These are political problems and they have political solutions. It's not "sad" that Silicon Valley can't get faster Internet access; it's the nature of the way California's politics as a whole have developed. The number of veto players (http://www.amazon.com/Launching-Innovation-Renaissance-Bring...) and NIMBYs ensure the problems California is currently experiencing.
This is more of a problem in medium density residential areas. In high density areas, big buildings often lease basement space to utilities. In low density areas, there's lots of room for infrastructure. It's the suburban areas where people obsess on lawn care where this is a problem.
Interesting. I have U-verse in Soma. Apparently my apartment building has a "deal" with AT&T so that no other TV/Internet providers can work there. And if you're curious, the U-verse Internet plans are awful.
They did. So now you are free to call Comast or whoever and receive a $250,000 invoice to run wire to and into your 500+ unit building with all the regulation, construction, union politics, city permits, bribes, etc it takes to get there.
These contracts aren't these evil things as much as they are there to recoup investment on the work AT&T put into that building. The neat part is that due to the cost of competitors walking in, the contracts don't even need to exist anymore. Its going to be a hard sell to get Comcast in there when AT&T already has the home field advantage.
I don't know the details, but apparently the deal had something to do with the wiring of the building when it was constructed in 2008. There have been resident meeting discussing the issue, and apparently the only way to support other ISPs is to pay for new separate wiring in the building, which I'm sure the building management will not do (given the housing demand situation in SF).
Pretty good chance we live in the same building. I've called our building rep a couple of times to try and pressure them into turning up the speeds, but no luck so far.
Yeah, at least for my building (which I'm heading up the internet committee for), the BPON that was installed by AT&T can do max 600 Mbps for about 30 customers on a loop, so that's 20 Mbps each. They should be able to burst higher than that when it's not saturated, but they haven't bothered to turn it on.
If you're in our building, you're in luck, though: the HOA is amenable to laying CAT5, so if things go well, we may have Webpass by the end of 2015.
I think it's less an issue of politics and more an issue of corporate inaction. SF has a tremendous amount of dark fiber already and the city is pushing hard for a proposal called 'Dig Once' that will make it a requirement to lay fiber on any utility/sewer/roadwork more than a few blocks:
Agreed. Whenever there's a comparison of our pathetic speeds with those in Korea/Japan, people claim "the US is a huge country", etc. However, San Francisco's density (6600/km^2) is higher than that of Tokyo (6000/km^2); why doesn't SF have FTTH?
Comparisons to Tokyo are not necessarily instructive, since Tōkyō-to includes a vast swathe of essentially uninhabited mountains. Population density in the central 23 wards, which is what people usually mean when they say "Tokyo", is 14,485/km2.
Where is the majority of Japanese internet traffic going? Where is the majority of San Fransiscan internet traffic going?
There's more than just population density to take into account. It makes a big difference when you don't need nearly as much long haul backbone capacity because almost all of the destinations for the traffic are close to the subscribers.
No, not really. The US has had a massive amount of backhaul fiber, huge amounts of it stayed dark for years. That in turn dropped transit prices to almost nothing. Bandwidth at data centers and other places near transit hubs is very cheap. The U.S. problem is a last mile problem.
In my experience (just shopping around for high-bandwidth hosting, including looking at regional pricing of CDNs), backhaul is way cheaper in the US than anywhere else, including Europe and Asia.
It is sad that with all the would-be entrepreneurs flocking to Silicon Valley and looking for startup ideas, they all shy away from 'hard' problems like disrupting the current ISP model.
There are many types of hard problems. Some are hard because the data just isn't there, and someone needs to connect the dots.
The ISP model is hard because it just requires fucking shit tons of money to solve, and there's no getting around the tragedy of the commons problem. With telecom infrastructure, you can either use wired (expensive and with a heavily fragmented regulatory environment) or wireless (expensive with extremely limited spectrum - see the $12+ billion spectrum auction happening now).
Disruption is well and good, but it requires new technology that delivers similar services for a fraction of the cost. Until someone figures out a way to bring the economics of delivering content to end users down by a factor of several hundred, we're stuck with the current ISP situation.
Even technologies like this face many of the same challenges as traditional wired or wireless solutions: operating at any sort of scale is tremendously expensive. I wouldn't call this "disruptive" as much as a local workaround to an ineffective local regulatory system.
I think that smart people in both business and technology are attracted to hard problems that are intellectually challenging. Dealing with the corruption and the entrenched bureaucracy of local, state, and federal governments doesn't qualify as an "interesting" problem for these types of people. It's why you don't see many scientists in elected office.
I used to feel the same way, except that this really boxes "intellectually challenging" into a fascinatingly narrow set of problems.
The meme that dealing with problems of physics and mathematics is somehow harder or more noble than dealing with problems of people should probably be considered harmful.
I don't think my definition is narrow or restrictive at all. You're forgetting all the other fields of human interest, like the humanities, healthcare, transportation, engineering, the arts, etc. That's a pretty wide swath and only a small subset of the "interesting" problems in those fields are dependent on getting your hands dirty with politics.
I don't think you can claim that it's "solving" the problem if you can throw money at it. That's the business-world equivalent of "brute forcing"... and what we've learned from technology is that you're required to throw ever-larger amounts of resources at the problem until it eventually overwhelms any real-world capacity to "solve" it.
