Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

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I thought the same was true for the Bay Area, hence why I moved here. I was genuinely surprised to find Google Fiber isn't even available, let alone any mesh networks.

In all other aspects of technical expertise though it's blowing my previous city, Houston, away. Companies open to candidates based on technical expertise alone (rather than throwing non-B.S. degrees straight into the garbage), lots of great meetups, lots of fellow geeks doing exciting work.

Actually, another thing that surprised me was lack of hacker spaces - Houston seemed to have the same amount of them... one. The only major one I'm aware of here is Noisebridge, same for Houston which has TX/RX.

edit: oh, apparently SF has quite a few more than I realized. So does Houston, but not as many.

https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/San_Francisco https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Houston

Monkeybrains (https://www.monkeybrains.net/) operates a mesh network in SF. They're not community owned but they are very much a local business.

I wanted to like Monkeybrains but they were just too subpar for the competition in terms of speed, reliability and flexibility. I switched to sonic and get 1GBps fiber for barely $12/mo more than what I paid MB.

Dunno where you are in the Bay Area, but in SF I have Sonic which is synchronous gigabit for ~$40 a month.

It's not Google Fiber, but it's close.

For some reason they offering only 10Mbps in my building in downtown SF... compared to the 150 I get through Comcast. I hate their guts, but they do at least give me pretty darn fast internet.

10Mbps sounds like Sonic Fusion (AT&T DSL partnership) and not Sonic Fiber.

I live less than 10 minutes from the Google complex and google fiber isn't an option. It's really sad.

There's definitely some mesh networking stuff going on, e.g. https://peoplesopen.net with weekly meetings at https://omnicommons.org

There are a large-scale effort in SF many years ago... but it's a hard city to build in. You can read a bit of that history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Municipal_Wirele...

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