Huge swathes of San Francisco have access to residential Fiber. Sonic started building it out several years ago in the western half of the city, beginning in the Sunset District, which forced AT&T to abandon their failed FTTN strategy and start offering direct fiber service as well.

It's slowly coming. I've enjoyed Sonic fiber in the residential Richmond District for 3 or so years already. Sonic is still building out fiber in other neighborhoods (e.g. Marina and Cow Hollow are now coming online, I think), as is AT&T, but there are still considerable gaps where utility poles are oversubscribed. A single unusable pole can prevent reaching several city blocks simply because the replacement cost is so high it makes those remaining blocks unviable economically. In other neighborhoods with buried utilities, the city refuses to provide any assistance: no micro-trenching permitted, and no leaning on existing license holders to lease any pre-existing underground infrastructure.

Even the least dense areas of San Francisco are more dense than elsewhere in the Bay Area. Sonic provides residential fiber in many Bay Area cities, but rollouts are far slower. Regulatory costs (including review time) and less favorable RoI (less density) means it's taking much longer to build, even when theoretically profitable. Sonic doesn't have as much capital, and those with capital (e.g. AT&T) aren't very motivated to build new infrastructure, especially when they're already the incumbent. About two years ago I chatted with an AT&T linesman putting up fiber on the utility poles outside my house and he flat-out said he wouldn't be there if Sonic hadn't forced AT&T's hand.

EDIT: Sonic is further along than I thought: "Santa Rosa-based provider Sonic has deployed fiber to more than one-third of homes in San Francisco over the past five years, Sonic CEO and co-founder Dane Jasper tells SF Weekly." https://www.sfweekly.com/news/can-san-francisco-finally-clos...

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I have a friend in SF who has been given the runaround by Sonic. He believes that Sonic's ticketing system is somehow integrated with AT&T and that AT&T is closing his install ticket after they finish an install at a different residence.

The City of SF bid on the utility infrastructure in the city that was formerly owned by PG&E. Hopefully this will allow the city to streamline installation of pole-based fiber installs, but I'm not sure how much PG&E ownership was causing problems before the auction.

Sonic has resold AT&T DSL and, more recently, FTTN services for many years. I think they also recently began reselling AT&T's fiber service in places where Sonic can't build out their own network for technical or economic reasons. See https://forums.sonic.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=6798 (User dane is the Sonic CEO and he's very active in the forums.) It's not Sonic Fiber if it's not $49.99 for 1Gbps. Their resold AT&T service has pricing closer to AT&Ts.

If that 1/3 figure includes resold AT&T service, that would definitely be less impressive.

I'm not too optimistic about any city-planned communications infrastructure. The "progressives" hold onto a pipe dream of a free, city-wide public network[1], and they seem to balk at partnering with private companies for this purpose. Fortunately the "progressives" usually fall [just] short of majority control of the city council, and haven't won the mayorship in over 20 years, but they still manage to throw monkey wrenches into sensible plans.

[1] There was (still is?) a master plan to bury fiber with the city's water & sewer network, but I think the city is half done with a city-wide, multi-billion dollar water & sewer refurbishment and replacement project without having buried any fiber at all. I'm sure most people in the city, including myself, would love to see a public fiber built-out, but it's just not financially viable. The city has too much on its plate, and the situation won't ever change. The self-styled "progressive" faction is all talk, and stonewall everything else with feigned outrage, much like national Republicans.

I wonder if a good rule would be if a new entrant offers FTTP to an area, an incumbent cant do the same for 15 years.

This way there is a huge incentive for startups as the incumbent cant just follow them and do them out of business while ignoring other areas. At the same time it puts pressure on the imcumbant to roll out FTTP to reduce startups doing roll-out.

Probably also consider something similar with pricing.

I'm in San Jose and am very fortunate to have AT&T Fiber aerials constructed in my backyard a few months after I moved here from Santa Clara. (I feel your pain.) AT&T now has quite a few customers in my neighborhood because they are faster and cheaper than Xfinity.

Unfortunately, I believe this install was one of the last under the DIRECTV merger deal which required AT&T to deploy residential fiber.

The spools and amount of manual work to install the fiber lines was really something to see over the course of 3 months and I can really see the value of an automated robotic fiber deployment. The legacy cables are really huge.

I don't entirely grok how the Bay can be the IT capital of the world and also have such poor fiber penetration. I've experienced commercial fiber first-hand in downtown SF, but that was never an option for residential use. Only Comcast, Spectrum and a couple of smaller mom-and-pop ISPs mostly focusing on WLAN.

I recently got a quote to hook up to CenturyLink business fiber for a church in a suburb of Minneapolis (on an industrial road). I believe the distance was around 700 feet to their termination point. With a 5 year contract, it was going to be at least $700/month. They told me the cost was due to getting all the permits needed and then doing the actual run of fiber (digging). Oh, and it would take 3 months to get done. They also told me I could bring that cost down if I recruited other businesses between the church and the termination point.

Better price then I would’ve expected for such a run and contract term.

Yeah - that’s actually not a bad deal given the high costs to do the build. CenturyLink charges well over $500/mo for a 1Gbps Fiber+ connection without doing any buildout.

