11 ms·

Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

103 points by a_taylor 13y ago

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
george88b 13y ago
I don't live in Sf but its city government sure sounds dysfunctional, more so than most cities at least.
- mahyarm 13y ago
  One of the most dysfunctional in america.
  - sirkneeland 13y ago
    Indeed. It baffles me when anyone tries to uphold San Francisco as a model of progressive good governance. SF succeeds in spite of its government, not because of it. Basically it is fortunate to have great weather and an abundance of wealthy educated people who can absorb the insanely high cost of living and tax structure and still have enough left over to pay their way past the lackluster public services they get for all that tax money.
- spikels 13y ago
  You got that right but I'll hold my rant for another day.
- wyclif 13y ago
  SF is the NIMBY capital of America for a reason. Loads of people who can't seem to understand why housing prices keep rising while they simultaneously ensure that no new housing can be built.
  - littledot5566 13y ago
    For ESL: NIMBY Not In My Back Yard; someone who opposes anything built right by where they live. NIMBYs cause a lot of things to not get done.
  - walshemj 13y ago
    The FIOS (FTC) role out was objected to in certain posh parts of London because the residents objected to "the ugly green cabinets" Apparently the second assistant nanny complained that it was hard to maneuver the giant buggy/prams around :-) BT said ok no FTC for you then and went off and did other less precious areas
    - rwmj 13y ago
      Tell me about it! In our village, FTTC has been delayed at least 2 years because one NIMBY bstard didn't want his view of the field in front of his house to be obscured by a larger cabinet. He's already got a cab in front of his house, just didn't want one perhaps 8 inches taller. That's one man holding back progress for thousands.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- nostromo 13y ago
  http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-city-in-the-u-s/full/ http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-ci...
  - rosser 13y ago
    Thank you for that link. I was trying to find it when another discussion about the idiocy of SF city government came up on HN a few weeks back. Folks, it really is this bad.
- Shivetya 13y ago
  Oh I can name a few more dysfunctional cities, Detroit comes to mind. Is a city dysfunctional because it fails one segment of its population? Lets face it, high speed internet is not going to appeal or be used by many in any city. Yes there are those who will, but we tend to vastly over estimate the impact the net has on those who are poverty line or lower.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    Is Detroit more dysfunctional adjusted for economic condition? Because even a well-run city would be in a bad situation if the local economy declined, for unrelated structural reasons, the way it has in Detroit.
    - crusso 13y ago
      Cart, Horse
    - danielweber 13y ago
      The Free Press had a long-form history about Detroit's mistakes and missed opportunities. http://www.freep.com/interactive/article/20130915/NEWS01/130801004/Detroit-Bankruptcy-history-1950-debt-pension-revenue http://www.freep.com/interactive/article/20130915/NEWS01/130... I like to point out "Pension officials handed out about $1 billion in bonuses from the city’s two pension funds to retirees and active city workers from 1985 to 2008" but there's a lot of other stuff in there. Detroit had some trouble baked into the cards back in the 1950's, when they were a geographically big city with corresponding fixed costs that would have trouble dealing with any decline in population, but it didn't have to be anywhere near as bad as it was.
    - tptacek 13y ago
      Yes, it is.
JoshGlazebrook 13y ago
If you want to look at even more dysfunction turn your attention to pondering why lovely Seattle was overlooked and was even cut off of Google's map (okay that was most likely just scaling). Gigabit Squared seems like it was destined to fail the second it was announced, and where are they now? We have all that fiber already in place and no one to use it. Could Seattle not sell it to Google? Some of kind of partnership? Something? The last I read about what the Mayor is planning on doing is try to make the fiber initiative into a public utility[1]. 1. http://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xtsjb/why_i_oppose_the_comcast_time_warner_merger/cfelx14 http://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xtsjb/why_i_oppose...
- Hydraulix989 13y ago
  Seattle isn't too bad off. It has CondoInternet (the thing I miss the most since moving to the Bay Area): http://www.condointernet.net/ http://www.condointernet.net/
  - dkulchenko 13y ago
    You mean that service that's only available in a few very dense high-rises around the city? Doesn't really help the vast majority of people living in the Seattle area. Still holding out hope for Google Fiber, or, really, anyone but Comcast.
    - techsupporter 13y ago
      If you're in the CD, Cap Hill, Belltown, most of Beacon Hill, the ID, or Rainier Valley you have Wave Broadband which is, from what I've been told, pretty good these days. Most of Cap Hill and Beacon Hill even have a choice of Wave or Comcast because the franchise areas overlap. ( The only good thing about living in Belltown, heavily outweighed by having to live in Belltown when the bars close.)
      - icelancer 13y ago
        Is Wave alright? I have Comcast and I'm actually pleased with the service (not the CS, but the actual product of bandwidth). Wave has bandwidth caps but I don't generally exceed 300 GB so it should be fine (and I can get 1 TB if I want), but the price is way lower. If anyone could chime in that'd be great. The reviews of Wave on Yelp and other sites are awful, but then again, they are terrible for Comcast too.
