San Francisco fiber
Someone emailed me this afternoon, saying “To get web access in a way that supports your 'don't support the telephone monopolies' campaign, where do I go? Whom to tell my friends to switch to? (I've had it with my Verizon dsl — too slow for my kids videos on YouTube), but aren't the cable companies just as problematic?”
Well, there really isn't anywhere to go — although Verizon is not the same as AT&T, and Verizon FiOS might be a good solution for my email correspondent if it exists in his neighborhood.
There's interest today in a feasibility study [warning, enormous PDF] for city-wide municipal fiber in San Francisco. It's expensive ($560 million) but bold. Oren Sreebny says it's fascinating, and I agree.
But it's not clear that fiber is necessarily neutral — indeed, this article suggests cities think fiber networks would have to be prioritized in order to pay off.
I share my email friend's despair at speeds here; from my school connection I can't use VoIP or watch streaming videos of hearings and arguments. Maybe we'll all be moving to San Francisco.