Monday, August 9, 2010

Boston's 'innovation district' slow to adopt high-speed Internet

By Galen Moore

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Bocoup LLC has everything Mayor Thomas M. Menino could want for an innovation district. The web development consultancy, which does business as Bocoup Labs, is run by a couple of open-source pros who are wired in with celebrity developers and the global open web standards community through the World Wide Web Consortium, headquartered at MIT.

Founders Boaz Sender and Alistair MacDonald are turning their loft space on A Street into a community center for startups, providing coworking space, booking luminaries for events, and – as of last week – offering free servers to startups through a sponsorship agreement with California hosting services firm Media Temple Inc.

Now there’s just one more thing they need: a high-speed Internet connection.

“Boston’s Innovation District” is the name given to Bocoup’s neighborhood, Fort Point, and the adjacent South Boston Waterfront by Menino and city officials, in hopes innovative firms will settle there.

But like most of Boston proper, Fort Point isn’t served by high-speed fiber cable. The existing copper and co-axial connections are too slow for some tech businesses. In most of Fort Point and the South Boston waterfront, the fastest available download speeds available are 10 MB/second: that’s what tech incubator MassChallenge got through a two-year agreement with Comcast Corp. (Nasdaq: CMCSA)

Instead, Bocoup and the other tenants at 319 A St. get their Internet signal streamed over the air. A Rhode Island firm called Towerstream Corp. (Nasdaq: TWER) beams high-speed web service from a transmitter atop the Prudential Tower. CEO Jeff Thompson said Towerstream can compete on price with any traditional broadband service – but Sender said data speeds fast enough to support Bocoup’s planned growth would be prohibitively expensive.

“Our plan is to bite the bullet and get a higher-grade connection when we expand,” he said.

Goldman Properties managing director Albert Price said the firm, which owns 319 A St. and seven other Fort Point buildings, is using Towerstream in several of its properties. It has tried to get fiber for tenants to no avail. “We were unsuccessful in getting any kind of attention from Verizon directly,” he said. “Comcast was the same kind of deal. We kind of got the runaround.”

Home to luxury condos and many of the city’s architecture firms, Fort Point was hit hard by the 2008-2009 recession and real-estate market collapse. Warehouse buildings like 319 A St. were once home to artist studios. Goldman Properties, the real estate arm of The Goldman Sachs Group Inc., bought 319 A in 2005 with Archon Group LP as part of a 17-building Fort Point purchase, with plans to build condominiums. The artists are gone, but development plans are on hold. The building – largely unchanged from its original lofty layout – is about half-empty.

Now, with officials pushing its new identity, the Fort Point neighborhood faces a chicken-and-egg scenario: it needs a critical mass of tenants demanding high-speed service, before Internet service providers will make the investment. “I think of it as tipping point,” said city cable television licensing officer Michael Lynch. There has to be a math to the capital investment….Your choice is ‘I’ll trench to this area where I haven’t quite got the population yet, or I can build out further in Dorchester’.”

So far, only Comcast has announced plans to improve Internet infrastructure in the area, said Lynch. But those plans remain indefinite. A Comcast spokesman said the firm has laid conduit for fiber-optic service in the Innovation District, but it still needs permits to do the work that will connect that new line to the rest of its fiber network. There is no date set for when the project is likely to be completed, a spokesman said.