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Google Fiber Delays Broadband Award To 2011
coondoggie writes "The response to the invitation to become a test market for Google's planned high-speed broadband network has been overwhelming, so much so the company today said it would delay awarding the system until 2011. According to a post in its website, Google said 1,100 communities and 194,000 individuals responded to its proposal. Google had hoped to award the test program this month."
more time for me to spam their system with more entries!
Considering the high demand, Google Fiber should make multiple awards.
Maybe Google could get into the ISP business.
Even if conflicts of interest would prevent Google from direct involvement, I would heartily welcome Google Fiber franchising.
Man what do you do when the fiber blocks you up? Drink more water? Maybe google needs an enema?
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
What if some of those 1100 communities were to just build the fiber out themselves, instead of looking for Google to do it for them?
Is there much point in broadband that fast? At some point, other parts of the system (such as the local network or hard drive) become the slowest link in the system and the extra speed is wasted.
So Google talks about rolling out fiber to the home and they get nearly 200,000 responses and 1,100 communities express interest. That pretty well sums up the network infrastructure in the US. It's too slow, too expensive, and falling behind the times. I'm sure we will not be regarded as the most technologically advanced nation within another generation. This generation has failed to invest in critical infrastructure and has let corporate interests divert the money that should be being spent on public works projects, into those corporations own back pockets.
And yet, I can't help but think, "we deserve this". I mean the people are too lazy and stupid to pay attention to what's going on, or bother to vote, or bother to research candidates before they vote. So corporate shills are elected. They hand over taxpayer dollars, but require no return on the taxpayer's investment and pass laws to make sure taxpayers have fewer, more expensive choices when purchasing services.
Maybe one of the few innovative companies with enough prestige will be able to start real reform, but I seriously doubt it. This empire is crumbling and, as usual, the average person is too arrogant (USA #1 whooo!) to even consider how far we've fallen behind already. They don't want to hear it or have to think about the hard decisions that need to be made to turn things around.
Good luck Google, but I almost think you should just test out your new technologies in Japan or Korea or Sweden or somewhere where they are actually implementing fiber to the home, for a more realistic sense of what your future customers will be using.
Remember that time Google promised to hand out 10 million dollars, based on poorly conceptualized public participation, and then ran the participation part of it, got huge press for it, and then...
Oh that is right, they actually gave 50,000,000 dollars ($10 mil each for 5 projects).
So you are saying they will roll out Fiber to 5 times as many places as they promise?
I steal signatures. This one used to be yours.
I stand corrected, and missed the news. But, seriously, 2 years to pick five projects, along with many months of non-responsiveness in between doesn't exactly inspire confidence in their execution or attention span.
Well I feel like a retard. It was only $10,000,000 dollars spread between 5 projects.
I also found out that Slashdot is proud of the fact that you can't edit or fix your comments. Nice to know.
I steal signatures. This one used to be yours.
No, I remember something that's kind of like that, except for the fact that they did follow through and give out the $10 million dollars, split among several projects.
Yes, in that it received a huge response beyond what Google expected, it was exactly like this. Sometimes, Google doesn't realize how popular Google's ideas will be. I'm sure many other businesses wish they could have that "problem" with their initiatives.
This project isn't about a charitable act. This project is about seeking a place to do a demonstration project aimed at improving the market conditions for Google's products. Its looking for an opportunity to shift the market for internet connectivity by exerting pressure the same way Google has on the browser market with Chrome, and the handheld device OS market with Android.
It may be win-win with the community (or communities) selected to be part of the demonstration, but its not charitable in any sense.
You're right, 10 million dollars is something people spend on a whim and giving it to a deserving company isn't that important, Maybe they should have drawn it from a hat and delivered it to a guy who's idea was to use nukes on whales to improve oil supply. The thing with a 10 million dollar prize that's open to all of the general public and advertised all over the news, is it draws so much media attention that anybody with a passing thought in their head submits. I'd estimate it take at least 6 months to remove the millions of terrible ideas, then another 6 months to weed down to 100 good ideas, then of course R&D to find out which ones are actually technically possible/plausible, which would of course require experts in fields that google only has half a finger in.
Now that's not a full pardon however, the honorary idiot award goes to, the person who gives these estimated dates and dosn't anticipate getting millions of responses for something they widely advertised and almost anyone would want.
Actually, it says something about your attention span.
2 years to go from having no ideas, getting thousands of ideas, sorting and grading, picking 16, and going from "Make educational content available online for free" to picking a partner out of all the options and funding it when it won't directly fall into a Profit center is pretty good.
Am I missing something?
Distributed Denial of APK: It takes 15 seconds to reply to him anonymously, but wastes tons of his time if we all do it.
