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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
You answered your own question when you said "Comcast."
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Europeans and their quaint ideas on remote. There are spots in the US have may have dozen people in the area of an European country.
The US is has the 3rd largest population, but is 50th in population density.
So that means a lot more long last mile connections. So in Europe you can have the bulk of your population in a urban center, this allow it to be economically feasible to give a connection to a more remote area because the population of the remote area is much smaller.
That isn't to say the US isn't at fault for being behind the times. We havn't had any leadership willing or able to shake up the big telecom companies and push them out for the greater good.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I think you'd be surprised at the ruralness of some places in Europe, that said country population density isn't particularly relevant when we're talking about wiring a city.
Comcast is accessible to people who are willing and able to pay for the service, We as customers are paying more for infrastructure that isn't going to our homes, as they will wire a community with only 50% may want to pay for the service. The wires are there, but they just decline service.
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.
Even if you buy a cabin in the woods and need to pay taxes for internet that you may not personally use, it will provider internet for that local grocery store who will process your credit card payment for food, update their inventory, so when you go on your away from it all vacation, you are not hunting for a place that you can buy that one thing you are missing.
Internet today is a key infrastructure. Like our roads, electrical grid, plowing, police, fire protection... There is a benefit to you even if you are not actively using it.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
That isn't to say the US isn't at fault for being behind the times. We havn't had any leadership willing or able to shake up the big telecom companies and push them out for the greater good.
I think the problem is that governments keep selling to a single bidder for the entire job and end up getting fucked time and time again, but I suppose it's always a new set of idiots in office making the same mistake so there's a little bit of an excuse.
The better idea in this case would be to identify as many companies as possible that could participate and give them each a smaller piece of the total work to be done, with some pieces of the work only being parceled out after a company has shown its ability to do a good job. The promise of future work for good performance (or the threat of no work for poor performance) will keep the companies from slacking and doing a crap job, and those who can't manage that don't get more work. Wiring fiber is something that would need to be done to the same code or standards regardless of who does it, so this isn't a case where you end up trying to integrate dozens of different solutions or smaller pieces that have little hope of fitting together.
As funny as it may sound, "socialist" Europe frequently has better market competition in many areas than the U.S. does. When companies have to compete for business, it greatly favors the consumer. Some of this can be laid at the feet of population density, as for example cellular wireless carriers aren't rushing to erect towers in bumfuck Nebraska, but it ultimately doesn't matter what allows for greater competition to exist as long as it does.
Yeah. San Francisco is amazingly rural. You'll often find entire stretches of sidewalk miles long with only one or two people living on them....
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I think you are wrong about this and California shows why. CA law doesn't allow exclusive deals between municipalities and ISPs. So why do CA residents have so few choices? I believe the answer is that wired Internet service is a natural monopoly.
We need to recognize that wired Internet is currently a natural monopoly and regulate it as such.
Technology may change its status as a natural monopoly, but the best placed companies (cellphone carriers) don't seem interested in doing anything about it (limited monthly bandwidth makes cellphone Internet impractical as a replacement for wired Internet).
The UK doesn't have this natural monopoly problem for Internet service, but the UK requires incumbents to allow competitors to user their last mile infrastructure. Remember when the USA had CLECs? Lobbying and obstruction by the ILECs killed that.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Our lesser population density is no excuse for not having the best infrastructure in the world in our most populous cities or even states. California's population density is double that of France, slightly greater than Germany's, and nearly equal to Europe's population density as a whole. No excuse.
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?