For anyone interested... the whole motivation of Google Fiber to motivate ISPs to stop gouging us does exactly what it is designed to do.
Cox, in Phoenix, miraculously doubled everyone's speeds > 100mbps last year because they were concerned with our general happiness levels and wanted to show their affection.
Nope... that's not it. Ran into two leads at Smash Burger in June of 2014 and asked them on the spot "When are we getting gigabit speed?" and their reply was "End of year, we gotta move before Google Fiber gets here."
None of that would have happened if G Fiber wasn't coming - CenturyLink and Cox were perfectly fine dabbling in 50mbps service for the rest of eternity without true competition.
Now in less than 12 months my 65mbps service was freely upgraded to 150mbps and we are suppose to have a 1Gbps option any month now (there are test neighborhoods live since last year around Scottsdale)
I have no illusions about how fortunate we are being in a well-wired/competitive environment, but damn am I happy and appreciative.
It actually has more impact on me and where I would want to live than I thought... the idea of going back to < 50mbps makes me sad.
Also worth noting that Google isn't doing this because:
1) They want to be an ISP
2) They feel bad for America and want us to enjoy faster internet.
They're doing it because they have plans for products which necessitate nationwide high speed internet. I don't know what those plans are... maybe making YouTube the everything-video-delivery-system, maybe massively collaborative work tools as they expand Google Docs et al... maybe something we haven't even heard about... but they've got something coming that they require Fiber for.
It is, but not because they have a plan beyond it, though.
Cox/Time-Warner/etc. basically shook down Google for money a couple of years ago. Google backed down and the last-mile ISPs thought they won.
Google, of course, was extremely unhappy to painfully discover that there was insufficient competition if the ISP's decided to play dirty and block their ads. So, Google now looks at the ISP's as a pure, existential threat that they must neutralize.
So, even if the ISP's upgrade or get really cheap, Google doesn't care. This is about making sure that no company ever has the ability to cut off Google's flow of ads to the consumer ever again.
Google will roll out fiber even if it's somewhat unprofitable just to slowly squeeze the ISP's into obeisance.
If that's the case, it would be more effective to settle on something cheaper, let's say program '100mbit/s to every home' and cover larger area faster. I also think that it has something to do with making major ISPs less aggressive, but there's probably something else, why Google needs 1 Gb/s
Think about this in terms of a startup vs incumbent problem. The newcomer often needs to be 10x better than the incumbent in order to change the customer's habits.
But it is profitable, isn't it? Google keeps telling everyone that they're not going into the fiber business to lose money.
I think what's more important is that they're willing to spend money on fiber that they could spend elsewhere to get better returns. Returns on being an ISP probably aren't as good as returns on other kinds of infrastructure, at least up front.
No, but I'm also being generous in my engineering estimates to put Google in the least-flattering light. And the ISP's started this fight by blackmailing Google--don't bring a knife to a gunfight springs to mind.
Google won't take too much of a loss, if any. Once a fiber network is in place, it's almost maintenance-free for several years. In addition, Google built all their hardware from scratch to minimize cost.
Finally, you may find that Google Fiber turns the network over to the locality for anything too unprofitable. That's a win-win--the locality runs the network (and gains the profit of cable TV, etc.) and Google breaks the monopoly of the last mile.
Not really... Anticompetitive would be if:
1) The entrenched players were selling at "zero profit" or price equal to marginal cost. (I find this dubious, they are monopolies after all. internet services are a fraction of the US price in many European countries)
2) Google were doing this with the intention of raising prices once all of its competitors go out of business. Since they are behemoths in their own rights, I just don't see Google having the desire to push a price war to this point.
In general "dumping" is hard to establish since no one is going to reveal their cost structure. In my experience it is normally an accusation flung by incumbents because that other guys stuff is too cheap.
If it breaks the back of the ISP monopolies and forces them into the role of unprofitable utility, all the better. That's the whole point of market forces, right?
Google could not force major ISPs out of business even if they wanted to. They just don't have enough money. Verizon and Comcast combined have more than 3x Google's revenue.
And if Google Fiber is indeed a loss leader, then each successive deployment will be more difficult to finance. And they've only deployed a few small communities.
But that's not Google's goal. Their goal is just to make sure that consumers have a broadband alternative in the markets where they currently do not. That's much more modest, and to me it seems competitive rather than anti-competitive. I certainly hope they come to my town, where Comcast is the only option if I want more than 5 Mbps.
It's called having a loss leader, and there are hundreds of products/companies that do it. You commonly purchase products sold as a loss leader. Hell, steaks at most restaurants are sold at a loss with the hopes you'll order a drink.
In this hypothetical situation, Google uses its internet access as a loss leader to sell hypothetical services which require high speed broadband. Traditional ISPs will use internet access as a loss leader to other services, such as phone and television.
Downvotes seem unwarranted, this is the definition of "predatory pricing", which is just a company using the profits from one business to undercut in another with the intent of forcing competitors out of business.
Though I don't know that it really applies here - they're unlikely to drive TWC-Comcast out of business by pricing low in just a few areas. It's more of a concern when it's a large monopolistic company doing it to regional competitors to maintain their monopoly.
But those companies do the same thing to competition. If all sides are below-cost then it goes back to being fair competition, and it weakens monopoly power.
Okay that is anti-competitive, than what shall we call dumping a useless service onto consumers that they have to overpay for? Also these ISP's keep their competitors at bay, so consumers do not have a choice but to pay them high fees for useless service.
Thats the kind of idiotic arguments that were put forth during the early progressivist movment. It used to be that anti-competitive meant actually doing something bad, the progressiv transformed it to 'companys who might do something bad in the future'.
How about we use common sence and let competition work its way until we actually OBSERVE bad effects instead of condemming a company because they might do something bad at some point in the future. Is this not one of the major advances that was made law in the last 200 years?
Most of the historical example of these laws in practice are so absured that you can only laught about them. Companys not allowed to unite because they would togheter have 8% of a market.
This law, since it has been on the books has served as block for competition WAY more often then it has helped. I encourage everybody to look at this history of this law and not JUST the 2-3 partial success story that seam to be the only once that are ever talked about.
You are right but it's deeper than that. "Anti-competitive" is not even a valid concept.
Companies are supposed to do everything they can to beat their competition. That is simply called "being competitive."
It's kind of like the word "progressive" as in "the Progressive movement." It's a linguistic deception that started out as a kind of dishonest propoganda.
It's a perfectly valid concept. A company takes action not aimed at succeeding in the market, but instead aimed at damaging their competitors. The direct goal is to reduce the amount of competition in the market, aka being "anti-competitive".
Companies are not supposed to do everything they can to beat their competition. That's closer to a description of organized crime.
There is no action a company can take to damage their competitors other than succeeding in the market by offering a better or cheaper good or service.
That is in free market capitalism, where the initiation of force by the government or companies against other companies is barred.
For instance, in free market capitalism, telecom companies are not granted local monopolies, so the only way for a telecom company to hurt its competition is to beat its competition on price or service, since anyone is free to build telecom infrastructure. (Obviously, this is not the system we have in the US, where telecom monopolies are rampant, but we should.)
> Companies are supposed to do everything they can to beat their competition. That is simply called "being competitive."
Real competition is stabbing your competitors in the face and taking their stuff. We prohibit that because it rewards the wrong kinds of competitors. Prohibitions on anticompetitive conduct are rooted in the same principle.