dmak 13y ago
It's a shame. I'm glad this was published. The public needs to be educated!
fragmede 13y ago
As long as we're talking about things only the lucky get, like fiber in Kansas, some buildings in San Francisco get Webpass - 100 or 200 Mbit symmetric residential service for $50/month.
dredmorbius 13y ago
Friends of mine in SF tell me of an existing alternative, though availability varies by neighborhood and building: Monkeybrains is a wireless ISP which offers service from 1 Mbps to 10 Gbps, with 100+ Mbps not being unheard of. Coverage is mostly in the eastern / hipster side of the City: North Beach, downtown, the Haight, Noe, to Bayview. So Sunsetters and Richmondites are SOL. Reports I've heard are that service is fast, reliable, and inexpensive ($35/mo). https://www.monkeybrains.net/ https://www.monkeybrains.net/ https://www.monkeybrains.net/wireless.html https://www.monkeybrains.net/wireless.html (coverage map)
- balls187 13y ago
  If they offer up to 10Gbps, then why are you making 100+ Mbps seem like a big deal?
  - ibmthrowaway218 13y ago
    It makes more sense if they'd said: 1 Mbps to 10 Mbps, with 100+ Mbps not being unheard of.
  - dredmorbius 13y ago
    From what little I know: 10 Gbps is more commonly associated with business service. For residential, 100 Mbps is more typical. It's also symmetric (you see it up and down). I'm reporting on 1) what their site claims (10 Mbps residential, 10 Gbps elsewhere), and what actual experiences are (they're delivering more than they promise). Given that most DSL/Cable options are still a small fraction of that, it's a considerable improvement.
- a_taylor 13y ago
  This Monkeybrains outfit also tried to crowdfund $325 million for a satellite last year (http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/monkeybrains-satellite http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/monkeybrains-satellite). They fell $324.989484 million short, though maybe that's just because crowdfunding wasn't as mainstream a year ago. That said, SF residents probably wouldn't tolerate a satellite in their air-space... i mean space-space?
bifrost 13y ago
I was born in SF and have lived here most of my adult life. Our city government needs to be thrown away, it really is that bad. That said, Google should never be allowed to run a public network for the city. Its like handing the NSA the keys to the kingdom. Get the city to greenlight a company that actually cares about this stuff (http://www.sonic.net http://www.sonic.net) and I'll be much happier.
- Decade 13y ago
  I'm not entirely pleased with sonic.net. They have a nice business plan, but they don't care about the deep issues. For example, Dane is against Net Neutrality, and he doesn't think IPv6 is terribly important. The beta IPv6 service is manually configured, and some time around the weekend they changed my IP address via DHCP, breaking my IPv6 tunnel. I'm going to have to hunt down my sonic.net login so I can get my tunnel back. Or switch to an he.net tunnel.
  - dotBen 13y ago
    Do you have a link to qualify the statement Dane is anti NN? Knowing him and his business I find that hard to believe. On IPv6 their implementation might be beta but most ISPs don't offer anything and don't care.
  - bifrost 13y ago
    NN as proposed is actually bad/horribad for all operators, so I wouldn't be surprised if Dane was against it. Its not even all that good for consumers for a variety of reasons but its not something that fits well into a HN comment. I also can't say that I've ever had Sonic be unconcerned with deep issues. FWIW, my tunnel is fine although if yours is busted it seems like that'd be something you would have been notified about or was done as a mistake. To caveat, I've known the Sonic guys forever, like since "I was installing modems for one of San Francisco's first ISP in 1995" forever. I've never had a bad experience with them, and I've dealt with a lot of operators...
- hueving 13y ago
  What gives sonic more power against wiretapping with gag orders?
Meekro 13y ago
Contrast SF's dysfunction with Houston, one of the conservatives' model cities. Houston's streets are clean, public parks seem to have the quality one would associate with private ones, there's no graffiti or homeless folks in the streets. The business-friendly environment means that there is constant development and affordable housing prices. You can actually own a huge and beautiful house in a gorgeous and safe neighborhood for under $300k. Imagine that.
- stbtrax 13y ago
  And you have to drive everywhere. Also you would live in a state where people give intelligent design serious consideration, and the weather is unbearable during the summer, and a lack of outdoor activities and an abundance of obesity(houston is #1 in the list of fattest cities).
  - Bahamut 13y ago
    I thought Philly had that distinction about weight?
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - SirensOfTitan 13y ago
    Neither the abundance of obesity nor intelligent design proponents affects me or my quality of life in any way. So the arguments against Houston collapse to: you have to drive everywhere and weather (essentially). And taking the MUNI isn't much of an upgrade over having a car in an affordable place.
    - tga_d 13y ago
      Could be wrong, I interpreted the obesity and intelligent design comments as reflections of the culture. Unless you never leave your house, living in a place that promotes sedative lifestyles and intellectual crutches seems... draining.
rayiner 13y ago
The second to last paragraph makes an excellent point. One of the reasons you see governments in eastern Europe making it a point to help deploy fiber is they see it as a way to attract business. American cities don't have the same sense of needing to compete since they're on top to begin with.
PaulHoule 13y ago
