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."

Comments

Re:Why?

[ScentCone]

Having a government ISP All people pay via taxes for internet, which is overall cheaper because everyone is paying, and more people would use it because they would have affordable access.

Hilarious. Nearly half the country doesn't even pay any income tax. Large percentages have their utilities (like power and water) subsidized or entirely paid for by other people. Your notion of "everybody paying" isn't even on the same planet as the reality of the situation.

And that rural grocery store? A slow, laggy satellite internet service is just find for the very low bandwidth needed to run a few transactions at the register. That's already available, and will be even cheaper as some newer low-orbit swarm solutions start to kick in. Nobody is going to drag fiber down every farm road and up every mountain gravel road for universal service. It would cost a hundred thousand dollars to serve some single farm houses.