Pittsburgh, Seattle Announce Interest In Google's Fiber Trial

An anonymous reader contributes a link to a press release from the mayor of Pittsburgh that says the city has announced, along with Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and the University of Pittsburgh, that it intends to respond to Google's 1Gbps FTTH (Fiber to the Home) request for information. Seattle's mayor, too, wants in on the action, and more cities will surely pile on.

Comments

Pittsburgh Tuxes

[K. S. Kyosuke]

Pittsburgh Tuxes will certainly welcome this service, provided that the modem won't be a winmodem.

Re:Pittsburgh Tuxes

[mdf356]

The east half of Seattle (Redmond and neighboring) can get Verizon FiOS, but over here in Ballard and other parts on the West side there's nothing faster than Comcast. *Someone* building out infrastructure would be nice.

Re:Pittsburgh Tuxes

[Nethead]

The Seattle Metro Area is well covered by Clearwire 4G WiMax. It will beat the pants off of anything DSL does. And for you, it's buying local (Kirkland) and helping to keep local geeks like me employed. And the back bone of the system; I can't say much but (NDA) but trust me, FAT PIPE.

Re:Pittsburgh Tuxes

[Kjella]

Now, in a higher-end neighborhood in Seattle, the fastest DSL available is 1.5M/768k and even then it's rarely that fast.

For someone claiming to not be a third world country, you do wonderful impressions. Here in Norway about 10% of the households have fiber now and it's growing rapidly, I think the most optimistic claim I saw was 35% by 2015. About 80% have broadband, with an average download speed of 5.7 Mbit/s and a median speed of 3.4 Mbit/s. That's in a country that is more sparesly populated than the US and where Seattle is bigger than our biggest city.

Re:Pittsburgh Tuxes

[im_thatoneguy]

Again though. Have you ever actually tried USING the service? With 10 users in a prime location it probably works great. My second hand experience with Wimax is that it's better than 3G but significantly worse than crappy DSL.

Re:Pittsburgh Tuxes

[Kjella]

What are they rolling out in Norway? Is it some form of xPON or are they using switched ethernet (like I expect Google will be doing)?

Since I don't have fiber myself, I "only" have a 25/2.5 Mbit cable line I don't know. I do know they lay fiber to inside the house where a converter box makes it into TV, internet and phone signals so it's a full end-to-end fiber network. The biggest provider (80%) is a franchise company so the terms differ slightly but 10/10 Mbit or 15/15 Mbit is their lowest offering. The family package normally has a 30/30 Mbit line but you can get up to 100 Mbit/s if you really want to pay. I think there are trials running with 1 Gbit/s but I honestly don't think there's much market, since they tend to have to actually deliver and not just fake it with "up to".

They w

[Anonymous Coward]

Troy in upstate NY announced the same on Thursday. http://troyrecord.com/articles/2010/02/12/news/doc4b74e2cd9e36e314599627.txt

I bet they'll receive tens of thousands of applications in the coming weeks.

Burlington, Vermont

[mysqlrocks]

Several citizens from Burlington, Vermont have contacted Google about this for our city. Someone on the City Council has asked the mayor to approach Google, as well. We actually already have a municipal fiber-optic network, Burlington Telecom. However, they are currently experiencing financial troubles and the City is considering bringing in an outside investor or partner. Google, if you want to come here we've already got the fiber in the ground. Let's talk ;)

Re:Burlington, Vermont

[vermontmcintyre]

I am on the Burlington Telecom Advisory Committee and we have been discussing this amongst ourselves as well. The timing on this is advantageous and important because of the issues Bradley mentioned above. The city in general is focused on this issue, so Google has an excellent chance to make a powerful and positive impact by its mere presence here in Burlington.

Re:Publicity Stunt

[hedwards]

The reason they can do it is that the people currently doing it are doing a terrible job. The point of this is that it's good for Google to have people wired with fast connections. They're in the business of selling ad space and other internet services which improve greatly with higher bandwidth connections. There's also the corporate benevolence angle which tends to help as they try to keep growing as large as possible. A positive corporate image can do wonders for keeping people from demanding anti-trust investigations and such.

If they do a halfway decent job in one city it should scare the regional monopoly players enough that they start upgrading and lowering prices to try and keep Google off their turf.

Re:Too big?

[billy8988]

Pittsburgh's population is only around 300k. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh).

Re:Publicity Stunt

[Daengbo]

Except that telcos routinely get money from municipalities for "modernization." The telcos then complain about increased costs while milking the customers for as much money as can be gotten away with.

Maybe Google is trying to "force the hand" of monopolies so that the customer doesn't have to suffer.