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America's Most Wired Cities and Towns
JoeD writes "This story on Yahoo lists the 50 most net-connected cities in the US. San Francisco is #1. Austin, TX is #2. Interesting reading. "
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I'm here in Austin - not sure what to make of the wired rep - we do have alot of computer geeks due to Dell, UT, etc. There is so much to do here IRL that it is hard to believe there could be that density of geekness. I figure a colder, snowed in climate would grow more geeks.
Although when it hits 100 in July here there is nothing quite like working in a job with the AC down to about 68 degrees, avoiding all that evil natural light...
Just found out my neighborhood is finally ADSL capable... time to order! Austin *is* nice. :-)
In areas where xDSL competes with cable, it's less expensive :(
I received a letter from Cathy Lewandowski of Time Warner Austin describing their rates:
"Please note that Road Runner service rates are based on the local market and economy."
That is corporate-speak for:
"We are charging the highest price we think people are willing to pay considering that there is no competition in this arena."
Seth@sansa.net
I just checked their site, and yup - there it is. But I don't remember seeing that when they first rolled it out... All they need is a line filter to seperate the services. That's pretty lame...
I'm shocked; beaureucrats here look at you funny if you tell 'em you work in high tech. They warn you "but you could lose your job". Then, they realize to themselves, "Oh yeah, he's the guy who pays the taxes" and tolerate you. This rating is scary; our idea of high-tech is running IE5 and excel spreadsheets. Hmmm, they must be talking about coffee, we're wired on something!
they were prolly talking about us over here in syracuse when they said it was falling apart. it's sad that most ppl seem to think that NYS is just NYC and a few small barbarian outposts scatered in the woods. :)
BTW - being in Austin I can warn people that Southwastern Bell has THE worst support of the baby bells. I deal with their crap all the time - they are by far the most bass-ackwards telecom in the country.
Wow, I'm typing this down my rock-solid 768K SDSL line from the middle of San Francisco, on my Covad-installed copper, using DNAI as my upstream provider... no PacBell here at all. You might do some homework about what's available out there.
Here at my school, Binghamton University,its always amazing to watch kids from LI and NYC meet up with kids from Rochester, Albany, Buffalo. The kids from LI and NYC have a hard time understanding that there are other cities in New York besides NYC. They just figure that theres NYC and the rest of New York state is pretty much like Binghamton, a barbarian outpost full of rust, decay and Walmart.
Well, maybe I should read the WHOLE article before I post, but the results look a little shakey. Actually, I'm surprised that they didn't lump us in with San Francisco.
That's awesome. I live in one of the supposedly most wired small towns in America.
:P So much for running high traffic sites out of my house.
Unfortunately there's nothing but analog... ISDN, xDSL or cable modems are not available. I've considered DirecPC but have heard too many horror stories about it, plus I'm not trying to have a telco return.
Looks like dedicated multilink PPP is the only way to go
if so, robbie sez hi.
Heh. Props. Good to see.
I can testify that SWBell has an issue with latency. I've seen it hit 600ms at times. But I can deal with latency issues better than I can deal with transfer limits. jump.net has a 5gig transfer limit on their acounts, if you exceed that limit you get charged $10 bucks for each gig over the limit.
There's more than one place here in Austin that does that.
Actually we are number 52. We were 15 last year. How in the hell did that happen? They have us as having 4.67 computers for every 100 students!! Maybe in the labs, but every student now is required to bring their own computers. Even the Rednecks. They say we don't have multiple e-mail accounts yet I have 4. Although it says we get lifetime E-mail. I didn't know that. BONUS! Well, that's all I have to say about that.
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Hell's Cowboy
Have a nice day.
Buddy, if you think Austin's a drug-using overcharging racist place to be, drag your ass out to California for a year or so. If you'd come here instead of Houston, you'd be *crying* to get back to Austin.
Ah, but I had friends who did try California. Gave it a whirl. Go west? They did. And they hated it. That is why I didn't. Think I'm bitter? Try some of my friends who went to LA and SF for 7-8 years after UT. Not very happy people, and all of them are back here, older, poorer, and out of the tech mainstream (I know that sounds weird, but oil companies are pretty cutting edge, and while you get a lot of cool Cisco hardware at Cisco -- to use an example -- you get a lot of cool everything at Exxon, Pennzoil, Shell, BP, etc.). Besides -- SF turned all of the queer friends that went out there into Republicans. Ghod only knows what it would do to my redneck ass. That didn't come out right ...
I was checking the DULLEST cities list and Austin made #1, congradulations Austinites keep that boretown rolling ...
Champaign/Urbana IL has apartmments with ethernet connections, and we're not that big.