Under laissez-faire (i.e. rights-respecting) capitalism, the initiation of force is barred. Prohibitions on "anticompetitive conduct" are separate from that. They are a restriction on what companies can do in addition to not using force.
And you know what? I'm fine with that. If Google wants to go and improve my internet experience as a part of some master plan where they do make a boatload of money, I'm perfectly happy to go along with that plan.
It's interesting how pure competition and "rational self-interest" got us the likes of Comcast and Cox and Verizon and all these other awful, awful companies. They quickly locked up the market, injected their own lobbyists into Washington, and then were content to provide a poor service for a lot of money.
What is shaking them out of their complacency now is not "the market" or "competition" as it's usually understood. It's a very large company, with tons of cash, led by someone (Larry Page) with goals beyond pure financial gains and rock-bottom self-interest.
Perhaps it's time to go back to the drawing board, and figure out what's wrong with these purely mechanistic models of society and the markets. It seems like it's time to ask ourselves if a dose of self-less-ness is perhaps required to make the whole system work better. Not a very large dose, mind you, but just a little bit; anything over the current level of zero, really.
You don't think that the core of the issue is regulatory capture, rather than a failing of "the market"?
It takes a lot of money to break into a captured market, which is why it takes a large company to do it. Google entering the ISP market has done more to shake up and spur on the incumbents in the past couple of years than anything regulators have done. And furthermore, you can be assured that their doing so is absolutely self-interested; Google isn't building fiber for the betterment of humanity, they're building it to improve the delivery of their services which make them money.
People trot out "regulatory capture" but can never give a straight answer about what is being captured and how that leads to a lack of competition.
Verizon wants to wire up the yuppie neighborhoods here in Baltimore with FiOS. That'd be major competition for Comcast, because those yuppies subscribing to triple play are where all the money comes form. The city won't let them do it, because they demand Verizon wire up all the poor neighborhoods too (which cost just as much to service but won't turn a profit).
Is the theory that Comcast has regulatory-captured the Baltimore city government, forcing them to impose this requirement? Because I've seen absolutely zero evidence for that proposition.
When Google goes into cities, they demand exemption from regulation. The regulations they get exemption from are not ones that give benefits to incumbents. They are liberal public policy choices: you have to wire up poor neighborhoods if you want to wire up rich ones, you have to kick in money to support public access TV, you have to get permits and your fiber cabinets can't be too big, etc.
This is too true. It's more regulatory moats than regulatory capture. At any rate, it's not profitable after, probably, the first time.
It's strange how cities force companies to wire this way. It's as if they forced a luxury brand, Hermès, say, to open a store in the most shit-hole, criminal part of town in order to gain the right to open a store in the yuppie part of town.
> Access to the Internet is increasingly viewed as a right and/or an essential service. Access to overpriced handbags, not so much.
Clothes are seen as essentials in Western society. Luxury brands, not so much. Yet access to internet and access to cutting-edge broadband are treated similarly by regulators in the U.S. That's the asymmetry.
...access to internet and access to cutting-edge broadband...
At the pace technology advances, there's not so much difference between the two. Since companies are still constantly pushing the limits of technology, the majority of the benefits of connectivity come at the higher end of the bandwidth spectrum.
I disagree. Almost all of the "internet as a human right" uses of technology are at the lower end of the bandwidth spectrum: e-mail, job applications, Wikipedia, etc. 95% of what's socially valuable on the internet can be done with HTML 2.0.
95% of what's socially valuable is feeling like an equal -- that means edX videos, Khan Academy, Coursera, YouTube, live streaming, backup software, immersive games, etc.
Since when is "feeling like an equal" a basic right? Everyone in my high-school had a car and designer clothing. Should the public subsidize that stuff for poor kids? Note that clothes are a much bigger part of "feeling like an equal" to a typical kid than anything to do with computers.
Games are not socially valuable, they're a diversion. Backup software--it's much cheaper to give everyone a USB drive than build fiber out to them. Finally, the failure of rich media in the educational setting has been profound. Text (and static diagrams) is the most efficient and precise way to convey information.[1] In the 1990's, it was about getting "multimedia" into classrooms, and it was a colossal waste of time and money. The value of online courseware is the lecture notes and exams, which have limited bandwidth demands.
[1] I'll note that HN is about as plain text as you can get, and is a place for serious discussion.
Edit: added ---> to quotes to make the paragraph separation clearer and clarify some minor points
---> Since when is "feeling like an equal" a basic right?
Since always, because large groups of people not feeling like equals inevitably leads to instability and uprising.
---> Everyone in my high-school had a car and designer clothing. Should the public subsidize that stuff for poor kids?
Yes, in the form of basic income sufficient to feed, clothe, and transport oneself and one's family.
---> Note that clothes are a much bigger part of "feeling like an equal" to a typical kid than anything to do with computers.
We're not just talking about kids, but even kids deserve the basic dignity of not being terrified to walk the halls of their school because they don't have reasonable clothing. The distraction of being strongly disliked by other students can have a profound effect on a kid's outlook for the future and motivation to improve.
---> Games are not socially valuable, they're a diversion.
Games are every bit as socially valuable as any other form of art or entertainment. As just one example of an artistic game, see Braid.
---> Backup software--it's much cheaper to give everyone a USB drive than build fiber out to them.
Give someone a USB drive you back up their files for a day, but give them fiber and you back up their files for a lifetime. Once built, the fiber is good for a very long time and many other uses.
---> Finally, the failure of rich media in the educational setting has been profound.
That's because people who call things "rich media" didn't know what they were doing or how to measure it. They were just jumping onto a buzzword. As a counterexample, Encarta on CD-ROM was quite useful as a tool for education and inspiration.
---> Text (and static diagrams) is the most efficient and precise way to convey information.
It depends on the information. What sound does a penguin make, in text? What does it look like to fly over an island rain forest?
If this is true, why do we still have classrooms at all? Why was video or telephone invented?
---> In the 1990's, it was about getting "multimedia" into classrooms, and it was a colossal waste of time and money.
I'll repeat my earlier mention of buzzwords, and add the benefit of a generation of students having early experience with computers, allowing them to perform better in a modern workplace.
---> The value of online courseware is the lecture notes and exams, which have limited bandwidth demands.
Strongly disagree. I took the very first edX course, MITx 6.002x. 95% of the value was in the excellent lecture videos by Prof. Agarwal, which I could speed up or slow down as needed to maximize understanding. The remaining value came from interactive circuit simulations. It's not just the medium, it's the quality of execution. Excellent videos and interactive software are invaluable and can't be replaced by lecture notes and exams.
------------------------------------
But all that said, I'll return to the first paragraph. People need to be connected to society in the way society wants to connect. Because the majority of the price of broadband is in the installation, it makes no sense to install second-class hardware in poorer areas unless you want to create a permanent digital underclass that will eventually drop out of the workforce, drain welfare resources, and eventually, revolt.
Cities already have to provide water, electricity, gas, and sewer services, so the roads will be dug up and the labor expended whether fiber is added to the mix or not.
Regulatory capture doesn't have to mean literal corruption. It can cover situations where governments acting on their own and in good faith, assume the status quo and grandfather incumbents. It might not even be on purpose, but rather the logical consequence of a distaste for laws and regulations with retroactive effects. But the end result is the same: legal obligations that impact new players more than old.
So the question is whether Comcast has to meet the same standard of building out their network in poor neighborhoods as Verizon does.
The "capture" part of the phrase necessarily means corruption. It's where incumbents control the regulatory process to keep competitors out. Unintended consequences from regulation is not "capture."
