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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.
Given the sheer number of human feces located around San Francisco now, I have a vastly more efficient city wide network plan - PoopNet.
How it works it, as packets are sent they go out to a drone that selects a hobo that usually staggers towards your destination, and injects them with tagged markers representing the contents of your packets.
After the hobo reaches your destination, they poop against a nearby wall, releasing the odors that carry your tagged scents into local receptors, delivering the desired packets.
As a backup in case the hobo wanders to the incorrect location, local pigeons will carry some of the poop to the desired destination and re-poop your packets, much like the standard TCP retry mechanism.
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.
"How young Donald Trump was slapped and punched until he made his bed"
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/donald-trump-fellow-cadet-article-1.3401110
My last conversation with Donald Trump was at the New York Military Academy, where we were both cadets. It was 1964, the year he graduated. We were walking together near the baseball field where, he reminded me, he'd played exceptionally well. He demanded that I tell him the story of one of his greatest games.
"The bases were loaded," I told him. "We were losing by three. You hit the ball just over the third baseman's head. Neither the third baseman nor the left fielder could get to the ball in time. All four of our runs came in; we won the game."
"No," he said. "That's not the way it happened. I want you to remember this: I hit the ball out of the ballpark! Remember that. I hit it out of the ballpark!"
Ballpark? I thought. We were talking about a high school practice field. There was no park to hit a ball out of. And anyway, his hit was a blooper the fielders misplayed.
But I wasn't going to argue with Donald. What was the harm in a little embellishment, if it helped him survive New York Military Academy?
NYMA, the private boarding school where Trump's parents sent him and where mine sent me, could be a brutal place where grown men who were veterans of the real military ruled with threats and force.
Trump's first year, under the command of Major Theodore Dobias, was hellish. Dobias slapped and punched him until he learned to make his bed and polish his shoes — things that Donald, an aggressive little wiseguy, had at first refused to do.
At some point Dobias assumed that he had broken Trump and eased up. More probably, Trump had figured out Dobias' weak points and had begun to exploit them. He flattered the major and became one of his "winners" who was favored with privileges and praised.
As the Academy's unofficial PR man, Dobias even contributed to the Trump myth, eventually telling Rolling Stone that pro scouts vied to sign Trump. As with many things Dobias asserted about Trump, this story may or may not be true.
Besides sports, most of Donald's years at the Academy were unremarkable. In his junior year, he was a supply sergeant in charge of the World War II M1s rifles we all lugged around at parade. But even in this laid-back position he was brash and assertive.
A member of the school band recallsTrump throwing shoes at him and yelling at him to shut up when this young man stood too close to the barracks trumpeting Reveille. Rumor had it that he got away with stuff like this because his father donated large sums to the school.
In his senior year, Donald was promoted to captain of A Company. Unlike other cadet captains who took an interest in the lives of the adolescents in their charge, Trump commanded at a remove. Aside from a determination that cadets in his care would always polish their brass belt buckles and keep the spit-shine on their boots, come evening he'd retreat to his room.
My friend Peter Ticktin, who was an A Company platoon sergeant, emailed me recently to say he saw Trump as someone who kept his thoughts to himself and delegated his responsibilities. "DT put his trust in me," Ticktin wrote . "(Although trust) may be too strong (a word), as I was not a confidant as to his personal thoughts. No one was. He was much to himself. A good guy, but no one's real buddy."
Trump couldn't remain aloof after one of his minions allegedly hazed a younger cadet. Ignoring the unwritten barracks rule that no report to the adult authorities be made, this cadet finked to his parents, who demanded a meeting with the superintendent. It resulted in Donald's removal as captain.
Any other cadet caught in such a scandal would have been busted to a lower rank and exiled to a different barracks. But Donald was transferred, with no loss of rank, to what was probably intended as a desk job. (He called it a promotion.)
While Donald had not succeeded as a manager of young men
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.