AUTOFLUSH
Show me anothr cith that _doesn't_ have that.
nope sorry...VT erased my email, and soon enough they sent me this alumni email address subscribtion...
shsss.......all the years paying tuition and they still want to milk me afterward....ohhh...the *agonY*
Same type of thing for my school. A whole bunch of the data like that was incorrect! By network drops, bandwidth, and machines, we are the most-networked public campus. But we were put at almost 200.
Actually, almost every business is in violation of anti-trust laws. But I digress..
I guess i would just like to toot my horn and say that we have citywide cablemodem connections for $40 (canadian) a month. We are a population of about 300 thousand. Our cable provider is Shaw (they own YTV - a canadian youth cable channel that syndacated the popular Reboot show that I think is also popular in the states?) which has partnered with @home.
Architectually, the "cable" segment is about a city block long with it feeding into a fiber tree for the neighbouhood, etc. If it matters, I've never seen a ping longer that 50ms to the company's web proxy.
(sorry about the earlier blank post)
SF's population as posted on the years-old city boundary sign next to Candlestick is 725Kpersons. FYI. Current population is nudging toward 800K, you should see the rental market, sigh.
One could argue that SF's 'population,' meaning the people that sleep there at night, is less important in this context than its 'occupancy,' the daytime population including commuters, estimated variously from 1.1 mil up to wild claims of 2 mil.
$130,000, with stock options as a senior UNIX admin (a Big Oil Company, so I don't expect two for one splits, but ...), great benefits, a one bedroom apartment all bills paid with enclosed parking downtown so that I can walk to work (!) for $645 a month (all bills paid means all the juice that I can soak up and all the AC -- with ADSL letting me keep 22 machines from me and friends on my own LAN, they are probably losing money on me). A two bedroom apartment would run you $800 inside the loop, all bills paid, with maid service and covered parking, but $1000 downtown. I suspect that you could make as much as me as an NT guy, as I have some friends pulling down over $160,000 doing contract UNIX programming.
...).
... that is one of the things that the "old timers" avoid ...
I wasn't suggesting that Houston is a mecca (roaches big enough to barbeque -- yum!), but a)it is a damned sight cheaper than Austin, b)you make a hell of a lot more, c)it is a real city (with all the suggested advantages to ballance out the disadvantages), and d)you have a future, and I am sorry but I have seen Austin just run out for the best and the brightest.
Consider Houston. It grows on you (hey, lots of stuff grows on you here with the humidity and all
And don't get me started on texas.net
You'd be lucky to get a 1 Bedroom in San Francisco for less than $1500...and a pretty sad one at that--more like $1800 for something above a hovel these days.
You folks down in the states are getting seriously hosed by your phone/cable companies. I'm in Halifax, NS, Canada. If I weren't so cheap, I'd be paying $45 CANADIAN (= $30 US) for DSL service right now. This includes all ISP charges. Installation is $25. And I would get much more bandwidth than I could ever use. Here's a quite from my DSL provider's FAQ:
Q. How fast is the Mpowered PC network?
A. Mpowered PC uses RADSL (Rate Adaptive Digital Subscriber Line) technology. This technology modifies its transmission speed depending on the state of the physical phone line so actual speed between two different customer connects may differ. This technology is also dependent on the length of the local cable loop, which is the distance from your home to our telephone switching office.
Here's the important bit:
Rates in the Mpowered PC environment can vary from 1 to 7 Mbs downstream (to the subscriber), and up to 1.5 Mbs upstream (from the subscriber). We are attempting to provide all customers with at least 3 Mbs.
Cable modem service is $40 a month with similar installation costs. It's a shame that I'm saving all my money to buy a house next month.
From what I've seen, these sorts of rates are the norm all across Canada.
Mark the AC
. . . but it sure as hell beats Allentown.
Or Scranton, for that matter. Or Texas.
penis power
HAR! I'm in northern Canada and I get all sorts of choices now... xDSL, Cable (full), ISDN, everything!
I am an Oracle DBA. My husband does something like that with Informix, in as much as you can do anything like that with Informix. No, we don't discuss work at home. I make $91/hr contract, he makes $88/hr, and we tend to average 60 hours/week. We only work on UNIX (we do agree on that). He is 31 and balding (but still cute) and I am 29 (and holding). Last year we made (before taxes)$540,000. No shit. Yes, I would say that Houston IS a mecca for DBAs (and even Informix people) because the oil patch is a no-bullshit kind of place with DP&A -- it damned better work and they will pay you for it if you can make it happen. If you want to make money and you are good (i.e., you have had Oracle incorporate your patches verbatim), come to Houston. There are TONS of jobs for good DBAs. If you can kick ass and want to be paid for it, Houston is a damned good place to live. And yes, it is very inexpensive, too.
So give me a URL. I am Lost in Austin and have questions for you.
