How a Trump admin ruling could hurt effort to improve data coverage in Syracuse’s poor areas

When Syracuse (NY) city officials conjured up a plan to buy 17,507 streetlights from National Grid, they saw an opportunity to pressure big telecommunication companies to extend better service to poor parts of the city and to make a few bucks in the process. But a ruling from the Trump administration late last year quashed that opportunity, slashed a source of potential city revenue and delivered a big win to companies like Sprint, Verizon and AT&T. The Federal Communications Commission recently set strict rules on how much a municipality can charge a private company to install infrastructure on public property and what conditions the municipality can set. That limited the authority of a city like Syracuse to make its own rules for cell towers, stripping the already sparse bargaining power the city has in negotiations with big telecommunication companies.