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. "

Comments

You think Pac*Bell is bad? Well, lemme tell ya...

[Anonymous Coward]

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)

Boo, San Francisco!

[PCM2]

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