On December 11 2012 Manhattan Borough President, and candidate for City Comptroller, Scott Stringer issued “Start-up City: Growing New York City’s Entrepreneurial Ecosystem for All“. The report delineates 11 areas in which NYC can act to foster growth and access to its developing tech economy. Section 3 is devoted to connectivity, and is reproduced below:
III. THE “FOURTH UTILITY”: IMPROVING INTERNET CONNECTIVITY IN NEW YORK CITY
“It’s like the elephant in the room is that bandwidth here sucks…There has to be ways for the city to construct much better bandwidth availability for start-ups.” – David Pakman, Partner, Venrock111
Defining the Problem: New York’s lack of reliable, high-speed internet is limiting the growth of Tech 2.0. Though entrepreneurs in New York have access to broadband, many of those we interviewed said that the City’s telecom infrastructure is well behind where it should be for a city vying to be one of the nation’s two leading technology hubs. In fact, many start-ups that have looked for affordable space in former industrial districts outside of Manhattan have had to abandon those plans after discovering highspeed internet connections were not available.
Goal: Improve internet speed and reliability by increasing competition throughout the five boroughs and opening up government property to fiber optic cable.