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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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- 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)
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!
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.
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.
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