Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

pando.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 94 posts

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#41

Post by rayiner »

vidarh wrote: post #32
Meekro wrote: post #20

Contrast SF's dysfunction with Houston, one of the conservatives' model cities. Houston's streets are clean, public parks seem to have the quality one would associate with private ones, there's no graffiti or homeless folks in the streets. The business-friendly environment means that there is constant development and affordable housing prices. You can actually own a huge and beautiful house in a gorgeous and safe nei…

> The business-friendly environment means that there is constant development and affordable housing prices. The far more likely explanation is the almost five times higher population density in San Francisco (6800/km^2 vs 1391/km^2) due to the natural limitations on expanding due to its position on a peninsula - San Francisco is constrained to a much smaller land area than Houston.

SF isn't dense enough to play that card. The core part of Chicago has 2m people living in an area as dense on average as SF. But comparably dense neighborhoods in Chicago are much cheaper. Part of that is lower demand, but it can't be ignored that Chicago builds thousands of new apartment units per year, while SF builds maybe one or two hundred.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#42

Post by rwmj »

walshemj wrote: post #15
wyclif wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SF is the NIMBY capital of America for a reason. Loads of people who can't seem to understand why housing prices keep rising while they simultaneously ensure that no new housing can be built.

The FIOS (FTC) role out was objected to in certain posh parts of London because the residents objected to "the ugly green cabinets" Apparently the second assistant nanny complained that it was hard to maneuver the giant buggy/prams around :-) BT said ok no FTC for you then and went off and did other less precious areas

Tell me about it! In our village, FTTC has been delayed at least 2 years because one NIMBY bstard didn't want his view of the field in front of his house to be obscured by a larger cabinet. He's already got a cab in front of his house, just didn't want one perhaps 8 inches taller. That's one man holding back progress for thousands.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#43

Post by ansimionescu »

Matsta wrote: post #30
dredmorbius wrote: post #16

Friends of mine in SF tell me of an existing alternative, though availability varies by neighborhood and building: Monkeybrains is a wireless ISP which offers service from 1 Mbps to 10 Gbps, with 100+ Mbps not being unheard of. Coverage is mostly in the eastern / hipster side of the City: North Beach, downtown, the Haight, Noe, to Bayview. So Sunsetters and Richmondites are SOL. Reports I've heard are that service is…

From the looks of it they are just using Ubquiti wireless gear. http://www.ubnt.com/airmax#nanobridgem That is the ariel in the picture on their site. Crazy how they charge you $350 though, they cost $79 to buy individually (they are probably getting a wholesale discount). I'm guessing for business accounts they are using the Airfiber which is pretty cool and fast. They can't do 10gbps though, don't think their fibre…

Not nitpicking, just honestly confused: do you mean aerial?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#44

Post by dotBen »

Decade wrote: post #25
bifrost wrote: post #17

I was born in SF and have lived here most of my adult life. Our city government needs to be thrown away, it really is that bad. That said, Google should never be allowed to run a public network for the city. Its like handing the NSA the keys to the kingdom. Get the city to greenlight a company that actually cares about this stuff ( http://www.sonic.net ) and I'll be much happier.

I'm not entirely pleased with sonic.net. They have a nice business plan, but they don't care about the deep issues. For example, Dane is against Net Neutrality, and he doesn't think IPv6 is terribly important. The beta IPv6 service is manually configured, and some time around the weekend they changed my IP address via DHCP, breaking my IPv6 tunnel. I'm going to have to hunt down my sonic.net login so I can get my tun…

Do you have a link to qualify the statement Dane is anti NN? Knowing him and his business I find that hard to believe.

On IPv6 their implementation might be beta but most ISPs don't offer anything and don't care.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#45

Post by a3n »

hueving wrote: post #36
bifrost wrote: post #17

I was born in SF and have lived here most of my adult life. Our city government needs to be thrown away, it really is that bad. That said, Google should never be allowed to run a public network for the city. Its like handing the NSA the keys to the kingdom. Get the city to greenlight a company that actually cares about this stuff ( http://www.sonic.net ) and I'll be much happier.

