Yeah living in the technopolis of America does have it's advantages. Just 40 miles outside one of the East Coast's larger cities and you might as well be in rural Kansas somewhere when it comes to ISPs. Maybe worse.
In a market situation where it was possible someone could probably turn a modest profit offering say 15 megabit DSL at rock-bottom prices but Verizon and Comcast negotiate deals with the towns for exclusive access to utility trunks and COs.
Beats me
Right, that makes sense.
Hmm, well I might just move on. There is Viasat here too. About the same price as Hughsnet. When Viasat (Excede?) came in here I found the service from Hughsnet improved.
George H.
Yeah, but all the BS and cost of living you have to put up with. My business pardoner lives in San Diego and he hates it. I can't believe the price of things and the amount of bureaucratic BS he has to put up with do almost anything. He pays 25c/KWh for the first 1000 KWh and then it rises rapidly from there. I pay 12 cents, 2 more cents than in town to compensate for maintaining the 25 mile feeder to my house. We passed a Constitutional Amendment prohibiting any type of tax based on income. No Ad Valorem taxes. Tags are a flat rate. I think they went up to $26 this year. Property taxes are trivial. I think mine was about $400 on an acre of land.
Forbes consistently rates us the cheapest state in the union to live. The TN government has a concerted and successful effort to get high tech industries to move here. An intangible is that people who move here are amazed at how friendly and helpful we are.
I'd never fit into New Orleans either.
John
Our gas+electric bill runs about $100 a month. And we have no mortgages. Property tax is low, thanks to Prop 13. We live in a nice little village where we know our neighbors and can park on the street.
I wouldn't move here now. We got in at a good time.
The work-from-home thing may make cities more livable again.
New Orleans is an island of weirdness that just happens to be located in the South. The food is great but it's all the same. It's a bad place to do electronics.
We have friends in Point Reyes Station who had bad internet. A few neighbors got a dish pair and get their data from across Tomales Bay. Dish pairs are crazy cheap now. You can get a gigabit pair for under $200.
Too many trees! There's no line of sight unless you've got a tower or are on the coast or something.
This is the highest feature we got in the area, Blue Hill at 635 feet. On a very clear day if you squint you can just make out Mt. Monadnock in southern New Hampshire to the northwest, about 70 miles away.
Heard a story on godless leftist NPR the other night about a software industry guy, late 20s early 30s, who left San Fran for Cincinnati.
The main issues he complained about was congestion/traffic, e.g. "Sometimes rush hour lasts four hours each morning and afternoon, and you're at a traffic light waiting to make a turn and the light goes green and you can't even make the turn because there's a line of cars blocking the side street..."
Neglecting for the moment that he came off very entitled and whiny, and seemed to act like he'd never lived in a city before, and that San Fran was basically like Calcutta (it's not Calcutta!), and that in Boston or NYC or Philly, Toronto or Montreal you can have the same experience except it's also cold as balls/snowing five months out of the year...
I expect some number of tech dudes like this in the "new normal" where they've discovered they can do their job adequately enough from a laptop at home, who are perhaps 30 and older and are married and have a young family and pulling down $130k/yr and can order everything they need in life online from Amazon.com and Apple.
They're gonna like suburban Cincinnati just fine you can live like a king on 130k/yr in suburban Cincinnati, never have to encounter any homeless people or blacks, everything you need is delivered to your door, send your kids to private school, your entertainment options are going to Buffalo Wild Wings or your buddy's house to watch the game which is more-or-less what's on offer for entertainment in suburban Cincinnati but is about what you have time for, anyway.
There are people to whom that lifestyle sounds like Paradise and people to whom it sounds like hell and people from San Fran to whom that sounds like Paradise will likely show up there eventually, how much that will actually benefit Cincinnati though is anyone's guess
Where do I go in suburban Cincinnati to buy a pack of BNC to PL259 adapters on short notice, though? in suburban Boston I can be at a brick and mortar store in 15 minutes looking at a whole wall of that stuff for prices as good or better than an Internet retailer. I expect San Fran is similar
If someone gets a condo in the heart of downtown, they can expect it to be busy.
Software companies have vastly over-packed a few cities, at great expense. I never understood why. I think that has peaked.
Not that I know of. Not any more.
Fry's is now officially dead. So is Radio Shack. The great surplus houses are gone. Retail electronic parts are a relic now.
Amazon or Digikey has what you want, with no driving or parking.
Maybe so but it's nice that there's one of the old fashion around. They don't have the latest SMT parts or anything but anything electromechanical or through-hole that has an NTE cross-reference is probably there.
They seem to mostly serve the local contractor market. AV/home theater/car audio/cable and telco etc. Not uncommon to see Comcast, Verizon or Amtrak picking up stuff. Still a number of hobbyists milling about most days too
I never saw a Fry's in its heyday it was a west cost chain, but I imagine that's a smaller version of what it used to be like at one time.
uunngggh amazon.
Brick & mortar appliance stores are probably a relic too but I bought a dish washer here I can't resist a store called "Atomic Appliance":
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