Yeah, living in Orlando for six months was the last straw for me; I finally had to move out of Florida after living there for something like 20 years. I really, really hated The Damn Mouse. Aside from the mouse mafia and the warmer weather in Orlando, I can't say that I found Orlando all that much different from the Tampa Bay area. Okay, maybe there was also something like 100,000 less tourists and 100,000 more old people, but they are both still flat, hot, barren strip mall havens. Ah well, I've escaped now. Good luck to you there. I still have a couple of friends down there that love it to death; I can only hope that they'll eventually try living somewhere else for at least a year and see more of the big wide world.
With Dayton at 35, Cleveland at 30, Columbus at 29, and Cincinnati at 23, almost all of the major cities in Ohio are on the list. None are extremely high, so I think Ohio should win some kind of "king of mediocrity" award. Cincinnati Bell is doing a semi-lousy job, but this ADSL is better than nothing. Just being able to install RedHat via FTP is a lot better than forking out dough for a CD...
Chris Moyer
- seth@sansa.net
.I lived there for more than twenty years and left. All of the people I grew up with in West Austin and Westlake have left as well. People from the East side whom I met at Johnston with the busing have left. Basically, Austin sucks. I moved to Houston. About half of everyone that I grew up with is in West U or Bellaire (including the black folks, which is certainly a change from West Austin, where you would be routinely stopped by police until a few years ago if you were there, black, and it was dark out). Let me be specific:
..), you will get ripped off. This really sucks after a while. You learn, after a long time, where to go. Austin is really distinguished by the fact that so many places are avoided by everyone who has been there for 10+ years. This makes basic stuff really troublesome.
...), c)am able to save 4X what I was saving in Austin (not too big a deal, you say -- I am 29, and I would like to retire at 50, and I will get there by saving money, not by paying Austin rents and making Austin pay), and d)I have an arts scene that revolves around something other than drink specials. And people here can drive and even use their turn signal on a semi-regular basis. And my car insurance dropped by half.
1. What you get costs a lot: The cost of living is ridiculous. It is nearly impossible to get an apartment someplace without gunshots at night for $550-600/month. That is for an efficiency, folks. Food is more expensive. Power and water are literally three times (yes, I am serious) as in Houston, where Houston Lighting and Power (HL&P, which was called Houston Looting and Plundering for years) is known for gouging the consumers. Modest homes in Austin, an hour outside of town in the developments, go for $200,000. And the price everything, down to the cost of a taco from a roach coach on the street is notched up a little because there are 80,000 students in town, most of whom have at least partial help with income and many of whom have a lot of cash and no worries/motivation to save. You are paying resort prices, basicly, where they are trying to gouge the tourists.
2. You can't get a job that lets you afford it: The pay scales are close to half that of the rest of Texas. This was drilled home to me when I realized that I would be paid 40% more in Alamagordo or Tulsa, twice as much in Ft. Worth or Houston. Austin pays as well as New Orleans, sometimes worse. A senior AIX or Solaris sysadmin may (MAY) make $45-50k a year. If he or she is lucky. Places like Dell, Samsung, AMD, and others are there for the cheap, young, and healthy labor that can be fired on the spot. This isn't slamming the fact that Texas is a right-to-work state -- most people don't understand how much this helps the skilled employee while not really allowing the employer to be beastly, except in Austin, because a)there are lots of people for every job, b)the people don't complain (they are kids -- they don't know that this isn't OK) (and in my experience most senior managers really don't like this at all), c)word never "gets around" drying up the labor supply because there is no "around" -- the transitory and unsettled population never develops professional ties. In most cities, if you acted like a jerk to the sysadmins, they would walk, have lunch, let people know that they were on the market, and have a job in a day or two. And they would talk, and pretty soon jerk-boss would find that he couldn't get applicants for his vacant positions. Right-to-work allows this. Austin is one of the only places where the union hack nightmare of ultimate workplace tyrany comes true. And it does, all the time. So what if I leave -- they will get someone who really needs a job and is 18 to replace me. Maybe he will screw up, so they will just fire him! So people screw over employees all the time. LOOK AT DELL. That's all I have to say. Just look at Dell. Talk to anyone who has worked at Dell. And the rest of Austin is the same. Lots and lots of people come to Austin, stay a few years, look at how they can't save any money and leave. And more people come in every day, so no one ever has any incentive to change. They just wait for the next sucker and pay $12/hr.
3. When you get it, it doesn't work well: Austin is the home of the ripoff. Everything from city power (you will have at least one 15+ second power-off incident a day, every day, all over town except well north, where they are on TU Electric from Dallas) to car repair (places that screw you flourish -- who cares, there is always another sucker coming by) to any kind of service (waiters, police, any sort of counter attendant
I moved to Houston and a)doubled my income, b)discovered that almost everything is easier (want to buy a pressure cooker, call around and find on, and go to buy it AND IT WILL BE THERE! as opposed to not there and no one knows who told you that and no one cares too much, either
Houston still gives me Southwester Bell, but at least I have choices beyond Time Warner. The (and the RoadRunner service) suck so hard that it isn't even funny.
