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Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
San Francisco Wins National Award For Providing Free High Speed Internet Service To Affordable Housing Residents
By
on
As the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP) is now bankrupt and no longer helping low-income households pay for home Internet service, the City of San Francisco is being honored with the 2024 Community Broadband Project of the Year Award by the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) for its Fiber to Housing (FTH) program.
Built on the back of the city’s municipally-owned fiber optic network – which since 2002 has been used to connect city and public safety facilities, hospitals, libraries and street lights – California’s fourth most populous city is well on its way to extending the city-owned network to deliver free high-speed Internet service to 30,000 affordable housing units across the city.
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The program currently serves over 14,300 affordable housing units in the city, as well as 1,500 beds at homeless shelters across 115 sites, city officials say. An additional 10,000 residential units are expected to be connected in the coming fiscal year, with the aim of serving 30,000 units by July 2025.
According to the city’s website, the program has connected 52 public housing locations across the city to “fiber-optic and Ethernet cabling in every housing unit.” An additional 63 housing locations are getting free Internet through onsite Wi-Fi with download speeds ranging from 60 to 120 Mbps (Megabits per second), which exceeds the 50 Mbps service Comcast’s Internet Essentials offers.
Connecting ‘San Francisco’s Most Vulnerable Residents’
NATOA, a nationally recognized association of local government leaders advocating for better communication practices and policies, honored the FTH program for “connecting San Francisco’s most vulnerable residents to educational, cultural, employment and health care resources available over the [I]nternet.”
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“The FTH program utilizes San Francisco’s extensive fiber optic network to reach residents in all neighborhoods of the City. By connecting affordable housing, the FTH program addresses the City’s most pressing digital equity needs.”
NATOA officials further noted how the program was providing a wired connection to individual units “to ensure high quality broadband” and had also successfully piloted a program to serve “privately owned single room occupancy (SRO) hotels in Chinatown.”
In a press statement San Francisco Mayor London Breed articulated what the program means to the city:
“We are working aggressively to provide low-income families with access to high-speed [I]nternet to ensure that every family in San Francisco has access to online resources for every day needs that so many of us take for granted, like paying bills or doing homework. Thousands of people are now connected thanks to the City’s Fiber to Housing program, but we know more San Franciscans need the support.”
The Fiber to Housing program is described by city officials as a cross-departmental collaboration between the city’s Department of Technology (DT), the Mayor’s Office on Housing and Community Development (MOHCD), and the city’s Housing Authority.
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The origins of the project, however, date back to 2018 when the city worked with local Internet Service Provider (ISP) Monkeybrains to bring broadband to public housing units in Hunters Point East and West (HPEW) in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood and the Robert B. Pitts housing development in the Western Addition neighborhood, which we detailed in our 2019 report “A Public Housing Digital Inclusion Blueprint.”
Affordable Housing and Then Some?
The city’s on-going efforts may be further boosted by a California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) staff recommendation that the city be approved for a $10 million grant award from the state’s Last Mile Federal Funding Account to extend the network further into the Bayview, Chinatown, and Tenderloin neighborhoods. The Commission will consider the recommendation and possibly approve the award at its July 11 voting meeting.
According to the CPUC, the grant award would connect an additional 434 unserved locations or a total of 5,771 unserved residents, noting that as many as 37,000 city residents would stand to benefit as the network would be capable of providing symmetrical gig speed service in the area.
“The City and County of San Francisco has committed to maintaining its prices for at least 10 years and will provide a low-cost plan … (as well as) free service to residents of affordable housing, Single Room Occupancy hotels, previously unserved locations, and small, disadvantaged businesses.”
The CPUC staff recommendation goes on to say that “the proposed (expansion) project will cost an estimated $12 million, of which the Federal Funding Account will fund approximately 84 percent of costs. The City and County of San Francisco plans to use monies from its capital budget to fund the balance.”
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Over the past few years, the broadband infrastructure investments the state has made has relied on a combination of state funds and federal American Rescue Plan Act dollars.
The state has yet to receive its $1.86 billion federal windfall from the BEAD program.
However, the rules for how and where BEAD funds can be spent – enshrined in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law – require those funds to be used for projects in mostly rural areas, leaving major metro areas having to rely on other sources of funding to connect unserved and underserved city residents.
As major metro areas from Los Angeles to Newark, NJ look to solve its connectivity challenges in the absence of BEAD-funded grants, we will follow the city's efforts to see how San Francisco manages to sustain the network financially in the absence of ACP-like programs and whether the city moves to further expand its network to give city residents and businesses more choices than the high-cost offerings of the dominant incumbent providers (AT&T and Comcast XFinity), which has left thousands of San Franciscans without access to reliable or affordable broadband.
Watch a video on the Fiber To Housing Program below:
Header image of San Francisco courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, ATTRIBUTION-SHAREALIKE 3.0 UNPORTED
Inline image of deploying fiber across a rooftop courtesy of City of San Francisco
Inline image of San Francisco Chinatown at night courtesy of Flickr user KayVeePhotos, ATTRIBUTION-NODERIVS 2.0 GENERIC
Inline image of workers installing wireless connection points on side of building courtesy of City of San Francisco
Inline image of young students at computer courtesy of City of San Francisco
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