Authors: Alex Karras & Michael Santorelli - Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute, New York Law School Published: August 18, 2026 Source: Broadband Expanded
Overview
Alex Karras and Michael Santorelli examine how the cost and promised reach of two New York broadband initiatives have changed since their projects were first announced: the Municipal Infrastructure Program (MIP) and the Affordable Housing Connectivity Program (AHCP). Between them, the two programs have committed more than $300 million in federal Capital Projects Fund (CPF) money and state funds to broadband construction and to connections in affordable housing.
The Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute (ACLP) catalogued 34 projects — 22 MIP and 12 AHCP awards — from July 2024 through July 2026. Three movements recur across the portfolio, the authors find: grant amounts adjusted upward, promised coverage adjusted downward, and a climbing price for each connection delivered.
Ten projects across the two programs have had their grant revised up by at least 5% since first announced, against seven revised down. Those upward revisions add roughly $38 million to what the programs will cost in combination. Promised reach over the same period dropped by about 34,000 locations and households.
Reconstructing the public record
The state has reworked the budget or the scope of many MIP and AHCP awards in recent months. None of it was announced by ConnectALL, New York’s broadband office. The authors instead traced the changes through the bulky board packets circulated to the directors of Empire State Development, ConnectALL’s parent agency. Earlier ACLP work on the two programs drew on records obtained via Freedom of Information requests.
Reporting on these grants is not standardized. Instead of a running file per award, cost and scope numbers appear scattered through board materials, fact sheets, performance reports, press releases and dashboard extracts — each a snapshot of where a project stood on a given date, with nothing tying the snapshots together into a history.
To supply that history, the ACLP pulled every figure it could find in the public record into one catalog, logging each as a discrete observation of project, source and date, as published. Program totals add up each project’s first and most recent recorded figure.
Three awards are treated as special cases:
The Manhattan and Upper Manhattan/Bronx AHCP grants are reported as a single project, following the ConnectALL board’s decision to merge them.
CNY Open Access, cancelled outright, is carried through at zero.
The Franklin County and Development Authority of the North Country (DANC) award appears in the scope figures as a collapse, but is kept out of the cost-per-connection calculations, since a residual grant spread over two locations yields no meaningful unit cost.
MIP costs rise as reach falls
Across the 22 Municipal Infrastructure Program awards, grants in total went from roughly $295.5 million to $302.8 million, a gain of about 2%.
Individual awards moved far more than that net figure implies. Cancelling CNY Open Access removed some $26 million, and the Franklin County/DANC grant was cut back to almost nothing; both were more than offset by roughly $34 million of increases spread across other projects.
The largest MIP increases:
Franklin County fixed wireless: about $13.1 million to $25.4 million, up 94%.
Schoharie County: about $30 million to $42.4 million, up 41%.
Dryden and Caroline: $8.9 million to $11.6 million, up 31%.
Madison County: $9.9 million to $12.6 million, up 27%.
Oswego County: $26 million to $29.5 million, up 13%.
Meeting those higher costs required money from elsewhere: unspent AHCP funds were shifted over to close the MIP gap. That reallocation, the authors note, surfaced publicly only in a footnote of the July 2026 CPF performance report filed with the U.S. Treasury. Very little of this budgetary rearrangement, they argue, translates into additional homes reached.
Fewer MIP locations
MIP was originally expected to pass 126,702 service locations. The latest combined commitment is 107,631 — some 19,000 fewer, a cut of 15%.
A handful of awards account for most of the shortfall:
Oswego County dropped from 10,792 locations to 2,319, a 79% reduction, while its grant went up.
Syracuse Surge Link dropped from roughly 13,000 locations to 9,246, down 29%.
CNY Open Access went from 6,671 locations to none after cancellation.
Franklin County/DANC was reduced from 1,600 planned locations to two, in order to meet a federal deadline.
Reach did grow at several MIP projects — Sherburne and Columbus, Schoharie, Dryden and Caroline, Livingston and Orleans among them — but not by enough to counterbalance the cuts and the cancellation.
AHCP contracts more sharply
Grants across the Affordable Housing Connectivity Program rose in total from about $33 million to $35.4 million, up roughly 7%. Four AHCP awards sit among the ten projects revised up by 5% or more: Geneva (up 74%), Greater Ithaca (up 55%), Greater Buffalo (up 44%) and the merged Manhattan and the Bronx grant (up 35%).
Households promised coverage fell over the same window from 34,452 to 19,427 — roughly 15,000 fewer, a 44% cut.
Geneva alone gained meaningfully on both counts, going from 222 to 387 households. Every other AHCP award tracked came down.
Among the steeper reductions:
Greater Rochester 02: 4,405 to 1,008 households, down 77%.
Greater Albany: 3,367 to 1,162, down 65%.
Greater Syracuse: 2,991 to 1,385, down 54%.
Greater Binghamton: 439 to 215, down 51%.
Manhattan and the Bronx: a combined 6,080 to 3,607, down 41%.
Greater Ithaca: 1,019 to 649, down 36%.
Greater Buffalo: 3,065 to 2,020, down 34%.
Buffalo City: 5,033 to 3,353, down 33%.
