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San Francisco Just Took a Huge Step Toward Internet Utopia (wired.com)
Susan Crawford, writing for Backchannel: Last week, San Francisco became the first major city in America to pledge to connect all of its homes and businesses to a fiber optic network. I urge you to read that sentence again. It's a ray of light. In an era of short-term, deeply partisan do-nothing-ism, the city's straightforward, deeply practical determination shines. Americans, it turns out, are capable of great things -- even if only at the city level these days. [...] San Francisco's dilemma is a compact form of the crisis in communications facing the rest of the country: Although fiber is the necessary infrastructure for every policy goal we have -- advanced healthcare, the emergence of new forms of industries, a chance for every child to get an education, managed use of energy, and on and on -- the private sector, left to its own devices, has no particular incentive to ensure a widespread upgrade to fiber optic connections. Comcast dominates access in the city, but has no plans to replace its cable lines -- great at downloads, not so great at uploads, no opportunity to scale to the capacity of fiber thanks to the laws of physics, and expensive to subscribe to -- with fiber. And its planned enhancements to its cable lines have, in other cities, resulted in a product costing $150 per month. AT&T will say it's upgrading to fiber in San Francisco, but so far its work in many other US cities has been incremental, confined to areas where it has existing business customers to serve or where it already has fiber in place. Other, smaller providers similarly have no plans to do a city-wide upgrade, leaving San Francisco with a deeply uneven patchwork of connectivity. Just as in the rest of the country, poorer and less-well-educated San Franciscans tend not to subscribe to a wire at home, but instead rely wholly on smartphone data plans -- no substitutes, given their expense and throttled capacity, for what's possible using a wired connection.
Perhaps they should focus on more basic needs. Eliminating the feces that litter the streets. The horrible roads that are full of potholes. Lowering housing costs. Yeah, Internet... that's the most important thing.
"to PLEDGE to connect all of its homes and businesses to a fiber optic network."
Which means about as much as Unicorn power.
It will all be twisted apart in the next big quake when San Francisco is again reduced to rubble anyway. Bad place to build a city.
Let's examine the utopia that is SF, shall we? Illegals are protected (and allowed to murder no less!), middle class people can't afford to live there. Hell no one can afford to live there for that matter. It's run by shitty, moronic liberals. I wonder which Citty Council members will be getting big kickbacks for this? Not to mention, IF they do manage not to bankrupt the city with this, do you REALLY think they won't censor the shit out of it? 'To block hate speech (ie speech on things they disagree with)' ostensibly I'm sure.
Look, I'm all for this, but we all know how fucking moronic California is, and how the city and state governments are the real fascists here, wanting to control everything and every one. Do you really think this isn't yet another power play by these crass pillocks?
If you don't, you're almost certainly a registered Democrat.