[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.

[Matsta]

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.