Capital New York By Miranda Neubauer
Last December, in one of his last official acts as mayor, Michael Bloomberg announcedplans for the country’s largest continuous public Wi-Fi network covering 96 blocks in Harlem, made possible through a donation from the Fuhrman Family Foundation.
But for the Harlem entrepreneurs behind the effort Silicon Harlem, the vision of the neighborhood as a technology innovation hub goes beyond that. With what they billed as the first tech conference in Harlem on Thursday, they aimed to build support for sustained broadband and technology company investment.
“A lot of the broadband announcements were around wireless … and that has a ways to go in terms of being effective,” Clayton Banks, a communications executive who is co-founder of Silicon Harlem, said in an interview. “What we’re focused on is more on the wired side [with gigabit speed]… that will attract companies, startups and help the existing businesses secure that type of speed.”
Banks said it’s important for the community to understand that “broadband is essential to lowering crime, increasing education opportunities and closing the wealth gap.”
“The real goal of the conference is to galvanize the community itself, and get the community really focused on broadband and how technology can transform the community to become a tech and innovation hub,” Banks said.
Banks praised Verizon’s efforts to expand FIOS in New York City and said the group has been working with the company to identify buildings that could benefit from “cable drops” to the network.
“Harlem is on par with fiber being available but unfortunately is not as aggressive at this point with attracting tech companies,” Banks said, pointing to the examples of Google Downtown and Etsy in Brooklyn.
He also emphasized the importance of partnering with political leaders, several of whom addressed the conference including Representative Charlie Rangel, city Economic Development Corporation president Kyle Kimball, City Councilwoman Inez Dickens and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer. Banks suggested that the city and the NYCEDC could be especially helpful with identifying funding and capital to help start-ups in the area.
Rangel invoked the memory of the Gang of Four to emphasize the reputation he envisioned for Silicon Harlem.
“We gotta become who we wish we were,” he said.
Rangel said that technological innovation can’t full make up for a history of slavery, bias and prejudice, the efforts in Harlem are “a shot in the arm,” he said. “Technology is color blind, it doesn’t see no economic status.”
In a later part of the program, he added: “I think we got a pretty bad deal from God from the beginning, but he’s given us Internet now to catch up.”
Broadband was high on the agenda from the beginning at the event, which took place at MIST Harlem, to which Verizon, a sponsor of the conference, began delivering high-speed FIOS service at no cost for six months in June, after it had offered a similar service to the Harlem Garage for a year.
In opening remarks, Leecia Eve, vice president for government affairs for Verizon, emphasized that the company has spent $3.5 billion on its project to build out fiber in New York City avenues and streets, which she said was the largest telecommunications project in a U.S. city in history, with the first phase to be completed this year.
On a subsequent panel, Heather Gates, digital literacy program development manager atConnected Nations, a national nonprofit, described efforts to map and gather data on community broadband needs and use across the country, while Josh Breitbart, senior research fellow at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, cited the example of the Digital Justice Coalition in Detroit.
Shrihari Pandit, C.E.O. of Stealth Communications, described his and his wife’s self-financed business of delivering high-speed Internet service to businesses that is an alternative to the large providers.
That ambition required negotiating with the city for Stealth Communications to lay its own fiber lines, he recalled, resulting in the company becoming the first to acquire such a rights-of-way franchise agreement from the city. After hiring its own construction workers, Pandit said the company has now installed fiber from 68th Street down to Lower Manhattan. At the outset, he said he wondered whether there would be a sufficient amount of business, and was somewhat surprised that there was “significant demand in Class A buildings.”
Many existing fiber lines do not yet reach office buildings, said Pandit, who also pointed to an interactive map from the city E.D.C. that aims to illustrate broadband availability in commercial buildings.
Pandit said he was interested in expanding to Harlem, and spoke out in favor of simple policies that would make the right-of-way process cost effective. He suggested that the community could ease the way for broadband providers by identifying businesses that seek high-speed Internet and going block-by-block to chart possible rights-of-way and micro-duct possibilities ahead of time.
Other speakers, including Gary Fowlie, head of the liaison office of the International Telecommunication Union to the United Nations, and keynote speaker Frances Colón, deputy science and technology adviser to the Secretary of State, tied technology efforts in Harlem to broader global accessibility initiatives.
“The app that you develop next week can change what happens across the world,” Colón said.
Silicon Harlem’s efforts to support STEM education, such as through its Apps Youth Leadership Academy program, could contribute to U.S. competitiveness, she said.
On the final panel, the other Silicon Harlem co-founder, Bruce Lincoln, founder of the Urban Cyberspace Company, said the nonprofit had a broad vision to take a multi-stakeholder approach to define the influence of technology in all aspects of life from the arts to schooling, with the conference a first step toward issuing a strategic technology plan.
“There’s a certain level of openmindedness and innovation that I think is a little lost if we were located in Midtown or the Financial District,” said another panelist, Samuel Sia, co-founder of the biotech incubator Harlem Biospace, noting plans to open a maker space to show students a path forward with companies and start-ups. “That innovative model for education works uniquely in a place like Harlem versus Midtown.”
Christopher Levendos, vice president for national operations at Verizon, said on the panel that FIOS entry into the market had led to lower prices and more innovation, and he predicted more lower prices with the further disruption of content delivery, as with the new HBO service announced this week. He added that Verizon is working with the city to negotiate the public rights-of-way process to be “less disruptive and faster” and looking for ways to engage with property owners to extend infrastructure the street.
Banks emphasized the importance of bringing technology experts to Harlem to give the local community direct exposure to new ideas. That is similar to the thinking behind regular meetups and quarterly tech talks with Rangel featuring technology executives.
“It’s one thing to talk to the Mayor’s Office or go down to D.C., it’s another thing when you have all of us together talking,” he said.
Brittney Saunders, deputy counsel to the mayor, said on the panel that it was “inspiring and energizing” to see such large enthusiasm for universal broadband. She noted that the city is preparing a pilot program to distribute wireless devices to students enrolled in afterschool programs and is working on an effort to wire housing authority community centers.
Though the city recently announced that it is auditing Verizon’s FIOS buildout and Mayor Bill de Blasio has sometimes expressed skepticism over its progress, Saunders said on the panel Thursday that the city’s continued partnership with Verizon “has been very helpful in many many respects.”
In his May Internet Week keynote, de Blasio said that he would be forming a broadband taskforce and reexamining franchise agreements wth Verizon and Time Warner Cable.