In every city I've studied, incumbents are bound by the same requirement to build-out their network as potential competitors. I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but the only one that comes to mind is Google Fiber: they get a pass on build-out requirements. These requirements curtail the most obvious route to competition: deploying in dense, rich neighborhoods where the incumbents generate most of their profits.
I've never felt that implication.If companies engage in effective (but legal) lobbying to benefit themselves at the public expense, that's regulatory capture even if it's not literally corruption.
I guess it could be an argument about what corruption means, but I think that people underestimate how dysfunctional the legislative and regulatory processes can be even without any legal violations.
Regulatory capture is more than just lobbying, it's a hijacking of the regulatory process by regulated companies. In any case, lobbying is an attractive narrative, but I don't see the link between lobbying and the actual anti-competitive regulations. Verizon and Comcast didn't lobby to be forced to build fiber/cable all over vast swaths of ghetto. AT&T isn't lobbying for San Francisco to impose inane restrictions on where you can put fiber cabinets.
To put it another way: look at the regulations Google demands exemption from in return for building fiber: build-out requirements, slow permitting, etc. Did the incumbents lobby for these things? No. They arose out of municipal politics that have little to do with lobbying.
Self interested lobbying is different to regulatory capture.
Even Wikipedia says:
Regulatory capture is a form of political corruption that occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or special concerns of interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.
I don't think I could say it better. Regulatory capture is different to lobbying because the regulatory agencies act in the interest of the company instead of the public. Lobbying is when the company puts forward its own interest.
It's horribly inefficient to lay new fiber for every ISP that wants to enter the market. At some point the economies of scale are such that it becomes impossible to even enter the market; many thought two entrants was the limit, Google is proving that the market can support three.
This is a classic case where government should be laying fiber to cover the last mile and selling access at cost to any ISP that wants it. The equipment on either end can be the ISP's equipment, a fiber is a fiber. Except for cuts, there's nearly no maintenance required.
If three fiber nets are not enougth to creat a good market, why not lay another? If all the ones that are there are really shit there are costumers to be had.
And just by the fact that there are three horrible equally sized companys there we allready know that they are not able to change because if they could, they would allready be winning over market share there.
Also its easy for one of these providers to sell of there own fibers to many providers on top of itself so they dont have to figure out all the costumer managment and things like that.
There are many, many option outthere but the are currenly very hard to take (because of old and new regulation).
Everything from a truly huge company building a huge new net for the hole country in order to provit from economy of scale to small local companys that take offer specialised communitys and then spread from there.
In principle letting government lay down the fiber sound like a fine idea that can work, but juging by other technical project governemnt do I have my doutes.
It's not just "regulatory capture" stopping competition in the broadband market.
Let's say I launch a startup fiber ISP that serves a small area, planning to use the profit from that area to expand to cover the entire country, and to show investors there's money to be made so they'll loan me money for the expansion. I invest a bunch of cash digging up the roads to lay new cables.
All the national incumbents have to do is drop their prices and increase their performance - which they can easily subsidize with profits from the vast majority of the country where my startup isn't operating, and economies of scale.
Now I've spent a load of money digging up the roads to launch a service that is lower performance and more expensive than my subsidized competitors. My planned expansion never goes ahead, and my initial investors lose their capital.
Far better to spend my time on a photo sharing app, where you only need nine employees to start a company you can sell to facebook for a billion dollars :)
The reality is that arguments of this kind are always made by people who dont have any fantasy on there own. This mechanical story you layed out is devoid fantasy.
In the real market people take advantage of oppertunities, large companies are not always so flexible and dynamic for example, companies can survive in small market, more companies may join.Maybe for some other reason all the streets have to be opened and you can somehow get your cable in for cheap. Maybe you have a groupes of special costumers that require special networks and you can give them a discount because you wanted to do that anyway.
The are for example universtiy networks in some country that are connected by glass outside of the internet. Now if you can find a costumer like that you can lay some internet glass as well.
Or how about a big company that did something diffrent joining the game (google in this case), they will not be underpriced so easly.
A small company could survive in a single place or town, and if they can do it other might be able to do it as well.
There are a millions of possible ways that your mechanical view does not take into account, and that why we have markets. Im not smart enougth to figure out a good solution, you are not smart enougth but somebody might come up with something. There were many great and powerful countrys that crashed in a suprisingly short time because of these sorts of things.
If we can get away from "regulatory capture" we have change to see these effects. For what is worth in Switzerland a new company is laying down massiv amount of fiber right now and the competition has yet to dynamiclly rearange themself to this new challange. Also even if it fails, its not at all clear that once prices went down, they will go up again. Just because the new competition is gone, does not mean a company wants to take the marketing hit of rising the price again. People might switch to the equally bad competition just because they are angrey at a company raising prices on them.
We have empirical evidence that competition has an immediate effect on improving the marketplace. Competition is hindered because of regulatory capture. It would seem to follow that competition is the cure, and impediment of regulation bought through corruption is the disease.
> Perhaps it's time to go back to the drawing board, and figure out what's wrong with these purely mechanistic models of society and the market
I've always had the impression that it's more a matter of timescales. Places do what's best for them in the next year, not the next 50yrs. If companies thought further ahead and building long term plans and potential would be a reason to spend capital, then I think we'd see a very different market, in many markets.
"with goals beyond pure financial gains and rock-bottom self-interest."
This doesn't paint an accurate picture. Google isn't deploying Fiber out of any notion of selflessness. This is a competitive play, and a very good one at that.
You say selfless ideals, I say this is exactly how "the market" and "competition" are commonly understood to function -- in the absence of corruption, regulatory capture and state granted monopolies.
And you're ascribing purity of motivation based on nothing more than apparent religious belief in your savior Larry. Hardly a more convincing argument.
I tend to think that it's just really easy to look at things on too-small a timescale.
Consider the extreme: in a single second, there aren't any discernible market pressures in the ISP industry, and it would be weird to expect it.
Which is mainly to say that it is important to talk about how quickly you want competition and market forces to come into play (not just that you want them to) when talking about why and how to change "the system".
While I agree that Page has more goals than pure financial gain, I don't see how those other goals really play into fiber. More bandwidth to Americans means more potential money for Google. No one else was increasing the bandwidth, so google is trying to jump start the process. But they are doing it purely for financial gain. It is just a bonus that it also benefits consumers. But isn't that how free markets are supposed to work?
> locked up the market, injected their own lobbyists into Washington
Ergo, it was not a free market and it was not laissez-faire capitalism.
In a free market, i.e. laissez-faire capitalism, anybody is free to do whatever they want as long as they don't initiate the use of force, including the government, so you could not get into the situation you describe in the first place.
A soft cap on corporate size seems like the simplest solution.
EX: 20,000 employs and or contractors and companies can’t own shares of other companies without being included in that cap. Outsourcing seems like the obvious loophole, but hardly an insurmountable barrier.
Though, increasing tax load as companies scale is probably a much better option. Not that there is a realistic chance of this passing any time soon, but large companies are harmful to both democracy and free markets so it's likely to be tried by someone.
PS: The only real counter argument I can think of is global completion.
Edit: (3 downvotes no responces.) How odd, looks like I hit one of those things you can't say. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html I wonder why?
I completely forgot about that. I remember having some POS 100Mb account with hotmail and upgrading to Gmail was a godsend. I think I bought an invite on ebay.
100mb?! I remember hotmail slowly reducing the mailbox capacity to like 20mb by the time gmail appeared.
