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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.
Thatâ(TM)s great. In stead of dealing with the homeless issues just give everyone internet access and a map of where not to walk because of human waste in the street.
I tend not to get too excited about political promises. There are two ways, as I see it, this can happen. One is the city tries to build the network. The private ISPs will sue and the project will languish for years, if it ever gets off the ground at all. Second, the city pays the private ISP's to build the network--in other words, a giant handout. Then some public interest group will sue, and the project will languish for years, if it ever gets off the ground at all.
> Perhaps they should focus on more basic needs.
Internet is a VERY big need.
How can you convince people that they're living in a utopia if you can't distract them from reality? In fact, Internet is VITAL making things better!
"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.
advanced healthcare, the emergence of new forms of industries, a chance for every child to get an education, managed use of energy,
All those things listed... not one of them has low hanging fruit that is addressed by "faster internet". Healthcare is a big, expensive mess - and that is not because hospitals and doctors' offices can't get fast internet. Education is an absolute shitshow in all but a few states, and that has nothing to do with the internet. Energy use monitoring consists of low-bandwidth wireless meters that benefit not at all from fiber. I'm sure that industries will pop up to take advantage of subsidized internet, just as industries pop up when there is subsidized water, electricity, etc. Even subsidized shit.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
San Francisco is about 5 billion dollars in debt. Although that's only 1/4 of the per capita debt of NYC, it's still irresponsible of the city to make such a claim.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
"Comcast dominates access in the city..."
Say no more.
When one of the largest cities in our entire country allows a fucking monopoly on internet service, there's only one true problem to solve for; the corruption that creates and sustains that shit.
"straightforward, deeply practical determination shines"
Right!
https://sf.budgetchallenge.org... (this is an official SFO city page)
This projection reveals deficits of $86 million in FY 2016-17 and $161 million in FY 2017-18, a total deficit of approximately $246.4 million over the next two years.
This is simultaneous with their floating a $3.5 BILLION bond to desperately try to fix BART infrastructure: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/...
Oh wait, not really: http://www.mercurynews.com/201...
"Less than three months after voters passed a $3.5 billion BART bond for capital projects, transit officials presented budget forecasts in which the district reneges on its part of the deal."
And let's not forget:
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.c...
Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed a $122.5 billion budget for California and is warning of a possible $2 billion deficit in the coming fiscal year.
Not sure what the OP is peddling, but the fact is that SFO's budget is sheer fantasy already without adding the ridiculous cost of shoving fiber-internet everywhere.
Even in California you can't build infrastructure out of candy, unicorns, and rainbows.
-Styopa
You make a good point. However, the days where the US is the world leader are rapidly coming to a close. Part of the reason for this can seen by numerous other responses in this thread demonstrating that people would rather find a reason to bitch and make wisecracks rather than do anything positive to keep up with our foreign competitors. In Korea and Japan one can purchase 10GBit/s internet speeds for less than $50/month. This year China will lay 10 times more fiber than the US, while also building more high speed rail, more wind and solar power, increase their exports to US and the rest of the world at about 2.5 times the pace of the US, All the while, the supposed "talent" in the US will busy putting their money into fattening the wallets of Comcast and AT&T execs.
Precisely why I voted Trump. He is against both those parties. He's the closest thing we've had to an Independent in a long, long time.
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.
Governments have lots of people in them. They're actually capable of doing more than one thing at a time.
Nope, no sig