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Poor Neighborhoods Get Slower Speeds in NYC '1 Gbps' Wi-Fi Plan

Earlier this month New York City unveiled one of the more aggressive Wi-Fi deployments ever, promising all NYC residents access to free, 1 Gbps Wi-Fi via 10,000 "LinkNYC" pylons installed in all five boroughs of the city. Those pylons will be supported by advertising display panels, and will offer users not only access to Wi-Fi, but also access to 911, 311, and touchscreen access to city services. "Affordable access to broadband for all New Yorkers (is) essential for everything we need to do to be a fair and just city," Mayor de Blasio stated at the time.

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As previously stated, the technical specifics are lacking for the project, and it's not entirely clear if the city actually plans to offer 1 Gbps speeds (since that's technically not even possible to most devices), or if someone in the Mayor's office just thought the term "1 Gbps" sounds neat.

The New York Daily News has since learned a little more information about the project, claiming that only wealthier areas will get access to 1 Gbps speeds (still not explained how), while poorer neighborhoods will "only" get access to 100 Mbps:
quote:
As a result, all of the 2,500-plus locations in Manhattan are high speed, giving the borough with 20% of the city’s population fully 65% of all the fast kiosks. Meanwhile, the Bronx will get speedy Wi-Fi at 361 kiosks — just 6% of the fast Wi-Fi stations in the city. The borough will have slower service at 375 non-advertising kiosks, which replace old payphones.
As neighborhoods get poorer, the speedy Wi-Fi becomes less prevalent:
quote:
In Melrose's Community Board 3, where the population is 85% black or Hispanic and 61% receive public assistance, just four of the former payphones will get the speedy service. And in Brownsville’s community board, where the population is 93% black or Hispanic and 50% receive public assistance, just 10 payphones will get the speedy service.
Of course it's unclear whether or not service in such a high-traffic city as NYC will even be usable half the time, regardless of whether or not you're in a rich or poor neighborhood. Though with most wealthy New Yorkers having plenty of access to pricey mobile data, it's obviously of bigger help to poorer communities. Even get 100 Mbps is at least a positive step forward, assuming the system actually gets built.

Most recommended from 11 comments



vividvew
@72.69.16.x

2 recommendations

vividvew

Anon

population density

blatantly slanted article. Will I'll certainly accede that nearly all processes in the US are disadvantaged for a few over the many. However the author has a completely failed to prove this is an example of that and uses a completely engineering ignorant line of reasoning.

I am a network engineer who was a Cisco employee for 5 years. Capacity planing for shared bandwidth networks(wireless) should be based on expected density of users in a given shared capacity boundary. To even the most inexperienced network engineer this is obvious.

Manhattan might only have 20% of the population of NYC but it is also by far the smallest by land mass. It is at the top of NYC boroughs as measured by population density. If the author gave some examples of rich lower density areas of Manhattan getting better speeds than some denser areas of Queens or Bronx then there might something to at least consider.

There are many more tourists and workers who commute in to Manhattan. The number of people in Manhattan on a business day is four times the resident population.

The flaws in the author's line of logic are too numerous too name.