A friend and I did a big trip to Southeast Asia and he begged his friends on email not to Include his email in their responses to save space on the server.
Of course, most competition also died. In terms of free email, there's now... I think Outlook.com is the only one I see semi-regularly? Yahoo's email service is utterly dreadful and I seem to remember a lot of kerfuffle regarding them and mailing lists.
No one I'm friends with uses yahoo, but out of a class I taught of 160 university students, I'd say about 20% of those who actually emailed me were using yahoo.com.
And for older folk, I still see plenty of @aol and @<serviceprovider> addresses.
Don't mistake what youre friends are doing for what the world as a whole is doing!
Most of the competition deserved to die. At the time 10-50MB mailboxes were normal, and Google came out with 1GB (and counting!) from day one, along with a much better UI than everyone else, and kick-ass spam filters.
Nobody's done much more than reach parity with GMail since then, so there's been no big incentive to switch back.
I'm not suggesting that there was meaningful competition before - just that there's no meaningful competition now, contrary to the comment I was replying to which asserted that "the competition got serious".
I never understood why people are hating on big companys that produce great effects and big market share. I can understanding people hatin horrible IE6, but gmail was and is fantastic and most people love it. Noting is stopping them from leaving to other provider (and there are still many other) but they are happy.
So why is everything that has big market shares bad?
How about we switch to a model where we gat bad at companys that are actually selling us shitty products instead.
I'm not getting mad at anything. I'm responding to "the competition got serious" - no it didn't, that's an outright lie. The competition died.
In any case, it's bad because it means that if I don't want to agree to Google's terms of service for whatever reason or just don't want to interact with them as a company (perhaps I disagree with some corporate policy of theirs), then I have to either deal with a worse experience, self-host, or pay money to a company like FastMail. If there were reasonable competition, I and many others could use them, and Google would have to convince us not to switch.
Are you really claming that there is not a single accaptable email hoster, even for money anywhere on the internet?
Even if there is no good one, there CLEAR are still many, many others that you can use.
Edit: Competiton is not defined as same service at same price. All email services compete with each other, gmail did not kill the competition or the market they just offered the best system on one price range. You are basiclly complaining that others that have diffrent privacy policy are not as good or cheap as gmail.
You offered this as a response to somebody saying that google was good for the market, but they clearly were. You get better free email in most aspects and you still have tons of other options including the old shitty free email providers.
These post feel like a bad accuse to find a reason to hate on google, or maybe im misunderstanding you.
Are you really claming that there is not a single accaptable email hoster, even for money anywhere on the internet?
Even if there is no good one, there CLEAR are still many, many others that you can use.
Edit: Competiton is not defined as same service at same price. All email services compete with each other, gmail did not kill the competition or the market they just offered the best system on one price range. You are basiclly complaining that others that have diffrent privacy policy are not as good or cheap as gmail.
You offered this as a response to somebody saying that google was good for the market, but they clearly were. You get better free email in most aspects and you still have tons of other options including the old shitty free email providers.
These post feel like a bad accuse to find a reason to hate on google, or maybe im misunderstanding you.
> You offered this as a response to somebody saying that google was good for the market, but they clearly were.
Look. If I have a measurably worse email system, and email is a central part of workflow in my industry, then I am not able to compete as well as those who have measurably better email systems.
You could argue that there are equally good email systems, or that there's no possible reason that I could possibly want to not use Google's email system. That would be valid and constructive.
No. Your attack on Google can easly be made in every single market on the planet.
"If I have a mesurably worse Ice Cream Delivery Guy, and Ice Cream is a central my marketing stratigy, then I am not able to compet as well as those who have measurably better Ice Cream Delivery guys."
What you take issue with is simple that you happen to not like on aspect of a service and your complaining about it. Your critic is basiclly a critc on markets as such, if that is what you are doing then say so, if not stop repeating that the world is unfair, nobody said it was.
And TWC upgraded most of the city while keeping prices the same (for now at least, since at least on my bill they credit the difference in plan prices). They started the same process in San Antonio around the same time SA started wooing Google Fiber as well. Definite win for consumers at east.
At least parts of SA had competition, since there were neighborhoods served by both TWC and Grande. Long before Google Fiber I remember actually getting better speeds than I paid for on Grande. I think I was paying $25/25mbps and seeing 30-35 on a regular basis.
Saw the same thing from Comcast in a very rural area - doubled speeds for free with higher tiers available. Went from 50 to 100. I think we are finally seeing some change.
Funny you mention 'rural area' -- my in-laws all live in the wooded section of Troy, IL... total population is like 1,000 people.
Anyway, they have Charter cable over there - and for the last decade they have been asking me about 'Getting Netflix' - but with a maximum download speed of 3mbps I kept telling them "It's just not going to work well for you..."
2 months ago Charter bumped them from 3mbps to 50mbps.
My first thought was "well, looks like another cable company is moving into the area..."
My thoughts too. However, I live in a Charter serviced area and when doing my research when switching from ATT, I noticed they only offer 1 speed. There are no tiers. 1 speed, 1 price
Also, I just looked up a price quote for Troy (near city hall) and noticed they indicate their speeds start at 100Mbps for 39.99. Granted you said they live out farther, but they may be able to get more.
My wife's internet at her studio was recently doubled, but only after we called. They said they needed to see if her modem was "too old". It wasn't and they doubled it on the spot. She has a business account for that one.
100?! That's phenomenal... I'll give them a call tonight and ask them to check with Charter and see what is available (for a decent price/a price they are OK with).
I just checked mine too and they doubled it. It was 30 and now it's 60. Not as great. They said it was already upgraded and I didn't need to call, but my speed tests were 30 before I called and 60 after I called....hmm.
what was the uptime on the modem? It might have just needed to be reset to pull in the new config. They can reset the modem remotely and they pretty much always do for support so I wouldn't read too much into your speed doubling.
To put 'Getting Netflix' into perspective for you, my home connection is 2 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up and I have no issue watching Netflix steams with good enough quality to be enjoyable. We choose to get this slow connection due to the cost ($15/mo) and see no reason to pay for higher tiers of speed from Time Warner.
I'm sure I don't have access to your specific provider, but what kind of service is that? I've been looking to go cheap, all I really need is decent latency.
Over the last 5 years the cable industry has mostly completed their own analog-to-digital transition and now have a decent amount of spectrum to throw at faster data speeds.
There does appear to be significant momentum in leaping forward in fixed broadband speeds. It helps that there is now an immense, growing amount of political pressure coming down on Comcast, AT&T and Verizon. I don't see that pressure letting up.
In my market (Atlanta) it's not even really about the speed. Granted Comcast is far more expensive per mbps than Google Fiber. It is "fast enough" except that Comcast will cap data usage to about 300 GB per month before charging fees.
Atlanta was one of the "test markets" for AT&T's data cap (which is expected to be applied to other parts of the country soon). It might be the same for Comcast.
Google said that any fiber project in CA is basically a non-starter due to all the hoops they'd have to jump through to comply with CA's environmental impact assessment laws.
Given that reality one wonder why the incumbents don't raise all their speeds to dissuade google from entering there various markets. Perhaps the shear magnitude of their collective greed obscures their reasoning?
Others have stated it well - and I understand the point you are making - but they are at the mercy of the market and their stock price... if they spend $10mm upgrading city infrastructure for an area they have a total monopoly in (that no one could leave them anyway) at a high level, that wouldn't be money "well spent"
-- as opposed to winning 1,000s of subscribers in a highly competitive city through marketing and new product/speed offerings.
