Untangling NYC's broadband underground

[Commentary] New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio talks of making broadband cheaper and faster. One solution may be lying beneath his feet. A vast conduit system runs through Manhattan and the Bronx that could support a thriving broadband marketplace -- or a municipal fiber network similar to the one in Chattanooga (TN), which delivers 1 gigabit per second (50 times faster service than what most New Yorkers experience) for $70 a month.

But New York's subterranean system -- built for telephone lines after the Great Blizzard of 1888 and owned since 1891 by Empire City Subway, or ECS -- also highlights the challenges the city faces in updating its broadband infrastructure. Like much of underground New York, portions of the network are in rough shape: Clogged or collapsed conduits force construction crews to detour south in order to go north as they run fiber from one neighborhood to another.

The extra mileage means the data take longer to reach customers -- a problem for finance companies, which count their connections in nanoseconds. And the extra costs make it tough on the city's few independent broadband providers, who have narrow profit margins and shallow pockets compared with the big operators.