Paul Bass Photo
Katz at Tuesday’s City Hall “Gigabit Summit.”
Like 19th century towns that were smart enough to tap into new national railroads, New Haven and its suburbs have an historic chance to leap onto the information superhighway — and join cities like Austin and Chattanooga as fast-lane 21st century tech hubs.
A woman named Elin Swanson Katz invoked history as she made that pitch Tuesday at a “Gigabit Summit” at City Hall.
Mayor Toni Harp invited Katz, state government’s top consumer advocate (official title: consumer counsel), to make the pitch to officials from suburbs like Branford, North Branford, Hamden, West Haven, Madison, Milford, and Bethany. Katz urged them to join New Haven two other communities, Stamford and West Hartford, in putting together a statewide ultra-high-speed Internet.
“It’ll be so much better,” Katz told the assembled officials, “if we do this as a region.”
The goal is to have a private company build a high-speed fiber-optic network that transfers data at up to 1,000 megabits per second and make that available to everyone in town, largely at discounted prices. That’s 100 times faster than the speed customers in Connecticut can now get. New Haven has taken the lead in issuing a request for qualifications (or “RFQ”;click here to read it) on behalf of Connecticut cities and towns to have the network built.
The network would aim to charge everyone as little as $70 a month for this 100-times-faster service at their homes and offices; and enable people in low-income neighborhood to pay a lot less, or nothing.
That way, the theory goes, Connecticut can lure more big-data and other high-tech companies that rely on super-fast service. (“Big Data is the new Big Oil,” Katz remarked.) The network would also enable disadvantaged communities to hop onto the information superhighway.
Cities throughout the country have, either on their own or with the help of Google or companies AT&T, built these “Gig” (1,000-megabit) networks. But hardly any have in the Northeast, Katz reported: Only Burlington, Vermont, and Rockport, Maine.
“We’ve got to put Connecticut on the map,” she said.
“I liken it to moving from a nine-lane highway to a 1,000-lane highway. When you think about what that does for opening areas that are congested, opening up the ability to moving goods and services, electronic goods and services,” it opens up new possibilities for growing the economy.
During a statewide “listening tour” earlier this year, Katz’s agency learned from “over 95 high-tech business leaders” that they need the faster service. One business owner reported that he was able to negotiate 1,000-megabit-per-second service down to $1,500 month; throughout the country where these networks have been built, no one pays more than $70 a month.
Those “millenials,” in particular, demand that kind of service so they can work at home, not just in the office, Katz said. “This may drive us crazy, but it’s the future.”
Municipalities need to step up because private industry isn’t building the networks here, Katz argued. That’s happened before in history, she continued, and smart local governments seized the moment. Communities that prevailed on national railroad companies to build depots in their towns in the 1800s prospered, she said. In the early 1900, private companies decided it wasn’t profitable to build electric networks in some communities; towns like Wallingford went ahead and created their own municipal electric companies. Wallingford’s public system remains intact today, and performed among the best in the state during super-storms in recent years, Katz said.
The network wouldn’t cost taxpayers money; it could in fact bring in permit fees, according to city Controller Daryl Jones, who’s overseeing the RFP process. The winning company would win the right to build a new network in town and do business with a huge new market.
The presentation drew “enthusiastic support” from the local officials present, reported Virginia Kozlowski, executive director of REX Development, the economic development arm of the South Central Regional Council of Governments. Eleven of the 15 municipalities represented by her group had people at Tuesday’s presentation. “They are going to pursue it” with their governments back home. They have until Nov. 19 to get local approvals.