Ten Years Ago... Critics Say New Jersey Phone Plan Shuns Poor

Critics Say New Jersey Phone Plan Shuns Poor
[SOURCE: New York Times 4/17/1997, AUTHOR: Melody Petersen]
Ten years ago, New Jersey's Ratepayer Advocate noted that in the five years since Bell Atlantic had promised to wire every home and business in New Jersey with fiber optic cable, the company had hooked up suburban business parks and large corporations and set a schedule for suburban neighborhoods, but had not yet made specific plans for the thousands of poor people who live in the state's largest cities. She said she was particularly concerned that Bell Atlantic had so far bypassed urban enterprise zones, which are the cities' main hope for attracting new businesses and jobs. Bell Atlantic officials said they were focusing on wiring major businesses first because that was where the demand was. They said that they would rewire 400,000 homes in northern New Jersey next, and that the company was on schedule for hooking up the whole state by the year 2010, making New Jersey the first state to be rewired. While the poor are assured access to low rates for basic phone service through a Federal policy known as universal access, so far there is not a clear policy to insure that low-income people are not left out of the Information Age. Andrew Jay Schwartzman, president of the Media Access Project, said that cities would slide further into poverty if nothing was done to assure access. A city without the best communication lines will not be able to attract companies, he said, "any more than a desert community could, until a dam project brought water."
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