NYCEDC RFP for Broadband Feasibility Study

The NYCEDC, a 501c3 non-profit like NYCwireless, released an RFP for a Broadband Feasibility Study to “deliver a thorough, objective, fact-based feasibility study of the current state of broadband in New York City and to explore whether there is a need for a citywide broadband network as a municipal initiative and whether such would be legally, technically, practicably and economically feasible for New York City.”

While generally I’d be supportive of such a study, there are a few things which concern me greatly about the RFP that the NYCEDC has released:

• The EDC keeps trumpeting the fact that “broadband availability is already high” in NYC. While this may be true as compared to other cities in the US, this isn’t true (and has been clearly shown false) as compared to other cities of similar size and stature across the world.
• Even if broadband availability is high in NYC, this is hardly the point. Internet adoption is about how much people are actively making use of the internet, not whether they could get access to the internet if they wanted to. This is, perhaps, the most troubling aspect of the EDC’s attitude. Adoption is about more than just technical feasibility (which itself is partially lacking in NYC); its about affordability and usefulness, and about whether people have the means to use the internet, including the availability of cheap computers.
• The RFP doesn’t call out non-profits and other community-based broadband initiatives that are already in place as required parties to be studied. While it might be assumed that non-profits should by default be included, very often they need to be highlighted since they often don’t have the resources to reach out to whomever is running the study to make themselves known.
• The study doesn’t specifically exclude telcos, cablecos, other ISPs, and other technology service providers to the City, EDC, or DOITT as ineligible for conducting the study. Furthermore, it doesn’t exclude those parties that have any relationship to those telcos, cablecos, other ISPs, and technology service providers as also being ineligible. Since such companies would represent a crystal-clear conflict of interest for the execution and outcome of the study, they should be explicitly excluded from even participating in the RFP. Incidentally, this would exclude NYCwireless from being a respondent as well.

  If any of these concerns bears out in the selection of company and their delivery of their report, it would be both a terrible waste of time and taxpayer money on the City’s part. I hope for their sake that the EDC takes a more aggressive role in the future to really help NYC’s economic development, and that the results of this study play into a long term plan for NYC’s economic and internet well-being that the EDC has thus far failed to articulate.

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