I wonder how much of the problem in San Francisco is Wi-Fi congestion rather than the wired service. When I am in SF the number of SSID's I see boggles the mind and with people stacked up in small apartments, plus Comcast offering the public Hotspots, even the 5GHz band is overloaded, and it's amazing 2.4 works at all.
pronoiac 13y ago
Oh man! I knew the answer to this before I read the article. After I heard about contentious community meetings about Google Wifi, I went myself, taping them for posterity.[1] The community seemed generally receptive. I was sad when it fell through; in case of an earthquake, I think a wifi mesh would be much more robust than fiber. The Google wifi FAQs / complaints I remember: * radiation concerns. * extra hardware on telephone poles. * "low bandwidth." I think someone was miffed that YouTube would take time to buffer. [1] http://pronoiac.org/recordings/category/wifi-for-sf/ http://pronoiac.org/recordings/category/wifi-for-sf/
- cnlwsu 13y ago
  "Radiation" should be better taught and understood I think. A local wind farm got shut down in my home town because someone convinced some townies they give off radiation and will give everyone cancer. There's a big difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radaition - A microwave (cell phone etc) can boil your blood with enough power but it will never cause a chemical change to DNA.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    Science literacy in general is woefully inadequate. You can get amazingly far in life without knowing what "radiation" actually is, or why airplanes leave trails behind them sometimes, but it leaves you open to being extremely easily fooled.
    - 911_Inside_Job 13y ago
      I'll just leave this here: http://www.gq.com/cars-gear/gear-and-gadgets/201002/warning-cell-phone-radiation?printable=true http://www.gq.com/cars-gear/gear-and-gadgets/201002/warning-... "Frey tested microwave radiation on frogs and other lab animals, targeting the eyes, the heart, and the brain, and in each case he found troubling results. In one study, he triggered heart arrhythmias. Then, using the right modulations of the frequency, he even stopped frog hearts with microwaves—stopped the hearts dead. "Frey observed two factors in how microwaves at low power could affect living systems. First, there was the carrier wave: a frequency of 1,900 megahertz, for example, the same frequency of many cell phones today. Then there was the data placed on the carrier wave—in the case of cell phones, this would be the sounds, words, and pictures that travel along it. When you add information to a carrier wave, it embeds a second signal—a second frequency—within the carrier wave. This is known as modulation. A carrier wave can support any number of modulations, even those that match the extra-low frequencies at which the brain operates (between eight and twenty hertz). It was modulation, Frey discovered, that induced the widest variety of biological effects." Well that's food for thought! Seems it might be a bit hasty to just say "well it's non-ionizing radiation, so one is ignorant to fear it" Or as put by Joe Bageant: "The Information Racketeers: It is the job of our combined institutions to manage cultural information so as to deny the harmful aspects of the rackets they protect through legislation and promote through institutional research. That's why research shows that cell phone microwaves cause long-term memory loss in rats, but do not harm people. Evidently, we are of different, more bullet-proof mammalian material."
jof 13y ago
As one of the volunteers operating the existing Market St. WiFi and the housing project WiFi, I can say that this is definitely being discussed and evaluated, but I don't have a lot of hope for the Department of Technology making anything happen. They have deeply-rooted relationships with large telcos and utilities that have granted them good deals on easements to lay their existing fiber and copper paths. If the city started offering competing services for money, it would throw those relationships in jeopardy. It's really too bad, as a lot of the dark fiber resources are already in place to build a decent backbone that could support radial paths out different neighborhoods. However, there's very little technical clue (if you're a competent network engineer in the Bay Area, why would you work for a city? ick.) and political capital/gumption towards making this happen. The layer 0 - 7 stuff is easy. It's layer 8 and above (money, politics, humans) that make this hard to accomplish. If you're an SF resident, call or write your supervisor. Let your opinion be heard and demand proper infrastructure! Fiber is becoming the new roads; how you get your product to market. Municipalities need to step up and get building, because the big utilities and ISPs sure as hell aren't.
- Matsta 13y ago
  A similar sort of thing happened in New Zealand, ISP's ruled and weren't doing much to upgrade internet speeds. Then the government stepped in and said you gotta get your crap together then forced Telecom (which is now split into multiple companies, Chorus and Visiontek I believe) to build a nationwide fibre network. I believe it's meant to be finished by the end of next year, but it's actually pretty cool how most people who live centrally can get 100mbps (and now 200mbps) fibre from virtually any ISP that offers it. People say the NZ government is pretty useless (which is still is depending on what topic/area) but I was surprised they actually got it together and got something right for once.
the_watcher 13y ago
The anti-fiber arguments are all so crazy to me. They literally only benefit those making money on the status quo, which is a small number of ISPs. I cannot imagine walking up to 1000 people and asking them what they would put up with to improve their satisfaction with their ISPs and not getting answers like "Literally anything." It seems like this is one of those things that nearly everyone would agree on.

