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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

AT&T couldn't even roll out U-Verse in San Francisco: http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/att-ordered-stop-u-verse-... , and it's among the hardest cities in the U.S. to build any physical infracture: http://www.citylab.com/housing/2013/10/san-francisco-exodus/... . As demand for housing the bay area rises supply remains constant, leading to dramatic price increases.

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.

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Sonic is starting to roll out their gigabit fiber system in the Sunset area of San Francisco. (https://forums.sonic.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1085&start=170) SF has a new law restricting the placement of equipment cabinets at ground level. (http://sfdpw.org/index.aspx?page=1692) Here's the site for protesting against equipment cabinets in SF. (http://sfbeautiful.org/portfolio/protest-boxes/) Sonic has to work with that.

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.

That's surprising. I thought the FCC banned those types of deals: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/05/federal-court-uph...

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.

They did. I, however, also lived in one of those buildings in SOMA for a few years (after '09).

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 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:

http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/san-francisco-seeks-t...

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