Getting broadband in Manhattan

I live in a central part of Manhattan and work in more or less the center of the emerging internet district (21st & 6th). Amazingly, one of our biggest challenges being a NYC startup has been getting reliable internet access. At home I have one option – Time Warner cable – and the service is down frequently (sometimes for days – I’ve set up a backup 3G network it happens so often). Perry Chen (cofounder/CEO of Kickstarter) lives next door and we share internet and sadly our main topic of email conversation is “Is your internet working?” At work the situation is far worse. Here’s the description of our experience from my Hunch cofounder Tom Pinckney:

We’re located on 21st between 6th and 5th aves and have had a very difficult time getting reliable internet access for our office. We’re frankly not particularly price sensitive on this given how critical fast low-latency access is for our programmers. When our internet access is down our programmers cannot be productive and our site can’t be monitored — we’re helpless and twiddling our thumbs. Every hour of no internet access is about $1,000 of wasted salary across all of our employees.

We’ve tried wireless WiMax from TowerStream, ethernet-over-copper from Megapath, T1s from Verizon, DSL from Verizon and cable modem access from Time Warner Business Services. Verizon Fios is not available. Verizon and Megapath could literally never get working lines installed for our building despite months of effort. The WiMax service suffered high latency and weather outages every time it rained hard. The Time Warner cable modem service has gone weeks with hour or two outages per day.

By my last count, there are 5 internet startups on our block alone. The situation is so bad someone set up a Twitter account so we could all go to our iPhones and lament whenever the internet is down.

It’s embarrassing how bad internet access in Manhattan is. As a side note, I think it undermines the arguments by people who claim there is actual broadband choice (e.g. regarding the net neutrality debate).

http://twitter.com/terrycojones Terry Jones

Wow, that’s astonishing. I was eyeing your office last night, thinking how nice it would be to take over the lease Guess not.

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

ha. i assume it will get fixed eventually but we will probably be moving soon anyways.

Anonymous

Hi Chris, I stopped by your office before the acqusition to leave my card with your office manager. Since youll probably be moving soon, I’d like to get together over coffee or breakfast because I represent a ton of tech companies in negotiating their office leases as a broker for Cushman & Wakefield. Please feel free to email me – kelly.broderick@cushwake.com. Thanks and congrats on the eBay news!

http://MeetInnovators.com Adrian Bye

i live on mercer st, about 10 blocks from you guys. i use RCN internet, a cable company i never heard of before. my usage is extremely heavy, and the service barely goes down.

it used to cost $30/month, and now has been raised to ~$60/month. i’m unclear why its so hard for you just a few blocks north of me.

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

My understanding is you need the whole building to switch to RCN to get it. Basically it comes down to scale – if you control a building you can run a good line into it – but otherwise you are dependent on whims of building management.

http://twitter.com/historysquared historysquared

That’s too bad. Live in midtown and Time Warner wideband that peaks at 50mpbs before dropping to 20s in the evening. It’s in heavy use and have only missed the occasional half day outage. The cable boxes are horrific however. we look every month for FIOS. The trucks are everywhere.

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

I’m dying for FIOS. But not available yet either at home or work. I am starting to think it’s just a political trick to make broadband look competitive when it actually isn’t.

http://johncappiello.com John Cappiello

As mentioned earlier today https://twitter.com/hmason/status/142663768772583426
Anonymous

fios has been abandoned by verizon, and only available wherever it has been currently deployed

http://mikecap.squarespace.com/ Mike Caprio

This is exactly what Bloomberg should be concentrating on. Forget building a “tech campus” somewhere, we NEED real bandwidth!

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

Totally agree.

http://twitter.com/DanielSBowen Dan Bowen

Wow…didn’t expect to hear this in NYC. I’m in Healdsburg, CA, 70 miles north of San Francisco in the middle of the vineyards and I’ve got 60 down, 10 up at my house on cable (less than $100/month). For something like another $150/month I’d get 105 down, 10 up, and 5 static IP’s. I guess California is good for some things!

http://picknit.com/ Isaac Rabinovitch

I have good at-home cable for even less than that in east Portland. I think the advantage we both have is that we’re on a cable network that’s newly built out.

