Bronx Lags In Digital Access And Education, Report Finds

By Jonathan Custodio, The City

July 8, 2025, 5:00 a.m.

A digital divide is leaving Bronxites behind.

A report published Monday by the policy think tank Center for an Urban Future outlines disparities in broadband internet connection, access to internet-connected devices, digital literacy and tech education in the city’s northern-most borough, where there’s less access to tools that are increasingly essential for many career and educational opportunities. It was funded by The Bronx Community Foundation, which has led a network of community-based organizations addressing digital inequities.

While nearly all of the borough’s infrastructure is wired for high-speed internet, about 22% of households lack broadband — or more than one in five, the highest share of any borough. In the Fordham, Bedford Park and Norwood neighborhoods in the northwest Bronx, more than 30% of households lack broadband.

Without a broadband connection to provide high-speed internet access, many parts of the internet are functionally off-limits, including streaming videos and remote meetings.

Boroughwide, 31% of households lack access to a laptop, again the highest share of any borough. In the South Bronx neighborhoods of Melrose, Mott Haven, and Hunts Point, more than 40% of the households have no laptop.

Elva Laboy, 70, said she had broadband service for years in Hunts Point via Optimum before canceling it four years ago. The service, she said, was too “expensive” for her, and she hasn’t signed up with another provider since.

“I was paying around $100 for Optimum,” she told THE CITY in Spanish last Wednesday while on her way to get food from a restaurant on Lafayette Avenue.

Affordability is one of the largest barriers to internet access for residents who live in a borough that has a poverty rate of 28%, 10 percentage points higher than the citywide rate. According to the report, 31% of households earning less than $35,000 lack broadband.

According to a 2024 report on broadband by the New York State Public Service Commission, residents in The Bronx paid an average of $79.83 a month for their broadband bills, $10 more than people in Brooklyn, the borough with the next highest rates.

Those stats could get worse following the end of the Affordable Connectivity Program last year, a federally-funded initiative created during the pandemic that subsidized internet service.

Under that program, eligible residents could get up to $30 per month off their broadband internet costs, and $100 towards a laptop and desktop computer. Before it shut down, 44% of Bronx households took advantage of the program’s help.

“We recognize that it is nearly impossible to participate fully in our increasingly digital society without making major new strides to close these digital equity gaps,” CUF Editorial and Policy Director Eli Dvorkin told THE CITY in a phone interview on Monday. “That’s not just a tech gap. It’s an obstacle to going to school, to finding a job, to seeing a doctor, to apply for city services, and you can’t fully participate in our economy with the digital divide like the one we have in The Bronx today.”

Dvorkin noted that about the share of households without broadband is up four points from before the pandemic, to 22% from 18%, “suggesting that the expiration of ACP has had a negative impact on Bronx residents’ broadband adoption.”

But, the report notes, there are several initiatives, municipal resources and community-based organizations that can help fill the digital divide through a proposed Bronx Digital Equity Plan.”

“This plan should include a robust public awareness campaign to enroll residents in affordable $15-per-month broadband plans; the creation of a Bronx Laptop Lending Library to distribute devices to the 184,000 households without a computer; full funding for CUNY’s Computing Integrated Teacher Education (CITE) initiative to train the next generation of educators in digital literacy; and expanded partnerships with libraries and community-based organizations to deliver tech training and support directly to residents.”

That $15-per-month plans are the result of the Affordable Broadband Act that took effect this January, requiring internet providers to offer low-cost plans to New Yorkers. Residents who are enrolled in the National School Lunch Program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, Senior Citizen rent increase exemption (SCRIE), Disability rent increase exemption (DRIE) or have an affordability benefit from a utility all qualify for the subsidized internet.

The state law, passed in 2021, finally took effect in January after years of legal challenges from broadband lobbying groups. AT&T then pulled its Internet Air service in New York, which had offered residents “download speeds of 40 to 140Mbps” for $55 per month,” The Verge reported in January.

It requires companies supplying broadband in the state to offer the low-cost service to eligible households, although suppliers with fewer than 20,000 customers can apply for an exemption. When that law took effect in January, an AT&T spokesperson in January had told CNET that it “imposes harmful rate regulations that make it uneconomical for AT&T to invest in and expand our broadband infrastructure in the state.”

Other big providers include Optimum, Spectrum, Xfinity, Verizon and Greenlight Networks.

Word about the $15-a-month plans has been slow to spread in a borough where most people get internet service through big providers.

“There’s still relatively little competition in many neighborhoods and, certainly, one option for policymakers is to do more to incentivize competition,” he said. “At the same time, there’s now a big opportunity with these required lower-cost plans to make sure that more Bronx residents know that that’s an option.”

‘I Was Tight’

It’s not that Bronxites don’t want to access the internet. The borough had the “second-highest volume of LinkNYC Wi-Fi traffic among any borough, uploading and downloading over 180,000 GB of data,” while also recording over 430,000 Wi-Fi sessions in the borough’s libraries, according to the report.

Without a laptop in his apartment, Charles Jackson, 59, uses a computer at his local Hunts Point library, which was recently renovated. A lifelong resident of the neighborhood, Jackson ditched his internet for three years in 2021 because the more than $300 per month he was paying was unaffordable.

“The price — every other month, they kept going crazy,” said Jackson, a retired chef who relied on his cellular service before signing up for broadband internet with Verizon in 2024 and now pays $120 per month.

“I was tight ’cause I’m one of them techy-type persons,” he said of his three years without broadband. “I wanted a laptop. I wanted to get me a modem.”

One group tackling the digital gap is Mott Haven-based The Knowledge House, which trains about 150 to 200 Bronx residents annually in technological and workforce development that includes data science, cybersecurity, web development and digital literacy.

“We know that a lot of young people, especially, do have access to mobile devices, but you really need a laptop or a desktop computer to log into online classes or access a lot of resources online,” Jerelyn Rodriguez, founder of The Knowledge House, now serving multiple cities after first launching in The Bronx in 2014, told THE CITY on Monday in a phone interview.

She noted that about one-third of 1,000 Bronx applicants for its most recent yearlong cohort didn’t have adequate devices to enroll in the program. The organization loans laptops for those who are selected and do not own one.

Rodriguez said the digital divide in the borough is “one of the reasons why we wanted to be headquartered in the South Bronx.”

This press release was produced by The City. The views expressed here are the author’s own.