And, not to put too fine a point on it, it is nice to be someplace where you can at least assume that every third person isn't stoned. Everyone screws around as a kid; Austin is where you go if you want to stay stoned for the rest of your life. Junkies and potheads are marginally funny until you have them as a boss, or until they run into you, or until you are behind several of them in line someplace and they can't decide what to eat/get/check out/buy. That gets old, man, real old. I have been in three traffic accidents. I have been hit each time. Each time the driver was stoned or drunk. I have friends who have had much worse luck. Drugs and drug people are a part of life in Austin. If you have kids, they will be doing coke by 14. Some of them will never make it back. This hasn't changed at all since I was at Doss Elementary fifteen years ago, but we never had crack. YMMV.
And it is nice being in Houston with for other reasons. I have a black girlfriend. I am white. That doesn't fly in Austin. No one in Houston cares. The myth that Austin is a liberal mecca is sort of true -- there are a lot of liberals here. But the racism is Austin is pervasive and corrosive. Below, I noted some places that I like in Austin. One of the reasons that I like them is that they won't treat black people and Mexicans poorly, apart from the fact that they do a good job. Black people who move to Austin should be prepared for an eye-opening experience. And when they least expect it, too.
For the record, if you are in Austin and are saying "so do you have any suggestions", if you have a VW (and I have four of them), try Boehr's German Motor Works (10+ years, the kind of place where they say "You don't need new brake lines -- they always look like that. No charge."). They do Volvos too, I think. If you need weird electronic parts or good used RAM try MC Howard Electronics (15+ years and responsible for my descent into hacking, many years ago). They have stuff like $50 486s, 2x CD-ROMs for $10, and original IBM keyboard. They don't mind Linux, either. ISPs: www.outer.net is very, very good, they essentially require ssh, and have threatened kiddies with baseball bats (I am told). If you need coffee, try Austin City Cofee (Ethiopians shop there for green coffee -- it is that kind of a place)(also helping my hacking for many years). Good luck if you move there. Have an exit plan in place.
I hate to break it to you, but Pac*Bell is the best of the RBOC's (the baby bells), nationwide, according to my friends who run national ISPs. Be glad you don't live in NYNEX or GTE territory.
The real problem is that legacy telephone companies are so invested in voice telephony and circuit switching that packet switching is a mystery to them. They Don't "Get It." They can generally be trusted to run wires or give you a point-to-point bit-pipe (i.e. a dedicated leased line), but never ask them for a switched data service (e.g. frame relay, ATM, SMDS) because they'll always fuck it up. ISDN is a borderline case, because it looks and smells like voice to them, but it has never been tariffed (priced) correctly: ISDN calls should have the same price as voice calls.
There was an article in Wired a while ago called, The NetHeads versus The BellHeads which described some of this cluelessness, and how Internet companies are eating the RBOCs and other LECs alive.
If you're looking for xDSL service, best to go with one of the Competitive LECs, e.g. Covad, or NorthPoint, because it's a lead-pipe cinch that your RBOC will hose up the Internet part of xDSL, even if they get the basic bit-pipe right.
The City of Stockholm, Sweden got it right - they laid down dark fibre all over the city, and then set up a city-owned corporation to lease it out to all comers. This makes it easy to get really high speed data service at low prices. Right on the edge of the Silicon Valley, the City of Palo Alto, California has the same opportunity (i.e. they've laid down the dark fibre) but they're hesitating to actually use it! (idiots)
Where else in the world does the Papa Johns delivery guy ask if he can hop on your computer to check his email
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Just lurking, thanks!
... I can tell that Bethlehem, PA isn't on the list... hell, I can only get one way cable modem (which is lame) because we're "too far from a fiber"...
:)
just venting some frustration with my current location
Why? Probbaly because very little has been done to improve how "wired" Blacksburg is. Espically in terms of access, while some residences have high speed ethernet, those are often in the minority of all the housing in town. Cable Modems are availble, but are still one way and frow what I've heard not to relible. DSL Service is also availble, but has a $200+ installation fee. Most internet users in Blacksburg still have to modem, which means slow connecitons.
So, we're trying to get DSL right outside Georgia
Tech, about three blocks from the BS tower, and
they can't get us DSL. We really want DSL.
But they can't even figure out who to talk to to
see when our area will be upgraded to allow for
DSL...
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Posted by The Incredible Mr. Limpett:
I live in St. Paul right now (#8) and grew up in San Francisco (#1). Top 10 at all times! woo hoo!
