NIMBYism at its finest. Cupertino did not allow cell phone towers for a very long time. The only one was an ATT tower on the top of Infinite Loop, right on the Sunnyvale border.

The people who would call their provider about bad cell coverage in their house are the same people that would go to city hall and demand that no cell towers be built in the city.

It’s amusing seeing Cupertino city council transcripts about this because the people show up claiming 5G gives them cancer and the city council desperately tries to get them to use better excuses so they can approve denying it.

Makes a change from the city council members usual practice of denying Vallco permits and claiming Apple employees are hiring prostitutes and molesting high school students. (I did not make this up.)

Are these transcripts online?

Only informally as far as I know.

https://twitter.com/HousingValley/status/1125959134329708545

https://twitter.com/HousingValley/status/1154781703262498816

The ISPs have tried, but they get pushback from local residents whenever they try to install the necessary network boxes at intervals down the street. They had to go out of their way to hide cellular towers as streetlamps to get the 5G rollout to happen; I remember getting two or three notices for this (each from different telcos, so the one street corner has three streetlamps and two traffic lights on one corner).

I suspect if the droughts didn't make people get rid of their green grassy lawns homeowners would be more amenable to seeing green network boxes every few houses. It looks awful in the context of concrete sidewalks, though.

PROTIP: The boxes are an excuse. Building infrastructure would make more people want to move there, and claiming the boxes are ugly is something you can’t disagree with.

The parts of SV that haven't buried their power lines (not too pretty to begin with) have gotten significantly uglier since all of the new cable/fiber/DSL infrastructure has gone in. There are in many cases multiple of these things on loads of poles:

https://www.dslreports.com/forum/r31593060-Equip-What-is-thi...

The parts of SV that have buried their power lines, probably haven't gotten a whole lot of new cable/fiber/DSL than whatever was there when they buried it.

SV is the perfect place to not bury infrastructure. There's no weather to worry about, and mostly people aren't going to shoot down the fiber to try to claim scrap metals.

I live in one of the few cities in the Bay Area where everything is buried, and it's refreshing not to have stuff hanging all over the place and blocking the view. Now, granted, AT&T fiber is slow to come here, but it's hard to know if the fact that the infrastructure is buried is the main reason. They are in some areas of town but not others.

You can bury conduits, by the way, and not cables or fiber directly. This allows you to avoid digging again just to install fiber, for example. There are ways to do it right. And having the infrastructure on poles is not a panacea either. New providers are not necessarily allowed to use the poles. The weather might not be crazy, but the poles are already overloaded and a little windstorm will disrupt electricity, coax cable, or fiber. And of course, those overloaded poles are crazy ugly.

Both options have trade-offs.

When I used to work in the telecom industry, burying conduit or cable in the ground was anywhere from 3x (bury in some dirt on the side of a county highway) to 20x (directional drilling in a heavily populated city where there's utilities all over the place) the cost per foot compared to hanging it aerially from a labor standpoint.

However, as you correctly point out, there may be restrictions on what you can hang on the poles and where, and oftentimes you'll find poles where it turns out it never should have had the number of attachments it did, but guess who gets to foot a large part of that bill if they want on?

But even then, I've seen absurd lengths gone to in the name of not digging. On Martha's Vineyard, I believe they wound up using a super-special Self-Supporting fiber that could be hung in or near the Power area of a Pole. Yes, that requires a far more trained/well paid worker than normal aerial work. Also, in that region, NESC 250C/D comes into play which makes it even more of a PITA. But it still was far cheaper than putting cable in the ground.

I wonder whether Teraspan or other Vertical Directed Conduit would be a good fit for the bay area (Saw-cut a minimal depth in the street, just lay in a special zip-up conduit for fiber or twisted pair.) If the weather doesn't tend towards large temperature shifts it works well.

Speaking of which, a couple drawbacks worth noting for buried conduit; You have to go out and do your markings, or pay someone to do them for you when a dig request is made, and you have to be ready to handle the repair when someone inevitably forgets to call or the markings are done incorrectly.

Yes, but SV doesn't have alleyways to run the power lines through, so you have all of these ugly wires everywhere and you're not allowed to have big trees in the front yard, since they could interfere with the power lines. It's really ugly and looks like Baghdad after the war.

Here in Germany we bury everything. I don't even want to imagine how long it takes to rebuild all of that when some drunkard crashes his car into one of these poles or a lightning strike hits.

I grew up in the Florida Keys where the water table is very close to the surface so it's impossible to bury anything. When I was a young teenager, we would lose electricity all the time from tree branches brushing up against the power lines. They finally solved the problem by putting in power lines on concrete poles that are a few stories up! No more squirrels and tree branches disputing power!

A lot less time than when an earthquake snaps an underground cable.

you'd be surprised but it takes quite an impact to disrupt a telephone pole. most crashes leave the pole standing (see examples online), and even when it does topple the wires seem to hold, and the utility company comes in with a fresh pole. the lightning strike factor does suck if you live very very close to the strike and nothing is surge protected. That happened to my house once and fried my xbox and router.

I've seen it happen personally, except it was the support cable to a pole with a transformer. Cable anchor came out of the dirt, pole fell over, sparks everywhere, transformer fluid all over the street, hazmat cleanup crew, big mess.

I could be wrong, but I'd worry about earthquakes severing the lines.

This map[0] shows the major faults, but each one of those is a lot of small minor faults that all could snap things and shift. One small fault right by where I grew up is about three blocks long. Last I checked had one earthquake to its name: a magnitude 5.0 aftershock of Loma Prieta

[0] https://usgs.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id...

Here in Japan, there's full of pole except a few tourist spot, recovery after car accident, earthquake or heavy rain is done immediately.

god forbid infra has some infra on it

No, it hasn't made anything uglier - you don't really notice the infrastructure unless you're specifically trying to look for something to get annoyed by.

Maybe you have gotten blind to it? When I first landed in Palo Alto (coming from Europe), I couldn't believe my eyes: 3rd world infrastructure with wires flying everywhere! I most definitely noticed and notice. It's symptomatic of some of the ill that plague Sillicon Valley.

Overhead power / telecom lines (and cable car power lines) have always been a thing in America. Adding fiber and additional infrastructure hasn't really made it uglier. It would be different if we had buried power lines to start with.

SV residents really do complain about everything, huh? Try living in an east coast city, our aesthetic is a mess.

Solution: Paint the boxes grey.

Other options:

1) Sprout the streetlamp from the box, add a car charging port.

2) Hire an artist to paint the box with artwork (property owner gets to pick from option set). Consider it to be city owned art installations.

Or even some cheap creeping hedges like bouganvillea

Solution 2: Lift the box up, attach it to the head of the street lamp.

servicing at the top of the street lamp would me so much easier, right?

Naw man, woodgrain stickers.

Palo Alto has its own municipal fiber program: https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/gov/depts/utl/business/progra...

Wonder if someone should take them up on it.

It’s only for commercial use. As much as I’d love to be able to drop a node in to peer at paix for my house ...

I know people with Palo Alto Fiber running to their house. They were hosting websites out of their garage years ago (I think archive.org for a while.), but today it's just residential, so it's very much possible.

is the cellular deadspot on 101 just north of redwood city still there?

Are you thinking about the area just around the SFO landing zone?

I thought that was less of a "won't" and more of a "can't" between the lack of taller building towers and the radio interference zone for the airport means the directional antennas skip a slice there.

This will probably get fixed if 5G becomes a proper thing and there's a lot of micro-cells along the "bay area's biggest parking lot".