One thing that is officially cool about San Francisco is the number of open Wifi spots. Someone with a 802.11 card wouldn't even need a DSL or cable modem in half the neighborhoods around here. I'm sitting in a coffee shop just below my new apartment and there are three open wireless networks in range. You just didn't get that in NYC.
My plan is to offer some of my bandwidth to the community. I'll set up the DSL modem (Speakeasy of course) right outside a OpenBSD box with 3 nics that will run a mostly-open firewall and a traffic shaper. Half of the bandwidth will go to my old 802.11b access point and will be open to the public. The other half will go through my Watchguard firewall box. That network will be locked down tight and keep my servers and desktop machines. For now, I'll ssh back into my secure network from my powerbook on the open wifi network. Later on, once I've figured out what the best secure alternative to WEP is, I'll put a 802.11g router inside the secure network so I can run the powerbook wirelessly inside. I'm thinking of going gigabit ethernet for the wired servers though -- apparently streaming HD requires more bandwidth than 100mb can handle (most HD media streams are bursty, according to a co-worker of mine).
I already have all the parts I need -- the only thing I'm missing is a few gigabit cards for the Linux servers and a 802.11g router that supports better security. If anyone can think of something I'm missing here, please let me know.