Brooklyn: 2,613 to 1,875, down 28%.
Taking both programs together, 15 projects are now set to serve fewer locations or households than they promised at announcement.
Cost per connection
Setting each grant against the coverage it currently promises yields a per-connection price. With grants rising and coverage shrinking, that price has moved sharply in both programs.
MIP, per location: $2,113 at first announcement, $2,661 on the latest figures — up 26%.
AHCP, per household: $957 at first announcement, $1,822 on the latest figures — up 91%.
Oswego is the outlier on the MIP side, where cost per location climbed 428% as the grant grew and coverage shed nearly four-fifths of its original total. Franklin County fixed wireless follows at 94%, then Syracuse Surge Link at 41%, Schoharie at 29%, and Madison and Dryden/Caroline at roughly 25% each.
Unit costs rose at every AHCP project but Geneva. The steepest: Greater Rochester 02 (up 301%), Greater Albany (up 173%), Greater Ithaca (up 143%), Manhattan and the Bronx (up 128%), Greater Buffalo (up 118%) and Greater Syracuse (up 108%).
Possible reasons for the changes
The authors point to several overlapping factors, while stressing that the thin reporting leaves the state’s reasoning largely opaque.
The first is timing. CPF-funded work is supposed to be substantially finished by the close of 2026; rewriting the scope of this many projects may signal that a number of them would not have made that date.
The second is the extension process. Treasury permits states to ask for more time on CPF projects, and New York appears to have secured extensions for some AHCP awards earlier in 2026, pushing their substantial-completion date to June 30, 2027. ConnectALL sought extensions for certain MIP projects as well, though that request remained undecided at the end of July 2026 — the state proceeded to rework many MIP projects anyway. The likeliest driver, in the authors’ reading, is private buildout: ISPs have kept pushing their own footprints outward, removing the case for some publicly funded construction, a pattern they say has shown up nationally. Even allowing for that, they maintain that the great majority of MIP and AHCP projects will still duplicate networks already in the ground — overbuilding they characterize as wasteful.
The third is construction economics. Prices have climbed on materials, tariffs and labor, and providers of every size are paying more than anticipated for rights-of-way, pole attachments and comparable access. Since neither MIP nor AHCP obliged grantees to contribute matching funds, the state absorbs the full project cost in many cases — and, the authors suggest, may be asked for more money later to keep absorbing it.
Transparency and accountability
The verdict the authors reach is that the two programs are delivering “less for more.” On the evidence assembled so far, they write, MIP and AHCP may not amount to a prudent or efficient use of scarce public money.
That the pattern could only be assembled manually, out of scattered documents, is itself the argument they close on: programs of this kind should be built with clear, standardized reporting from day one.
NOTES
The “about $38 million” figure is the sum of the upward revisions across the ten projects revised up by at least 5%, as the report states. It is not the net change in program cost: on the report’s own totals, the two programs together move from approximately $328.5 million to $338.2 million.
The report documents cost escalation and scope reduction from the public record. Its broader characterizations — inefficient use of public funds, wasteful overbuilding — are the ACLP authors’ assessment rather than conclusions established by the project data alone.
The cancelled CNY Open Access award went to the Central New York Regional Planning and Development Board, for a 275-mile open-access network serving mainly Cayuga and Cortland counties. The ACLP report identifies the award by project name only; the grantee and network details come from subsequent trade reporting.
The full data appendix, Data Mining New York’s MIP & AHCP (August 2026), contains per-project observation tables, a cohort breakdown of cost-per-location change by award round, and the complete source list.
COMMENTARY
Wireless Estimator — reads the findings for fiber and tower contractors, arguing the cost pattern mirrors private-build pressures (Aug 2026)
Broadband Breakfast — adds program context, including the Dec 31, 2026 completion deadline and the identity of the cancelled CNY award (Aug 2026)
Communications Daily — trade brief on the scope reductions, paywalled (Aug 2026)
Benton Institute for Broadband & Society — carries the analysis in its headlines digest (Aug 2026)
RESOURCES
Data Mining New York’s MIP & AHCP — the ACLP’s full data appendix, with per-project observation tables and every source (Aug 2026)
ConnectALL 2026 CPF Performance Report — the Treasury filing whose footnote discloses the AHCP-to-MIP fund transfer (Jul 2026)
Municipal Infrastructure Program — ConnectALL’s open-access and publicly controlled broadband construction program
Affordable Housing Connectivity Program — ConnectALL’s low-cost service program for affordable and public housing
ESD Board Meetings — the Empire State Development board packets in which the scope and budget revisions surfaced
Capital Projects Fund — the U.S. Treasury program funding both New York initiatives
Advanced Communications Law and Policy Institute — the New York Law School institute behind the analysis
New York Doubles Down on Broadband Overbuilding — earlier ACLP assessment of MIP awards against existing networks
Monitoring New York’s Municipal Infrastructure Program: Evaluating Round 1 Awards — the ACLP’s first evaluation of the program
New York Continues to Use Federal Funds for Overbuilding — Cortland County analysis, and the source recording the CNY Open Access cancellation (Feb 2026)