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 partnership? Something?
The last I read about what the Mayor is planning on doing is try to make the fiber initiative into a public utility[1].
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.
If you're in the CD, Cap Hill, Belltown, most of Beacon Hill, the ID, or Rainier Valley you have Wave Broadband which is, from what I've been told, pretty good these days. Most of Cap Hill and Beacon Hill even have a choice of Wave or Comcast because the franchise areas overlap.
( The only good thing about living in Belltown, heavily outweighed by having to live in Belltown when the bars close.)
Is Wave alright? I have Comcast and I'm actually pleased with the service (not the CS, but the actual product of bandwidth). Wave has bandwidth caps but I don't generally exceed 300 GB so it should be fine (and I can get 1 TB if I want), but the price is way lower.
If anyone could chime in that'd be great. The reviews of Wave on Yelp and other sites are awful, but then again, they are terrible for Comcast too.
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 neighborhood for under $300k.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
In the 2010 census, Chicago has 11 community areas above 20k/sqm, with 708k people in about 29 sqm (average density = 25k/sqm). Throw in West Town (18k/sqm) and the Loop (19k/sqm), and its 818k people in 35 sqm (average density = 23k/sqm). That's almost a San Francisco worth of dense neighborhoods both in population and area. And its not like SF is uniformly that dense. Parts remind me of the suburbs where my parents live in VA. Huge yards, etc.
I don't disagree that San Francisco is somewhat more dense as a whole, but I still contend that the density angle is overweighted. I think city planning plays a huge role, not just in limiting densities (given the geography of the city, density should be more like Manhattan, not like Chicago) and also making less dense areas harder to access. There are huge tracts of residential neighborhoods in Chicago with back yards and bungalows, but they're often pretty close to an 'El' station or a METRA station. That takes a lot of pressure off housing prices downtown. Meanwhile, tons of land on the Peninsula less than 10 miles from downtown have no practical public transit besides one BART line. The McSuburbs of DC have better rail access, and that's sad.
> 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't even notice.
Eh. Houston also has uncontrolled sprawl and major pollution issues from letting chemical companies have free reign. I'm quite impressed with Chicago myself. The business climate is a lot more stifling, but for example it has never imposed rent controls so housing is a lot more affordable than in comparable cities. Its famous for being liberal, but is a lot more pragmatic than say San Francisco. And in many parts of the city, there are two FTTC providers (ATT Uverse and RCN). I remember 70 megabit was like $55-65. Atlanta is quite good too--I was glad to see it as a Google Fiber city.
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 on telephone poles.
* "low bandwidth." I think someone was miffed that YouTube would take time to buffer.
"Radiation" should be better taught and understood I think. A local wind farm got shut down in my home town because someone convinced some townies they give off radiation and will give everyone cancer. There's a big difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radaition - A microwave (cell phone etc) can boil your blood with enough power but it will never cause a chemical change to DNA.
DNA mutates spontaneously from background radiation and mutagens present in the cytoplasm (oxygen is even one!) and etc. This isn't normally a problem because the rate at which this happens is balanced by protein repair kinetics, however, if you are boiling the blood denaturing these proteins isn't an unreasonable expectation in non-thermophiles... Furthermore, if you're boiling blood, DNA can uncoil and become susceptible to other problems.
The question is what power is required affect this balanced system. Apparently over time mutations occur which cannot be repaired and sometimes after that cancer occurs ordinarily. It is easy to tell when this happens to 100% of organisms you're studying after doing X and waiting less than a year's time, but is considerably harder to answer when you're trying to see if there is a lethal effect over 60 years in 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000 or 1 in a million. This is an open and challenging problem.
I don't claim microwaves of some power won't cause cancer, but I also won't claim oxygen can't cause less cancer. In the microwave case there isn't enough evidence to expect it in lower power situations, but to some tolerance there is always a possibility.
The problem with a lot of folks is the way in which they perceive risk. Risk management should be taught. SF should worry a lot more about an earthquake than cancer from wifi.
