Order for a hearing to discuss internet access and digital equity in the City of Boston.
Thank you. Docket 0221. Order for a hearing to discuss internal access and digital equity in the city of Boston. Thank you. The chair now recognizes Councilor Ed Flynn, chair of the Committee on City and Neighborhood Services. Councilor Flynn, the floor is yours. Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, we held a hearing on digital equity and Internet access this Monday, December six. The matter was sponsored by myself council me here in council. I want to thank councilors Brayden, Murphy, Bach and Flaherty for attending and to the panelists for being there also Alex Lawrence, Michael Lynch, Sarah Segal, Lara Peter for the Reader and from the from the Do It Week team. Margaret McKenna, who is the chair of the Boston Human Rights Commission. Theodora Hannah from Tech Goes On. Stephanie Lee is with Verizon. Angela Holm is with Comcast at the hearing. They do. A team presented their work on digital equity, including their efforts on publicizing the emergency broadband benefit to eligible residents, which gives up to $50 discount a month to qualified residents. And with the new infrastructure bill, there will be a new affordability connectivity program going forward. We spoke about the barriers for families to apply to these programs, since the application itself is in eight pages and the application itself is only in English and Spanish. Two, it is now working to reach out to different communities and help them apply for this important benefit. Margaret McKenna also spoke about the immediate need to address the gap of access for all residents and how broadband is now a necessary. Necessity for everyday life. She suggested having wi fi at bus and street train stations as a way to close the gap. Panelists from Tacos Home, Verizon and Comcast also spoke about the spoke about their programs, including plans to expand that network and current discount programs for residents. We still have a lot of work to do to address this important issue. And with the passage of this infrastructure bill, we have an opportunity to expand resources and take a huge step forward in closing the digital gap. I'm asking that this matter remain in committee so that we can continue the conversation. Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you very much, Councilor Flynn. Um, would anybody else wish to speak on this docket? I'm sorry I missed your light there. The chair recognizes the co-sponsor. At-Large city councilman. Dorchester councilman here. The floor is yours. Thank you to my co-sponsors, Councilor Flynn and BOC for working to create an incredible productive hearing on a topic that we all deeply are invested in. There seems to be a lot of work going on when it comes to expanding Internet access across the city of Boston. But a lot of this work seems to be happening in silos, and we need to step up to ensure that the work of connecting Boston is unified and intentional about reaching communities that are usually left out of the conversation. I also want to uplift something that the Human Rights Commission chair, Margaret McKenna brought up during the hearing. We already know what we know. We know that communities in Boston, particularly low income black and brown communities, lack access to reliable Internet services and simply by expanding Wi-Fi free and wicked free Wi-Fi isn't enough. We know why these communities are not connected. The question is, what are we as a city going to do about it? I look forward to working alongside Councilor Flynn and Bach to implement short term and long term solutions to ensure that everyone has a stable and reliable Internet connection as a right, not a privilege. And thank you again to my co-sponsors. Thank you very much, Councilor, here. The chair recognizes the district councilor for Beacon Hill, Councilor Kenzie BLOCK. The floor is yours. Thank you so much, Mr. President. And I want to also thank my co-sponsors, Councilor Flynn and me here on this. And I just wanted to underscore one thing that came up in the hearing, which is that I really think. We need to be careful. There's a lot of really good, well intentioned efforts to extend Internet access around the city. But when you drill down the quality of the Internet access that a lot of those low income and subsidized programs are providing is just not competitive with what people need for real educational and economic access. And so we're at risk of creating a city where even in the programs that we're extending and frankly, any emergency broadband benefit that the city that the federal government is subsidizing, where we're subsidizing and extending a real kind of second class, class service. And so, for example, right now, 75% of the city in theory, has access to fiber at their household. But only less than 2% of the Bostonians taking advantage of the emergency broadband benefit are getting it through fiber. And what that means is a situation where we're talking about low income Internet programs that might cap out at a 50 megabyte upload five download cap, whereas for folks who are paying for fiber are getting sorry, 50 megabytes versus a gigabyte, right, which is like a 20 x difference. So I just really want to stress because I think it's something that we're going to need to work on in the coming year. But the reason that we get into the conversation long term about municipal broadband and about extending fiber that is more under public control is because the only way you're actually going to shift it into being a utility as opposed to sort of an amenity that's and recognize it's essential ness to people's life is if we're investing in that really high quality product for everybody. So that was just something that alarmed me a bit that came out of the hearing. And I just really want to stress that I think it's going to be an area of council and administration need for action in the coming year. So thank you. Thank you very much, Councilor. Would anyone else wish to speak other than the three co-sponsors on this docket? Councilors Flynn, McKenna and Bach are asking the docket 0221 remain in the Committee on City and Neighborhood Services. And so it shall. Madam Clerk, would you now please read docket 0899?