Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco • Hacker News Board

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#91

Post by Matsta » Thu, Feb 27, 2014, 10:05 PM UTC

jof wrote: post #63

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 cit…

A similar sort of thing happened in New Zealand, ISP's ruled and weren't doing much to upgrade internet speeds. Then the government stepped in and said you gotta get your crap together then forced Telecom (which is now split into multiple companies, Chorus and Visiontek I believe) to build a nationwide fibre network. I believe it's meant to be finished by the end of next year, but it's actually pretty cool how most people who live centrally can get 100mbps (and now 200mbps) fibre from virtually any ISP that offers it.

People say the NZ government is pretty useless (which is still is depending on what topic/area) but I was surprised they actually got it together and got something right for once.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#92

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Feb 28, 2014, 8:46 AM UTC

dctoedt wrote: post #87

dredmorbius wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's because the weather's so gawdawful hot in Houston nobody dares venture outside for 8 months of the year. In San Francisco, you can live and sleep in the streets. Any many do!

> That's because the weather's so gawdawful hot in Houston nobody dares venture outside for 8 months of the year. Houstonian here. I've long maintained that we have better weather than SFBA (where I was stationed, off and on, for five years) or even San Diego (where I also spent a good deal of time). That's because when Houston has a beautiful day like we're having today, we appreciate it, whereas Californians wouldn…

On that basis, there's any number of storm-swept islands or tropical hell-holes which would be even better.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#93

Post by a3n » Sat, Mar 01, 2014, 7:09 PM UTC

izzydata wrote: post #74

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…

I'd sell my soul to google for fiber.

The problem with selling your soul is that you eventually miss it.

Re: Google won’t bring Fiber to San Francisco

#94

Post by bifrost » Thu, Mar 06, 2014, 9:55 AM UTC

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…

NN as proposed is actually bad/horribad for all operators, so I wouldn't be surprised if Dane was against it. Its not even all that good for consumers for a variety of reasons but its not something that fits well into a HN comment.

I also can't say that I've ever had Sonic be unconcerned with deep issues. FWIW, my tunnel is fine although if yours is busted it seems like that'd be something you would have been notified about or was done as a mistake.

To caveat, I've known the Sonic guys forever, like since "I was installing modems for one of San Francisco's first ISP in 1995" forever. I've never had a bad experience with them, and I've dealt with a lot of operators...