I'm not TOTALLY discarding the 'all cable companies are evil' element here, just that if I was sitting at the head of that table and my stock price was all that mattered to my board and the exec team, I'd probably make very similar decisions to ignore monopolized markets unless I absolutely had to (i.e. bad publicity)
Because you're talking about a few cities affected, while the incumbents have a very large number of them in their markets. Waiting to get the names, and changing only those, allow them to keep milking cities where google fiber is not coming (which is most of their market).
Google doesn't need to add its service to every city. If you nail the top ~50 cities, then the rest must compete regardless. It adds massive pressure at a national level when you're talking about tens of millions of people having access to 1gbps, it becomes a cultural talking point, average people start applying pressure to politicians over it.
If you put a 1gbps service in Cincinnati, that forces Cleveland to have to compete with the economic gravity that generates. And they will either respond through attempting to build their own muni broadband or enticing eg Google fiber, or they will suffer and Cincinnati will draw people, capital and talent away from Cleveland.
There's no money in building "dumb pipes" to the internet. Verizon's wireline margin over the last couple of quarters has been under 5% (http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/verizon-nears-the-en...). Note Google has never revealed how much profit Fiber actually makes.
The existing networks are fast enough to service what makes the money: video services. The cable companies will only upgrade the pipes to the extent that it threatens usage of their video service.
Walmart has 3% net income margins; Costco has 2% net income margins; Target has 3% net income margins; BestBuy in its best days had 4% net income margins. By that premise, nobody should have ever built grocery stores or most retail outlets.
"There's no money in building "dumb pipes" to the internet."
Not for Verizon, maybe -- but Google never struck me as a bunch of chumps or wild philanthropists. I'm betting they're getting more eyeballs in front of Adsense and YouTube ads...
Which is why I'm attracted to the idea of municipal systems or regulated monopolies.
There's no money in building dumb electric lines or dumb sewer lines or dumb phones lines either, so the solution there was to guarantee customers in return for regulating the service.
This would create a common platform upon which video service providers could compete equally. As it stands now, integrated companies like Comcast have no incentive to make sure Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, Sling TV, etc. work well for their customers. Quite the opposite, actually.
And, for most purposes, modest (e.g. 25 Mbps) is all that most people have any need for. Admittedly, I don't have a house full of people using high bandwidth services, but my home 25 Mbps and my work connection are subjectively pretty much equivalent. Maybe if I'm loading big files from somewhere that isn't throttling me, but I'm certainly unconvinced I should pay Comcast more for something faster than my current connection (which I could if I wanted to).
In my building we have FiOS and Comcast. In Baltimore, Verizon doesn't have a video license, just internet. But it's 50/15 for $50/month, and I always get 50/20.
One day, the ONT on my floor went out and nobody noticed but me. Apparently, I was the only person on the floor (of dozens of apartments) to subscribe since the building was built 5 years ago. People on HN like to believe that what the market really wants is a fast dumb pipe for watching Netflix/Youtube, but it's a fantasy world.
The reality is that there's little money in the dumb pipes. The money is in content: in Comcast's case video content, and in Google's case, web apps and ads. Existing cable networks are plenty fast enough for video, so Comcast doesn't bother upgrading. They're not fast enough to enable the future Google envisions, where you store all your content "in the cloud" (and they datamine it to sell you ads), so they're building fiber. It's that easy to understand.
And other than in a few neighborhoods, they don't have to.
10 minutes north of Durham, ya, I'm sure Time Warner will feel the need to 'fight' there, let alone all the neighborhoods in Durham that won't get Google Fiber.
I have Time Warner here in Austin. Although Google Fiber is not yet available for my place, in the last 6 months, TWC has increased my speeds and sent out new modems/routers.
The cable industry has been working on ramping up speeds for the last decade starting with DOCSIS 3 to compete with Verizon FIOS. The development of DOCSIS 3.1 for gigabit speeds over cable actually started before Google Fiber existed. It seems like people don't want to give Verizon credit for this because perhaps Google offers a more compelling story or maybe because it would suggest that competition in the telecom duopoly actually worked out pretty well. Even after Verizon scaled back / halted their build-out of FIOS they had dumped so much money into it that we suddenly had a competitive market for FTTH/G-PON equipment and trained contractors to build it. Google Fiber and muni FTTH projects couldn't have existed without Verizon basically seeding the market for it in the US.
Yeah, and Verizon couldn't exist without the government taking away the rights to my land and giving it to Verizon to run their cables without compensating me in the slightest. What's your point?
Verizon could be selling gigabit FIOS today but they don't because there is no competition in most markets. FIOS is profitable, just not as profitable as wireless.
Guess what Verizon uses to provide wireless? (Hint: public airwaves, most of which they got for free too)
It's impossible to talk about this in general terms, but in most places, the utility poles are owned by the power company and Verizon pays to string fiber along them. It's unclear whether FiOS is profitable when taking into account the capital investment. They're running a small operating profit, but they have $23 billion to recoup. Almost all the traffic on Verizon's network runs on LTE, and that is spectrum Verizon bought the license to for billions of dollars in auctions.
It's staggering how much FUD there is on these issues. This is stuff you can just Google to inform yourself about.
I hear you. The problem is that the response is super local. ie I think Google hoped that just entering the space would spur activity on regional and national levels. So far though it seems to be only those specific cities that Google launches in then respond. I hope that changes but the bigger guys are calling Google's bluff and just matching it in the small cities (like mine wooo hooo!) that Google launches in.
In Chandler, which was the first city in AZ to get broadband in the 90s, we are very jealous of Tempe, Scottsdale and Phoenix getting both Google Fiber love and Cox love due to that competition.
Cox probably cares about Chandler even less now it has competition to deal with, we'll be last to get 1Gbps Gigablast that suddenly was announced when Google Fiber picked Phoenix.
Woah. I am at 40th st and Cactus. No gigabit here yet. Last time I had a tech out he was saying this area gets newer stuff quicker because we are so close to North Scottsdale.
EDIT North Scottsdale is generally first because that is where most of the company execs live.
We are in this weird vortex of 'new stuff' - I grew up in PV where we got Cox Cable (5mb down, 5mb up) back in what must have been 1995 - the weird thing is that the sheer volume of customers in PV is so low (big/sprawling houses) that the quality of the infrastructure there is crappy - my parents are still there and have a Cable/Phone/Internet outage probably once a week.
Just north where we live, I think we are right in the middle of everything because even during that huge AZ/CO outage a few days ago - PV was blacked out and we had no impact.
I think we are in the bermuda triangle of broadband in Phoenix.
I don't question it, I just appreciate it and thank whichever god is in charge of these sorts of things.
Even when they do that, you should still support Google Fiber by switching to it. If nobody switches then Google Fiber will die for lack of customers and revenue and the established players will go back to using their old attitude towards the customers, and never upgrade again.
Certainly true... I have a 50' inflatable arrow on the top of my roof that says "I need Google Fiber" so I'm at least doing my part to get the message across...
It's harder than just stringing up new wire to the poles.
I honestly don't know how much work it is to add to the buried cable. If you have to go dig up each piece of conduit, that would royally freaking suck. Maybe there are access tunnels where they can use strings or something to yank the cable through. I would love to hear more about this.
And honestly, fibre to my cul-de-sac would probably be good enough for me.
I am sure there is - but I don't think CL had the capacity to really 'push' Cox. They weren't rolling out anything better than what Cox had, just comparable, so both were just happily sitting there for years and years not really bothering each other.