But my last job was at a company in an old office building where we go Internet via DSL. *Very* flaky. Ironically, it was from the the same provider!

http://johncappiello.com John Cappiello

Sounds like a good opportunity for some sort of mesh network provider to the nearest proper uplink.

http://picknit.com/ Isaac Rabinovitch

Not a good use case for mesh. These kinds of users need low-latency networks. And consider the fun of trying to install hundreds of little transponders….

http://www.nabbr.com MattMinoff

We are on 22nd and 5th and the Time Warner outages are brutal. VOIP phones barely work. We set up a Clear router as a backup but that stinks too. Very frustrating.

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

yeah, my experience too

http://twitter.com/davecwright David Wright

Very surprised. Might it be a Chelsea thing?

I live in Battery Park City (north) and Time Warner for me goes down about once every two months.
Working downtown we use broadview networks and they’re pretty good for service uptime, even if a bit slow (might be because we get a cheap package and don’t need big bandwidth).
Scott Kolb

We use Rainbow Broadband at the Slader offices on Lafayette. It is wireless broadband but comes with an SLA, unlike TowerStream. We have the lowest tier service of 8mbps up/down for $799. We haven’t had any outage in our year of service. They offer service upto 100mbps. I highly recommend them, especially for our area where Verizon DSL is the only other wire option
Natan Gesher

I think it undermines the arguments by people who claim there is actual broadband choice (e.g. regarding the net neutrality debate).

Much more than that, it undermines the arguments by people who claim that society needs a central authority to assign concessions/monopolies to infrastructure companies, utilities and providers of basic services like internet access.

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

I agree.

Craig Plunkett

I think you really need to think of this as a utility, and as such, you do need regulated distribution infrastructure, the same as electricity distribution. Delivering bits to fixed endpoints is essentially the same as delivering amps.

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

I agree. I think the problem is that right now there is no incentive for these companies to run lines for the “last 50 feet” for small companies.

Craig Plunkett

Yes, In Manhattan, its the last 50 feet from the manhole in the street into the building’s basement. It is expensive to to do and you have to have some assurance of cost recovery, which means cooperation with the landlord/management company, and a dark fiber provider with a presence in the closest manhole.

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

Interesting. Sounds like you know a lot about this. I would love to know if there is any data about how many Manhattan buildings are sufficiently wired.

Craig Plunkett

I’d be happy to chat. You can find me @nwc:disqus fairly often. E-mail or DM @plunkman and we can set something up.

Natan Gesher

What’s needed is actually not regulated distribution, but negative consequences for the failure to distribute. The authorities that assign these monopolies are not capable of imposing the consequences. Only the market can do it.

Grant Barrett

Oh, God, this hasn’t improved? It was like this ten years ago when I was setting up broadband access (fractional T1s, mostly) for small businesses all through that part of town (and elsewhere in Manhattan and Brooklyn). The only solution was all solutions: if the client could afford them and they were available, get DSL (how far to the drop point? how far to the telco box? how old was the copper? [there was way too much silk-wrapped 30-year-old copper in use!]), all or part of a T1 (was one already in the building? was it maxed? would they share?), and cable Internet (was there a cable drop already?). All of them. Set up failover in an internal router. And, sometimes, add dial-up. I would set up mail servers to go out and fetch mail by dial-up and dump it on an internal mail server (pointed to with a second MX record with a lower priority) for routing in-house, so at least if web access was out, there would still be some kind of digital information coming and going. Complex and expensive but even by then some companies (advertising and publishing mostly) could not live without Internet. Just could not.
http://www.alearningaday.com Rohan

That does sound bad.

And I love the new design, Chris!
http://blog.thestateofme.com Chris Swan

If misery loves company then you’ll be pleased to know that it’s just as bad in London. ADSL is massively contended, EFM is hugely expensive and takes months to install, fiber more so and longer. Other options like WiMax run into issues with landlords over getting antennae installed etc.

