I thought the same was true for the Bay Area, hence why I moved here. I was genuinely surprised to find Google Fiber isn't even available, let alone any mesh networks.

In all other aspects of technical expertise though it's blowing my previous city, Houston, away. Companies open to candidates based on technical expertise alone (rather than throwing non-B.S. degrees straight into the garbage), lots of great meetups, lots of fellow geeks doing exciting work.

Actually, another thing that surprised me was lack of hacker spaces - Houston seemed to have the same amount of them... one. The only major one I'm aware of here is Noisebridge, same for Houston which has TX/RX.

edit: oh, apparently SF has quite a few more than I realized. So does Houston, but not as many.

https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/San_Francisco https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Houston

Monkeybrains (https://www.monkeybrains.net/) operates a mesh network in SF. They're not community owned but they are very much a local business.

I wanted to like Monkeybrains but they were just too subpar for the competition in terms of speed, reliability and flexibility. I switched to sonic and get 1GBps fiber for barely $12/mo more than what I paid MB.

Dunno where you are in the Bay Area, but in SF I have Sonic which is synchronous gigabit for ~$40 a month.

It's not Google Fiber, but it's close.

For some reason they offering only 10Mbps in my building in downtown SF... compared to the 150 I get through Comcast. I hate their guts, but they do at least give me pretty darn fast internet.

10Mbps sounds like Sonic Fusion (AT&T DSL partnership) and not Sonic Fiber.

I live less than 10 minutes from the Google complex and google fiber isn't an option. It's really sad.

There's definitely some mesh networking stuff going on, e.g. https://peoplesopen.net with weekly meetings at https://omnicommons.org

There are a large-scale effort in SF many years ago... but it's a hard city to build in. You can read a bit of that history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Municipal_Wirele...

I know people doing this in Detroit on a smaller scale. The nodes are I believe using cable modems, not 20 GB connections. But it's free because they have money from a foundation and it's all volunteers. It's all about getting the poor on the net.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kz3xyz/detroit-me...

Better still, if you live in Brooklyn you can actually subscribe to an independent locally-run fiber ISP: http://bkfiber.com/

It's more of a business product than a consumer product, and it's got limited range, but it's great to know the option even exists.

Unfortunately it's limited to very few places and is practically non existent if you consider Brooklyn as a whole.

Meanwhile Brooklyn has Verizon fiber gigabit network and supposedly getting one from Altice too. Two gigabit fiber ISPs in one place would be something quite unique.

NYC is a nice place to believe in in an idealistic way, but crummy when it comes to the nitty gritty function of the city.

Source: I live here

Could you maybe elaborate on some examples you have in mind?

I'm strongly considering accepting a job offer for a company in NY since I'm starting to get bored of living in Seattle. I figure moving to NY would mean being surrounded by more people and having more opportunities to collaborate on projects like these.

Oh :(