Bridging New York’s Digital Divide One Hotspot at a Time
Above, a subway patron takes advantage of free wireless internet service at the 116th Street station. Below, a map of New York City neighborhoods with the highest percentage of residents reporting no internet access at home. Photo and map by Jennifer Doherty for NYCityLens. Map created on Tableau using data sourced from NYC Open Data.
Start-ups, nonprofits, and internet collectives work toward a more connected future for all
By Jennifer Doherty
In 2015, New York City signed a deal to replace thousands of its antiquated pay phones with LinkNYC kiosks. The purpose: allow New Yorkers to call anywhere in the United States for free. These Wi-Fi-enabled sidewalk spots also give users access to maps and city services, the ability to charge their devices, and permit them to connect to the web.The kiosks follow the city’s push to help more New Yorkers gain online access by installing free public Wi-FI in every subway station, which it accomplished in 2017.
While the solutions are convenient for checking your messages or looking up directions on the go, for many New Yorkers, the only way for them to go online is on a street corner or underground via these free hotspots and kiosks.
“It is absolutely impossible for a young person to have to navigate homeless people and drug addicts to get to a Wi-Fi signal and do their essay on a phone!” expounded Clayton Banks, co-founder of Silicon Harlem last Thursday at the opening of a new uptown coworking space run by the social entrepreneurship company. The space is one prong of the company’s ongoing fight to narrow the city’s digital divide.
Currently, 21 percent of New York City households are still not connected to the internet, according to the latest data from the United States Census Bureau. In lower income neighborhoods like Harlem, that number increases to 40 percent. In East Harlem, it reaches 50 percent, according to Banks. That means one out of every two residents can’t access the web at home.
As with most problems, the trouble comes down to money, says Banks. Whether they’re necessary or not, internet subscriptions add another utility to a list of bills that some New Yorkers are already struggling to pay.
“The gaps that we’ve seen in our history are two: you don’t know about it, and you can’t afford it,” Banks explained in a phone call.
Silicon Harlem started out in 2013 organizing meet-ups for entrepreneurs who wanted to promote their visions and exchange ideas but were tired of schlepping downtown for networking events. It quickly evolved into a limited liability corporation that produced coding courses for schoolchildren. This year, they’re taking on the affordability issue by partnering with the internet service provider Spectrum to bring low-cost broadband into buildings that aren’t currently equipped with highspeed internet.
The lower prices are “built on bulk billing,” as Banks puts it, with the idea being that every unit in the building will subscribe to the internet service provider at a lower price.
“Everyone’s going to benefit from everyone being connected, and hopefully we can close that gap of connectivity,” he says.
With this new pricing model, qualifying buildings will receive high speed internet, mobile data, and cable that would usually cost upwards of $150 per month for just $39. The system has now launched for units in the building that houses Silicon Harlem’s headquarters and the new coworking space, with more to come.
Silicon Harlem projects that it can bring the number of Harlem households without internet down to 25 percent in the next 18 months.
“Internet is no longer an option, it’s a utility. New Yorkers need it to go along with their daily lives,” said a spokeswoman for Manhattan Borough President Gale A. Brewer’s office in a statement. She went on, praising Silicon Harlem as “a phenomenal organization” for its work to to make internet connectivity more equitable.
In February the Manhattan borough president’s office switched from a standard internet service provider to NYC Mesh, a non-profit network whose goal is to make internet available to all.
In contrast to Silicon Harlem’s approach of working within the system, NYC Mesh functions on an anti-corporate, collective ownership model. Mesh users own (not rent) their modems as they would with a commercial internet service provider, often referred to as an ISP. Instead of a set fee every month, they make voluntary contributions. Hall says that about 80 percent of users pay the suggested $20 monthly donation. All proceeds go toward maintaining the network, and installations and trouble-shooting are done by Hall and core team of about 30 volunteers.
Mesh began when founder Brian Hall stuck antennas out of the windows of his East Village apartment. The network expanded slowly at first, as individual nodes had to be within sight of each other to receive the signal.
Today, there are 316 Mesh users across Manhattan and Brooklyn. The number of users doubled last year, and Hall expects it will double again this year. Many of those users live in NYCHA’s Saratoga Village Houses in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant. Mesh installed antennas on the roofs of buildings there and now provides internet to residents for free.
Hall points out that in low-income neighborhoods highspeed internet is often not available, even for those who are willing to pay, because service providers don’t see installations as worthwhile.
“The reason poor areas have bad internet is because the ISPs can’t make money out there. I’ve seen some really obnoxious things. They’ll run fiber, not connect anyone, and say they satisfied the terms of the contract,” says Hall.
Rather than working with ISPs, Hall dreams of a return to the internet as it once was. “I see us getting back to the original idea of networks connecting to networks for free,” says the activist.
Banks also takes heart for the future of connectivity in New York. “We all tend to go to the past a lot; sometimes we get stuck there,” he says. “The present is laborious, it’s exhausting. The future is beautiful; nobody owns it. We’re in a space where we can all participate. There are no rules.”
“My generation brought on the internet,” says Banks. “Your generation has the opportunity to rethink how infrastructure serves everyone fairly.”