Syracuse, NY officials say the city’s community-owned broadband network Surge Link continues to dramatically expand two years after the network first launched, bringing affordable broadband access to the city of 145,000 – with a particular eye on helping the city’s disadvantaged.

A recent update from the city states that the network now serves more than 9,200 households in Syracuse, located in central upstate New York. The latest expansion brought the service into the city’s Valley, Skunk City, Washington Square, Northside, Prospect Hill and Hawley-Green neighborhoods in early July.

The Surge Link initiative is part of a broader $15 million investment into fixed-wireless access broadband infrastructure into a city traditionally left underserved by giant regional telecoms.

A lack of competition between dominant regional monopolies Charter (Spectrum) and Verizon has resulted in spotty access, high prices, and slow speeds.

Image

The lion’s share of Surge Link’s latest expansion was made possible by a $10.8 million grant from the New York State 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.

As states gear up to administer federal BEAD funds from the bipartisan infrastructure law, a handful of states are already making significant investments in municipal broadband using federal Rescue Plan dollars.

California, Maine, Vermont, and New York have each established grant programs that center municipal broadband projects (mostly fiber builds) – with New York being the most recent state to announce more than $70 million in grant awards through its ConnectALL Municipal Infrastructure Grant Program (MIP).

Courtesy of the U.S. Treasury’s Capital Projects Fund, the awards are part of a $228 million initiative to bring high-quality Internet connectivity and consumer-friendly choice to New York communities long-stranded on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Syracuse officials have launched a new wireless community broadband network they hope will help bring affordable broadband access to the city of 145,000.

Dubbed Surge Link, the effort is backed by more than $3.5 million in federal funding and aims to deliver free broadband access to the city’s lowest income neighborhoods.

Motivated by peak pandemic connectivity headaches, Syracuse put out a request for proposal (RFP) late last year. The city then hired US Ignite as an advisor, and selected Geneva-based Community Broadband Networks (no relation to our program here at ILSR) to build a fixed wireless network capable of delivering discounted access starting with 2,500 underserved Syracuse households.

City officials tell ILSR the network is using Fixed Wireless Access technology, specifically Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS), which is an emerging technology a growing number of municipalities and other nonprofit community groups have been experimenting with as a way to bring broadband to unserved and underserved residents in dense settings. And while CBRS has promise, as US Ignite notes, “because the technology is relatively new, the hardware and software associated with CBRS networks is also new. Vendors may still be working out the kinks in their solutions, particularly if those solutions are being used in novel ways, or need to interface with other older systems.”

It should also be noted that another New York community (Westchester County) embraced CBRS, only to find that it could not deliver the capacity they wanted to many people who needed the service.