The 130-Year-Old Entity That Can Fix NYC’s Broadband Crisis

Affordable internet is under our feet

An Empire City Subway Co manhole cover (Source)

Suzi Ragheb and Katherine Jin on how a nineteenth-century underground cable network could unlock internet access and affordability across NYC.

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New York City is digitally redlined. Internet service providers (ISPs) have divided the market into geographic monopolies, leaving most residents with a single provider, or, at best, a choice between Verizon and Spectrum. Prices stay high and quality remains mediocre. At a recent press conference announcing an internet access initiative, a Bronx resident, Caridad Suarez, shared that her broadband bill was over $200 a month. For nearly one in four Bronx families, these exorbitant prices push home internet access beyond their reach. Kids are forced to do homework at McDonald’s, seniors are cut off from telehealth medical care, and job applications are left unsubmitted.

The lack of competition is driven in part by the high cost of entry: smaller, local fiber ISPs cannot afford to trench new conduits through City streets to reach residential customers. At first blush, this problem might appear insurmountable, an inherent feature of the capital-intensive business of internet service provision. But NYC already has a tool that could fix this problem: the Empire City Subway Company (ECS), an obscure entity whose initials are stamped on manhole covers across Manhattan and the Bronx.

Created in 1891 to move overhead telegraph and telephone wires off the street and into shared underground conduits, ECS controls all of the underground conduits (or sub-ways) in Manhattan and the Bronx. While ECS is a subsidiary of Verizon—the same company that dominates NYC’s broadband market—the City retains powerful contractual rights and revenue-sharing claims over ECS. In principle, by allowing fiber ISPs to lease space in the existing conduits, ECS could eliminate the costs associated with digging up streets, pulling permits, and managing construction—allowing companies to reach new customers at a fraction of the cost of building from scratch. In practice, however, it hasn’t worked out that way.

Mismanagement and Opacity

The Empire City Subway Company was last publicly audited in 2010, by Comptroller John Liu. According to Liu’s report, ECS was undercounting profits, thereby reducing its required revenue sharing with the City, and failing to manage and reinvest in its network. In 2008, for instance, ECS built 1,026 new conduits. Of these, 277 were occupied by its parent company Verizon, while other vendors received only 28. What happened to the other 721 conduits? They remained vacant—new, public infrastructure, locked away. And this marked an improvement from 2007, when other vendors received only four of the 1,484 newly built conduits.

What does the picture look like today? Given the opacity surrounding ECS’s operations, it’s difficult to know. In 2014, Harvard law professor and tech policy expert Susan Crawford filed a Freedom of Information Law request seeking basic information about ECS: the current franchise agreement, occupancy data, and financial records. The City’s response was mostly redacted, and when Crawford asked clarifying questions about which ISPs were renting ECS’s conduits, she was told those were “trade secrets” and that disclosure would cause “substantial injury to the competitive positions of the subject enterprise” (that is, Verizon).

Crawford sued the Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI), and in 2017, a court ruling pushed the City toward greater transparency about ECS’s assets. In the years since, however, the underlying dynamic has remained essentially unchanged: Verizon controls access to this public infrastructure with minimal public oversight or accountability.

Leading ECS

What can City Hall do? The original 1891 franchise contract with ECS gives the City explicit rights that have never been enforced: the right to demand all maps and occupancy data, the right to require fair and impartial access for all tenants, and the right to purchase the system outright. Using these existing terms as leverage, the City could seriously shake up the broadband market to tackle access and cost barriers for New Yorkers.

There are two immediate steps that could be taken. First, the City should conduct a full public audit of ECS’s extensive conduit capacity in the Bronx and Manhattan and publish detailed occupancy data. It’s been almost two decades since the last public audit, and the Mamdani administration should make clear that the era of treating public infrastructure as a trade secret is over. Second, the city should establish an open-access conduit leasing program, with transparent, non-discriminatory pricing that allows competing ISPs, especially small, local providers, access to residential markets that they currently cannot afford to reach.

In the longer term, the City should consider tying its revenue-sharing terms with ECS to measurable competition outcomes, such as the number of ISPs with active conduit leases, pricing benchmarks, or broadband adoption in underserved neighborhoods. And if Verizon refuses to open up ECS for competitors, the City should use its contractual right to purchase the ECS conduit system outright. It can then lease the conduits, generating income for the City. Importantly, none of these suggestions requires new legislation, as these contractual rights fall under the existing administrative authority of OTI.

ECS only covers Manhattan and the Bronx, so other underserved boroughs are left out for now. But for the Bronx, the borough with the worst broadband access, it’s a concrete, available, and underutilized policy lever. It would also carry symbolic significance beyond New York—encouraging cities to take a hard look at the existing administrative powers they have to open up the broadband market for competition. Many cities across the country, including in New York State, have even built their own broadband networks. New York City is piloting its own publicly-owned broadband network, Neighborhood Internet, operated by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the New York Public Library.

New Yorkers deserve a better, faster, and affordable internet. New York, one of the wealthiest and most densely populated cities in the world, lags behind similar cities on broadband access and speed. That’s a policy failure—but one that comes with a 130-year-old solution already on the books.

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Suzi Ragheb and Katherine Jin are leads for the Internet for All campaign, a grassroots, volunteer-driven campaign to expand affordable internet access for all New Yorkers.