Things would be very different if landlords realised that a nice fat pipe adds to the value of their property rather than treating it as a decorative/building maintenance issue.

http://twitter.com/machielse Joris Machielse

Across the pond in Amsterdam it’s pretty great in fact. 120 megabit cable is about €50/month, and some parts of the city have fiber to the home/office (100mbps), which is screaming fast and also about €50/month. But that’s useless advice for some in NYC.

Have you considered getting 2 (or even 3-4) different connections and then running a loadbalancer/failover router over those? The Draytek 2920 can load balance/failover between two WAN connections.

Anonymous

move your startup to Brooklyn. Navy Yards and Dumbo have awesome broadband access!

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

actually i was an investor that was going to rent a large space in dumbo but backed out after they found out they’d have to spend $50K to lay their own fiber to get broadband.

Anonymous

hm… that is at odds with my own experience, and what i’ve heard from other tenants of the neighborhood slumlord. i guess the local connectivity is spottier than i thought. i could see where some of the more recent warehouse converts might not be fully wired yet. but of those that are, i’ve heard the net is very robust and hi-speed. particularly hearing this from folks out at navy yards.

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Elena Banfi

Move to Dallas
http://picknit.com/ Isaac Rabinovitch

Doesn’t sound that much worse than the rest of the U.S. ISPs need to spend less money on PR and acquiring each other, and more on building out their networks.

The most common excuse is that the country is too spread out. But NYC is *dense*, and a bigger market than most countries.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Nick-Mikhailovsky/568583458 Nick Mikhailovsky

Doesn’t it look like an opportunity to use internet in its original sense? Install a router and connect to all channels you can procure, then have a good admin set up dynamic routing for you.

http://profitably.com Graham Siener

This is really hard in practice for anything more trivial than browsing the web. I know from experience :/

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Anonymous

We have multiple internet providers at work and home here in RTP and they all work fine. Cheap too.

Maybe you’re living in the wrong place.

-XC
Anonymous

you need to think beyond broadband, since you are in an office. there are actually plenty of other options in NYC.
http://craigrcannon.com Craig Cannon

Same deal in SoHo @ The Onion. It’s actually been increasingly less reliable over the past few months. Any theories?
Anonymous

When did you try Towerstream? We have add a lot more serviceable areas . contact me – kgreen@towersteam.com – or 866-848-5848 ext 475

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

I really love Towerstream inasmuch as you are adding real competition and innovating and we used it pretty successfully for years. We have direct line of site to the empire state building so basically best of all possible worlds, but the reality is it would go down with bad weather.

http://www.victusspiritus.com/ Mark Essel

This is unfortunately a valid reason why not to start a company in Manhattan. Are there areas that are well known for blazing fast reliable connectivity? (Google building)

Any information or network sensitive business needs reliable, blazing fast internet. Without it, you’re always going to be at the mercy of flakey lines or slow uploads/downloads.

Fortunately git pushing code is pretty lenient on bandwidth and asynchronous friendly.

http://occupyyourbrain.tumblr.com Joshua_Whalen

There is one area. Anywhere within half a mile of the AT&T long lines building on Worth and Church.

http://www.postlinearity.com gregorylent

#occupy21stST
http://occupyyourbrain.tumblr.com Joshua_Whalen

Hmmmm… if you’re looking for commercial grade bandwidth (not tw or dsl or anything, but t1 & t3) I hate to sound like a broken record but…..

panix.com. I just noticed they don’t seem to be offering consumer dsl anymore.

I’ve spec’d commercial t1 & t3 through other vendors. Theirs is competitive.

I’ll also reiterate that a broadband co-op may be an idea whose time has come.

I should also mention that the office I work in is adjacent to a data center office. It’s unused. I think we could get a good deal on it. We’re within half a mile of the AT&T long lines building so we’d pay nothing for a local loop, if I’m nit mistaken, just the trunk.

http://www.cdixon.org chris dixon

tried to get it but unavailable

http://occupyyourbrain.tumblr.com Joshua_Whalen

Really? Details, please. Did they tell you what the hangup was?

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Chris Dixon