I remember being wired back in 1989 in SF. Had 2 university UNIX accounts and a few BBS accounts going just for good measure
----
"Wars, conflict, it's all business. One murder makes a
villain. Millions a hero. Numbers sanctify."
That's not fair to places with loads of networking 'service' via .edu or .gov.
I can't figure out what the logic was behind restructing it to .com, other than to deliberately favor commercial use of the nyet as somehow "more important" than noncomercial use.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Bring your fat capital and keep this boomtown rolling. It kicks ass around here.
Don Negro
Don Negro
Perl 6 will give you the big knob. -- Larry Wall
At first when I saw SF was #1, I thought, "Groan. They must have lumped San Jose in as part of San Francisco again." (It's mildly annoying considering San Jose is the bigger city but far and away lesser known of the two. People outside the area seem to always call the whole Bay Area "San Francisco", even though SF is really just the 6x8-mile city at the tip of the peninsula.) But I see they did separate them after all - their criteria was weighted in favor of the (rather nebulous) hosts per capita figure. I can believe that SF's financial district and the peninsula cities could dominate that. So at least they had an explanation for how their numbers turned out that way. San Jose was highest in the categories you'd expect for Silicon Valley... users accessing the Net from work and .com domains per thousand licensed businesses.
FYI... for more info, here are the pages for San Jose, San Francisco and the Assoc of Bay Area Governments (ABAG).
Here in the Bay Area, you can get 384k/128k for 80 a month, but only with 1 IP address, and you have to go through pacbell. if you want more IPs, or more bandwidth, the price shoots up to at least 200 or so... That's what we pay. I think I'm getting bled, but I'd rather not IP masquerade...
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
The way this state operates, I wouldn't be surprised if Philadelphia came around the bottom of the list. Oh, well... no wonder Pennsylvania got the motto "Cook with coal"...
In Soviet Russia, Jesus asks: "What Would You Do?"
Now if only I could afford a decent house.
BTW, if you're from California and are thinking about moving to Austin - GO AWAY!!! WE DON'T WANT YOU!!!! Austinites think that Californians are scum.
--
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
Could you tell me more about your complaint to the ATC? I'd like to file a complaint, too.
--
Timur Tabi
Remove "nospam_" from email address
It's hard to believe that so many people are taking this article serious. Doesn't it bother you when the judging criteria includes:
"Content Quality - In this category, we analyzed government, media, and cultural sites and assigned them overall rankings."
How subjective can you get.
My bias for my hometown has me believing that Atlanta should be higher than #9. Three years ago, Atlanta was the most wired city in the world as a result of the Olympics. I've had cable modem to my house for about eighteen months now. And I've been offered DSL three times in the last six months.
like others above from SF, I'm sort of surprised by ZD's award. DSL, you name it, it really bites here in San Francisco.
As a proud Ohioan...I always will say that our great state is a little bit on the underestimated side (well, except for maybe Dayton, which is just a big suburb of Cincinnati.)
The explanation as to how Cincy beat the other Ohio metropolitan areas is not the most explicit in the world; my impression is that Columbus is the more technology oriented area in Ohio.
Someone said that the Road Runner system in Columbus has the most users of any of the nation's cable modem networks (it certainly was one of the first.) Can anyone confirm that?
I'd have thought that it was Dallas that was #1 or #2...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
They're popping up all along the Dallas North Tollway corridor.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Well I think that the reason that Omaha has so much fiber that you can bury people with their computers and they _still_ get better connections than I do, is because it's basically the largest city in the geographic center of the US.
This made it a favorite switching station for the phone companies - LOTS of calls get routed through Omaha.
IIRC, from a book I have (the name escapes me - if anyone's interested say so and I'll dig it up) in the planning stages for the ARPANet, a centralized system was considered, which would probably have also been in Omaha. Then they decided to go with the distributed topology. At least, that was the idea anyhow.
But the point is that while there's a lot of fiber there, there are not as many connections that originate there, and that's more interesting for the poll.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
At least Orlando has wind. I'm from Tallahassee and it's hotter in the summer, colder in the winder, no wind ever, and last I heard piss poor prospects for DSL &| cable modems.
Currently I'm in Boston, which is better (although in Boston proper, we have few cheap high speed connections. It's beginning to change though. Suburbs are better for that)
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
It may be #1 on the list of most-connected cities by Yahoo's criteria, but overall its communication infrastructure is terrible! So far there are no cable modems available in San Francisco. DSL coverage is good, but you deal with Pacific Bell -- and as near as I can tell, the particular branch of Pacific Bell with the worst overall service out of their entire market.
I have not had an acceptable voice phone line in San Francisco in something like 3 years -- meaning, either it's multiplexed using a box called a "dammel", or it has persistent (but intermittent) interference. Either way, the quality of the lines is so poor that you can't count on a consistent modem connection from them.
