooklyn | $ 69.03 | -8% |
| Manhattan | $ 55.59 | -3% |
| Queens | $ 62.71 | -7% |
| Staten Island | $ 66.24 | 1% |
| Median of all NYS counties | $ 68.74 | |
| Data: 2025 Report on the Availability, Reliability, and Cost of High-Speed Broadband Services in New York State | ||
| *For the stand-alone internet service with download speed closest to 100 Mbps | ||
The Public Advocate’s report fails to grapple with the real cost of building out a city-wide muni broadband network, in a city with 8.3 million residents, one of the most complex underground infrastructure systems in the world, and no municipal utility to piggyback on. The report acknowledges the fiber backbone will cost more than $2.1 billion, based on an outdated January 2020 estimate. But that estimate predates the massive post-pandemic inflation in construction costs. Moreover, no discussion of the city’s debt capacity or capital budget constraints appears.
The Public Advocate’s report holds up Chattanooga’s muni broadband as a replicable model, but the comparison is deeply misleading. Chattanooga is a mid-sized city with a pre-existing municipal electric utility, suburban density, and a far simpler regulatory environment than New York City.
In addition, the report wants to abandon “Big Apple Connect” — a program provided by Spectrum and Optimum and funded by the City to provide free internet to about 300,000 qualified residents in New York City Housing Authority buildings at a modest cost to the city government. There is no indication that this program fails to deliver; yet, the report wants to close it down. NYC Mesh, the report’s preferred alternative to Big Apple Connect, is a volunteer-run organization with only 2,500 members after more than a decade of operation. It’s hard to imagine how to scale that up.
Too often, well-intentioned state (and federal) policymakers jeopardize a good program or project with a self-destructive devotion to another countervailing objective. One of the biggest disappointments of the Biden Administration was the BEAD program, enacted in 2021 to provide $42 billion in funding to fill in gaps in broadband coverage across the country, and especially rural regions. But when Biden left office at the beginning of 2025, not a single home had been wired with BEAD funds, in large part because well-meaning regulators loaded extra requirements onto the program.
The New York City Public Advocate’s report would lead the citizens of New York City down the same sort of problematic path. Building an unnecessary municipal broadband system in the most crowded city in the country is a recipe for an expensive financial (and political) disaster.
