San Francisco's City-Wide Fiber Internet Plan is Delayed, Future in Doubt (arstechnica.com) 109
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."
Wait (Score:5, Funny)
...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.
Re: Wait (Score:2, Insightful)
Or they're succumbing to the bribes and blandishments of the entrenched players without consideration of the values of the public.
Or they're proceeding with the situation with due caution and consideration to get the most value.
Hard to say without more examination.
Practically speaking, it is a good investment for their community, so let's see if we can find a good way to get it done.
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Retirees will outnumber workers in 2030 and 2/3 of the federal budget will go to social programs. The remaining workers will have to pay more in taxes to support the retired, poor and rich. Fast Internet will be the least of our problems.
Well, you could always encourage population growth through immigration.
Unfortunately, the ignorant baby boomers will still be around and continue to vote against any politician who encourages immigration, or medicare taxes, or keeping social security solvent.
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We do encourage legal immigration of skilled and educated, just like the rest of the world.
People still vote for the USA with their feet, almost certainly, your countrymen prefer America to your nation. I understand you're in denial about this...work on that.
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Or... Congress could repay the trillions they have "borrowed" from the Social Security Trust Fund...
If any private business raided their pension plan the way that Congress has raided SS, the executives of that business would be in jail.
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Re:yurope checking in (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re: yurope checking in (Score:2)
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There actually are large parts of the Alps where there is basically no population. Ironically, there has been a lot of effort to make sure that there is basic cell service there, so that hikers who get lost (days from anything) can still be found in emergencies (which cost more than the cell infrastructure).
However, the U.S. (and even more so Canada) does still make Europe look very densely populated. A prime example is the state of Wyoming. It has about the same land area as the United Kingdom (253sq. km.
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Australia (Score:2)
Americans complain about population density, leadership or telecommunications companies... ha Australians have beer...
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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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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 abi
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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 t
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The thing about areas of low population density is that most people *are somewhere else*.
We're not (yet) talking about whether it's economically feasible to connect the person who is the absolute furthest from anyone else (and may have chosen to be there deliberately), but rather the people at 90th percentile or even the 99th percentile.
Also, I don't see why we should need political leadership to encourage companies to make money. What they need is corporate leadership that are actual capitalists.
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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.
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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.
The 50th in what? Not population density, the US is 191st in the world with 33 people/km^2. I'll won't repeat the notation, but the EU would - if it were a country - have a density of 116 so on average it's true. Wiring up the UK (271) is like Conneticut (286), Germany (232) is like Maryland (238), Italy (201) is like Delaware (187), France (124) is like Florida (145), Spain (92) is like California (97), Greece (82) is like Virginia (81). Then there's a pretty big gap in western Europe, we don't have anythi
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Why is SanFranciso or any other city wanting to tax their citizens to fund the fiber upgrades and other communication infrastructure upgrades? California is home to the wealthiest technology companies in the world. Tax them. Google could fund fiber upgrades for the entire state of California with their petty cash. Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, MS, Comcast, and every other billion dollar technology company should be required by law to fund the technological infrastructure they depend on to rake in their
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Given we're talking about San Francisco what really matters is the ubanisation rate, something which puts USA on par with the average of Europe.
What's your excuse now?
It's like those idiot politicians in Australia saying "wows me Australia is such a big country" in response to someone 2km out of the centre of a city with a population of 2.2million people not having access to anything faster than ADSL2 with a significant cable loss.
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Liar. You should check the immigration requirements.
Your countrymen are voting with their feet. Bet there are more here than Americans living in your nation.
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You are going to run a fiber network 300 miles into a desert to serve 100 people? Because there are plenty of examples like that.
I don't think you grasp how big the country is, because you are from Western Europe, which is just a bit bigger than the state of Texas, depending on where you draw the line at "western". You can drive on a single interstate highway (I-10) for 890 or so miles/1400 Km without leaving the state of Texas, and about 800 miles/1300 Km on Interstate 5 all within the stat
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Hilarious. Nearly half the country doesn't even pay any income tax. Large percentages have their utilities (like power and water) subsidized or entirely paid for by other people. Your notion of "everybody paying" isn't even on the same planet as the reality of the situation.
And that rural grocery store? A slow, laggy satellite internet service is just find for the very low bandwidth needed to run a few transactions at the register. That's already available, and will be even cheaper as some newer low-orb
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Hilarious. Nearly half the country doesn't even pay any income tax. Large percentages have their utilities (like power and water) subsidized or entirely paid for by other people. Your notion of "everybody paying" isn't even on the same planet as the reality of the situation.
yup, spot on. The half of the nation that pays the income tax is even smaller in terms of absolute dollars because the tech titan robber barons hold nearly all the wealth in tax advantaged offshore accounts, so the burden falls on the ever shrinking middle class bums
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Comcast is accessible to people who are willing and able to pay for the service,
No. It isn't. Cable coverage is garbage. I've lived in a little neighborhood where one street has it and a nearly-parallel street you can literally hit with a rock and which has just as many homes doesn't, and on a loop road where both ends of the loop have coverage but the middle doesn't.
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Internet will allow all communities to get educated and then have more people from different demographics around the city attend university.
The university system will then take on the same demographics of the educated and university ready city population.
Internet will make all the city smart so everyone can pass university entrance exams.
No internet was the one thing that was holding back entire g
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There are no housed poors left in SF. Hunter's Point was the last of it. It's in the middle of being dozed and redeveloped into yuppie housing.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. The poors use the net to watch videos that make them dumber. Tell them: "It's all someone else's fault!"
One problem with the net, it lets fuckwits find each other, reinforce their stupidity via circle jerk (e.g. Antifa).
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SF? Techno capital?
No. Just no. That's SanJose...Perhaps Berlin, if your talking about the _shitty_ music.
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The real reason (Score:2)
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Pretty sure it's because the workers were scared of getting dysentery or hepatitis from all the human waste in the streets.
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I wish you were kidding. I haven't actually seen any sewage yet here in San Francisco, but I've been up here all week this week, and the smell reminds me of the few times I went to Ciudad Juarez as a kid (across the border from El Paso), where you'd see cracks in the sidewalk with sewage bubbling up through them. Every time I come up here from the South Bay, I'm reminded of why I try to avoid coming up here.
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Wish I was kidding to. SoCal has some serious issues they need to deal with and instead of doing it, people are looking in the opposite direction.
NIMBY (Score:2)
Lasers? Not in MY one square meter back yard!
Sans Cisco (Score:2)
ATT (Score:2)
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Sonic is already installing fiber in many neighborhoods in San Francisco. I've been enjoying symmetrical gigabit internet in my sleepy little beach neighborhood for two years now.
One way or another there will be fiber everywhere one day, it's just a matter of if it's 100% commercial or if the city can get it to everyone that wants it in a more 'public utility' type of way.
and again ... (Score:2)
Monopolists win !
All your public is belong to private (Score:1)
Can't have competition in a Mercantalist society.
Capitalism requires full informed competition, and protection of the Public Good.
Why use wired at all? (Score:3)
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?