Oswego County, NY officials are celebrating the award of a new $26 million New York State grant aimed at dramatically expanding affordable fiber access to long-underserved rural communities in the northwestern part of the state, just north of Syracuse.
According to the announcement by New York State Governor Kathy Hochul, Oswego’s latest grant award will help fund the deployment of 345 miles of new fiber infrastructure to largely rural unserved regions, helping to bring affordable broadband access to nearly 11,000 homes, businesses and community institutions across 22 towns and villages.
Oswego County will own the finished open access network and lease the fiber to Internet Service Providers (SPs), including Empire Access, "on a non-discriminatory and non-exclusive basis."
Empire, a family-owned ISP and named the fastest ISP in the nation by PCMag in 2021, currently offers local residents symmetrical 500 Megabit per second (Mbps) service for $50 a month; symmetrical 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) service for $65 a month; and symmetrical 2 Gbps service for $100 a month.
The offerings are both significantly cheaper and faster than services provided by regional monopolies Verizon and Charter, both of which have caused significant annoyance statewide for their failures to provide affordable, competitive broadband access and reliable customer service.
Verizon has long been under fire for skimping on fiber upgrades and repairs across key parts of New York State.
In 2018 Charter Communications (Spectrum) was almost kicked out of New York State for failing to adhere to conditions of its merger with Time Warner Cable and misleading regulators about the full reach of its broadband network.
Oswego’s investment should be a major shot to the arm for broadband competitiveness given the open access nature of the planned network, which should dramatically lower the cost of entry to independent ISPs seeking market share in upstate New York.
“This $26 million investment in Oswego County's broadband infrastructure represents our commitment to building a more connected New York, where every family and business can access affordable, high-speed Internet,” Hochul said of the award. “By partnering with local governments to expand broadband coverage, we're creating opportunities for economic growth, improving access to health care and education, and ensuring our rural communities are fully equipped to participate in our digital future.”
The latest awards are part of New York State’s ConnectALL initiative, a multi-layered billion-dollar project to dramatically boost high speed Internet access across the state leveraging a series of new grant programs, education initiatives, broadband mapping improvements, and digital equity proposals.
The ConnectALL initiative was largely made possible by the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which continues to help fund numerous impressive fiber expansion projects all across the country, as we highlighted in our recent report on Carver County, Minnesota’s use of ARPA funds to deliver 100 percent fiber availability to every last county resident).
“Expanding reliable broadband connectivity is crucial for New York State's economic growth,” Empire State Development President, CEO and Commissioner Hope Knight said of Oswego’s award. “Through ConnectALL's transformative work in Oswego County, we will help bridge the digital divide and connect thousands of Central New York residents and businesses to the modern digital economy. Through the ConnectALL initiative, we are building the infrastructure needed to provide all New Yorkers with reliable, affordable Internet access.”
New York State Continues To Prioritize Municipal Broadband
Many U.S. states continue to attempt to solve the digital divide by throwing more and more money at entrenched regional telecom monopolies, ignoring decades of waste, fraud, and subsidy abuse by these same companies as they work to protect regional market dominance.
New York State is taking a notably different tack with its embrace of community broadband access. Oswego’s award is technically part of New York State's Municipal Infrastructure Program (MIP), which has now awarded over $240 million in funding for 2,400 miles of broadband infrastructure, expanding access to 98,000 locations across New York State.
The state’s embrace of community broadband access has been a boon to upstate communities like Dryden, New York, which is leveraging an open access network to deliver affordable fiber to the city of 14,500, in the process inspiring numerous other Tompkins County and NY State communities to follow suit.
Granted regional state monopolies like Verizon and Charter want to ensure the lion’s share of taxpayer subsidies goes to them and not community broadband – most recently exemplified by Charter’s failed attempt to insert a Trojan horse in a NY state budget bill that would have all but destroyed the viability of municipal broadband projects.
New York state has also ruffled the feathers of entrenched regional monopolies by passing a law during peak COVID lockdowns requiring that regional telecoms with less than 20,000 subscribers provide low income state residents with access to 25 Mbps broadband for as little as $15 a month. The Supreme Court recently rejected an industry challenge to the law.
New York State's ConnectALL Office has also been allocated more than $664 million in funding from the federal Broadband Equity Access and Deployment (BEAD) Program, made possible by the 2021 Infrastructure Improvement And Jobs Act (IIJA).
Header image of Oswego sign courtesy of J. Stephen Conn on Flickr, Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic
Inline graphic of Fastest ISPs in 2021 PCMag screenshot
Inline image of Route 21 in Oswego County NY courtesy of Doug Kerr on Flickr, Creative Commons, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic
Inline image of Dryden groundbreaking ceremony courtesy of Dryden Fiber
