Mayor Eric Adams’ administration may redesign the 32-foot 5G transmitting towers whose installation across the city has sparked backlash in multiple neighborhoods for their sheer size, a City Hall official said Friday.
Since 2022, the city has installed more than 140 of the so-called Link5G towers as part of a public-private partnership that aims to expand speedy 5G internet and cellular service to more neighborhoods. The ultimate goal has been to install 2,000 poles across the five boroughs — but the rollout has been rocky, and was paused for months last year after federal officials ruled they needed to be subject to more environmental review.
That pause has since been lifted, allowing construction on the towers to resume, city Chief Technology Officer Matthew Fraser said during a City Council hearing on Friday. But Fraser surprised lawmakers by adding that the Adams administration is “reassessing design elements” in response to public criticism.
“Some of the things that we’ve heard very recently, over the last year or so, is that many people aren’t fans of the look and the aesthetics of the tower,” Fraser said. “So we’re looking at other design options and elements from other cities that [have] done it, to see how we can make it different.”
Redesigning the towers would mark a major backtrack for the 5G program, which began as an effort to revamp the troubled partnership between the city and the private vendor CityBridge that runs the parent program LinkNYC. LinkNYC began in 2014 by replacing defunct phone booths with WiFi-emitting kiosks; its leap into 5G was formalized in 2021, when Bill de Blasio’s administration persuaded the city’s Public Design Commission to sign off on the towers despite concerns over their size.
Those concerns have grown more audible since the first towers were installed in 2022. Business improvement districts have argued the towers might inconvenience pedestrians and said their flashy advertising screens could outshine adjacent businesses. And preservation groups on the Upper East Side and in Greenwich Village have criticized the “ungainly” towers while arguing they serve little purpose in already-well-connected Manhattan neighborhoods.
Fraser did not say when the new design would take effect, although he said the city might start a competition seeking proposals for the new transmitters’ design. The changes would need to be ratified again by the Public Design Commission.
Adams has mostly embraced the 5G program since taking office in 2022, and spoke at the unveiling of the first transmitting tower in the Bronx. The city’s contract with CityBridge requires 90% of the poles to be installed in the outer boroughs and above 96th Street in Manhattan — part of an effort to bridge the “digital divide” and benefit the estimated 1.5 million New Yorkers who lack both home and mobile broadband. (Still, the 5G poles, rather than improving people’s in-home internet connections, mainly benefit users at street level.)
In response to the neighborhood pushback, some business leaders have sought to shore up support for Link5G. Last year, the Partnership for New York City and dozens of other business groups sent a letter to the mayor and council speaker, imploring them to hold firm in their support for expanding what they called a critical technology for the city’s growth.
“When you’re judging how much you like or dislike the 30-foot pole, make sure you understand that the future of our economy may depend on that 30-foot pole,” Kathryn Wylde, the Partnership’s CEO, told Crain’s in June. She argued that most criticism of the towers boiled down to typical “NIMBY” objections from wealthy neighbors.
Fraser revealed the planned changes while being questioned during a council technology committee hearing by City Councilman Erik Bottcher, who represents Manhattan’s West Side. Bottcher told Crain’s afterwards that he was pleased by the news.
“We’re talking about 32-foot-tall features of the streetscape that are going to be there for many years, seen by tens of thousands of people each day,” Bottcher said. “We should take the time to get the design right.”
The city’s Office of Technology and Innovation, which oversees Link5G, declined to share more information about the planned redesign. But spokesman Ray Legendre said in a statement that “CTO Fraser is interested in looking at every option for enabling existing street furniture to support Wi-Fi and other services, similar to the Link5G program.”
CityBridge, which operates the Link program, is a joint venture made up of tech companies Intersection and Boldyn Networks — although the group’s membership has changed multiple times since its inception. A few years after LinkNYC’s 2014 launch, CityBridge owed the city nearly $60 million in revenue-sharing payments from advertising, had fallen behind on its installation targets and had put most of its kiosks in wealthy neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn despite its stated goal of improving connectivity in low-income areas.
City officials amended their contract with CityBridge in 2021, aiming to revamp the program by allowing for 5G towers and slimming the revenue-sharing payments that CityBridge had struggled to pay. Instead of relying solely on advertising revenues, the 5G program allows CityBridge to collect fees from the cellular carriers whose equipment is housed in each tower.
Although installations have resumed since last year’s pause, the ruling by the Federal Communications Commission has had consequences: Patch reported that nearly all of the 18 5G towers once planned for the Upper East Side have been canceled after a historic preservation review.
Nick Garber , 2024-03-11 16:06:46
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