Then GFib comes in and suddenly everyone has piles of internet laying around ;)
I don't live there, but I guess it is an oligopoly. They probably offer identical (or very similar) services at similar prices, both making a huge profit. Neither wants to rock the highly profitable boat.
> the idea of going back to < 50mbps makes me sad.
Sincere question. What are the specific functional improvements that you've seen at a much higher mbps? Better youtube performance? Faster p2p? Faster web page load times? More supportive of a multi-device household?
Here's a concrete instance. Last week I made the decision to buy the new Dragon Age game. I have 100mbit, and it downloaded in about 30-45 minutes. This was frustrating because my time is valuable, and of the 3 hours I had to play a game, I only got to play for 2 hours. If I had had the foresight to upgrade to gigabit, it would have downloaded in under 5 minutes. My excellent provider, CondoInternet.net provides 100mbit for $60, and gigabit for $80, but unfortunately I cheaped out. (Well, rather, I decided to first try 100mbit since it was such a huge upgrade over my previous Internet before spending more cash because I'm cheap like that).
Gigabit means you can make decisions on a whim, and not have to schedule down time days in advance. I mean I play video games when I'm physically and mentally exhausted (the couple hours post-gym, for instance).
Really good question - for my household specifically, streaming 4k and HD at full quality to multiple TVs and still being able to game in real time without massive interruptions.
Also buying digital delivery games (steam or PSN) is awesome :)
Did you get the 'GigLife' flyer? If you notice in the footnotes, "GigLife is 150mbps internet service" -- the Gigabit service is a different thing they are calling 'Gig Blast' or something like that.
I've experienced the opposite so far in my area; I've received a data cap from Comcast for which my monthly overage charges exceed $100, on top of the $50 base cost, for the same 50Mbps service.
Knoxville is a Comcast test market, so we get data caps. You can buy a faster connection, it just means you hit the cap faster. Just a heads up on what Comcast is planning on doing to you next...
Advice to all the folks in the new cities: Google deploys per-neighborhood, once signups reach a critical level. So get your apartment manager, your HOA, your neighbors to sign up, even if they don't have any immediate plans to switch. Post tear-off-tag signs in your community with the url: google.com/fiber
Yep, I had to do exactly this here in Austin. I literally went door to door, met many of my neighbors for the first time, and mentioned that we were only a few signatures away from fiber in our neighborhood. Even after getting all of the signatures we have to wait until June for our install, which kind of sucks, but it's better than continuing to deal with Time Warner.
People seem to immediately throw away anything that looks like promotional material, but maybe it's just me or maybe I wasn't mailing them something they found interesting. However, I'm pretty sure a handwritten note to your neighbors would go a lot farther.
>> It’s been nearly five years since we offered to build a fiber-optic network in one U.S. city as an experiment — and were met with overwhelming enthusiasm.
I suspect the enthusiasm had to do with Google not acting like a phone/cable company. My own hope is that this remains true, and that they come to the Boston area.
I'm with you, but don't get your hopes up. Verizon never wired the city for FiOS because it was "too costly" [0].
Though something I always wanted to try when I lived downtown was netBlazr [1], which beams internet from antennas on the tops of buildings. If you've got your own place or can convince your landlord to install an antenna, they get fantastic reviews.
Excavation projects are famously successful in Boston, so the Google Fiber people are probably chomping at the bit to get their shovels in Beantown dirt. <\s>
But seriously, your hypothesis about GF's non-evil fundamental DNA is a good one. It makes for a much better user experience.
I am now surrounded by Google Fiber to the east and west, and Chattanooga's public fiber to the south, out here in Knoxville, TN. I really wish we could manage something here. This area has the biggest national lab, and a host of tech industry around it, I was kind of surprised more options didn't exist when I moved down a year ago.
It makes sense to me that Google went after these southeastern markets, because we are the area where Comcast is already enforcing (I've had to pay a couple times) data caps[1]. It's called a "trial" on their site, but the charges are real.
Same situation for myself currently. Doing some grad work at ORNL also.
I'm really frustrated by comcast, my fiance and I have a hard time doing bandwidth using things simultaneously (netflix/twitch). I constantly watch our data meter to make sure we don't approach the cap.
Although it's kind of baffling because I recently lived in the bay area. AT&T's UVerse I had wasn't much better in terms of the bandwidth and price, I don't recall a cap though.
I'm here for a few years before fleeing back to CA. I've been researching how to start any sort of movement for reasonable service in town but it seems the town council is pretty alright with comcast, even though some tech business have actually moved from knoxville to Chattanooga for the internet. So really not sure what to do other than give up.
Unrelated to this, but do you guys like board games or really almost anything else? I made the mistake of living in Oak Ridge and I've had a hell of a time meeting people ( I mean, clearly, I'm propositioning a random person in an unrelated HN thread). When my mentor isn't around I can go days without talking to people, and it's starting to drive me a bit mad. I keep buying board games and local multiplayer PC games, but they all languish unplayed.
Back onto the topic, I seriously feel Comcast is "trialing" their data caps her because the southeast is perceived as less tech-savvy, and they're probably aware they can get away with it more.
EDIT: Thanks y'all, I'll be sending out some emails when I get home.
Hah, I feel the same way! We have carcassonne and pandemic, but playing with just my fiance and I got boring quickly. I usually play single player pc games for the same reason. I'm in a bit better situation socially since I take classes at UTK and commute to ORNL twice a week so I talk and meet other students, but I'm always up for meeting new people who are similarly bored :) I'd probably be available on either the weekends or Friday, feel free to email. I'm also trying to get into hiking and exploring the area if you are into that stuff also.
I agree with your data cap comment. Although it's not just the southeast. Any cornered internet market seems to have them. They're pretty widespread in Canada.
My friend and his wife are in Knoxville working at ORNL (He's also working on his Masters at the moment). He was in my DnD group at NC State for our Nuclear Engineering undergrad. Feel free to email me and I can put you guys in touch.
Hey! I'm currently doing an internship at ORNL and hang out with a bunch of the interns / employees / postdocs. Send me an email if you'd like to join us on skiing trips, hiking, other get-togethers, etc.
Hey cool! I grew up in Knoxville! :) I still have family there, so I'm up there several times a year. Last time I was up there I saw a billboard for gigabit connections being offered by TDS Telecom, but I'm guessing that's in a reeeeeally small area there near Farragut.
FWIW, It's the same way down here in Huntsville. Google Fiber in Nashville and Atlanta, fiber in Chattanooga, and I'm stuck with a 25 megabit cable connection that I pay out the nose for. We're trying to get something together here with the local utility[0] (a la Chattanooga), but it's still in the very early conception stages. It's still years away, if ever, from actually happening.
I'm from Knoxville, though I currently live in the Raleigh-Durham area (one of the areas the fiber gods have smiled upon). You should consider coming out here. I would not go back.
(Land prices are super cheap in Knoxville, though!)
Well, I'm only down here for a relatively short bit. Just starting the second year of a postmasters at Oak Ridge National Lab, and at the end either there's funding for me to stick around and be real staff for a while or I'm off to some bigger city.
I'm fully aware of the extreme cost of rolling out a fiber infrastructure in new locations, but I still wonder why Google isn't more aggressive with their expansion. While the upfront costs are great, they more or less have guaranteed success in most major cities. Nobody likes the incumbent telcos--they're hated all over the US. I just dream of a world in which we aren't getting raped by Comcast, TWC, and Cox. They are absolutely abysmal and have no incentive to make their customers happy given their market monopoly/oligopoly.
