Dominic Fracassa

San Francisco’s (CA) attempt to bring affordable, high-speed Internet service to every home and business in the city is set to take a major step forward Jan 31 as city officials begin choosing private-sector partners to build the network at the lowest possible cost.

San Francisco (CA) Supervisor Mark Farrell has assembled a group of business, privacy and academic experts to discuss crucial, early-stage questions surrounding Farrell’s plan to wire the city with high-speed Internet service. In the coming months, the San Francisco Municipal Fiber Blue Ribbon Panel will conduct research and provide recommendations on the most efficient and effective ways to blanket the city with broadband, an effort that could cost up to $1 billion.

If it becomes reality, San Francisco would be the largest city in the country to implement citywide high-speed Internet. City officials are currently targeting speeds of 1 gigabit per second. The average Internet speed in the US is 31 megabits per second according to the most recent data published by the Federal Communications Commission, so this could be about 30 times faster. Farrell will serve as the panel’s co-chair alongside Harvard Law School Professor Susan Crawford.

In the invisible spaces between the broadcast channels on your TV dial, a battle is brewing. As part of an effort to expand access to broadband Internet, Google and Microsoft are butting heads with the nation’s thousands of low-power television broadcasters, all jockeying for the same slivers of wireless spectrum.

The Internet and television industries are grappling over how portions of unused spectrum, commonly dubbed “white space,” should be put to use in the wake of a seismic upheaval of the TV spectrum landscape. At stake, broadcasters and their advocates say, is the future of low-power television, a class of TV operators who beam a wide variety of religious, ethnically diverse and hyper-local programming over the air. But setting themselves against the prospect of faster, more reliable Wi-Fi service, experts say, will be a steep uphill fight. “The balance here is trying to maintain some sort of local broadcasting versus what’s coming next, and what’s coming next is wireless” Internet, said Jonathan Kramer a telecommunications attorney. “The value of having high-speed Internet at home is likely far more valuable than simply access to a local station.”