Science literacy in general is woefully inadequate. You can get amazingly far in life without knowing what "radiation" actually is, or why airplanes leave trails behind them sometimes, but it leaves you open to being extremely easily fooled.
"Frey tested microwave radiation on frogs and other lab animals, targeting the eyes, the heart, and the brain, and in each case he found troubling results. In one study, he triggered heart arrhythmias. Then, using the right modulations of the frequency, he even stopped frog hearts with microwaves—stopped the hearts dead.
"Frey observed two factors in how microwaves at low power could affect living systems. First, there was the carrier wave: a frequency of 1,900 megahertz, for example, the same frequency of many cell phones today. Then there was the data placed on the carrier wave—in the case of cell phones, this would be the sounds, words, and pictures that travel along it. When you add information to a carrier wave, it embeds a second signal—a second frequency—within the carrier wave. This is known as modulation. A carrier wave can support any number of modulations, even those that match the extra-low frequencies at which the brain operates (between eight and twenty hertz). It was modulation, Frey discovered, that induced the widest variety of biological effects."
Well that's food for thought! Seems it might be a bit hasty to just say "well it's non-ionizing radiation, so one is ignorant to fear it"
Or as put by Joe Bageant:
"The Information Racketeers: It is the job of our combined institutions to manage cultural information so as to deny the harmful aspects of the rackets they protect through legislation and promote through institutional research. That's why research shows that cell phone microwaves cause long-term memory loss in rats, but do not harm people. Evidently, we are of different, more bullet-proof mammalian material."
> Seems it might be a bit hasty to just say "well it's non-ionizing radiation, so one is ignorant to fear it"
That would be nice if anyone was saying that. But we're not. Instead, we're saying that people fear it out of ignorance, which is considerably different.
Do you have a link to Frey's study? I couldn't dig that particular one up.
Well, if I know the typical populace, which includes people who have conditions, or know loved ones with conditions, which make arrhythmia life-threatening, they would not regard such effects lightly.
But, sure, the GQ author may be guilty of using a mis-leading characterization of the induction of irregular heart patterns as the full "stopping" of heart patterns. ("Hey it's true it 'stopped' for a little," plausibly says the misleader.) Kind of like industry just may be guilty of mis-leading us in the opposite direction.
Oh, and thanks for not trying to make me substantiate the Joe Bageant quote. He's more of a dead, angry, neo-communist Hunter Thompson who values rhetorical effect above all, and will play loose with facts. I just like his rhetoric.
But back to the bottom line:
"The data as a whole clearly indicate that the heart responds to EM energy, particularly if it is pulsed and the pulses impinge at the right time in the cardiac cycle... [but] are not sufficient to draw conclusions about mediators.... [but, again,] the neural system is responsive to the energy."
Anyway, in my long experience, people let their preferred conclusions guide them persistently (if sub-consciously) to interpret perceptions, observations, and "facts" accordingly. The conclusive ends justify the means of getting there. When people want to persistently deny something, they can, easily. With that in mind, I just say "I exhort you draw your own conclusions -- you probably were going to do just that anyway."
Profitable as this conversation has been, I think I'll exit stage-left now.
This is a good example of the difference between "fear due to ignorance" and "fear can only come from ignorance". Perhaps there are reasons to think that heart arrhythmia is a potential effect of microwaves. Certainly there's an obvious and plausible mechanism, i.e. microwaves induce electric currents, the heart is sensitive to electric current, and the two could very well interfere.
However, this is the first I've heard of it. Which is not to discount it, but rather to point out that people fear microwaves for completely different reasons. I've never seen anyone say "it'll interfere with my heartbeat!" No, they think that they'll get brain cancer or something that makes little sense, and for which there is no real evidence.
Regarding Joe Bageant, I don't think that quote really contained any facts, so there isn't much to substantiate. Anyway, I'd rather learn about irradiating frogs than argue, so thank you for the link to the paper on that.
