The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has shined a harsh light on some of San Antonio’s most intractable problems. Foremost among these is addressing income inequality across the city.
For many years, San Antonio has had among the highest poverty rates among big cities across the U.S. As in many other urban areas, low-income residents in San Antonio have struggled to adapt to a mostly digital lifestyle during the pandemic as adoption of high-speed internet access by these households lags their wealthier counterparts. Lack of a broadband connection translates to missed educational, telemedicine and employment opportunities, putting these households at further disadvantage.
What is the best way to solve this technology issue? An optimal solution would entail tapping into the city’s robust broadband market to identify opportunities for closing San Antonio’s digital divide. The city is well-served by broadband—numerous options exist for getting online via cable, fiber or wirelessly. Available federal CARES funding could be used to subsidize the cost of a subscription with an existing provider for those low-income households that remain unconnected. The digital divide would likely shrink considerably.
Instead of choosing this path, San Antonio is pursuing a riskier route. According to the city’s plan, it will spend $27 million of federal relief funds as a down payment to build a network to connect some 20,000 homes for low-income students to the internet. But that on-ramp will only allow these new users to access their local school’s filtered web connection, limiting their ability to surf the entire internet.
This is a dauntingly complex project that the city expects to complete on a drawn-out timeline: A pilot phase will seek to bring service to six neighborhoods in the West Side by December; the remainder are expected to come online by next fall. Notwithstanding the many technical challenges of building an advanced wireless infrastructure—challenges that could greatly delay rollout and drive up costs — the long lag in bringing this network to targeted households means that thousands of students will remain without an internet connection when school resumes. More importantly, the vast majority of low-income students will have to wait a year before they can avail themselves of the city’s network.
If the goal is to ensure that low-income students have the digital tools needed to thrive during this school year, the city’s plan fails to come anywhere close to achieving it. To say nothing of the fact that it is impossible to build and continually maintain and upgrade a broadband network with the available funds.
A wiser expenditure of these funds would be to partner with existing broadband service providers and provide subsidized access to the internet. Similar public-private partnerships are what a number of major cities are doing. Chicago, for example, is using $50 million in mostly philanthropic funds to provide 100,000 low-income students with free broadband connections for up to four years via a partnership with its major cable providers. Since Chicago is leveraging existing broadband networks and not having to build its own, its funding will go much further than in San Antonio, where most of the money will disappear into sunk costs.
In a city where broadband abounds, San Antonio’s choice to build its own wireless network in an attempt to close the digital divide is a very poor use of taxpayer funds. The city’s low-income schoolchildren would be much better served if they had subsidized access to truly high-speed and unfiltered internet connections offered by existing broadband providers. This is a path that the city should carefully consider before moving forward with its own network.