15311, the wires under the street, and city data

The short version: 311 is the non-emergency front door to city government in the US and Canada: a phone number that grew into apps and websites for reporting potholes, graffiti and missed trash pickups. Behind it sits a layer of private telecom in and on the street, from small cell antennas on streetlights to buildings where internet networks meet. Cities increasingly publish the data these systems produce, and some have tried to wire whole districts with sensors. Who controls that data, and what the city is allowed to do with it, has turned out to be the hard part.

What is 311 and when did it start?

311 is a three-digit number, and now usually an app and website as well, for non-emergency city services and information. It started as a way to take pressure off 911. Baltimore, Maryland, launched the first 311 service on October 2, 1996, for police non-emergency and information calls.⁹¹

A few months later the federal government made it national. The FCC's First Report and Order FCC 97-51, adopted February 18, 1997, and in effect from March 28, 1997, assigned 311 across the US for non-emergency police and other government services. The same order assigned 711 for relay services.³²¹

Other countries chose their own numbers:

• Canada: the regulator, the CRTC, reserved 311 on November 5, 2004, and Calgary launched first, on May 18, 2005.⁹¹
• Germany: 115 is the government services number.⁹¹
• UK: 101 is the number for non-emergency police.⁹¹

How it changed: from hotline to service desk

The model that most big cities copied came from New York. NYC311 launched in March 2003.⁹¹ Its biggest single day came on December 20, 2005, the first day of a transit strike, when it took a record 240,000 calls.⁹¹ By then 311 was less a police overflow line than the place people called when the city itself had stopped working.

By fiscal year 2026, NYC311 handled far more than phone calls:³²²

Falling call counts alongside large app and web numbers suggest a shift from phone to digital channels, though one city's figures cannot prove a national pattern.

Open311. Each city's 311 system started as its own software, which made it hard for outside apps to file requests. On March 3, 2010, US Federal CIO Vivek Kundra announced Open311, a uniform API, an open standard for submitting and tracking service requests.⁹¹ The UK's FixMyStreet, a citizen reporting site, uses it.⁹¹ In plain terms, Open311 lets a request typed into a third-party app land in the same queue as one phoned in to the city.

In Boston: Citizens Connect and the 311 app

Boston was early to the smartphone version. A July 2009 report described Citizens Connect, an iPhone app conceived by mayoral aide Nigel Jacob and built by Connected Bits, a New Hampshire company, for a $25,000 support fee.⁸⁹ The flow it set up is still the basic pattern for city reporting apps: a resident photographs a problem such as graffiti or a pothole, the phone's GPS records the location, and the resident gets a tracking number to follow the request.⁸⁹

The app launched in October 2009 as Citizens Connect and is now called BOS:311.³²³ The renaming came on August 11, 2015, when Mayor Martin J. Walsh launched BOS:311 and existing Citizens Connect users were upgraded automatically.³²⁴ Reports from the app made up 6% of all service requests tracked in the city's systems in 2010 and roughly 28% by 2014.³²³ The city publishes the reports filed through the app as a downloadable dataset on its open data portal.³²³ WBUR counted 287,148 Boston 311 requests in 2024 through December 10; parking was the most common category, at 60,423, followed by street cleaning, at 21,873.³²⁵

Why are there antennas on streetlights?

Look up at a city streetlight or wooden utility pole and you may see a gray box or cylinder that is not a light. That is often a small cell, a low-power cell site that adds mobile capacity over a short range. 5G signals travel short distances, so carriers need many small sites, often on streetlights, utility poles or buildings.⁵⁴ (More on the poles themselves in How streetlights work.)

Each of those sites sits on public property or in the public right of way, which gives cities a say. In the US, the FCC limited that say in its small cell order, adopted September 26, 2018, and in effect from January 14, 2019:⁵⁴

• Shot clocks: cities get 60 days to decide on attaching a small cell to an existing structure and 90 days for a new structure.
• Fees: presumptively lawful fees are up to $500 one-time and $270 per year per site.

Municipalities challenged the order in court, in the Ninth Circuit.⁵⁴ Broadly, the dispute was over local control versus speed of deployment: carriers and the FCC argued for faster, cheaper permitting, and cities argued for keeping authority over their streets and fees.

On August 12, 2020, the Ninth Circuit upheld most of the order, including the fee limits and shot clocks, in City of Portland v. United States.³²⁶ It struck down two of the order's tests for local aesthetic rules: that they be "objective" and "no more burdensome" than rules for other infrastructure.³²⁶ The US Supreme Court declined to hear the case on June 28, 2021.³²⁶

The wires under the street

The visible antennas are the end of a much larger network. Under most city streets run conduits carrying fiber and copper for phone companies, cable companies and the city's own systems, and in older cities such as Boston the fire alarm boxes still run on their own wired loops, separate from the phone and power networks.⁷⁸ (Their history is in From fire alarm boxes to 911.)