Meanwhile Pacific Bell offers great (read: competition-squashing) rates on DSL, but with a catch -- you have to use your existing, poor-quality phone pair for it.
Not that you'd want to get a new phone line for your DSL connection from Pac Bell -- installation appointments FREQUENTLY fall behind due date, because when the service tech arrives you're told there are no facilities to give you a phone. (Typically they blame "all those people with their modems and fax machines and their Internet".)
And don't get me started on my experience with a Pacific Bell Frame Relay connection. You can't even count on them sending the right encoding over the wire from month to month.
OK, telecom companies-- Yahoo! says San Francisco is where you want to be! Everyone here wants "in" on the Internet! Now somebody come and save us from this drought of decent service!
--
PCM2
Breakfast served all day!
Houston at number 26? My apartment complex wires Ethernet right into the units. Show me another city that has that!
Several places in Austin have ethernet net connections available. The place my roommate used to live was setting their's up right before he bought his house. This was a year and a half ago.
Now if they would fix the pair gain problem in our neighborhood so we can replace our ISDN with DSL.
Well, (here in Austin) you can get 128k up / 384k down for $40/month from SWBell, and you can get ISP services from SWBell for $10/month. However, I've heard that the SWB service on the ISP is horrible, and that latency can get to 300-400ms, etc. Jump Point (jump.net) is supposed to be much better, for $30/month. I can't verify any of this firsthand, though.
Where'd you get the higher numbers? Are you looking at more bandwidth & static IPs?
Do you have any experience w/ SWBell as an ISP? I heard horror stories of 30Kbps...
As for you other point, there are plenty of major peering points in SF. China Basin has a really massive coloc facility. There are several others.
Take a walk in SOMA in zone bounded by market, first, townsend, and 3rd. Walk around in the streets and look at the spraypaint on the blacktop. Those little words that say "USA", "GC", "ATT", "PBI", "SPRINT", "MCI", "ABV", and many, many more are the names of major bandwidth providers. There is so much fiber buried under 2nd street that there isn't room for any more.
Internet in Albany, NY seems pretty damn expensive compared to even Utica or NYC.
1) Most dailup connections (not all 56k either) start at around $20 and the most populuar are about $25. This is much higher then other local areas. Connections are extermely on reliable, frequent disconnects and websites not loading is the norm (I've switch ISPs like 5 times and used other machines it seems to be a problem in general).
2) Cable Modems are both hard to get and are really expensive. Prices start slightly short of $45 a month on top of cable TV, only from Time Warner/RoadRunner. So if you don't have Time Warner, you don't get a cable modem, even people living a few miles from the city are screwed in that way.
3) ADSL is super expensive even for a cheap up 128/down 356 connection, starting at like $60-70, lacking features that other places throw in for free (like static ip). Only providor of this in the area is Bell Altantic, and again it doesn't reach far out of the city at all.
It's too bad the connections are so expensive and so unreliable.
I just read a thing about Omaha being one of the most wired place in the world. So much bandwidth you can fly a kite on the temporal distortion induced by the sheer amount of data delta-vee.
A hellish amount of fiber coming into town. Three companies competing to provide you with cable modem service. Plus ADSL just about everywhere as well.
Sounds like this study is just one of those "43% of all statistics are made up on the spot" stories.
I agree -- I don't know how accurate these results are. I'm in a small town of 30,000 people and we have cable modems for $30 a month through the utilities company. There's fibre optics running throughout our little town.
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Football Sports Contest - Win $500 for having an e
I can think of close to 20 complexes in Austin that have Ethernet access, not to mention all the dorm kids that have access also.
I can't wait till SDSL is offered in Austin, it's supposedly will have a better coverage area than the 40% adsl coverage that SWbell provides.
Does this bother anyone else? In order to read the article you had to click on 7 links and be exposed to 3 or 4 advertisiements per page. This seems to be a trend on the big news sites. For the folks on a 14.4 in Brazil and Indonesia this pretty much makes some sites inaccessible and adds useless junk to the total bandwidth load of the 'net.
Oh well, there's always Lynx.
Blacksburg, VA has had ethernetted apartment complexes for over six years. I'm not impressed.
Second to reply also from .br ...
Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
Hehehe, é duro competir com estudantes com um bocado de tempo livre e um T1 nas mãos ;-)
Information wants to be beer, or something like that.
woo! Portland placed one spot ahead of NYC. Let's hear it for my home town! WOO!!
I do live arround here, Palo Alto to be precise.
San Jose is 40 miles from San Francisco but it's all one continuous city. Did you check the population numbers? 1.5 Million for each. That means they included a lot of those little burgs.