Google does not want to be in the telco business at all, it just has to be to protect the source of its revenue which is people connecting to them via some ISP. They are purposely building out in cheap to build areas. If they started hooking up rural areas and areas with high land values and labor it would be a very expensive exercise. What Google is trying to do is get into enough homes as cheaply as possible to light a fire under other telco companies without actually having to build out the whole country.
> I'm fully aware of the extreme cost of rolling out a fiber infrastructure in new locations,
It's really not that much. I could do my entire town for a little under $9m. Fortunately, Google just announced they'd be coming here (Raleigh-Durham) so hopefully I won't have to.
I'm starting to get interested in wiring my neighborhood (the best current option is 6mb during the day and ~0.5mb in the evenings.) Are there any resources you could send me on what it would take to wire up a small area?
I could talk about this for hours... But really, it's quite a bit of work and really specific to your area. Since you're looking to do a small area, you probably won't have enough capital to bury fiber which is a shame because that's when you start getting the biggest bang for the buck. There's a couple different angles you need to assess.
Politics/Bureaucrats -- what laws are in place to prevent you from deploying in X fashion? Can you bury fiber? Do you have to string across utility poles? If so, who owns the poles? (It'll either be the city or a utility company) What are their rates? What are the requirements to get quotes for their rates? (CenturyLink requires you to be a part of an NDA/Non-Compete Agreement program if you are reselling competitive services)
Business -- how many people are you looking to service? What's the absolute max you could potentially service? (usually subdivisions are zoned with a specific max amount of households) How many would you like to service? What is an acceptable cost? (I found $100 is the sweet spot for gigabit fiber) What kind of customers will you be servicing? (mostly soccor moms who will browse the internet from 11a-3p, young families who embrace video streaming from 8p-11p, retirees who only care about email and facebook from 9a-12p, etc.)
Technical -- how much bandwidth do you really need? Chances are you can actually service 100 or so residential customers with just a single gigabit ethernet connection. How much fiber will you need to run to everyone? The easiest thing to do is run single-mode fiber connected to a media converter in their house. Depending on how you can do "huts" (as google has dubbed them) you will probably do single cisco ToR switch with 48 spf+ ports for 40 customers. You will dedicate 4 ports for uplink connectivity via LACP and have 4 stand-by ports should one be bad. Scale this out as needed.
This will also be specific to your area -- but expect $10k/mile to run conduit to a hut with an additional $2k/mile for different fiber pulls. You would usually run conduit and some kind of fiber at the same time -- probably 96 strand single-mode. But that's up to you.
Not sure what else you need to know. That should be a good starting ground. The bulk of our capital was for fluid insurance bonds. About 80% of our working capital was going to be tied into those while we laid the fiber.
> I suspect I'm going to have to do copper on poles to make it viable, but how do I find out who owns the poles and what they charge?
That's where a lot of leg work comes in. You'll have to start asking the city who owns them. I started by emailing the first person who sounded like they had the title of "secretary". It took about 5 emails getting batted around before I found out.
> Also I don't have any idea how to go about purchasing upstream bandwidth - any advice there?
Again, this is the leg work on your part. Do all the research you can and figure out who has fiber running nearby. You're going to have to tap into that for service. If it's the provider you go with who owns it then you won't have a seperate dark fiber leasing cost. CenturyLink, AT&T, XO, TW Telecom, Layer3, Qwest (many of these have merged together, but they sometimes use older names when referring to circuits -- so a qwest circuit might be running nearby but you'd go through centurylink to get it) will all be more than happy to take your money, but most of the backbone providers probably won't return your phone calls if you're not talking about 100G connections.
I assume your comment was not meant to come off as hostile, but please don't use the word 'rape' to refer to things other than sexual violence. Doing so creates a hostile environment and minimizes the experiences of rape victims.
It's more a publicity stunt than a business. Google has been per-announcing Google Fiber for five years now, and they've only installed it in parts of three small cities.
They previously tried "free" ("must have Google Account") city-wide WiFi in Mountain View. That lasted from 2009 to 2014 and was shut down on May 3, 2014.
Google has only been expanding to cities that give them extensive tax breaks and other perks that haven't been afforded to most other companies. This is a good thing as it allows Google to expand, but they would never do this unless they got these incentives, plus the guaranteed number of users pre-signed up for the service so that they can guarantee some sort of ROI.
The big telecom companies got massive tax breaks at various times over the last 20 years to deploy high speed broadband, and essentially defrauded customers and tax payers by not doing what they said they would.
Techdirt really has some of the most one sided and consistently terrible articles of any "news" site I've seen.
Here is some actual relevant information related to the Google Fiber concessions, mainly in that they don't have to build out infrastructure to the entire city (unlike Comcast etc), and other breaks not given to previous providers:
> Google received stunning regulatory concessions and incentives from local governments, including free access to virtually everything the city owns or controls: rights of way, central office space, power, interconnections with anchor institutions, marketing and direct mail, and office space for Google employees. City officials also expedited the permitting process and assigned staff specifically to help Google. One county even offered to allow Google to hang its wires on parts of utility poles—for free—that are usually off-limits to communications companies.
It's kinda sad that the current ISP climate in America is such that faster speeds being rolled out is at the top of Hacker News.
That said, I'm excited as hell for the roll out. I'm not in one of the target cities, but Google Fiber spreading gives me hope that they'll eventually make it to me. I've lived with Bright House and their terribleness for far, far too long.
Whatever Google's motive, this does help the internet to fully self-realize: every endpoint should be able to both consume and provide services. I don't care if it's a phone or a tablet, or a smart toaster.
I wonder if, for customers who sign up for the basic (free after install fee) package, Google will ramp up their speed if the FCC announces that "broadband" is officially 25/3. That'd be a nice bonus.
Can any Google fiber user tell us how the TV offerings differ from Comcast/Uverse/TWC/Direct TV? Do they include local channels and other channels I've come to expect?
Here is the TV lineup for Kansas city Google fiber customers. Looks like they have all the local and traditional channels. Then add-ons like HBO for $20/month.
Seems slightly more expensive than the Comcast/Uverse packages I've had but with much much more bandwidth (not that I am capping out my 45mbs right now).
Although I'd love to see them come to Houston, we're 640 square miles, so it's not really possible to do a "city" rollout. If Google ever rolls out fiber by Zip Code, that'll be for us.
I would love to see these guys bring us their MVNO Sprint product and/or build a technology park fed by Google Fiber instead, either of which would still have the desired effect of lowering consumer bandwidth costs.
Competition isn't always the boon to free enterprise that we would like it to be. I live in Omaha, NE, where Cox and CenturyLink are the primary ISPs. CenturyLink has limited gigabit fiber in some neighborhoods (not mine, unfortunately), launched late last year.
Cox has raised internet rates about 7% twice in the last 14 months.
Apple earnings, @ $18 billion, are a smidge higher than Sprint's market cap. T-Mobile US has at various times been for sale. It makes you wonder if the major Web ecosystem players won't just start buying SPs so they can break out of bandwidth scarcity as a business model.
Hooray for me and all my Raleigh-Durham brethren! Besides just being a great development, I think this reflects the rapid growth of the tech sector in this area, and having cheap fiber ISP options will go a long way to ensuring we continue to attract top talent & companies.