I think this is a pretty good indication that the general public would like faster access to the internet, despite the telcos' claiming that people are pretty satisfied. I for one welcome our multiplexing digital overlords, and would like to remind them that I'm not interested in cloud services until I get at least 2 9s of at least 10Mbps connectivity with overall uptime of 4 9s or so.
I still find it funny that all these municipalities were drooling all over themselves to give out right of way to Google for free when they would have charged any other company money or charged them a tax for the same.
I think it's that way so a person can't write a good post, get modded up, and then put shockimage links into it afterwards. Refunding mod points is an option but after how long? Could sockpuppets mod themselves up and a few days later edit posts to get their points back?
I actually like the no-editing thing but damn does it attract spelling/grammer nazi's.
Sorry, i know this post is O/T.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
You're bitching it took 2 years to pick 5 projects?! That was down right fast by corporate standards! And non-responsive? You didn't even know they accomplished their goal...
I agree; a no-edit policy provides incentive to get it right the first time, and I think that results in a higher caliber of comments overall.
But yeah, the grammar nazi in me wants to tell you that pluralized nouns don't receive apostrophes.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
They should do it like Dpreview forums: after you post, you have 2 minutes to re-edit your post X-amount of time(s).
Both Kansas City, MO and North Kansas City, MO cannot get the fiber because Google strips off City after the name. So they are Kansas, MO and North Kansas, MO.
Also North Kansas City, MO has fiber to the home already.
Fair point. I'm not unfamiliar with how foundations spend out resources: Gates, Hewlett, Skoll and Omidyar foundations come to mind as similarly sized, and I've been involved with some of them on projects of this size.
My ire at Google is partially based on the naivate and ego with which they approached the whole operation. They strongly implied that their Google approach will be faster, better, smarter than the existing foundation methods, and then, after much fucking around (I'm sorry, innovation), finally realize that there are very good reasons for the way foundations do things, and that this stuff is actually kind of difficult to do correctly. At the end of the day, they end up with a solution that looks exactly like what they would have done if they'd just sat down with a handful of people who have done this before and asked for advice.
And there is no excuse whatsoever for blowing your deadline by several months and not mentioning it publicly.
It really seems like you have a grudge against Google. It's their money to waste. Not to mention that what you are saying is the equivalent of advocating for a "business as usual" approach. Sure they might have found out the hard way that they couldn't come up with a better way, but at least they are trying. Or we could all just do exactly what we've always done because that must be the best way to do it.
Right now many places have decided to leap in with a flavor or PON which is not much more than cable TV over fiber. The local bunch keeps saying it can grow in speed forever yet the largest user of it in the world (NT&T) has hit a wall and both AT&T and Verizon have both pulled back plans for future rollout. Its looking like shared isn't the way to go but no one has a good idea how to do direct point to point that isn't way too expensive to roll out.
As far as *PON being future proof, it has managed to get 40x faster in 2 decade in a lab compared to point to point which is now 20,000x faster using 4 decades of off the shelf equipment.
The average US constituency is massive , at around 700,000 people. This is much larger than originally envisioned when the country was founded, and guarantees that the little guy is drowned out. From Thirty-Thousand.org:
The framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights intended that the total population of Congressional districts never exceed 50 to 60 thousand. Currently, the average population size of the districts is nearly 700,000 and, consequently, the principle of proportionally equitable representation has been abandoned.
Such large constituencies as we see now in the US are also much larger than in other representative democracies. The Isle of Wight is an interesting comparison:
With a single Member of Parliament and 132,731 permanent residents in 2001, it is also the most populous parliamentary constituency in the United Kingdom.
While not widely known, the first article of the original twelve proposed for the Bill of Rights laid out the size of congressional constituencies, as an attempt to avoid that the dilution of individual votes seen in the modern US. From the US House of Representatives website:
Article the first
After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.
James Madison himself talked about how larger constituencies tend to favor those with land and property (i.e., the rich). He was writing about the justification for having larger constituencies and longer terms for the Senate than for the House, but his description of the basic political mechanics is sound. From page 155 of The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates by Ralph Ketcham:
Large districts are manifestly favorable to the election of persons of general respectability, and of probable attachment to the rights of property, over competitors depending on the personal solicitations practicable on a contracted theater.
I.e., large districts are more impersonal, favor the rich, and are less representative. This is precisely what we have in the US. I do not expect any real progress until this gross imbalance is corrected -- and frankly I suspect changing my citizenship would be much more productive for me personally.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
The 'We the People Surround Them' crowd known as the Tea Party don't want taxes. They want no services. They want spending cut.
FIBER? FIBER?