(for those who don't know, SF and SJ only have populations if 600k and 700k respectively)
San Francisco and San Jose are part of the same metro area. Further, the really monsterous clusters are not within the city limits of either.
PAIX, MAE*West, Exodus, PB*NAP, Frontier,...
NONE of these are actually in San Francisco or San Jose. But they're closer to San Jose than San Francisco. San Francisco is, relatively speaking, not a high tech place. No major peering points, no major co-lo facilities. Limited DSL. No cable modems. I think they gerrymandered the Peninsula onto the San Francisco ledger just so they could put the cute cable car photo on the page.
I don't think the @vt.edu addresses are lifetime. My older brother's address expired 3-4 years after he graduated. Granted, he wasn't using it, so maybe they let you keep it if you actively use it.
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.freebsd.org
Quite a few places in Austin offer this, The Metropolitan comes to mind immediately.
Austin's also relatively cheap to run your own line in, too.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Houston at number 26? My apartment complex wires Ethernet right into the units. Show me another city that has that!
Praise the Force Field! Praise the Laser Project! Slackware Loon #19830573
Blacksburg, VA was the original super-freak and yet not on the list? I guess it wasn't fair competition. I've lived in Orlando and have friends there and they aren't nearly as connected as we are here in blackburg.
I can't wait til we get the OC12 here in the park. No one can compete with that speed!
According to the article, San Francisco has 13,000 hosts per every 1,000 individuals. Given 1.655 million people, that comes to 21.5 hosts...
That can't be right. I know there is a shitload of tech industry, but almost 20 million more hosts than people? Maybe they lumped MAE West in with them or something... or their methods are flawed.
The five most connected American cities add up nearly enough to match the whole of Brazil. Think about it.
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Boa tentativa, colega, mas você ficou em terceiro. :)
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I wouldn't say it's too small to be listed as a town. I wasn't expecting it to be under the city listing.
And about the domains, I'd be surprised to find out that college kids hadn't registered enough domains to put us on the map. Much moreso than other towns.
Regardless, since they don't even have Va Tech included in their 200 Most Wired Schools list, I don't give this report much credibility.
Blacksburg, VA is the home of Virginia Tech. We were a testbed for AT&T to see what would happen if a small town got connected. For example, the flower shop has a web page, as does the local cd store. I have a direct 10baseT ethernet connection to my ISP via the ethernet port in the wall of my apartment.
;)
Reader's Digest has done stories on us entitled, "The Most Wired Town In America". Oddly, we're not even mentioned on that page.
Check out the Blacksburg Electronic Village if you care
I think a lot of people expected this to be an article listing the 50 most connected cities in the US.
....
If you looked at the criteria, or *gasp* read much of the article, you saw it was based on real basic statistics such as surfing from home and/or work, domains per business, etc., NOT how fast do you surf, how big a pipe can your ISP lay to your front door for $XX, mobile network connections, PC's per capita,
I would like to see a survey on some of those criteria, personally.
In Seattle, TCI Cable provides cable modem service (via At Home). Unfortunately, it is not actually available in Seattle proper. It's only available in West Seattle and Mercer Island, two small parts of town. bummer..
The phone company offers DSL, but not in all areas. You must live within 1-2 miles of your neighborhood phone hub.
This demonstrates how the cable and phone companies really are monopolies. The offer poor service in a limited section of Seattle. I know so many people who want either cable modems or DSL.. and there is no company able to fill their desires! These monopolies are leaving money on the table.
Mr Government: let other companies swoop in and start some real competition!
cpeterso
I live in Seattle and fully disagree with your comments. TCI has just upgraded their network (at least in Ballard, i'm sure in many other places) so now I get about twice as many channels and am eligable for a cable modem.
I've had USWorst DSL for a few months and it works great. I get 640kbps up/270kbps down for $40 (soon to be $30) a month + $20 for my isp. Its true that you have to be ~15000 feet from the CO, but this is just a limitation of DSL and nothing bad about the phone company.
Covad also offers service in the Seattle area. They have many isps to choose from and a large coverage area. They can force USWorst to give you dry copper and offer iDSL (DSL over IDSN) if you are over 15000 feet away from the CO.
Basically it seems that anywhere in the city you should be able to get some sort of broadband connection for not much money.
So why is DSL so damned expensive? When I was living in Hawaii, GTE was talking ADSL at $80/month including phone, internet account, and modem rental. Here in Austin, it's $80/month for just the line and modem, and and extra $40/month for an internet account. Hawaii put out cable modems a year ago, Time-Warner has yet to do a wide distribution. Grr...
No wonder we have this shitty isdn and flaky ISP instead of frac T.
...
Shouldnt have left school. Although we do have cat5 100-T for our internal net which really is 10 times faster than the net at UC.
