Download an entire movie in about a minute and a half. Send a whole genome in a fraction of the time.

That's the promise of low-cost gigabit Internet service that is finally coming to New York.

Brooklyn Fiber, a three-year-old five-person startup, is rolling out its gigabit broadband service this week in Industry City, the Brooklyn complex of former warehouse buildings under development in Sunset Park. That's 20 times faster than existing download speeds in New York City, which average around 52 mbps, according to Ookla's Speedtest.net service. Upload speeds average about 17 mbps.

The Internet service provider is charging $500 a month. Until now gigabit service has typically cost well north of $3,000 a month and is so rarely available that one IT consultant said he couldn't talk gigabit pricing because none of his clients had ever used broadband speeds higher than 300 megabits per second.

That's a far cry from Kansas City, where Google Fiber costs as low as $70 a month for residential use, and starts at $100 for small business. But industry watchers say the market for super high-speed Internet service in New York is heating up. They expect prices to come down and service to expand to soon include residential users.

Brooklyn Fiber, which got its start wiring small businesses on its home turf in Red Hook, has been aiming to bring gigabit service to its customers ever since it launched, said CEO Eric Veksler, who founded the company with his brother Rob Veksler. They are offering businesses a symmetrical connection—meaning 1 gigabit speeds for both uploads and downloads—and are promising no long-term contracts, hidden fees or “bill creep.”

The company will not be offering a dedicated circuit, which entails a service level agreement with specific guarantees that would drive up the price. But the Vekslers say they are offering “carrier-grade” service with redundant sources of fiber and that the company will maintain gigabit speeds even during periods of heavy usage.

Gigabit users have tended to be large companies, including hospitals and banks. By keeping the price down Brooklyn Fiber hopes to draw a different kind of client to Industry City.

“We want this to be as accessible as possible to startups and artists’ studios and post-production studios, and [at this price] it’s something that a lot of small businesses can swing,” Eric Veksler said. Affordable gigabit service “will draw those kinds of customers to these buildings.”

Symmetrical high-speed connections are particularly critical for post-production companies, which need it to upload videos to clients. A full-length movie in HD, which is about 8 gigabytes of data, can be transferred in a minute and a half with a 1 gigabit connection. By comparison a 100 mbps connection—which would be considered a reasonably fast connection for many businesses, and which can cost more than $2,000 per month—would need 16 minutes to transmit the file.

The Vekslers plan to extend the service to Red Hook once they are finished rolling it out in Industry City.