What gives sonic more power against wiretapping with gag orders?

He said it's like handing NSA the keys.

Google's very business model is analyzing your bits and selling what that reveals about you. They do what the NSA does.

Sonic at the moment (as far as I know) only makes money from moving your bits, and doesn't much care what's in them. Any telecom in the future will probably not be able to resist the profit in selling you to advertisers, but at the moment they mostly don't, the occasional DNS advertisement notwithstanding.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#46

Post by [deleted] »

Bahamut wrote: post #26
stbtrax wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And you have to drive everywhere. Also you would live in a state where people give intelligent design serious consideration, and the weather is unbearable during the summer, and a lack of outdoor activities and an abundance of obesity(houston is #1 in the list of fattest cities).

I thought Philly had that distinction about weight?

[deleted]

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#47

Post by rayiner »

JoshGlazebrook wrote: post #6

If you want to look at even more dysfunction turn your attention to pondering why lovely Seattle was overlooked and was even cut off of Google's map (okay that was most likely just scaling). Gigabit Squared seems like it was destined to fail the second it was announced, and where are they now? We have all that fiber already in place and no one to use it. Could Seattle not sell it to Google? Some of kind of partnershi…

Is Seattle dysfunctional? I had the impression that it was pretty sane. No state income tax, etc.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#48

Post by rayiner »

Shivetya wrote: post #35
george88b wrote: post #3

I don't live in Sf but its city government sure sounds dysfunctional, more so than most cities at least.

Oh I can name a few more dysfunctional cities, Detroit comes to mind. Is a city dysfunctional because it fails one segment of its population? Lets face it, high speed internet is not going to appeal or be used by many in any city. Yes there are those who will, but we tend to vastly over estimate the impact the net has on those who are poverty line or lower.

Is Detroit more dysfunctional adjusted for economic condition? Because even a well-run city would be in a bad situation if the local economy declined, for unrelated structural reasons, the way it has in Detroit.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#49

Post by crusso »

rayiner wrote: post #48
Shivetya wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I can name a few more dysfunctional cities, Detroit comes to mind. Is a city dysfunctional because it fails one segment of its population? Lets face it, high speed internet is not going to appeal or be used by many in any city. Yes there are those who will, but we tend to vastly over estimate the impact the net has on those who are poverty line or lower.

Is Detroit more dysfunctional adjusted for economic condition? Because even a well-run city would be in a bad situation if the local economy declined, for unrelated structural reasons, the way it has in Detroit.

Cart, Horse

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#50

Post by vidarh »

rayiner wrote: post #41
vidarh wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The business-friendly environment means that there is constant development and affordable housing prices. The far more likely explanation is the almost five times higher population density in San Francisco (6800/km^2 vs 1391/km^2) due to the natural limitations on expanding due to its position on a peninsula - San Francisco is constrained to a much smaller land area than Houston.

SF isn't dense enough to play that card. The core part of Chicago has 2m people living in an area as dense on average as SF. But comparably dense neighborhoods in Chicago are much cheaper. Part of that is lower demand, but it can't be ignored that Chicago builds thousands of new apartment units per year, while SF builds maybe one or two hundred.

The density of Chicago is about 4500/km^2 for about 2.7m people. Substantially lower than SF, which will act as a substantial barrier to increasing the cost of land even in areas that do have high densities.

You also can't directly compare neighbourhoods by density alone - many ways of increasing density brings lower prices per unit. Consider high density housing projects with tiny apartments. Others bring higher prices - think luxury apartment buildings.

The point in any case was not that SF bureaucracy does not influence prices, but that you can't just point to differences in planning rules and lay the entire difference in house prices on that with no further justification when comparing two such different places.

Post reply on HN