Or, move back to Frisco, get the juicy bandwidth and pay 10 times the rent
Ever say "No thanks, I have enough RAM"?
I used to live there and used to work for Koyote Internet (the isp they specifically mention) and while koyote has some great equipment and offers isdn and adsl at good rates, commerce itself has such a terrible phone system that you cannot get over a 28.8 connection and isdn isnt supported by the phone co. (koyote got around this by housing the server is a better place).
and TAMU-Commerce (i went there) has incredibly bad problems with it's lan and with it's user/modem ratio. they did start wiring the dorms for ethernet, but if you had to dial in, good luck. they actually instituted a 20 minute limit at one point. (after 20 mins they'd kick your connection).
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
is there a tech industry in hawaii? thats about only place id leave ess eff for.
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
See http://dls.jump.net
Just got 1.54/384k personal for $200 per mo.
You can get 384k/128k for $69 per mo (comes with a few dhcp addrs and 5gig per/mo).
Over and out,
Jim
TCI also won't add new cable channels to their 'regular' service, they want you to buy Digital Cable. There are only few small suburban cities (Edmonds, for example) with services that haven't yet been bought out by TCI. Viacom died a while ago, and now TCI's services are really lacking from slightly south of Seattle on up through the city.
In places where they *used* to receive service from Viacom, they have at least 25% more cable channels (than those that have been TCI longer, i.e. the city and some suburbs) at the same rate. If you want good cable, go live in a dorm at the UW: of course then you get *local* phone service to everywhere from Everett down to Tacoma, on the downside you have to deal with K20 and their networks.
TCI brags that they offer 'cable modems', but it's rare (as you've pointed out). I know that the cable company in Edmonds offers normal ISP services (at a discounted rate to cable customers), but I doubt any cable modem services.
You don't have a choice as to who your cable provider is (it's either TCI or by chance something like Edmonds), and in most cases you can only choose your long distance provider.
If you don't go to the UW, chances are your speed will only get up to 56k... unless you live close to the phone hub, then you're lucky.
When I move *back* to Seattle (3 years), I sure hope things have changed. Until then, I'll live in the middle of nowhere (Pullman) connected to a T1 through my apartment as an ISP, and work at the University using their T3s (though K20 has horribly routed service).
-nicole
Yeah, I thought it was pretty nifty that we made the list.
Shhh, I enjoy my 20 minute commute, and decent housing 100k that lets my wife stay home with our daughter. Let's not push Rochester until I can get my lakeside cottage.
Not long ago in Boardwatch magazine, there was a story about a small town in Western Kentucy where the city utility commission installed fiber optic controls for its substation.
Without realizing it, the city fathers had wired the entire town with 10-base-T. They eventually started an ISP. Instead of modems, they supplied everyone with ethernet cards. They also supplied cable TV service and dial tone.
Until more and more towns get wired, the Internet will not be ubiquitous. And POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) companies just don't have a real clue. They are too rate oriented to get a clue that digital is in and analog needs as much help as possible to die quickly.
Do you think cable companies and ISP would survive long if they charged by the minute?
I noticed a lot of the postings about Blackburg, Va., but that is old news. Most of these Internet surveys don't use good research about recent history ... because That's so 10 minutes ago.
Rehabilitated journalist and web builder No electrons were harmed during the creation of this mess
Yeah! It isn't fair to make the people that use the net pay for it. Lets tax the offliners, build a really fast net, and have FREE access!!! I can have my Quake and someone else can pay for it. We'd have to put tax breaks in for people who run Quake servers, though. To make it fair.
You think that's bad, I live in seattle (yes, number 3 on the list) and I can't get cable or adsl right now. I'm in a suburb but not bfe by any means.
http://www.freebsd.org
I hate some of you people ... Atlanta has Cable modem for 18 months, ppl with DSL .. man I live in Somerset MA, No cable, no ADSL no nothing, and with ISDN prices beiing ridiculous I start wondering if it's not time to move ...
34th? Not bad for a city that's supposedly falling apart
"Somebody exploded a letter-bomb today
...deserves special demerit points for still having virtually nobody offering DSL or cable modems. Millions of people in the few square miles covered by Manhattan alone, and you can't get services that are available in some godforsaken suburban mallrat nest elsewhere. It's enough to make me move to Dayton. Just kidding. Obviously.
I dunno why so many posters seem to be complaining about shoddy internet support from PacBell. Admittedly, it did take three weeks from the time I originally requested DSL installation until the outside contractor -- Prime Services Group -- actually arrived to do it. Oh, and that I had to wait on hold for three hours that same afternoon for PacBell to get the router to recognize my IP. However, it's hard to argue with the end result: $40/month and 180K/sec consistently. Anyone considering DSL from PacBell in the SF area shouldn't hesitate: it's well worth it.