But also no love for places near Atlanta like Decatur, Avondale Estates, College Park. They're just gonna go for the core + rich northern suburbs. It's a business decision and I get it, but hopefully they'll expand out to those areas soon. To many of those communities in the southern unincorporated areas of fulton/dekalb and southern near-suburbs, free "high speed" internet will be a HUGE boon to the younger generations.
I had a chance to hear a discussion with the Durham City Manager about this last year. Basically the cities that are most willing to work with Google (favorable laws/willingness to guarantee removing construction red tape/etc) have a huge leg up. There are strategic reasons too, but Google wants to come in, lay down a bunch of cables and move on to the next.
They have the leverage to ask cities to actively pull down barriers that other ISPs would face, and the cities willing to do that are the ones who get consideration.
Only the wealthiest of the Atlanta suburbs, it seems. What good is "affordable" true broadband that challenges the cable and DSL companies if it never makes it to those who could most use the savings?
I'm going by the map graphic they have here[1] showing certain suburbs highlighted. Granted, College Park and Hapeville aren't necessarily wealthy areas but they are near the airport so that makes sense. I was thinking more of Sandy Springs and Avondale Estates, and to a lesser extent Decatur.
Of course, that graphic could have zero to do with their plans and I'm going on about nothing. I do wish you could check by ZIP code alone instead of needing a street address as well. It would be nice to know just how close the service is to me geographically.
MY SWEET REVENGE ON TIME WARNER CABLE AND COMCAST!! Take my money Google. I'd love to see the look on their faces when they realize that Google is coming to eat their lunch.
I really wish they start the service in the D.C Metro/VA regions too. We have FIOS but they charge ridiculous prices (i.e. ridiculous compared to G Fiber prices :-))
I'm surprised they didn't choose San Jose. There must be some things outside of their control considering they would have expanded into their own neighborhood.
In the middle of last year, Google announced that they will also look at other bay area cities like Santa Clara for Fiber. I don't see what happened to that and there is no more mention of Santa Clara in the latest post. Maybe it fell through? The last update I see is from the city claiming that the discussions have ended - http://siliconvalleypower.com/index.aspx?recordid=3191&page=...
They will probably hustle now. But their "fiber" wasn't true fiber like Google Fiber. RST's solution was fiber to a wireless node that would power multiple homes.
I just hope it doesn't take too long to radiate out from Atlanta. Barrow County is the middle of nowhere, but it is right on the road between Atlanta and Athens.
I dunno, Nashville's got the AT&T building, heck Google put it squarely in the shot and images for this rollout, seems almost like a message, though it is pretty iconic in a city with little other skyline.
Perhaps you're not color blind enough. :-) I'm much more than mildly color blind and I can distinguish the legend items just fine. Certainly more so than most graphs/maps I see.
Here's an idea for a web plugin: it takes displayed colors that you have difficulty distinguishing and moves them in color space, to the point where you can distinguish them.
Is there any rime or reason to the cities that Google chooses to put fiber into? Is it a matter of more friendly local government, less resistant local teleco's, a combination thereof or some other factors?
Just seems the locations aren't exactly tech hubs so I'm trying to get a better idea of how the expansion works.
Raleigh-Durham, Austin, and to a lesser extent Provo, are definitely regional tech hubs.
Another interesting observation is that all four of the new cities surround Chattanooga, TN which has had municipal gigabit fiber for years now. I wonder if that had anything to do with Google's decision-making process.
For example: Google looked at Seattle's NIMBY laws regarding utility boxes on sidewalks (each requiring a lengthy community approval process) and said, "Nope!"
Seattle's new mayor is now looking how to streamline the process to make the city more Google friendly, should the opportunity arise again.
That rule (SDOT 2-2009) was repealed in October, 2014 and replaced with new, better requirements, including removing the "abstentions/no answer counts as a 'no'" when seeking a permit to place a cabinet, removing almost all restrictions on small-height cabinets, and stops owners of property adjacent to the easement from being able to block the entire process on their own.
> Google looked at Seattle's NIMBY laws regarding utility boxes on sidewalks (each requiring a lengthy community approval process)
Which is good, as sidewalks are for walking, not utility installation pads.
In much of the UK outside conservation areas BT has powers to install cabinets as it sees fit. Combined with utility poles there are now some pavements on my town impassable to prams.
The parent was downvoted, but this is actually true in the UK. The are utility boxes in some really strange locations. Such as a bicycle lane that runs straight into a box, then just continues on the other side.
Places like Kansas City and Atlanta are much more development-friendly. In Atlanta, it doesn't matter how ugly your development is--we're talking about a city bisected by a 15 lane highway. Moreover, these are "up and coming" cities who see fiber as a competitive advantage. San Francisco doesn't feel the need to offer fiber to get tech workers to move there. Heck, they're trying to get the tech workers to move out. A place like Atlanta is the exact opposite.
As mentioned elsewhere, its a combination of factors at least for here in Provo. Provo does have a sizable number of tech startups like LucidChart and according to this report it was number 11 on the tech startup list http://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/moving-up-provo-orem-a...
Also, as part of the deal for coming to Provo, Provo city sold the existing fiber network to google for a single dollar and google's job was to upgrade the system to gigabit. The whole infrastructure was in place for the most part, so it was a good deal that they couldn't pass up. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Google-Fiber-Provo-iProvo-P...
The reason Kansas City was selected was supposedly because they were the most willing to give access to utility poles and let google dig up streets/alleys where necessary to run the fibre. I don't know if that's the case with these more recent expansions, but i suspect it is.
KC was selected for a lot of reasons -- tons of cities were desperate to be the first Fiber city and would've given any accommodation necessary. KC had the perfect coalescence of geography (quite flat, minimal bodies of water, etc), market availability, and governmental cooperation for the pilot.
Dude, Raleigh is home to the Research Triangle Park, one of the largest research parks in the country. Pretty much all the major tech companies have a presence here. Plus, three major universities all in the same general area. It's not some podunk little town.
Technically, RTP is fully inside Durham. Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill each house one of those major universities, and the region as a whole is known as "The Triangle" or "The Research Triangle."
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I believe that in amsterdam, even though you only have 1 fiber line running to your house, you can choose from many ISPs over that line. Since (I assume) google is not installing an entirely new fiber network, but merely buying fiber rights and doing last-mile construction, it seems like that would also be a reasonable framework to establish here.
I'm not saying it would be easy. It would take a lot of legal work. But if google's missions to not be evil, and disrupt the ISP market are to believed, they could make it easier.
Listing cities is really disingenuous as the number of neighborhoods they will actually serve will be quite low, let alone the metro area of cities like Atlanta is quite large and the area most likely buried under cable.
Cox, in Phoenix, miraculously doubled everyone's speeds > 100mbps last year because they were concerned with our general happiness levels and wanted to show their affection.
Nope... that's not it. Ran into two leads at Smash Burger in June of 2014 and asked them on the spot "When are we getting gigabit speed?" and their reply was "End of year, we gotta move before Google Fiber gets here."
None of that would have happened if G Fiber wasn't coming - CenturyLink and Cox were perfectly fine dabbling in 50mbps service for the rest of eternity without true competition.
Now in less than 12 months my 65mbps service was freely upgraded to 150mbps and we are suppose to have a 1Gbps option any month now (there are test neighborhoods live since last year around Scottsdale)
I have no illusions about how fortunate we are being in a well-wired/competitive environment, but damn am I happy and appreciative.
It actually has more impact on me and where I would want to live than I thought... the idea of going back to < 50mbps makes me sad.