Edit: one big fat exception to not hearing about this is, of course, the common warning that people with pacemakers should stay away from microwaves. Which illustrates this in the opposite direction: while there's debate about how realistic the danger is, nobody thinks it's a crackpot idea, because it's fairly well founded.
I agree! At the time, I thought of running the numbers to compare them to, say, radio and TV transmissions towers, or microwave ovens, but I had thought it was a done deal, with a few details to work out.
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?
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.
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.
Indeed. It baffles me when anyone tries to uphold San Francisco as a model of progressive good governance. SF succeeds in spite of its government, not because of it. Basically it is fortunate to have great weather and an abundance of wealthy educated people who can absorb the insanely high cost of living and tax structure and still have enough left over to pay their way past the lackluster public services they get for all that tax money.
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.
I like to point out "Pension officials handed out about $1 billion in bonuses from the city’s two pension funds to retirees and active city workers from 1985 to 2008" but there's a lot of other stuff in there.
Detroit had some trouble baked into the cards back in the 1950's, when they were a geographically big city with corresponding fixed costs that would have trouble dealing with any decline in population, but it didn't have to be anywhere near as bad as it was.
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 tunnel back. Or switch to an he.net tunnel.
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...
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.
> 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?"
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 fast, reliable, and inexpensive ($35/mo).
This Monkeybrains outfit also tried to crowdfund $325 million for a satellite last year (http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/monkeybrains-satellite). They fell $324.989484 million short, though maybe that's just because crowdfunding wasn't as mainstream a year ago. That said, SF residents probably wouldn't tolerate a satellite in their air-space... i mean space-space?
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 lines can even handle that much.
Speaking of which, I noticed there's not many Data centers in SF which probably because there isn't much fibre around. My Digital Ocean box in SF is really quick however, even less hops to New Zealand than it is from LA which is weird since the Southern cross cable lands closer to LA.
Among the reasons there aren't many DCs in SF are the cost of real estate, and the seismic risks. There is 365 Main, and a second one going into warehouses south of Potrero Hill.
Others are on the Peninsula and San Jose. There are also several in the Central Valley, which is more seismically stable, though flooding can be a concern.
Since provisioning is on a building basis, there may be individual unit wiring required as well -- the antenna goes on the roof, you need a router and Cat-6 to your unit, so there's a wiring run required and some testing.
Reliability and Monkey Brains is not something I'd put in the same sentence. It's a pretty regular occurrence for it to go down at our office, even after moving to a new space, several streets down.
A couple of years ago, Monkeybrains talked about using microtrenching to spread a fiber network across San Francisco. I guess it's stalled, but I occasionally look for updates.
From what little I know: 10 Gbps is more commonly associated with business service. For residential, 100 Mbps is more typical. It's also symmetric (you see it up and down).
I'm reporting on 1) what their site claims (10 Mbps residential, 10 Gbps elsewhere), and what actual experiences are (they're delivering more than they promise).
Given that most DSL/Cable options are still a small fraction of that, it's a considerable improvement.
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.
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.
The second to last paragraph makes an excellent point. One of the reasons you see governments in eastern Europe making it a point to help deploy fiber is they see it as a way to attract business. American cities don't have the same sense of needing to compete since they're on top to begin with.
I wonder how much of the problem in San Francisco is Wi-Fi congestion rather than the wired service.
When I am in SF the number of SSID's I see boggles the mind and with people stacked up in small apartments, plus Comcast offering the public Hotspots, even the 5GHz band is overloaded, and it's amazing 2.4 works at all.
As long as we're talking about things only the lucky get, like fiber in Kansas, some buildings in San Francisco get Webpass - 100 or 200 Mbit symmetric residential service for $50/month.
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.
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 partnership? Something?
The last I read about what the Mayor is planning on doing is try to make the fiber initiative into a public utility[1].
1. http://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/1xtsjb/why_i_oppose...