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

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.

*raises hand*

[andytrevino]

Google, I too am interested in your fiber trial. Please consider my house in Wisconsin for fiber service.

Love,

Andy.

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

[Dr. Spork]

And guess what comes after that? Total zombification. That's right, the inevitable result of good internet access from Google and your astutely-prophecized inevitable tax writeoffs will be cuts in our regulatory systems that will introduce zombifying chemicals in ordinary tapwater, leaving entire cities of people clawing each other in search of brains to devour. Oh, if only we hadn't squandered that tax money! If only our mayors had been able to resist the lure of faster internet! This is the end!

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

[TubeSteak]

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.

A lot of businesses won't build [infrastructure] unless they get some government tax benefits or funding.

Example: I don't recall the last time I heard about a stadium or convention center getting built without [city] putting up taxpayer dollars or passing a law to give them a tax break.

I only use those two because they're the easiest for most people to google since the process usually receives endless local news coverage. Factories are also waaaay up on the tax break & subsidy food chain.

Re:tax dollars for corporate capital expenditures

[shutdown -p now]

When "free market" (not that it's actually free... but hey, at least there's "competition") has failed repeatedly for decades, a competent monopoly with a proven track record is more than welcome.

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:Would you move to the winning city?

[Grimbleton]

What, not Pittsburgh?

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: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: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: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:Pittsburgh Tuxes

[symbolset]

Washington is a weird state. They recognized the value of fiber infrastrucure early because they had DOE projects (notably Hanford) that were well served by operators who were confident the nuclear fuel wouldn't kill them. That meant high bandwidth low latency connections to different points.

And then there's I-5. Washington has this international path that threads from California to Canada. I was there when they buried the fiber optic cables under I5 - they're bundles as thick as your leg. Seattle does not lack bandwidth - and they have their own peering point.

They're not even new to this - Grays Harbor county on the coast and Grant county in the center had programs that resulted in 100-1000gbps service (for many years now!) to the customers before Comcast and AT&T shut down expansion of the projects. They have the bandwidth, but they can't afford the lawyers. It's sick when that prevents progress. Maybe Google can help us here.

We had a law to allow Public Utility Districts to resell bandwidth to ISPs and build out fiber networks from the proceeds, but Comcast and QWest killed it.

Bring on the Google! I'm sure they know how to do this in a way that does not prevent progres!