English: The Brooklyn Bridge, seen from Manhattan, New York City. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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Download an entire movie in about a minute and a half. Send a whole genome in a fraction of the time.
That’s the promise of low-cost gigabit Internet service that is finally coming to New York.
Brooklyn Fiber, a three-year-old five-person startup, is rolling out its gigabit broadband service this week in Industry City, the Brooklyn complex of former warehouse buildings under development in Sunset Park. That’s 20 times faster than existing download speeds in New York City, which average around 52 mbps, according to Ookla’s Speedtest.net service. Upload speeds average about 17 mbps.
The Internet service provider is charging $500 a month. Until now gigabit service has typically cost well north of $3,000 a month and is so rarely available that one IT consultant said he couldn’t talk gigabit pricing because none of his clients had ever used broadband speeds higher than 300 megabits per second.
That’s a far cry from Kansas City, where Google Fiber costs as low as $70 a month. But industry watchers say the market for super high-speed Internet service in New York is heating up. They expect prices to come down and service to expand to soon include residential users.
