Vexed in the city: Silicon Valley's invasion of San Francisco

Zendesk was the first tech company to take advantage of a tax exemption in 2011 that brought the firm to the Tenderloin, a blighted neighborhood in San Francisco. James Martin/CNET

This story is part of a CNET special report that examines the controversy gripping San Francisco as a massive influx of techies feeds an unprecedented economic boom -- and backlash.

SAN FRANCISCO -- From the sixth-floor boardroom where Zendesk holds its most important meetings, CEO Mikkel Svane has a unique view of San Francisco. It's not the iconic snapshot of the city -- no Golden Gate Bridge or Transamerica Pyramid. Instead he sees a jumble of grit and gild: a housing project, the gold-trimmed dome of City Hall, and a cryptic, crudely spray-painted message scrawled atop a nearby building: "Snakes get out or we flood."

"I still don't know what it means," says Svane, laughing while peering out the window on a clear day in late July.

The enigmatic view is a fitting one for the leader of a company doing business on relatively unfamiliar terrain. Instead of settling in Silicon Valley, some 40 miles south of the city, the customer service software firm decided to set up shop in San Francisco.

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AT&T to deliver 1Gbps broadband to Silicon Valley

AT&T

AT&T has announced the first city in Silicon Valley that will get its 1Gbps fiber service.

On Wednesday, the company said that Cupertino, the home of tech giant Apple, has been added to the list of cities that will get its ultra-high speed broadband service in the coming months. AT&T is already offering the broadband service, which delivers 1Gbps downloads as well as 1Gbps uploads, in Austin, Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. And it has confirmed plans to deploy the service in 11 additional cities: Cupertino, Charlotte, Greensboro, Houston, Jacksonville, Fla., Miami, Nashville, Overland Park, Kan., Raleigh-Durham, San Antonio, and Winston-Salem.

In total, AT&T has said it plans to expand the 1Gbps GigaPower service in up to 100 candidate cities and municipalities across 25 markets nationwide. Other Silicon Valley and Bay Area communities are still on the list for consideration, including, San Jose, San Francisco, and Mountain View, home of Google, AT&T's biggest rival in delivering 1Gbps fiber broadband.

Even though most communities in the US could benefit from a super high-speed network, such as AT&T's, delivering this kind of speed to residents and startups in the nation's technology and innovation hub is likely to be a guaranteed hit. And it could spawn new ideas, technologies and businesses that will benefit the entire technology ecosystem as residents and startups in the area put the high-capacity network to the test.

"Cupertino is leading the way in creating an environment that fosters innovation," the city's mayor Gilbert Wong said in a statement. "And the deployment of ultra-high-speed broadband service will further support innovation in our community, spur our local businesses, and result in even greater economic development in our city."

The attractive customer base is also one that Google is considering. Google included San Jose and its hometown of Mountain View in its list of nine metro areas that it will evaluate for deploying its own 1Gbps download service. So far, Google is still deploying service in Kansas City, home of its first Google Fiber network. And it's still working on deployments for Austin and Provo, Utah.

AT&T didn't provide specifics on pricing or when it would start building the Cupertino network. Currently, the company charges $70 a month for the 1Gbps high speed Internet service. This is also the same price that Google charges for its 1Gbps serice.

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