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Comment by jwuphysics | Hacker News Reader

> CMU spin-offs represent 34 percent of the total companies created in Pennsylvania based on university technologies in the past five years.

CMU has helped Pittsburgh rebrand itself from a coal-mining, steel-working town to a technological hub. I'm glad to hear that they want to continue the trend.

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As I am in this year's graduating class, I was immensely excited to hear this news. Carnegie Mellon's greater fostering of entrepreneurship through initiatives such as this and the relatively new Engineering and Technology Innovation Management program (masters program with classes in Tepper, one of the top graduate business programs, and a required internship at a startup) will prove very fruitful. If we could just also get Google Fiber to come to Pittsburgh, it would be possible to start to see another great entrepreneurship hub form.

What does Google Fiber have to do with it?

Just curious, as the internet access was plenty fast at CMU 15 years ago when I was there, so I can't imagine it is worse now. And of course these days you host virtually (hah) everything in EC2 or the like, so local bandwidth should never be a limiting factor.

Perhaps I'm just sensitive on this topic since I've been using an (at best of times) 100k connection in Rwanda starting a software company here.

It's average now, slightly better than a base Comcast connection, but that's about it. (I can compare directly since I lived on campus two years and off the last two). I suppose it would depend on what you were doing that would make it matter whether Google Fiber was important or not, but certainly for running large scale things, especially simulations from cloud based sources, Google Fiber would be massively appealing. I'd argue that the effect of ultra high speed internet on a large population base isn't predictable and could only be a positive for the region in terms of drawing developers et al. Also, thank you for laughing at your pun instead of crassly saying "pun not intended."

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