miltones

Thanks for all the suggestions. Really very much appreciated. Lot's of interesting ideas.

Michael

It's not free unless you want a 5 mbps download and 1 mbps upload speed and even that has a $300 construction fee.

Google Fiber Kansas City

Also although 1 Gigabit may sound great but it's not much different that the speeds that cable providers have on their cable (most cable providers have a 750 mbps to 1 Gigabit cable) but the difference is that cable pushes channels to all households where everything is on demand for Google fiber. If everything is internet on demand and people use it heavily, throughput can go down significantly. On the other hand, standard cable may limit maximum internet speeds to 150 mbps (50 mbps is minimum in my area) but that is only for internet on demand.

It's nice to say that you have a 1 Gigabit connection but if servers and the internet could move data that fast to individual users, connections would be extremely erratic in performance sometimes not moving data to individual users for extended periods of time.

cranston

+1 Austin...

Hotscot

How are you finding San Francisco?

miltones

I fly in one hour.

Nutek

No.

scrubbedexpat099

Sounded unlikely

petitefrancaise

We have google fiber in Austin now, central and south have it and it's creeping north to the suburbs, so I'm still waiting. Reports are that it is very good, even the "free" once you've paid for the box version.

Just used it the other day in a Starbucks and it was great!

Timewarner and ATT have all improved their services in the last few months trying to retain customers. We pay for only 15 meg but are now getting 60 for the same price.

I know Austin is getting a bad reputation for traffic but it's no worse than Bristol for example, in fact if you've had to commute along the M4/M5 junction then Austin will probably be an improvement.

And we have a BA flight direct to LHR in 9 hours now.

I presume you are looking for US staff? Plenty of people wanting to relocate from the Bay area to here.

Michael

The cable companies have been dropping analog channels which are bandwidth hogs and was always a service provided by US cable companies since the consumer didn't need a set top box. I suspect most cable companies have finally eliminated the last of the analog channels and now require set top boxes for all, have enough bandwidth for all the HD channels, and still have plenty of bandwidth for high speed internet service.

In San Jose, the basic internet service was 25 mbps (actual throughput was 29 mbps) but about 3 months ago, I ran an internet speed test and the download speed indicated 60 mbps. I then checked the Comcast web site and noticed that the basic internet service was 50 mbps. I then checked my past statements and there wasn't any price change.

It appears most if not all the cable companies have plenty of bandwidth to supply the higher speeds without problems. In most cases, web sites can't serve at 60 mbps (often 20 mbps if you are lucky) except speed test web sites and often they are overloaded and can't serve at that speed either.

5 mbps works ok for many things but for HD video services, they'll reduce the video quality since 5 mbps often is not enough throughput for high quality HD video. Netflix checks the consumer's line speed during startup to determine the quality to stream. For a 5 mbps connection, Netflix may only serve a maximum of 3 mbps to allow for variations in line and internet speeds. The speed needed for high quality HD varies depending on the action of the video and the compression algorithm used but can be as low as 5 mbps and as high as 20 mbps. If the video was transmitted without compression, over 1 Gigabit per second would be required for all HD videos.

mrlion

FWIW I love Boise and Kansas City - hugely liveable. Minneapolis is also lovely provided you hibernate in winter...

I think a lot would depend on the specific dynamics of your business, what sort of people you need, how transient they are likely to be etc...

Good luck!

GeoffM

Charter have improved too. When we moved in 6 months ago we had a choice of Charter or Fios. The former offered about 6 meg; the latter up to silly speeds (over 100 meg IIRC, more now). But just last month Charter sent me a flyer that I can now get 60 meg, and significantly cheaper than Fios, plus they'll buy out any ETFs. Since we barely watch any cable TV, just Netflix/Acorn/etc via Roku, we might just drop cable TV completely.

andrew_maine

For a smaller city with an emerging tech scene another option would be Portland, Maine. A bunch of online payment companies are located here and there is a start up scene as well:

Startup Portland
Maine Technology Events, Companies and Coworking

It's close to Boston, low COL and definitely has an entrepreneurship vibe (especially in brewing!).

Also, this: Portland, Maine Adventures | Best Place to Live | Best Towns | OutsideOnline.com