In New York City, the dream of free, high-speed, community-owned internet was once more than just a dream. The People’s Choice Communications, a worker- and community-owned internet cooperative, launched in 2020, and thanks to subsidies from the Affordable Connectivity Program, successfully offered fast, cheap internet in the Bronx while the ACP was still active.
“No one believed that we could actually build out the system,” said Troy Walcott, president of People’s Choice, “and then we built it.”
The city’s decision to exclude the co-op from the Big Apple Connect program has led to significant staff reductions at People’s Choice and put the organization at risk. Still, the story of the co-op is an unlikely and rare tale of broadband connectivity, one that begins with Spectrum workers going on strike.
Building from the ground up
In 2017, 1,800 Spectrum workers walked out because of unmet demands regarding health care and retirement benefits, after Charter Communications’ acquisition of Time Warner Cable the previous year (which led to the creation of the Spectrum brand). Forty of those striking workers decided to take matters into their own hands by creating their own internet network, intending to prioritize equity over profits.
“Instead of giving a lot of profits to, like, CEOs, etcetera,” said Walcott, “we take those profits and reinvest back into the system to also help provide service to those areas that normally wouldn’t be served by a strictly profit-motive driven ISP.”
The model is simple: Workers and subscribers mutually own the network. People’s Choice employees build and maintain the network, and residents pay monthly fees and participate in governance.
Wiring the community, one building at a time
People’s Choice used a mesh network to get buildings online, installing millimeter-wave antennas on rooftops to receive signals. The initial setup was similar to that of NYC Mesh, another provider of free internet service in the city. Since then, the co-op has expanded to fiber internet service for added reliability.
The New York City Internet Master Plan, former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s initiative to make internet more affordable and accessible, tapped People’s Choice and other small ISPs to wire buildings overseen by the New York City Housing Authority, the city’s government-run public housing agency, which was a significant source of funding for the newly formed co-op.
“During the pandemic, we built out a network that served over 1,000 households in public housing and affordable housing and provided them with free, high-speed internet,” said Erik Forman, People’s Choice co-founder and a labor activist who also helped develop a worker-owned ride-hailing cooperative in the city.
People’s Choice currently offers 200 megabits per second of symmetrical download and upload speed for just $30 a month, with plans to expand to a 500Mbps tier for $45 monthly and a 1,000Mbps tier for $60 monthly. For context, Spectrum offers a 500Mbps tier for $50 monthly and a 1,000Mbps tier for $70 monthly, making People’s Choice a viable competitor.
The fight for accessible internet is an ongoing battle
Since launching the service, People’s Choice has faced several roadblocks, the biggest of which was the city’s decision to cut the co-op out of the Big Apple Connect program.
After a change in city administration, the Big Apple Connect program effectively replaced the Internet Master Plan. The initiative, launched in 2022 by Mayor Eric Adams and the NYC Office of Technology and Innovation, intended to bridge the city’s broadband divide by offering free internet to 150,000 households in 220 NYCHA developments for three years. According to a spokesperson from New York City’s Office of Technology and Innovation, the program serves approximately 330,000 New Yorkers.
Which internet companies did the city choose to helm the Big Apple Connect program, instead of People’s Choice? Spectrum and Optimum Internet.
According to Walcott, the co-op’s largest customer group was located in Melrose Houses, a New York City Housing Authority development with a People’s Choice internet build-out that was 90% complete. Combined with progress in other NYCHA developments, the co-op was close to surpassing more than 5,000 units served. The city denied People’s Choice a license to continue services in the Melrose Houses development, and the co-op was required to remove all equipment from the buildings.
New York City’s Office of Technology and Innovation “telling NYCHA to both remove us from the buildings we were in and not let us expand to any other buildings totally destroyed every area we had worked on to that point,” Walcott said.
Though People’s Choice is still operational, Walcott told CNET that the workforce has been significantly reduced and that the co-op’s focus now is on expanding fiber internet services.
Echoes across the country
Public-owned internet networks are an increasingly popular alternative to private incumbent internet service providers, and the nonprofit Institute for Local Self-Reliance records as many as 450 public-owned internet networks across the country, a number that excludes internet co-ops.
Though internet co-ops are public internet networks, they’re typically created by existing telephone and electric utilities, often in rural areas. They’re relics of utility cooperatives formed during the New Deal. Some examples include the RS Fiber Cooperative in Minnesota and the Central Virginia Electric Cooperative’s Firefly Fiber Broadband.
“Pure play broadband cooperatives are quite rare,” said Christopher Ali, a telecommunications expert and professor at Penn State. “There’s only a handful of them.”
Starting an internet co-op from scratch is no cheap or easy feat. According to Ali, telephone and electric co-ops are much easier to create because they already have a business model and resources to draw from.
“Having employees be at the table, having labor be at the table, and the origins of the company, will go a long way to ensuring that the customers are satisfied with high-quality, low-cost broadband, but that employees are also able to make a meaningful, dignified, living wage,” said Ali.
Initially, People’s Choice considered a municipally owned network they could help maintain and presented a plan to the city, but it never came to fruition.
Instead, a combination of grants, private funding and subsidized funds from the Affordable Connectivity Program allowed the co-op to start in the Bronx, which, according to a report from the NY State Comptroller, is one of the worst-connected boroughs in the city.
“I think folks really saw that we were solving an important social problem. In fact, multiple important social problems,” said Forman. “Our goal was not just to bring folks affordable or free internet service, but also to create jobs for the strikers and to get to a different level of scale.”
“When we were up and running at the highest, and we had installed in the Bronx and NYCHA developments,” said Walcott, “we were able to hire digital stewards that were working with the company to help sign up their friends and neighbors for a service, as well as some basic digital literacy training.”
People’s Choice also offered members discounted laptops for $11 — another perk from the ACP — and Walcott said that eventually the plan would introduce participatory budgeting to the co-op.
What happens next?
“So while programs like Big Apple Connect provide [internet] temporarily for free to NYCHA, what happens when it stops?” said Walcott. “And also, what happens to all the surrounding buildings and the community that are in the same position … but are still unable to access service at those low rates?”
OTI has not announced an extension option for the Big Apple Connect Program. Shortly after being cut from the initiative, People’s Choice submitted a request to OTI, under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, for information about the Big Apple Connect contract. According to Foman, the city has requested multiple extensions in the years since that initial request. The co-op has since filed an official complaint regarding the FOIL request with the city.
“We reached all NYCHA developments within a year of the program being publicly announced,” a spokesperson from OTI said to CNET in a statement, “a major win for our students, older adults, families and jobseekers who suffered the negative impacts of our city’s digital divide during the pandemic.”
Despite the massive loss in subscribers and revenue afforded by the Big Apple Connect decision, Walcott and Forman remain optimistic about the future of People’s Choice.
“These are David and Goliath struggles,” Forman said. “So if you don’t have as much money or power, you’ve got to be smart and strategic. But the key is to just don’t stop.”
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