Why does the Bay have such bad housing and transit? Fiber deployment is, first and foremost, a municipal issue. Municipal governments have almost total control over the process. Some cities make it easier to build it than others: https://broadbandnow.com/research/fiber-friendly-cities. I’ve got two fiber lines to my house a few miles outside Annapolis. Verizon, which covers the vast majority of the population of Maryland, plus Comcast. I had fiber at both of my precious addresses (DC and Baltimore). My parents had fiber since 2005 back in their Virginia house, and now in their Maryland house. (They don’t even have public sewer and water.)

Whatever the big picture national issues are, there is no reason the Bay Area should be lagging even compared to the rest of the US. Rich suburbs of tightly packed single family homes are prime fiber territory. Those are the very first places Verizon wired up with FiOS 15 years ago.

Isn’t most Virginia governance at the county level?

I live in NY, and each town or city gets to negotiate franchise agreements that always favor the telcos. You have to wield a big stick with these companies, who divide and conquer.

In my cities case, in exchange for some bullshit (public access tv and filming equipment for the high school) gave Spectrum an exclusive contract for TV.

So Verizon brought FIOS to every town around us, and we’re stuck in the internet ghetto.

I was talking to a coworker earlier today (who is starting a community WISP), and it seems most of the effort/time for an ISP is about real estate negotiations, not technology.

The bay is the IT capital but it’s probably a close contender for the NIMBY capital as well. Most of the South Bay is a low density sprawling suburbia where nearly all of the homeowners are focused 100% on property value and block any development that’s not more commercial (which brings in more jobs boosting housing).

Have you seen the infrastructure of the Bay Area? It's ancient. I've had more power outages in 18 months of living here than I did in 20 years of living in San Diego(in a 70's tract. SD also has lots of old infrastructure.).

The bay area needs to be torn down and rebuilt, but the NIMBYs won't even let adequate housing be built so the chances of that happening are about zero.

Funny that you say that — I have a neighbor complaining about preserving old telephone poles, because she feels the new ones are too high, and the color stands out.

Not a Bay Area resident, but I like to buy houses in older residential areas because I like big yards and roomy interiors. Since the advent of WiFi it has been my experience that they seem to be about 10 years behind new neighborhoods. My understanding is that it's vastly easier to build new infrastructure to large developments than to bring it to older, less-dense areas.

Because cable has improved enough that no consumers really needs fiber to their homes. You can get 300-1000 Mbps cable internet now in most places and it is far more than anyone really needs. Upload bandwidth is the main limitation of cable internet but that's not a major factor for most people.

If cable internet was still stuck at 25 Mbps or similar, the pressure for fiber internet would be a lot stronger.

But cable internet got good.

The backwards and scandalous aspect of modern American internet is that the ISPs managed to roll out 1 TB data caps without being blocked by lawmakers.

This is spot on - A large majority of residential internet customers would see no difference between a 50/5 plan and a 300/30 plan. I done a significant amount of consulting in the ISP would and every time we would do mass speed increases there would be virtually no increase in aggregate traffic levels. As long as people could go to a speed test and get their subscribed speed they were happy. An HD Netflix stream takes the same amount of bandwidth no matter what your max speed is.

Most consumers aren't willing to pay the monthly cost that ISPs would be need to charge to make overbuilding fiber economically feasible. DSL providers overbuild with fiber because they can't compete with cable and the rising cost of maintenance of a copper plant. Some cable providers will do new builds with FTTH or overbuild when upgrading the existing plant is cost prohibitive. But overbuilding a working coax plant almost never makes since. Spending millions of dollars to offer higher speeds at the same price just doesn't make business sense.

Maybe it's a regional thing, but the comcast cable internet my parents have is absolute shit. They just upgraded from 300 to 600 and that did basically nothing (still get about 25 mbps most of the time and it occasionally now goes to 50 mbps in speed tests) and our video conferencing calls stutter all the god damn time which literally never happened back in my apartment that had fiber.

cable here (vancouver canada) is still limited to ~25 up. Not sure if that's a tech limitation or an ISP choice thou.

If we could somehow force the property market to list Maximum Internet connection speed as mandatory, thereby creating an incentive for property owner to get Fibre installed.

Ars had a good article on community fiber build outs in the UK

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/the-r...

Sad to say but that's probably what communities in the US will have to do as well.

I live in the Bay Area suburbs and Sonic brought fiber to my home in 2 weeks with no installation charge or minimum contract and charges $40/month for it. I guess their penetration varies widely.

How about the 2gbit comcast fiber option? From what ive seen install costs are not high. It does cost about $200/month although

I live in Glen Park and I've had gigabit fibre for two years now. I don't know which ISP you spoke to but I suspect Sonic has thousands of customers in the Bay Area.

Certainly I know of at least one other guy with it myself and I cannot fathom that we're a third of all the guys with fibre in the Bay.

uhhh, Sonic is all over the richmond district and the mission. It's 60$ per month for gigabit. I've had it for years now.

Fiber doesn't necessarily mean High Speed. You seem to be conflating the two.

There are plenty of areas where cable meets or exceeds the fiber bandwidth that can be sold to the home.

Anecdata, Consolidated Communications will happily sell you fiber into your business - including an MRV to convert the fiber into copper inside your property. But... the bandwidth options start out with a 10/5 Mbps line.