Downtown businesses seek faster broadband
Jack Miller needs speed. The downtown Columbia headquarters of his firm, True Media Services, houses the servers used by his St. Louis and Canada offices. The faster his upstream broadband connection is in Columbia, the faster the servers can pump advertising proofs and other files to those offices, which allows employees there to be more productive.
“They can download only as fast as I can upload,” Miller said. “That’s why upload speed is very important to me.”
Miller isn’t alone. A few blocks away, Newsy.com streams thousands of videos each day and strains its upstream connection.
“We definitely see a real need for an increase, both up and down,” said Jim Spencer, president of Newsy.com.
Whether it’s upstream, downstream or both, many downtown business owners said they need faster broadband to stay competitive. That demand highlights a larger issue: The availability of super-fast broadband affects downtown’s ability to attract and retain businesses that otherwise might consider outlying areas — or even other cities.
1 gigabit per second available now
If there’s so much demand for higher speeds, why aren’t CenturyTel, Mediacom, Socket and other operators providing it? The short answer is they can but only when they have customers willing to pay a premium for premium speeds.
Mediacom has two different broadband networks downtown because, like all other cable operators, it historically focused on TV for consumers; its network went where residences are.
“Between Eighth and Ninth streets on South Broadway, you have cable — the back of Tellers and Broadway Brewery because there are apartments above,” said Jonathan Sessions, managing partner of Tech 2, a computer consultancy. “If you didn’t need cable TV service at your business, you didn’t get cable run to it. That’s why downtown lacks corner-to-corner cable infrastructure.”
By comparison, Mediacom’s Enterprise Solutions division runs fiber optical cable to downtown businesses as they sign up for service instead of piggybacking on the existing consumer-focused infrastructure.
Meanwhile, CenturyLink also offers speeds of up to 1 gbps downtown.
“We currently serve over 1,000 (customer) devices by fiber out of the central office on 625 Cherry St. and distribute the fiber in six different directions,” a company spokesperson said.
More fiber coming?
Regardless of who’s providing it, high speeds don’t come cheap, especially if the fiber or copper can’t be snaked through existing utility conduits to reduce construction costs. Digging up a city street costs about $110 per foot.
“It’s a mess,” said Carson Coffman, Socket vice president. “You have to bore through concrete.”
Those costs are passed on to the customer. Add in the monthly fee, and a fast connection becomes more expensive than many businesses can justify. For example, Mediacom charges about $5,600 per month for a dedicated 100 mbps fiber link.
For downtown businesses that want those kinds of speeds but can’t justify the expense, help could come from wireless carriers. To accommodate data-hungry devices such as smart phones and the iPad, wireless carriers are upgrading the broadband connections to their cell phone towers, including ones atop downtown buildings.
Those “backhaul” connections often are fiber and are provided by companies such as CenturyLink and Mediacom. Each new fiber line to a cell site puts that super-fast connection closer to more businesses downtown and throughout the city.
So instead of a telco or cable operator having to spend, for example, $30,000 to trench fiber to a business — and pass that cost on to the customer — the construction expense could be just a fraction of that because it can tie into a fiber line close by. If that scenario pans out, it’s good news for business owners such as Miller — and downtown itself.
“Businesses today may not need a gig of upload and download, but in five years, I bet everybody does,” Miller said. “To get businesses to look at downtown as a viable possibility, we’ve got to have the infrastructure.”