The Little Guy in Tech
Broadband TV concern hooks up the ‘hood
New York City is the epicenter of wealth creation in the world’s richest nation. But along with its growing ranks of millionaires, the Big Apple still has huddled masses of have-nots. The South Bronx, an area of New York City that has, for decades, borne the brunt of crime, drugs, and poverty, is still a neighborhood emblematic of urban blight and evocative of the lot of the underclass everywhere.
But in an office building in the heart of the ‘hood, on a bustling commercial thoroughfare lined with small grocery stores cheek by jowl with shops studded with large, hand-scrawled signs hawking the latest bargains on household goods and electronics, exists one of the city’s original broadband franchises—and the industry’s most unlikely success story. The company, Urban Communications Transport, which does business under the name Urban Telephone and Video, has been making a profit in an endeavor that has defeated not a few telecom industry giants [see photo, “Where Angels Fear to Tread”]. Urban Telephone offers the lineup of telecommunications services known as the triple play: cable TV, broadband Internet access, and Internet telephony. Customers can get 300 television channels, downstream data rates of up to 8 megabits per second, and Internet telephony with unlimited calling plans, and pay for it all on one bill. And these all-digital services come in on the same twisted copper pairs that once provided only plain old telephone service.
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