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San Francisco's City-Wide Fiber Internet Plan is Delayed, Future in Doubt (arstechnica.com)
San Francisco's plan to build a city-wide gigabit fiber Internet service won't go forward this year, as city officials decided they need to do more research before asking voters to approve a ballot initiative. From a report: The universal broadband project "has suffered a setback as outgoing Mayor Mark Farrell will not place a tax measure on the November ballot to fund the project before he leaves office in the coming weeks," the San Francisco Examiner reported Sunday. The deadline for Farrell to submit the ballot initiative passed yesterday. In January, the city issued a Request for Qualifications (RFQ) to find companies that are qualified to build the network. After examining the submissions, the city named three entities (Bay City Broadband Partners, FiberGateway, and Sonic Plenary SF Fiber) as "pre-qualified bidders."
...are you suggesting that we can't simply have everything we want when we want it, and just charge it on our credit card?
Next you're going to say stuff costs money and we have to pay for it.
-Styopa
European here, fiber based networks available even in the remote mountainous regions, or far out in the archipelago. You're all welcome over here.
Why waste all this money when Comcast already probably has the city completely wired or is preparing to do so? This is a waste of taxpayer money, and quite frankly a business the taxpayer should not be involved in.
What happened to the citywide wifi initiative of the 2000s? Oh, now just selected public areas. If the city can't get that right, fiber had no chance.
Perhaps they should house the homeless instead or at least clean up the needles and the feces on the streets.
And maybe pick up all those discarded e bikes and scooters
I bet it's because the fibers weren't free range vegan fibers so some outrage culture activists threw a fit.
We need another earthquake to flatten out all the expensive housing and the hipster scum that lives there.
Lasers? Not in MY one square meter back yard!
Americans complain about population density, leadership or telecommunications companies... ha Australians have beer...
Would be appropriate.
I think that if an investigation is done on this, we'll find that it fell through because ATT lobbied against it, they're the only provider there, provide low speed at high cost.
Monopolists win !
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
Can't have competition in a Mercantalist society.
Capitalism requires full informed competition, and protection of the Public Good.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Comment removed based on user account deletion
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/04/technology/fast-internet-service-speeds-business-development-in-chattanooga.html
Hint: everywhere. Promise big, spread some money around, move on to the next batch of suckers without actually delivering anything.
Regarding how long this process is taking in San Francisco -
If California is divided into separate mini-states, and if San Francisco and Silicon Valley are put into the same mini-state, and so forced to work closely with each other, then that mini-state would not work well.
In San Francisco, projects can be delayed a long time by reviews and protests. People in Mountain View, Cupertino and Sunnyvale are used to getting projects done faster. SF and Silicon Valley people would drive each other crazy.
You know, if municipal broadband can't work at the Silicon Valley millionaire's shiny city on a hill, that probably means that municipal broadband is a pipe dream and the making of yet another California boondoggle.
People should be paying more attention to the legal environment that anyone deploying a network is going to have to navigate.
In the (European) country where I live, for about $15/month you can get a cellular data package with 100GB of data per month. Download/upload speeds are routinely over 1MB/second. Nowadays, I don't even have a wired internet connection at home anymore, I just use this instead. And it's actually more reliable in my experience than wired internet was.
I think San Francisco should contract with the cell phone companies to roll this out over the entire city (i.e. put up some more cell towers). It would probably be a lot cheaper than wired internet. Why waste money on a technology which is becoming obsolete?
Ayn Rand was a worthless foreign history major who exploited the generosity of the American people, instead of coming here and getting a real job she became a 'writer' where she was allowed to poison our culture with her foreign ideas. Then after all the USA did for her she predictably ran into the comfortable arms of our social welfare programs and sucked the government teat until she died.
Her whole life she was a bullheaded cheapskate.
As a result she smoked her whole life and wouldn't listen to anyone who claimed the habit was unhealthy. The weak mind of the foreigner lacks long term planning and will squander everything in pursuit of fleeting short term pleasures.
She developed lung cancer and due to her irresponsible personal finances she ran out of money quick and went on welfare until the day she died.
All her poor decisions coming home to roost she did it all to herself and expected the US taxpayers to foot the bill for her foreign ass. Only if we can only learn our lessons, limit immigration to top engineers and scientists, and stop giving hand outs to people who refuse to better their own situations. Only then the situation in America will improve.
2GB a month is considered a good plan. Some will give 2GB of high speed and then 16kb/s the rest of the month. Some will charge per megabyte or gigabyte above that. Most also charge more for tethering if it is available at all.
US cellular service is the only thing *WORSE* than US internet service, at least in the communications world. And that is saying a lot.