Hacker News Reader

Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Hell I work at a farm on the coast near Silicon Valley in San Gregorio (designing a farming robot) and Starlink is the only decent internet option we’ve ever had.

View on HN

What speeds do you get?

Edit: That's weird. San Gregorio is like 15-20 miles from Cupertino. Here in Jackson County, AL, Farmers Telecom Coop has gigabit or half-gigabit fiber to much of the county.

Bay Area’s fiber and broadband network is a joke. That it’s the tech capital of the world makes it so much worse. Things are improving - I got fiber in 2020 - and speeds are trending upwards with some local completion. AT&T and Comcast are finally getting a bit better with speed. Coverage still sucks. Number of available options still suck. Not to mention weird collusions between Comcast and apt management companies and other anti-competitive behaviour. Then there’s PG&E using various excuses to block using their poles to expand the network.

It’s terrible.

Yep, completely terrible. My only high-speed choice in a well-developed neighborhood in San Francisco is 1000/35 from Comcast (not like I ever see that 1000, though). AT&T's fiber trunk is a block away from me, but they want $20k+ to run that fiber to my home.

Apparently Comcast has been experimenting/offering higher upload speeds for a while now, but it's still not available where I am.

As a non resident, perhaps it's a good thing. Advanced people eat dogfood with slow connection.

There is something to be said for this. Didn't Marissa Mayer refuse to get broadband at home for a long time to make sure the tech she was managing was usable on dialup?

No, you don't understand. The offices have gigabit connections…

The future is here, it's just (very) unevenly distributed. There's an IPX in downtown San Francisco so if you have the money for it, you can get 10-gig business class Internet. But if you're principled and don't want to get Comcast, and are in a shorter building so you can't get monkey brains, the local WISP, you get DSL, even in the heart of San Francisco so a friend is on 3Mbit down/128kbps up. Watching streaming at her place is a roll of the dice, so I torrent it at my place and walk it over on a USB drive. She pays for Paramount+ which is where the show we're watching is on, so monetarily I'm okay with myself.

There is a slim sliver of coast that has farms, then mountains, then the valley.

The mountains are sparsely populated and heavily forested. Driving up and out of the valley you enter into a different world complete with legends of murder cults.

Its a car and motorbike mecca. Drive down the coast from San Francisco. Climb up the mountain at San Gregorio or further south, stop at Alice’s to look at the superbikes and super cars, and drive back down into the valley.

> Its a car and motorbike mecca.

I'll say! In high school and college I had a 1991 Mitsubishi 3000GT VR4 and I grew up on Highway 9 in Ben Lomond. I went to college at Santa Clara University and continued dating someone who lived off Highway 9 in Boulder Creek. I got to rip it over HWY 9 a few times a week! Such a lovely drive. Tho I lost a dear friend to a car accident on that road and I slowed down a lot since then.

Just remember (this isn’t directed specifically at you), because apparently this needs reinforcing: public roads are not a racetrack! If you want to drive recklessly go to a track day. If you can afford a fast car and tires you can afford a track day. Public roads have wildlife, and the public on them.

I've lived in lots of locations around the Bay Area over the last 20 years and I didn't have fiber until a year ago when I moved to Oakland.

According to three speed tests with the command line speedtest application I am getting these speeds with Starlink:

Download: 59.79, 88.52, 104.76 Mbit/s

Upload: 6.45, 11.42, 15.79 Mbit/s

> Farmers Telecom Coop has gigabit or half-gigabit fiber to much of the county.

You are benefiting from the rural broadband subsidies being applied well. A coworker of mine has lived in various rural Oregon towns through his career and regularly gets faster, more reliable, and cheaper broadband than I do in Portland. Not only that, but it's run by municipalities or coops and so you can often get to know the operators personally!

I think something that's often overlooked is when the Starlinks or TMobiles of the world win these subsidies: rural communities lose the potential to provide decent local tech jobs and offer customer service those of us in cities can't dream of.

If we're going to subsidize things, let's subsidize publicly owned infrastructure!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com