103 points by a_taylor 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

george88b 13y ago

I don't live in Sf but its city government sure sounds dysfunctional, more so than most cities at least.

mahyarm 13y ago
One of the most dysfunctional in america.
- sirkneeland 13y ago
  Indeed. It baffles me when anyone tries to uphold San Francisco as a model of progressive good governance. SF succeeds in spite of its government, not because of it. Basically it is fortunate to have great weather and an abundance of wealthy educated people who can absorb the insanely high cost of living and tax structure and still have enough left over to pay their way past the lackluster public services they get for all that tax money.
spikels 13y ago
You got that right but I'll hold my rant for another day.
wyclif 13y ago
SF is the NIMBY capital of America for a reason. Loads of people who can't seem to understand why housing prices keep rising while they simultaneously ensure that no new housing can be built.
- littledot5566 13y ago
  For ESL: NIMBY Not In My Back Yard; someone who opposes anything built right by where they live. NIMBYs cause a lot of things to not get done.
- walshemj 13y ago
  The FIOS (FTC) role out was objected to in certain posh parts of London because the residents objected to "the ugly green cabinets" Apparently the second assistant nanny complained that it was hard to maneuver the giant buggy/prams around :-) BT said ok no FTC for you then and went off and did other less precious areas
  - rwmj 13y ago
    Tell me about it! In our village, FTTC has been delayed at least 2 years because one NIMBY bstard didn't want his view of the field in front of his house to be obscured by a larger cabinet. He's already got a cab in front of his house, just didn't want one perhaps 8 inches taller. That's one man holding back progress for thousands.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
nostromo 13y ago
http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-city-in-the-u-s/full/ http://www.sfweekly.com/2009-12-16/news/the-worst-run-big-ci...
- rosser 13y ago
  Thank you for that link. I was trying to find it when another discussion about the idiocy of SF city government came up on HN a few weeks back. Folks, it really is this bad.
Shivetya 13y ago
Oh I can name a few more dysfunctional cities, Detroit comes to mind. Is a city dysfunctional because it fails one segment of its population? Lets face it, high speed internet is not going to appeal or be used by many in any city. Yes there are those who will, but we tend to vastly over estimate the impact the net has on those who are poverty line or lower.
- rayiner 13y ago
  Is Detroit more dysfunctional adjusted for economic condition? Because even a well-run city would be in a bad situation if the local economy declined, for unrelated structural reasons, the way it has in Detroit.
  - crusso 13y ago
    Cart, Horse
  - danielweber 13y ago
    The Free Press had a long-form history about Detroit's mistakes and missed opportunities. http://www.freep.com/interactive/article/20130915/NEWS01/130801004/Detroit-Bankruptcy-history-1950-debt-pension-revenue http://www.freep.com/interactive/article/20130915/NEWS01/130... I like to point out "Pension officials handed out about $1 billion in bonuses from the city’s two pension funds to retirees and active city workers from 1985 to 2008" but there's a lot of other stuff in there. Detroit had some trouble baked into the cards back in the 1950's, when they were a geographically big city with corresponding fixed costs that would have trouble dealing with any decline in population, but it didn't have to be anywhere near as bad as it was.
  - tptacek 13y ago
    Yes, it is.

