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

Fiber to the HOME trial

[nurb432]

Key word there is HOME, not business, not municipality. I also offer to be a trial at my home. FreeNet would just scream.

tax dollars for corporate capital expenditures

[SuperBanana]

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

And guess what comes next? A reverse-competitive bidding process, whereby various cities write off their taxes on both the profits and the capital equipment, waive requirements like community access programs, and more- just to get google to give them fiber-to-the-home, something that has no proven public benefit. Which is idiotic- I don't want my tax dollars used to fund capital expenditures for corporations!

Anyone else a little more than slightly freaked out by this move? Google now encompasses search, email, instant messaging, calendaring, social networking, blogging (both content production and reading), cellular and telephone services, online payment, and now actual last-mile services? What's left?

Why does it feel like in 10 years we'll be calling it The Gnet, not the Internet?

Re:tax dollars for corporate capital expenditures

[log0n]

Not particularly freaked no.. they haven't been evil thus far. Belief in online privacy is naive and I trust Google far more than I do Verizon, Comcast, etc etc.

Re:tax dollars for corporate capital expenditures

[DarkTempes]

Oh, come on. It's not like Google has anything close to a monopoly on any of those services. I understand people (rightly!) getting upset over privacy issues with using Google services but acting like Google is taking over the internet is just silly. They don't own the backbones and they don't even create much content. They mostly stick with ways to find and view content and they are not even close to being the only way to find or view that content online (excluding maybe Google Books).

ISPs/telecoms in the high-speed internet business, for the most part, have regional monopoly or duopolies in the US. I also believe a lot of their intrastructure was promoted in some way by government tax benefits or funding. With that said what's the problem with Google testing the waters to see if they could potentially become a competitor without getting bulldozed from incumbents? Do you really think anytime in the near future Google is going to be able to drive out multiple entrenched companies that are, lets face it, much larger monetarily?

Re:tax dollars for corporate capital expenditures

[Khyber]

"They don't own the backbones"

Have you been paying attention to how much dark fiber Google owns? They're probably BUILDING THEIR OWN BACKBONES. I most certainly would if I bought up that vast amount of unlit fiber.

Re:After Comcast,

[Hurricane78]

Wait for Comcast to sue Google just as they sued the cities, just because they intended to build their own net. (For what? Deprivation from their monopoly? I don’t know.)

They will sue Google at least long enough, to stall things, until they got something ready and bribed their way into the city taking their offer instead.

Man, I hope I’m wrong. It hurts my heart to see a fellow geek without at least 10 Mb/s downstream. :/

Re:Would you move to the winning city?

[symbolset]

Seattle is committing hundreds of miles of in-place fiber, and access to hundreds of thousands of utility poles. If they reach out to the community for contributions of resources and subscription commitments they may not need Google to pull this off. And Seattle has a world-class Peering point shared by All these people.

Re:Pittsburgh Tuxes

[JustNilt]

I think you mean the east side and north end of Puget Sound but yeah. Last I heard, Qwest refused to do a fiber rollout and threatened lawsuits if the city did their own. When they finally started offering faster tiers they called it "fiber-like" speeds. Now, in a higher-end neighborhood in Seattle, the fastest DSL available is 1.5M/768k and even then it's rarely that fast.

Qwest upper management is a bunch of asshats that cares only about milking every last dollar they can out of their infrastructure.

Re:Seattle's Mayor?

[shutdown -p now]

It would be a "fuck you" if Microsoft was offering ISP services.

As it is, I'm sure that most Microsoft employees in Seattle area would actually be quite happy with an affordable 100Mbps fiber connection to their homes, Google or not. From company's perspective, too, that would mean improved ability for employees to work from home (which isn't a rare occasion).

Re:Would you move to the winning city?

[Hadlock]

Seattle already has 400 optic fibers between every municipal court, police station, sub station, jail and holding area. It's a pretty substantial network, and all the leg work has already been done to get it across I-5 (that's the major hurdle). Go google "Jerry Hedstrom" in the mid 1990s Network World archives. Seattle probably has more dark fiber strung across (under) highways than any other city in the nation.

Re:They w

[nine-times]

Seriously, though, who wouldn't want Google to roll out fiber in their city? Even if they already have Verizon FIOS, why wouldn't you want competition?

I'm in NYC and can't get decent Internet to save my life. There don't seem to be many places in the country where the Internet doesn't stink, and Google's talking about 1Gbps? Of course they're going to get a lot of applications.