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 DMenschaIt's Not Fixed, But We Have A Workaround
join:2001-07-19
<-nowhere-> | Palo Alto is OLD news I installed and repaired DSL for pacbell in the Palo Alto area for almost 2 years, The Fiber ring in PA is old news, except for the fact the buried it, and THEN went looking around for someone to connect to it. The big number is a "buy in" ala a cooperative the hook up is the last 100 feet thing and then the monthly is the cost of service.
There had been so few takers to the idea, that cable and DSL were the only game in town. The cable system was a cooperative venture (old and infirm btw)which was recently sold to ATT broadband.
As for the difference between PA and EPA, EPA is still a rough place, but it has made big strides in the last 5 years. I was sort of proud that SBC extended DSL to EPA before they ran it to Atherton (top 10 in income per capita in the US).
In case anyone had missed it, people tend to vote with their pocket books, which is why cable and DSL have done so well in Palo Alto. It's also why, when I moved out to the boondocks, i decided to not go with a satellite DSL connection with a $700 installation and $90 a month servcie to get half the speed I had in Menlo Park (right next door to PA)
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 g0nepostalI Am The One Her Mom Warned Her About
join:2001-03-23
Concord, CA
 ·magicjack.com
 ·Astound Broadband
 ·DSL EXTREME
| My two centavos Interesting how you say that East Palo Alto has made so many great strides. I drive by the place on Highway 101 every once in a while and see all the new stores that have opened up. Presumably the Home Depot and the Bed, Bath, and Beyond employ some of East Palo Alto's residents, but with the way the retail economy has gone down the tubes, that kind of "economic turnaround" is problematic at best. Even the rich types that live in Palo Alto and frequent those stores can't spend all the time.
Not that I mind, those folks on the other side of the University Avenue overpass need all the help they can get.
Now, about Palo Alto's fiber. $1,200 to set up is nothing to homeowners who for some crazy reason don't mind ponying up six or seven figures on a postage-stamp size piece of land with a nice house on it. Then $45-100 a month for massive bandwidth. I'd snap it up in a heartbeat if I were a Palo Alto moneyed yuppie.
Question is though, what would someone DO with all that capacity? Even the most hardcore video streams are currently encoded at 500Kpbs. Morpheus is great to get video and music with, but the quality is very hit or miss. And unless you're going to be running a server of some kind, there really isn't a need for 10 or 100Mbps of raw bandwidth, of which you'd probably get 85-90 Mbps after the Layer 1-4 overhead (I assume since it's fiber it is either FDDI or ATM).
If the city can make it work, more power to them. It would be nice to have a municipality (albeit, a very rich one, but that's how it always is) show Pacific Hell and AT&T Narrowband up.
Meantime, my poor butt will stay in Concord and keep using ATTBI. 
gp
[text was edited by author 2002-02-22 00:29:27] | |
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