The dream of free, high-speed, community-owned internet was once a reality in New York City. The People’s Choice Communications, a worker and community-owned internet cooperative, launched in 2020 and, thanks to subsidies afforded by the Affordable Connectivity Program, successfully offered fast, cheap internet in the Bronx while the ACP was still active.
However, the city’s decision to exclude the co-op from the Big Apple Connect program puts the People’s Choice at risk caused by losing thousands of subscribers.
“No one believed that we could actually build out the system,” said Troy Walcott, president of People’s Choice Communications, “and then we built it.”
Building from the ground up
The People’s Choice is an unlikely and rare story of broadband connectivity. It began with Spectrum workers going on strike.
In 2017, 1,800 Spectrum workers went on strike because of unmet health care and retirement benefits demands after Charter Communication’s acquisition of Time Warner Cable in 2016. 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, etc.,” 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, while 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 NYC Mesh, another free internet service provider 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 the People’s Choice, among other small ISPs, to wire buildings in the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), 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, co-founder and labor activist who also helped develop a worker-owned driver 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 (OTI), intended to bridge the city’s broadband divide by offering free internet to NYCHA residents for three years.
What internet companies did the city choose to helm the Big Apple Connect program instead of People’s Choice? It was Spectrum and Optimum Internet.
According to Walcott, the co-op’s largest customer group was located in the Melrose Houses, an NYCHA development that the co-op was 90% complete building out. Combined with progress in other NYCHA developments, the People’s Choice was close to passing more than 5,000 units served. The city denied People’s Choice a license to continue services in the Melrose and the co-op was required to remove all equipment from the buildings.
“OTI 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.
While the 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 Institute for Local Self-Reliance records as many as 450 public-owned internet networks across the country — a number that excludes internet co-ops.
While internet co-ops are a public internet network, they’re typically created by existing telephone and electric utilities, often in rural areas. They are relics of utility cooperatives formed during the New Deal. Some examples include the RS Fiber Cooperative in Minnesota and Central Virginia Electric Cooperative’s Firefly Fiber Broadband.
“Pure play broadband cooperatives are quite rare,” said Christopher Ali, a telecom 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 ACP allowed the co-op to start in the Bronx, one of the worst-connected boroughs in the city, according to a report from the NY State Comptroller.
“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?”
While the Big Apple Connect has extended services through 2027, OTI has not announced an extension option beyond that. Shortly after being cut from the program, People’s Choice submitted a FOIL request to OTI for information about the Big Apple Connect contract. According to Foman, the city has requested multiple extensions in the years since the initial request. The co-op has since filed an official complaint regarding the FOIL request with the city.
Despite the massive loss in subscribers and revenue afforded by the Big Apple Connect decision, Walcott and Forman remain optimistic about the future of the 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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