JoshGlazebrook 13y ago

If you want to look at even more dysfunction turn your attention to pondering why lovely Seattle was overlooked and was even cut off of Google's map (okay that was most likely just scaling). Gigabit Squared seems like it was destined to fail the second it was announced, and where are they now? We have all that fiber already in place and no one to use it. Could Seattle not sell it to Google? Some of kind of partnership? Something? The last I read about what the Mayor is planning on doing is try to make the fiber initiative into a public utility[1]. 1. http://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xtsjb/why_i_oppose_the_comcast_time_warner_merger/cfelx14 http://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xtsjb/why_i_oppose...

Hydraulix989 13y ago
Seattle isn't too bad off. It has CondoInternet (the thing I miss the most since moving to the Bay Area): http://www.condointernet.net/ http://www.condointernet.net/
- dkulchenko 13y ago
  You mean that service that's only available in a few very dense high-rises around the city? Doesn't really help the vast majority of people living in the Seattle area. Still holding out hope for Google Fiber, or, really, anyone but Comcast.
  - techsupporter 13y ago
    If you're in the CD, Cap Hill, Belltown, most of Beacon Hill, the ID, or Rainier Valley you have Wave Broadband which is, from what I've been told, pretty good these days. Most of Cap Hill and Beacon Hill even have a choice of Wave or Comcast because the franchise areas overlap. ( The only good thing about living in Belltown, heavily outweighed by having to live in Belltown when the bars close.)
    - icelancer 13y ago
      Is Wave alright? I have Comcast and I'm actually pleased with the service (not the CS, but the actual product of bandwidth). Wave has bandwidth caps but I don't generally exceed 300 GB so it should be fine (and I can get 1 TB if I want), but the price is way lower. If anyone could chime in that'd be great. The reviews of Wave on Yelp and other sites are awful, but then again, they are terrible for Comcast too.

dmak 13y ago

It's a shame. I'm glad this was published. The public needs to be educated!

fragmede 13y ago

As long as we're talking about things only the lucky get, like fiber in Kansas, some buildings in San Francisco get Webpass - 100 or 200 Mbit symmetric residential service for $50/month.

dredmorbius 13y ago

Friends of mine in SF tell me of an existing alternative, though availability varies by neighborhood and building: Monkeybrains is a wireless ISP which offers service from 1 Mbps to 10 Gbps, with 100+ Mbps not being unheard of. Coverage is mostly in the eastern / hipster side of the City: North Beach, downtown, the Haight, Noe, to Bayview. So Sunsetters and Richmondites are SOL. Reports I've heard are that service is fast, reliable, and inexpensive ($35/mo). https://www.monkeybrains.net/ https://www.monkeybrains.net/ https://www.monkeybrains.net/wireless.html https://www.monkeybrains.net/wireless.html (coverage map)

balls187 13y ago
If they offer up to 10Gbps, then why are you making 100+ Mbps seem like a big deal?
- ibmthrowaway218 13y ago
  It makes more sense if they'd said: 1 Mbps to 10 Mbps, with 100+ Mbps not being unheard of.
- dredmorbius 13y ago
  From what little I know: 10 Gbps is more commonly associated with business service. For residential, 100 Mbps is more typical. It's also symmetric (you see it up and down). I'm reporting on 1) what their site claims (10 Mbps residential, 10 Gbps elsewhere), and what actual experiences are (they're delivering more than they promise). Given that most DSL/Cable options are still a small fraction of that, it's a considerable improvement.
a_taylor 13y ago
This Monkeybrains outfit also tried to crowdfund $325 million for a satellite last year (http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/monkeybrains-satellite http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/monkeybrains-satellite). They fell $324.989484 million short, though maybe that's just because crowdfunding wasn't as mainstream a year ago. That said, SF residents probably wouldn't tolerate a satellite in their air-space... i mean space-space?