The companies that use those conduits need the city's permission. In Boston, the city is the licensing authority for cable television, and its Broadband and Cable Office works with Verizon (Fios), Comcast (Xfinity) and Astound (RCN) on their license agreements.³²⁷ Comcast of Boston has held one of the city's cable franchises since July 17, 2002, and when a license comes up for renewal the city takes public comment and reviews the operator's service quality and complaint handling.³²⁷

Whether cities should run their own internet service is contested in the US. A BroadbandNow report, last updated in July 2025, counted 16 states with laws that substantially hinder municipal broadband networks.³²⁸ Supporters cite networks such as Chattanooga's municipal fiber as a way to add competition and close the digital divide; incumbent telecom companies have lobbied and campaigned against such projects in several states.³²⁸

Where does Boston's internet meet?

Data does not travel from your phone to a website on one company's wires. Networks hand traffic to each other, and they do it in specific buildings. A carrier hotel is a building where many telecom networks place equipment and interconnect. Inside, an internet exchange point (IXP) is a shared switch where networks swap traffic directly instead of paying a third party to carry it.

In Boston, that place is One Summer Street, a datacenter run by Markley Group. The Boston Internet Exchange runs there, with a second site in Lowell; it went online in 2012 and has 48 members.⁹⁰ In practice, traffic between two networks that both connect there can stay in Boston instead of making a round trip through New York or Virginia.

What is open data?

An open data portal is a government website that publishes datasets for anyone to download and reuse. Boston's, Analyze Boston, went live on April 6, 2017, after a beta in February.³²⁹ The city's Analytics Team and its Department of Innovation and Technology built it on CKAN with OpenGov.³²⁹ At launch it held about 115 datasets, including CityScore, food inspections and public safety data, all with API access and public domain licensing.³²⁹

Smart cities: sensors, platforms and digital twins

"Smart city" covers several very different ideas. Three examples show the range.

An open sensor platform: Barcelona. Sentilo is an open-source platform for sensors and actuators, sponsored by Barcelona City Council's Municipal Institute of Informatics.³³⁰ It grew out of a smart city strategy begun in November 2011, with a platform start date of January 2014, and it is dual-licensed under the EUPL and LGPL so other cities can reuse it.³³⁰ Barcelona tested noise, air, traffic and waste sensors.³³⁰

A digital twin: Singapore. A digital twin is a detailed digital model of a city or system used to simulate and plan changes. Virtual Singapore launched on December 3, 2014, as part of the country's Smart Nation program, and was completed in 2022.³³¹ It was co-led by the National Research Foundation, the Singapore Land Authority and GovTech, and built on Dassault Systèmes' 3DEXPERIENCE City software.³³¹ Its uses include planning, flood management, and simulations of wind, noise and traffic.³³¹

A private master plan: Toronto. Sidewalk Labs pulled out of Toronto's 12-acre (5 hectare) Quayside waterfront project in May 2020.³³² CEO Dan Doctoroff cited "unprecedented economic uncertainty" from the pandemic, and the project had drawn criticism, with disputes that included who would own its intellectual property and data.³³²

Our reading of the three: sensors and software are cheap compared with the governance around them. Barcelona made its platform open-source and city-sponsored; Singapore built its model under government agencies; Toronto's project ended with unresolved questions about who would own and control the data, alongside the economic reasons the company gave.

Is Boston using facial recognition?

Cameras and sensors raise a question that open data portals do not: what the city may collect about people, not about potholes. Cities have answered it differently, and the debate is ongoing.

On June 24, 2020, the Boston City Council voted unanimously to ban city use of facial surveillance, including obtaining it through third parties.³³³ The measure was sponsored by Councilors Ricardo Arroyo and Michelle Wu.³³³ It does not cover private companies or federal agencies.³³³ Police Commissioner William Gross said at the time that the department did not use the technology: "Until this technology is 100%, I'm not interested in it."³³³ WBUR reported that the vote made Boston the second-largest community in the world to ban the technology, after San Francisco.³³³

This guide takes no side in the wider debate; the record above is what Boston decided.

What's changing now (2026)

• Phone to app. NYC311's calls fell from 18.231 million in FY2022 to 16.609 million in FY2026, while app, text and web contacts ran into the millions.³²²
• Small cells under federal limits. The FCC's 2018 shot clocks and fee limits still shape how fast antennas go up on US streetlights.⁵⁴
• Digital twins as finished tools. Virtual Singapore moved from launch in 2014 to completion in 2022, and is now used for flood and planning work.³³¹
• Open data keeps growing. Analyze Boston started with about 115 datasets in 2017.³²⁹

As of October 2026, Analyze Boston lists 235 datasets.³³⁴

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