The problem is that ISPs don't need disruption- local politics does. As hard as starting a new bank or writing a new OS is, who wants to sign up for disrupting every local and state government in the country and incur the cost of laying all that fiber? This is why only Google is doing it. They have the money to burn and the clout to get municipalities to cooperate through all or nothing deals.
It's not too surprising. Look at the crap companies like Uber and AirBnb get, even on HN, for disrupting government rackets. I would shy away from that as well, even though there's obviously big opportunities there.
But I agree with your premise, that hard problems with large rewards require a different sort of VC pitch and may take longer to see a payoff. And are completely worth pursuing!
MonkeyBrains is currently offering Gigabit wireless in SF[1] on Indiegogo, $2500 setup fees and $30 monthly. estimated delivery date is early February next year.
Monkeybrains has been a WISP at least four years. [0]
They also sell service in a Carrier Hotel. I read an article a long while back where they mentioned that:
1) The $250 installation fee, plus the $35/month monthly fee more than covers the costs for each residential customer.
2) The revenue from the stuff in the Hotel would also cover the cost for the residential customers, if the residential customers stopped paying their bills or something.
Ha, that is an old service map! We have close to 5000 antennas up now. Also, Business WISP is the new revenue hog for us... Colocation is stable, but not growing. Residential WISP is also growing (and has outstripped colocation). - Rudy
Yikes! I should have re-read my comment. My prose doesn't make it at all clear that I was pointing to a four year old map. (Sorry about that! :( ) An up-to-date coverage map can be found under the "Coverage Map" section here [0].
It's neat to hear how your new revenue sources have changed over the years. Hope you guys keep growing the business and -one day- push Comcast and ATT out of The City!
MonkeyBrains is not quite what we call "WiFi"; it's in the 80GHz spectrum. (I thought it was 60GHz, which is becoming a WiFi spectrum, but their page says 80. So I don't fully understand what they're up to.)
Beamforming and directional antennas works really quite interestingly on the higher frequencies. I think their stuff could work. It's not obviously doomed to failure, like most 2.4GHz-based WiFi setups are, in my opinion anyway :)
What we are up to is building a high speed 24Ghz/60GHz/80GHz point to point meshed network. MonkeyBrains will continue to pull fiber to our endpoints and continue with more affordable 5GHz antennas for residential users.
Check out Siklu, SAF, AthenaWave, AirFiber, etc to see some of the antennas that talk outside of (normally) consumer grade frequencies.
And yes, we do have an FCC filing in place to deploy 80GHz gear.
I'm not sure who starts it, but they're very clearly (and openly) rolling it out based on not only logical locations, but willingness of cities. Some places are just hard to get into, like Seattle[0].
From an email I got from the Google Fiber team last May:
"We’ve been impressed by how enthusiastic the City of Mountain View has been as we’ve worked with them over the past few months — so let’s take a moment to thank them for everything they’ve done so far."
The City is also working on the physical infrastructure Google needs:
I can't speak for other cities in the area, but for Mountain View, the belief that Google Fiber expansion is being held up by government inaction or unwillingness, is unwarranted.
(The one exception is San Francisco, which is a mess whenever anyone wants to build anything anywhere in the City, but SF's an outlier in that regard)
I'm in SoMa right now. No Comcast / cable, AT&T DSL maxes out at 6Mb / 0.8Mb. My Clear hotspot outperforms DSL. The city is so backwards, I don't understand why people clamber to live here.
Not really. Spread the benefits - Silicon Valley already has the advantage of having a huge amount of investment money swilling around. Give Austin and Kansas better internet connections to see if they can attract larger startup industries of their own.
I doubt you'll ever really see Google Fiber much outside the neighborhoods in downtown Austin (and maybe some up north). This fits the engagement model they've used in other cities where they wire up the dense / wealthy areas and never get around to the rest of the city. Which is also what Verizon, AT&T and Comcast do. The neighborhoods in Austin getting Google Fiber already have U-Verse and TimeWarner Cable.
"Sign-ups are beginning today in South and Southeast Austin. We’re starting with these neighborhoods, and will be opening new areas on an on-going basis."
Also, I'm pretty sure that TWC is available pretty much everywhere in Austin.
TWC is, but U-Verse isn't. Most places in Austin (specifically apartment buildings) your only option is TWC (or Grande, if you're in a Grande area).
If you look at other cities (Kansas City) only a fraction of the city (the denser, wealthy area) actually has the service 2 years later. Other large areas have been carved out entirely. Construction is "ongoing" in a number of areas but service remains unavailable. Half of the city hasn't even opened sign-ups yet - nearly 4 years after the initial announcement. A large part of KC that does have service was because Google purchased an existing fiber to the home network that already served that area.
By and large, Google Fiber is a big promise that's proving pretty tough to deliver quickly. Just google for the myriad of delays the project is facing in the cities it's "launching" in. By the time they're done launching in most of these cities by the end of the decade, the cable/telco companies will have gigabit service available in most of their markets.
"Free" access to right-of-way and waived fees for permits are a small price to pay.
Better yet, cities should eliminate them entirely to encourage even more competition. All those rules do is create barriers to entry that prop up the existing players.
These are political problems and they have political solutions. It's not "sad" that Silicon Valley can't get faster Internet access; it's the nature of the way California's politics as a whole have developed. The number of veto players (http://www.amazon.com/Launching-Innovation-Renaissance-Bring...) and NIMBYs ensure the problems California is currently experiencing.