If only my part of SF had fiber service. #1 city for tech, but I still have to rely on Comcast.

Sounds weird to read that from Western Europe where even the most rural places have fiber!

I understand that the USA is big, but no fiber in SF?

we have fiber in half of SF via Sonic - where there are overhead wires. The other half of SF has its utilities underground making economics more difficult.

https://bestneighborhood.org/fiber-tv-and-internet-san-franc... has a detailed map, by provider, if you wanna dig into the gory details, but there is fiber, just not everywhere.

Not where I am

American government doesn't work for its own people. This is by design.

What?

> where even the most rural places have fiber!

No need for the hyperbole. I know for a fact that you don't get fiber in the remote countryside of France

SF is mostly served by AT&T, who abandoned any pretense of upgrading their decrepit copper 20 years ago, and Comcast, whose motto is “whatcha gonna do, go get DSL?”

AT&T has put fiber out in little patches, but only in deals with a guaranteed immediate ROI, so it would mean brand new buildings, where they know everyone will sign up, or deals like my old apartment, where they got their service included in the HOA fee, so 100% adoption rate guaranteed! AT&T loves not competing for business.

Sure, others have been able to painstakingly roll out fiber in some places, but it costs millions of dollars to string fiber on each street and to get it to buildings.

Lived in an older neighborhood in Georgia a couple years back. A new neighborhood across the street had it (AT&T), but we didn't.

Caught an AT&T tech in the field one day, and he claimed that if 8 (or 10—memory's a little fuzzy) people in the neighborhood requested it, they'd bring it in.

I never did test it, but thought it interesting that they'd do it for that low a number. Of course, it may have been because it was already in the area.

Still, may be worth the ask for those who don't already have it.

In the US, it’s not about money or demand. The more entrenched cities (especially in California, for some historic reasons/legislation) tend to have a much more difficult time getting fiber installed. It all comes down to bureaucracy and NIMBYism.

It's just SF, there's fiber-to-the-pole or better in most of the LA area, even if the only last-foot service is DSL or cable

Sure, but it took much longer for it to roll out in LA than it should have, and even then (as you pointed out) the furthest they could get was the pole in most cases. FTH is mostly reserved to the more suburban areas (the Valleys) and the independent cities.

Computers are stupid good at serving files over http.

I’ve served (much) greater-than-HN traffic from a machine probably weaker than that mini. A good bit of it dynamic. You just gotta let actual web servers (apache2 in that case) serve real files as much as possible, and use memory cache to keep db load under control.

I’m not even that good. Sites fall over largely because nobody even tried to make them efficient.

And nobody knows how stuff works at the web server level anymore... The C10K problem was solved a long time ago. Now it's just embarrassing.

I’m reminded of a site I was called in to help rescue during the pandemic. It was a site that was getting a lot higher traffic (maybe 2-3x) than they were used to, a Rails app on Heroku. These guys were forced to upgrade to the highest postgres that Heroku offered - which was either $5k or $10k a month, I forget - for not that many concurrent users. Turns out that just hitting a random piece of content page (a GET) triggered so many writes that it was just overwhelming the DB when they got that much traffic. They were smart developers too, just nobody ever told them that a very cacheable GET on a resource shouldn’t have blocking activities other than what’s needed, or trigger any high-priority DB writes.