bifrost 13y ago

I was born in SF and have lived here most of my adult life. Our city government needs to be thrown away, it really is that bad. That said, Google should never be allowed to run a public network for the city. Its like handing the NSA the keys to the kingdom. Get the city to greenlight a company that actually cares about this stuff (http://www.sonic.net http://www.sonic.net) and I'll be much happier.

Decade 13y ago
I'm not entirely pleased with sonic.net. They have a nice business plan, but they don't care about the deep issues. For example, Dane is against Net Neutrality, and he doesn't think IPv6 is terribly important. The beta IPv6 service is manually configured, and some time around the weekend they changed my IP address via DHCP, breaking my IPv6 tunnel. I'm going to have to hunt down my sonic.net login so I can get my tunnel back. Or switch to an he.net tunnel.
- dotBen 13y ago
  Do you have a link to qualify the statement Dane is anti NN? Knowing him and his business I find that hard to believe. On IPv6 their implementation might be beta but most ISPs don't offer anything and don't care.
- bifrost 13y ago
  NN as proposed is actually bad/horribad for all operators, so I wouldn't be surprised if Dane was against it. Its not even all that good for consumers for a variety of reasons but its not something that fits well into a HN comment. I also can't say that I've ever had Sonic be unconcerned with deep issues. FWIW, my tunnel is fine although if yours is busted it seems like that'd be something you would have been notified about or was done as a mistake. To caveat, I've known the Sonic guys forever, like since "I was installing modems for one of San Francisco's first ISP in 1995" forever. I've never had a bad experience with them, and I've dealt with a lot of operators...
hueving 13y ago
What gives sonic more power against wiretapping with gag orders?

Meekro 13y ago

Contrast SF's dysfunction with Houston, one of the conservatives' model cities. Houston's streets are clean, public parks seem to have the quality one would associate with private ones, there's no graffiti or homeless folks in the streets. The business-friendly environment means that there is constant development and affordable housing prices. You can actually own a huge and beautiful house in a gorgeous and safe neighborhood for under $300k. Imagine that.

stbtrax 13y ago
And you have to drive everywhere. Also you would live in a state where people give intelligent design serious consideration, and the weather is unbearable during the summer, and a lack of outdoor activities and an abundance of obesity(houston is #1 in the list of fattest cities).
- Bahamut 13y ago
  I thought Philly had that distinction about weight?
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- SirensOfTitan 13y ago
  Neither the abundance of obesity nor intelligent design proponents affects me or my quality of life in any way. So the arguments against Houston collapse to: you have to drive everywhere and weather (essentially). And taking the MUNI isn't much of an upgrade over having a car in an affordable place.
  - tga_d 13y ago
    Could be wrong, I interpreted the obesity and intelligent design comments as reflections of the culture. Unless you never leave your house, living in a place that promotes sedative lifestyles and intellectual crutches seems... draining.

rayiner 13y ago

The second to last paragraph makes an excellent point. One of the reasons you see governments in eastern Europe making it a point to help deploy fiber is they see it as a way to attract business. American cities don't have the same sense of needing to compete since they're on top to begin with.

