New York City Councilwoman Gale Brewer has a plan. She wants to bring broadband services to underserved parts of the city by using a combination of fixed wireless technology and fiber optics. Not only would such an effort bring broadband to the masses, but according to this 29-year veteran of city government, it also would save New York a great deal of money on telecom services.

If Brewer's track record is a reliable indicator, this latest flight of fancy will save the city a bundle on telecom services. It was Brewer, while working in the office of former Mayor David Dinkins, who came up with the simple yet highly effective idea of installing information kiosks in front of city hall. Later, while working in the city's public advocacy office, she conceptualized and developed the city's official Web site, www.nyc.gov. “We had to figure out how government could be more accessible and efficient,” Brewer said.

Now Brewer, who represents the Hell's Kitchen and Upper West Side sections of Manhattan, wants to see high-speed data services expand beyond Midtown, downtown and the financial district. And she only has to look across the East River for her motivation.

The borough of Brooklyn has 2.5 million residents and would be the sixth-largest city in the United States should it ever decide to leave New York City, as its beloved Dodgers did nearly half a century ago. But despite its scale, Brooklyn is largely devoid of DSL or cable modem services, Brewer said, mostly due to its reputation for being on the lower end of the socioeconomic meter — at least compared with the more affluent Manhattan, the nation's preeminent business and financial center.

“A year ago, a senior citizen center with a multimillion-dollar budget wanted to put in broadband, but no one wanted to go there,” Brewer said. “I've worked in a lot of low-income areas in New York City, and private companies always think there's no marketplace there. We have to get this to go beyond the central business district.”

In Brewer's mind, accessibility is not only an issue of physical infrastructure but of cost. She said that 98% of the companies doing business in New York are small, with 100 employees or less. The city also is home to hundreds — if not thousands — of non-profit organizations. Such companies are hard pressed to pay the $400 to $1200 monthly charge to connect to a T-1 line from incumbent Verizon Communications, said Brewer.

Accordingly, she has proposed that the city construct a metropolitan area network linking four of the five boroughs — Staten Island would be excluded — by installing point-to-multipoint fixed wireless points of presence (POPs) that would then be connected to fiber-optic lines. Because of the incredibly prohibitive cost of laying fiber in New York City, the near-term plan is to use fiber the city already owns in combination with excess capacity leased from other fiber owners. The fixed wireless POPs would be placed atop the tallest municipal buildings in each borough, including schools, employment centers and borough halls.

The own/lease aspect of the plan, which is dubbed Network NYC, is a hybrid of two very different approaches. The first is Chicago's CivicNet project, which calls for private sector companies — including incumbent telco SBC Communications — to bid for the right to build out a fiber/wireless MAN and then lease capacity back to the city. The second approach calls for a city to operate and maintain the fiber under 20-year indefeasible right to use (IRU) contracts, which essentially confer all the rights and obligations of ownership upon the lessee. NYSERNet, a consortium of public and private educational institutions in New York City, and RISQ, a similar consortium in Quebec, currently are pursuing the latter model on a much smaller scale.

Each model has its advantages. Under the CivicNet model, there would be no upfront capital costs, though lease costs would rise proportionately as bandwidth use increases. On the other hand, while the upfront costs of the NYSERNet/RISQ model are significant, bandwidth costs over time would be relatively stable because terms would be locked in by the IRU contracts. “Network NYC is a tiered approach,” said Nick Noe, Brewer's legislative aide. “In some parts of the city it makes sense to own the fiber, in others to lease. We have to do what makes sense given the city's fiscal crisis.”

According to Noe, businesses buying broadband services would see their bills decrease immediately, and the city could be saving $25 million per year by the second year under the Network NYC plan. That doesn't include any additional savings gained by converting current circuit-switched traffic to packet-switched traffic that could be run over a fiber/wireless MAN — money that could be reinvested to expand the fiber reach. Noe said current estimates predict New York City would save an additional $11 million per year if it were to migrate to Internet telephony over the fiber/wireless MAN.

Currently, the city's Metropolitan Transit Authority owns 490 miles of fiber, much of which is currently dark. It also owns 714 miles of rights-of-way in which new fiber can be placed. In addition, the city owns or has access to conduit systems through which fiber could be pulled, which would save New York the astronomical trenching costs that otherwise would be incurred by a major fiber deployment. For example, a defunct water main that connects Manhattan and Brooklyn is available, as is a defunct pneumatic system that once was used to transport documents between Manhattan libraries.

Other systems not owned by the city but that are under its “sphere of influence” might also become available, said Noe. One such system is a conduit owned by Consolidated Edison and the Empire City Subway, which is owned by Verizon. Noe pointed out that the city would spend about $136 million this year on telecom services, with about $96 million of that going to Verizon. “That would buy us a lot of leverage,” Noe said.

Frank McLoughlin, vice president of government relations for Verizon in New York, conceded that the Big Apple carries a big stick into any negotiation. “They're our biggest customer, and we're not going to do anything to lose them,” he said.

Leverage, however, might be the least of the city's concerns as it contemplates whether and how to bring Brewer's vision to fruition. According to McLoughlin, cable companies serving the city provided most of the MTA-owned fiber under terms of their franchise agreements, and that's a problem for New York. “Those contracts say the city can't use those facilities to compete with the cable companies,” McLoughlin said.

In addition, Verizon pays a princely sum to the city each year in taxes and provides thousands of good paying union jobs that come with attractive benefits, considerations that surely will resonate with New York City lawmakers who ultimately would have to approve the project.

Finally, McLoughlin thinks the city quickly would regret its decision to effectively become its own phone company. “I can't blame them for looking to reduce their bill, but do they really think they can manage and operate it as cheaply as we could?”

Brewer doesn't think the city has a choice, based on the belief that carriers will bring advanced services only to places where there is a sufficient customer base to support the effort. That means Midtown, not Bedford-Stuyvesant. Plus, she knows no other way. Said Brewer: “We're always pushing, and this technology is going to allow us to push harder.”