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Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

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Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#61

Post by a3n »

raldi wrote: post #54
a3n wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, th…

> Google's very business model is analyzing your bits and selling what that reveals about you. Do you really think that? What do you think would happen if you called up Google's sales team and said, "Hi, I'd like to buy your analysis of Mike Schiraldi's bits. How much will that cost me?"

Personalized ads.

People are a little too literal sometimes.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#62

Post by rayiner »

vidarh wrote: post #50
rayiner wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

You have to keep in mind that city limits are rather arbitrary, and San Francisco is unusual in drawing them very tightly, excluding SFO and excluding low-density commercial areas along the bay. Meanwhile, Chicago's boundaries include both O'Hare and Midway, and stretch south through industrial areas all the way to Indiana. But the the cheap land in Pullman doesn't affect the price of land in the Loop any more than the cheap land in San Bruno affects the price of land in SOMA, city limits not withstanding.[1] Those properties aren't fungible from the perspective of potential buyers.

The part of Chicago north of 95th street (the southern boundary of the 'El' system) and outside the airports has 2.5 million people (93% the population) at a density of ~16,500 per square mile, comparable to San Francisco. Yes, it's somewhat arbitrary to exclude part of the city in calculating density, but no less arbitrary than where San Francisco's southern boundary is drawn, ten miles short of its airport.

[1] This isn't to say that those areas "aren't part of Chicago" culturally and in other ways, just that the availability of land in those areas shouldn't have much impact on housing prices in the rest of the city.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#63

Post by jof »

As one of the volunteers operating the existing Market St. WiFi and the housing project WiFi, I can say that this is definitely being discussed and evaluated, but I don't have a lot of hope for the Department of Technology making anything happen.

They have deeply-rooted relationships with large telcos and utilities that have granted them good deals on easements to lay their existing fiber and copper paths. If the city started offering competing services for money, it would throw those relationships in jeopardy.

It's really too bad, as a lot of the dark fiber resources are already in place to build a decent backbone that could support radial paths out different neighborhoods. However, there's very little technical clue (if you're a competent network engineer in the Bay Area, why would you work for a city? ick.) and political capital/gumption towards making this happen.

The layer 0 - 7 stuff is easy. It's layer 8 and above (money, politics, humans) that make this hard to accomplish.

If you're an SF resident, call or write your supervisor. Let your opinion be heard and demand proper infrastructure!

Fiber is becoming the new roads; how you get your product to market. Municipalities need to step up and get building, because the big utilities and ISPs sure as hell aren't.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#64

Post by jseliger »

dkulchenko wrote: post #13
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seattle isn't too bad off. It has CondoInternet (the thing I miss the most since moving to the Bay Area): http://www.condointernet.net/

You mean that service that's only available in a few very dense high-rises around the city? Doesn't really help the vast majority of people living in the Seattle area. Still holding out hope for Google Fiber, or, really, anyone but Comcast.

Doesn't really help the vast majority of people living in the Seattle area. Still holding out hope for Google Fiber, or, really, anyone but Comcast.

About half of Seattle is still zoned for single-family housing; the economics of attempting to wire single-family house are not good.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#65

Post by bdcravens »

diafygi wrote: post #58
tga_d wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be wrong, I interpreted the obesity and intelligent design comments as reflections of the culture. Unless you never leave your house, living in a place that promotes sedative lifestyles and intellectual crutches seems... draining.

The big city culture in Texas is actually quite progressive. Houston was the first major city to elect an openly gay mayor. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annise_Parker

Don't forget the startup darling Austin. Lifelong Texan here, and I live in Houston. I have a cousin who has lived in Austin for a long time - 30+ years. She's conservative, and country - she describes Austin as the capital of Texas where you can almost see Texas.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#66

Post by the_watcher »

pronoiac wrote: post #59

Oh man! I knew the answer to this before I read the article. After I heard about contentious community meetings about Google Wifi, I went myself, taping them for posterity.[1] The community seemed generally receptive. I was sad when it fell through; in case of an earthquake, I think a wifi mesh would be much more robust than fiber. The Google wifi FAQs / complaints I remember: * radiation concerns. * extra hardware o…

Wait, low bandwidth? Of all the complaints about Google Fiber I've heard (none of which are compelling at all, especially when the alternative is the status quo that literally no consumer enjoys), YouTube speed has never come up. Isn't the big perk of fiber instant video? Or am I misinformed?

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#67

Post by the_watcher »

The anti-fiber arguments are all so crazy to me. They literally only benefit those making money on the status quo, which is a small number of ISPs. I cannot imagine walking up to 1000 people and asking them what they would put up with to improve their satisfaction with their ISPs and not getting answers like "Literally anything." It seems like this is one of those things that nearly everyone would agree on.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#68

Post by rtkwe »

the_watcher wrote: post #66
pronoiac wrote: post #59

Oh man! I knew the answer to this before I read the article. After I heard about contentious community meetings about Google Wifi, I went myself, taping them for posterity.[1] The community seemed generally receptive. I was sad when it fell through; in case of an earthquake, I think a wifi mesh would be much more robust than fiber. The Google wifi FAQs / complaints I remember: * radiation concerns. * extra hardware o…

Wait, low bandwidth? Of all the complaints about Google Fiber I've heard (none of which are compelling at all, especially when the alternative is the status quo that literally no consumer enjoys), YouTube speed has never come up. Isn't the big perk of fiber instant video? Or am I misinformed?

The person you're responding to was talking about the failed Google Wifi in San Francisco not Google Fiber.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#69

Post by tptacek »

rayiner wrote: post #62
vidarh wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

You have to keep in mind that city limits are rather arbitrary, and San Francisco is unusual in drawing them very tightly, excluding SFO and excluding low-density commercial areas along the bay. Meanwhile, Chicago's boundaries include both O'Hare and Midway, and stretch south through industrial areas all the way to Indiana. But the the cheap land in Pullman doesn't affect the price of land in the Loop any more than t…

Chicago is somewhat less dense than San Francisco even in a neighborhood-by-neighborhood comparison.

If you go through stats per neighborhood and cut off at 20k/sqm, you'll see that San Francisco has a lot of neighborhoods over that cutoff. It's true that Chicago's dense neighborhoods are much bigger than San Francisco's; for instance, The Mission is an SF standout at 1.4sqm, while Chicago has many dense neighborhoods at 2-4sqm (Lakeview, West Town, Logan Square).

But if you add up all the little SF neighborhoods, I suspect you'll get a bigger number of dense square miles in SF. SF also has some absurdly dense neighborhoods (Chinatown, Downtown); they're tiny, but north of 50k/sqm.

It's pretty obvious that Chicago has an inherent advantage in sheer land area; huge tracts of Chicago are residential neighborhoods of bungalows on lots with back yards, which is a kind of home you can get in Chicago very inexpensively, but is priced out of reach for most people in SF. These areas relieve a lot of density pressure in other parts of the city; if you live in a dense neighborhood in Chicago, it's because you want to.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#70

Post by robryk »

SirensOfTitan wrote: post #29
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).

Neither the abundance of obesity nor intelligent design proponents affects me or my quality of life in any way. So the arguments against Houston collapse to: you have to drive everywhere and weather (essentially). And taking the MUNI isn't much of an upgrade over having a car in an affordable place.

Intelligent design proponents might affect education of children, which might affect you if you have children (now or in some future).
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