NYC Eyes City-Wide Connectivity With Internet Master Plan

Hi everybody, I'm Diana Blast in New York City where 1 .5 million New Yorkers are still living without a mobile or home broadband connection. Well, New York City now has a plan to fix that and we're going to meet with New York City's CTO, John Paul Farmer, to learn more. We're advocates for a bottoms -up approach, for one that starts with communities and goes there as opposed to one that tries to apply a cookie cutter one-size-fits-all approach which has been tried in the past and it hasn't worked. The scale of New York City is is unlike any other city in the United States. We currently have roughly five million people who are fully connected here and that's an accomplishment that we should be proud of and we've got infrastructure in place that allows that but that also means we have about three and a half million New Yorkers who are what I described as connected or even unconnected. And that would be the third largest city in the country, that population in and of itself. And so it's not possible for us to look at some other city because cities that have taken a single approach simply don't have the diversity that we have here, the diversity of communities, the diversity of circumstances. And so we needed to create something new. In terms of who the partners are, are there certain telecom players you're leaning on or others to make the infrastructure a reality here? We're agnostic. So we currently have $70 million in seed investment money that's already been earmarked for this What we're looking to do is to leverage that because we recognize that there are a lot of private sector players who want to work here in New York City. so we want to understand from them where they're willing to make investments, where it makes sense for them, and where our investments should be made to unlock more activity, more investment, more service to more communities. We're looking at what's needed from New York City, where we've got rooftops and rooms and poles and assets that could be helpful to companies that want to close the digital divide. And I should be clear, companies and community groups mesh networks for example are something that communities here in New York City and around the world have been exploring so we're looking at all of these unique innovations that have made progress and looking at how we can knit that into a quilt pardon the analogy but a quilt that really does cover the whole city and doesn't leave any part of the city behind. What about and just now that we're seeing the emergence of 5G how will this just enable you know the city to get most out of this next wave of connectivity? We might look back a decade from now and say that 5G has enabled incredible innovations, but the plan itself is not based on any one technology. And so it could be 5G, it could be fixed wireless, it could be CBRS, could be edge cloud. There are so many technologies that are a part of the internet master plan and potentially new technologies that could be added as time. goes by. And so we're open to any and every partner, we're open to any and every technology that they want to bring to the table, and then we'll assess does this serve the purpose of equity, of performance, of affordability, of privacy, and of choice. So those five principles are really at the core of what the city is trying to do in closing the digital divide, and a variety of technologies and a variety of partners could play a role in doing that. Thank you.