PaulHoule 13y ago

I wonder how much of the problem in San Francisco is Wi-Fi congestion rather than the wired service. When I am in SF the number of SSID's I see boggles the mind and with people stacked up in small apartments, plus Comcast offering the public Hotspots, even the 5GHz band is overloaded, and it's amazing 2.4 works at all.

pronoiac 13y ago

Oh man! I knew the answer to this before I read the article. After I heard about contentious community meetings about Google Wifi, I went myself, taping them for posterity.[1] The community seemed generally receptive. I was sad when it fell through; in case of an earthquake, I think a wifi mesh would be much more robust than fiber. The Google wifi FAQs / complaints I remember: * radiation concerns. * extra hardware on telephone poles. * "low bandwidth." I think someone was miffed that YouTube would take time to buffer. [1] http://pronoiac.org/recordings/category/wifi-for-sf/ http://pronoiac.org/recordings/category/wifi-for-sf/

cnlwsu 13y ago
"Radiation" should be better taught and understood I think. A local wind farm got shut down in my home town because someone convinced some townies they give off radiation and will give everyone cancer. There's a big difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radaition - A microwave (cell phone etc) can boil your blood with enough power but it will never cause a chemical change to DNA.
- mikeash 13y ago
  Science literacy in general is woefully inadequate. You can get amazingly far in life without knowing what "radiation" actually is, or why airplanes leave trails behind them sometimes, but it leaves you open to being extremely easily fooled.
  - 911_Inside_Job 13y ago
    I'll just leave this here: http://www.gq.com/cars-gear/gear-and-gadgets/201002/warning-cell-phone-radiation?printable=true http://www.gq.com/cars-gear/gear-and-gadgets/201002/warning-... "Frey tested microwave radiation on frogs and other lab animals, targeting the eyes, the heart, and the brain, and in each case he found troubling results. In one study, he triggered heart arrhythmias. Then, using the right modulations of the frequency, he even stopped frog hearts with microwaves—stopped the hearts dead. "Frey observed two factors in how microwaves at low power could affect living systems. First, there was the carrier wave: a frequency of 1,900 megahertz, for example, the same frequency of many cell phones today. Then there was the data placed on the carrier wave—in the case of cell phones, this would be the sounds, words, and pictures that travel along it. When you add information to a carrier wave, it embeds a second signal—a second frequency—within the carrier wave. This is known as modulation. A carrier wave can support any number of modulations, even those that match the extra-low frequencies at which the brain operates (between eight and twenty hertz). It was modulation, Frey discovered, that induced the widest variety of biological effects." Well that's food for thought! Seems it might be a bit hasty to just say "well it's non-ionizing radiation, so one is ignorant to fear it" Or as put by Joe Bageant: "The Information Racketeers: It is the job of our combined institutions to manage cultural information so as to deny the harmful aspects of the rackets they protect through legislation and promote through institutional research. That's why research shows that cell phone microwaves cause long-term memory loss in rats, but do not harm people. Evidently, we are of different, more bullet-proof mammalian material."

jof 13y ago

As one of the volunteers operating the existing Market St. WiFi and the housing project WiFi, I can say that this is definitely being discussed and evaluated, but I don't have a lot of hope for the Department of Technology making anything happen. They have deeply-rooted relationships with large telcos and utilities that have granted them good deals on easements to lay their existing fiber and copper paths. If the city started offering competing services for money, it would throw those relationships in jeopardy. It's really too bad, as a lot of the dark fiber resources are already in place to build a decent backbone that could support radial paths out different neighborhoods. However, there's very little technical clue (if you're a competent network engineer in the Bay Area, why would you work for a city? ick.) and political capital/gumption towards making this happen. The layer 0 - 7 stuff is easy. It's layer 8 and above (money, politics, humans) that make this hard to accomplish. If you're an SF resident, call or write your supervisor. Let your opinion be heard and demand proper infrastructure! Fiber is becoming the new roads; how you get your product to market. Municipalities need to step up and get building, because the big utilities and ISPs sure as hell aren't.

Matsta 13y ago
A similar sort of thing happened in New Zealand, ISP's ruled and weren't doing much to upgrade internet speeds. Then the government stepped in and said you gotta get your crap together then forced Telecom (which is now split into multiple companies, Chorus and Visiontek I believe) to build a nationwide fibre network. I believe it's meant to be finished by the end of next year, but it's actually pretty cool how most people who live centrally can get 100mbps (and now 200mbps) fibre from virtually any ISP that offers it. People say the NZ government is pretty useless (which is still is depending on what topic/area) but I was surprised they actually got it together and got something right for once.

the_watcher 13y ago

The anti-fiber arguments are all so crazy to me. They literally only benefit those making money on the status quo, which is a small number of ISPs. I cannot imagine walking up to 1000 people and asking them what they would put up with to improve their satisfaction with their ISPs and not getting answers like "Literally anything." It seems like this is one of those things that nearly everyone would agree on.