6 ms·
A California ghost town can have fiber to the doorstep, but it’s not easy
- beachstartup 11y agothis is the only thing holding back virtual armies of tech workers from moving to the country, which would greatly relieve the cost of housing in major coastal metros (tech hubs). a mass exodus and spike in housing supply is exactly what we need. too bad the broadband providers aren't making it happen. i fear this is a problem that the broadband market won't solve, because it's run by a few oligarchs.
- mahyarm 11y agoI doubt it personally. There are many affordable metros, small towns and so on with good enough internet connections already, and there is no mass exodus to be remote workers there. Remote isn't popular because the customers (employers) prefer workers at headquarters, in person. Founders want to be close to investors, and investors don't want to travel that much.
- beachstartup 11y agoaffordable metros aren't the country.
- rconti 11y agoThe point was that if housing prices were going to drive people out to the country, it would also drive them to tier 2 affordable metros. Yes, there are people who specifically want to live in the country, but that's even more of an edge case than the folks who just want to live in a cheaper town. Frankly, most people want to live where they are.
- jacobr1 11y agoIt is happening on the margin though. The tier 2 tech cities like Denver/Boulder, Raleigh/Durham and Austin have been booming for a decade and are continuing to grow.
- x0x0 11y agowhere does one look for jobs in eg denver/boulder? craigslist is a ghost town -- 1 ruby role (but ads for ruby jobs in sf) and 2-3 java engineers once you deduplicate / remove ads for other areas
- ericabiz 11y agoFacebook (seriously!) For Boulder/Denver, start here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/boulderstartups/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/boulderstartups/ For Austin (where I live), start with these three groups: https://www.facebook.com/groups/austinstartups/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/austinstartups/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/austindigitaljobs/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/austindigitaljobs/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/capitalfactoryjobs/ https://www.facebook.com/groups/capitalfactoryjobs/ I'm sure there are others, but these are the ones I'm familiar with.
- x0x0 11y agothank you
- leesalminen 11y agoBuiltincolorado.com
- reality_czech 11y agoTry McDonald's, or Burger King.
- trhway 11y ago>a mass exodus and spike in housing supply is exactly what we need. too bad the broadband providers aren't making it happen. building 1km high towers (be it in SF or several miles in the ocean off the Ocean Beach - doesn't really mater) would do it too - housing supply with great connection. Humans are social animals, and, in particular, nightlife is nothing on Peninsula compare to SF, and in rural it is nothing even compare to Peninsula.
- tostitos1979 11y agoToronto tried it. The city is full of ugly, ugly towers. This has made traffic much worse and the public transit system is a pain to navigate. The craziness of traffic made condos right next to the subway much more desirable than 15 minutes away (the last place I lived in had 700K condos for a two bedroom, 40 minutes from Union station). No silver bullet. That said, I've almost had it with high housing prices. 900K for a crap hole starter home in Sunnyvale does not make sense to me. Unaffordable housing prices are starting to make me want to go to the bottle :'( Curious how other people are dealing with it?
- hueving 11y ago>:'( Curious how other people are dealing with it? Give up on your hopes and dreams and start to convince yourself that renting isn't a bad deal and that you don't really need more than 500 sq ft to be happy.
- soperj 11y agoI didn't think the public transit in toronto was really that bad. If you want to live in Canada somewhere not named Vancouver, Victoria or Toronto, housing prices are very affordable.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoToronto is literally the Canadian SF.
- ericabiz 11y ago
- sithadmin 11y ago>this is the only thing holding back virtual armies of tech workers from moving to the country, which would greatly relieve the cost of housing in major coastal metros (tech hubs). What? Aside from the fact that there are tons of instances in which remote work simply isn't as effective as showing up at the office, I suspect that most of us in the tech sector in a major city actually enjoy living in the city.
- beachstartup 11y agoi didn't say every one would, i said a virtual army of us would.
- waterlesscloud 11y agoEven in Silicon Valley, most tech workers choose not to live in a city. Most live in suburbs. Speaking for myself, I'd move 10-15 miles outside a 50k-ish population town in a heartbeat if I could work from there.
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoBecause even a bog standard 125K a year salary will only go so far in SF. Sunnyvale/Milpitas/Fremont etc are much more desirable in that case
- ForHackernews 11y ago> even a bog standard 125K a year salary This is a friendly reminder that the median income in SF is around $47k [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Education.2C_households.2C_and_income https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco#Education.2C_hou...
- ZanyProgrammer 11y agoI was referring to tech salaries, not the avg San Franciscan in general.
- 11y ago
- randomdata 11y agoMy family farm got fiber in 2013, and had high speed DSL for more than a decade before that. Many of the farms in the area had fiber for several years even before they got to us. I believe the rollout is nearing completion now. I don't really see any tech professionals moving here.
