PEOPLE are willing to spend extra money to live near work or get to the beach, so will they pay more to live in a place with quick access to the Internet? The Internet Building is betting they will.
The unassuming five floor brick building in Manhattan's trendy East Village claims to be the world's first residential building with high speed direct Internet access in all its apartments, according to Gregory Salgado, sales director for the estate agency handling the building.
Tenants pay above market rents $1,500 to $1,750 (about IR£910-1,060) for a one bedroom apartment, plus fees for access to the building's T-1 cable.
The cable allow users to access the Internet up to 55 times faster than the fastest popular modem, in order to circumvent a major source of frustration with the Internet, the long wait to download material.
In a neighbourhood where sixth floor walkups and bathrooms without sinks aren't uncommon, Salgado hopes the Internet amenity will develop from merely an indulgence to a standard apartment building option.
"The main thing we have is the proximity of all these outrageously cool people," he said of the downtown neighbourhood.
"Cool" is the word Salgado uses to describe his tenants - so far students, models, business executives and computer workers who started moving into the building earlier this summer, 70 per cent of whom took up the Internet option.
The cyber commune feels like a US college dorm, with neighbours chatting in the lobby and planning a keg party to inaugurate their living experiment. But unlike a dormitory, a lot of conversation involves bandwidth, download speed and the building's nascent Web site.
Some tenants have a serious purpose for their heightened Internet access, but most admit they are just playing. Ed Figlar is a computer consultant for several large corporations whose mainframes have a software glitch that will make them inoperable at the stroke of the year 2000. With the T-1 cable, he can link clients' computers from home and read code faster. "I'm going to triple my business easily," he says.
For that difference in speed, tenants pay $85 to $115 a month to their Internet provider, Spark Internet, of which Salgado is chief executive. He has plans for another nine buildings in New York and predicts 20,000 to 25,000 New Yorkers will live in buildings with T-1 cables within three years.
Tenants in the building share the cable's bandwidth, so if all 28 apartments were online at once - an unlikely event, Salgado says - the speed would be divided by 28. But this is still about double the speed of a common 28.8 modem.
If residential T-1 cables do catch on, they will eventually face competition from cable modems. Cable providers maintain they can bring the Internet to millions of people at 10 to 30 times the T-1 rate within a few years. In Ireland, Cablelink also has similar plans to provide Internet access via its cable TV network.
But Salgado says he is not worried about cable modems coming to New York City any time soon. The cables already installed in the Internet Building can handle bandwidths up to 28 times faster than the T-1 whenever that technology becomes available, he says.