The NYC Broadband Advisory Committee met on Wednesday to hear from Diamond Consultants, the company hired by the NYC Economic Development Corporation to report on the state of broadband access in the city. Diamond has done an incredible job gathering data on broadband availability and adoption in the city. That alone gives New York City an advantage going forward.
We'll be posting a more complete response to the draft report soon, but subtle dynamics cut through the event itself, providing hints of what's to come. For starters, when we showed up at the guard house on the east side of City Hall and told the cop on guard what we were there for, he said he had no idea what we were talking about. He even called inside to check, but said that nothing was scheduled. Meanwhile, more people kept showing up.
Turns out, there is a City Council entrance and a Mayor entrance. We were at the Mayor entrance and the two sides don't talk to each other. So the cop at the Mayor entrance was holding up a dozen people while the cop on the other side was waving people through. We walked around the park and came through on the other side, and eventually it got worked out, but it says something about the two branches' different attitudes towards the issue. It's a commentary more generally on the interoperability of local government communications if the two sides of City Hall Park can't even synchronize their calendars.
Matt Kelly from Deputy Mayor Robert Lieber's office endorsed Diamond's proposals, but everyone said this was just a starting point. Verizon rep Thomas Dunne's only comment was to request confirmation that the report was a draft that was open for edits, suggesting they want to see changes. When a member of the audience asked a question about maintaining copper infrastructure, he passed on answering, even though that's Verizon's department. This is important because the proposed strategy relies heavily on Verizon's FiOS rollout.