A vanishing all-American tradition is the Welcome Wagon, which greets newcomers to the neighbourhood with a freshly baked pie and information about the best butcher, baker and candlestick maker in town. I imagine the local ladies knocking on the door, as in a Doris Day movie, to take a good look at the new arrivals and ensure they won't lower the tone of the area.
The Welcome Wagon has gone the way of butchers, bakers and candlestick makers (they're all one big Wal-Mart now), but when I recently moved into a new house I experienced what I can only call a Cyber-Welcome Wagon, Palo Alto style.
My neighbour introduced himself, and then asked if I'd be interested in participating in a fibre-optic trial, bringing the Net to my house approximately 200 times faster than a regular modem. That surely beats getting directions to the nearest Wal-Mart, I thought, and said I'd be keen to know more.
It turns out that Palo Alto has spent around $2 million (#1.2 million) putting in a 27-mile fibre "loop" around the city, hoping to connect businesses, research facilities and the like to each other and to the Net. Along the way, a group of residents suggested to the city that there might be some demand from the local citizens for such rapid access, either on their own behalf or as telecommuters to their companies. OK, said the city, we'll publicise the option and establish the interest level.
The area of the city into which I've just moved was one of the top-responding neighbourhoods. My neighbour was attempting to increase the interest further and thereby increase the possibility that the trial might go ahead. The city still needed some more convincing that the project was viable. Why? Simple, really.
The city wasn't acting like a local venture capital-funded start-up, willing to lose millions just to establish market share. It actually wanted to make its money back, so it warned potential subscribers - 1,000 had expressed serious interest - that the cost would be about $1,200 to sign up and $35 per month on top of their existing Internet access charges. Yikes! Even at that rate, the city said it would take 26 years to recover the set up costs for residential service.
Faced with such a long payback period, city officials have recommended not going ahead with the trial. However, the main residents' pressure group, PA-Fibre Network, has come up with an alternative plan which anticipates a 10-year payback period.
Quoted in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle, PA Fibre Network president, Mr Michael Eager, said: "Here's an area where we're watching the leading edge drift off into the distance.
"In the same valley where Netscape can go from zip to $4 billion in four years, where people talk about working on Internet time, and in a city which has a claim to being the centre of the Internet superhighway, it is really remarkable that the city seems to work on a time scale better compared to the Pony Express."
Of course the City is as keen as anybody to get more traffic on its fibre network it just doesn't want to sign up to a financial black hole to do so. The issue with all its counter-arguments is to be decided by the full Palo Alto City Council next month. Those of us who want fast Internet more than anything else except perhaps the end of the Lewinsky impeachment hearings will be anxiously awaiting the outcome.
Frank O'Mahony can be contacted at frank@liffey.com