- NotSammyHagar 11y agoWhere are in you located? Is it really cold in the winter and hot in the summer ;-) I liked living in Tucson where ther are lots of ranches but no jobs; that was a long time ago though.
- randomdata 11y ago> Where are in you located? Canada. About an hour away from "Silicon Valley North". Perhaps not the ideal spot for American tech professionals, but the Canadian tech professionals don't seem to have interest in living here either, even with the tech sector reasonably close by. I'm not sure how things are stateside, but I see a strong social stigma against living in rural areas in Canada. You haven't made it until you live in the city. This might be, in part, due to our current housing bubble in metropolitan areas and people seeing those inflated prices as an indicator of success. > Is it really cold in the winter and hot in the summer Yes. -30ºC (-22ºF) to +35ºC (95ºF) isn't uncommon. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
- NotSammyHagar 11y ago-30c is indeed colder than I would like to see. +35c is also hotter than I would like to see. I like Seattle, ~50f in the winter, sometimes colder, about 80f on a good day in the summer.
- rhino369 11y agoYou can get speeds more than fast enough for remote work in much of the country. And people still pile into cities.
- viraptor 11y agoI agree. It's sure easier and more fun to be on fiber, but honestly, how many tech positions require connection that fast? I worked for quite a while now on 8Mbps DSL - I'd say that's enough for many devs.
- beatpanda 11y agoAlso, most employers won't allow remote work.
- protomyth 11y agoUhm... Plenty of rural areas actually have bandwidth well in excess of anything in Silicon Valley. Various places have fiber to the house and the cost is pretty cheap with no caps.
- galdosdi 11y agoThere is not a shortage of urban housing space, though, by any means. Only in a small number of highly-popular urban areas like silicon valley, NYC, etc. Shockingly cheap housing is readily found in St Louis, Philadelphia, and many other less "sexy" sounding medium-sized cities.
- sathackr 11y agoThe company in the article seems to poo-poo a local WISP, but Wireless ISPs will continue to be the chief deliverers of last-mile broadband to rural areas for a long time. Nobody is willing to foot the bill for a huge capital buildout. It just doesn't make financial sense to spend millions to deliver internet to a community with a 50 year ROI. Disclaimer: I currently work for a WISP and have been involved with microwave wireless internet for the better part of the last 20 years. No, it's not gigabit fiber, but in reality, every person in America doesn't need gigabit fiber right now. Many WISP reliability concerns have far less to do with the weather than they do the operators of the ISP. Many are inexperienced in reliable network design, or have budgets stretched so thin they cannot afford quality equipment. Most pay far more for the internet access they provide to customers than the big boys. I'm in a fairly rural county with a couple of mid-sized towns and cities (largest city has a population of about 100,000). Wired internet is available in most population centers, but dial-up and satellite is still all that is available for huge swaths of the county. I know of a particular neighborhood with new houses (Built during the boom around 2005) that the local cable company had hardline right out in front of the neighborhood. There were about 750 houses, most 2000+sq ft. For reasons unknown to me, the neighborhood had a high percentage of government-assisted families living in it. The cable company refused to run lines into the neighborhood for almost 10 years.
- scoot 11y ago> every person in America doesn't need gigabit fiber right now That's a pretty bold claim. Granted, Gb fiber to the home has limited uses outside of high bit-rate 4K / 8K TV; but to suggest that not a single individual out of 320M in the US (never min the rest of the world) needs Gb broadband? BS.
- jauer 11y agoI don't think he's saying no one needs gigabit fiber period, rather not everyone needs gig right now, which is demonstrably true. Even 4k is doable without gig using HEVC (50Mbps is typical ref: Wikipedia) and when uncompressed a gig isn't enough. Gig is cool and all but there are fairly large parts of the US where 10-30Mbps+ download with reasonable latency (not satellite) and no data caps (not cell) would be a gamechanger.
- mschuster91 11y agoWhat I don't get for the last mile: usually homes are connected to a central sewer system, which usually consists of pretty huge-diameter pipes. Why isn't it possible to run fibre through the sewers? Instead, people have to rely on DSL over rotting old copper pair lines (FTTC)...
- amazon_not 11y agoPossible, but not cheap. It's much cheaper to install aerial fiber.
- mschuster91 11y agoAmericans and their trend to wire everything and their dogs aerial. One snowstorm or one drunk idiot crashing his car into a pole and it gets expensive as hell to get everything working again. Not to mention the looks of dozens of operators (cable, electricity, telephone, fiber, private networks, traffic light controls, ...) hanging their cables on poles alongside the street.
- amazon_not 11y agoI said cheaper, not better :) You can obviously do buried fiber, but it may or may not be cheaper than sewer fiber in cities. Aerial is cheaper to install, but as noted has its downsides. It depends on the circumstances whether aerial is cheaper in the long run or not. Aerial will however in most circumstances be cheaper than sewer fiber, even if you have to patch it up once I a while. Good design helps in that, even if you do end up repairing it.