Slashdot Mirror
Can Google Save Us From Slow Internet
CoveredTrax writes "As part of the beta test of their new gigabit fiber network, Google has provided Stanford University with mouthwateringly high-speed Internet. Since the program was announced, the service, which is now being provided free to students and faculty in the Palo Alto area, has got a lot of people to asking (sometimes begging) that their city be next on Google's list for communication salvation. But can Google save us all from inferior web access? And more importantly, is it a good idea to let them?"
I just want a provider that doesn't drop me every 30 minutes, unlike some I could name *cough* Veri--zon DSL
See subject.
AT&T can't.
Comcast won't.
Verizon could, if the could afford it, eventually.
Otherwise I'll be waiting on Sonic.net.
Can Google save us from slow YouTube videos?
Unfortunately the local phone company (Frontier) has a mortal lock on telecom, and of course the usual shitty cable provider (Time Warner) prevents any competition. So we won't be seeing fiber in my area, probably ever.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Google should get into the ISP space. AT&T and the lot keeps on complaing about how Google use a lot of bandwidth and have not paid for it. It's time for Google to show those major ISPs how things are done.
...that the US will remain a first world country in terms of internet access yet. Now if we could only fix healthcare accessibility. And college accessibility. And income inequality. And the incredible hunger and unemployment rates.
Furries make the internet go.
But can Google save us all from inferior web access? And more importantly, is it a good idea to let them?"
Probably. Yes.
Google has a very excellent track record of awesomeness. Let them save us.
Just wait till Google starts building rafts in the Pacific.
when google gives us free high-speed access and tons of other services to which we will all benefit greatly! But the cost will always be our privacy. Understand google's profit comes from advertising and then piece together how they will benefit. I'm not in favor.
is it a good idea to let them?
No, of course not. Obviously. It's kind of like a neighborhood that's had a spot of high crime deciding to let policemen with cameras station themselves inside each bedroom 24/7.
"Oh, gee, I dunno about that... but maybe it'll be okay if their badges are really, really shiny. I like Shiny...
Slow Internet is not the problem. The problem is that we (or rather, our applications) demand more and more data. When 480p video used to suffice, now 1080p is all-important, and soon some 3D variation of that. Where text used to be just fine now it's necessary to watch a Youtube video. Where you used to get animated GIF banner ads now you get full video ads. Where before our preferred content format was local files saved on our hard drives and distributed via home networks, now we store everything in "the cloud" and stream it through our Internet connections. It would be nice if Google tried to do something about that. (I know, I know, get off my lawn and all that. But still, each of those trends irritate me for various reasons, more irritating and bandwidth-consuming ads, less ownership of your stuff, being forced to watch videos when text would be faster to load and read, and not require speakers or interrupt your music.)
Currently on a 2year contract for 200/10 Mbit internet with 4.95e/month for the first year and 24.95e/month for the second. 29.95e/month after that.
No caps or that silly stuff. Oh, and I've topped 19.7Mb/s down and around 1Mb/s up with ideal conditions.
*hides*
Anyone who thinks that Google is doing this out of the kindness of their hearts is silly.
Google doesn't care whether you have high-speed access. They want to be able to trace your browsing and other internet usage habits, and they want to make sure they can serve up their ads in a way that minimizes the requirements on their resources.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
Thank you, Google!
Just in time!
I have been working on a project that would need to pump massive amounts of data through the pipes.
We live our lives mostly in the fleeting moment... but there is a way for that to change...
And more importantly, is it a good idea to let them?
I'd go with SatanCo and their service powered by burning babies for a gigabit fiber.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
As a current student and network admin of a small fiefdom at Stanford, I can tell you that the story is partially incorrect; Google is currently installing their fiber in the "faculty ghetto," a large Stanford-owned neighborhood by the school's foothills. They are not providing fiber to students - all student housing, academic buildings, and the campus core have separate mouthwateringly fast internet, Internet2, and wireless (via the SUNet).
More importantly, though, Google is *not* installing fiber in Palo Alto. One of the things that likely helped Stanford's case when we were selected is that the school owns *all the land* and even, as far as I know, all the utility lines on our campus. When you buy a house at Stanford, you actually only buy the building – you only lease the land. Because of that, when Stanford says "we're gonna install fiber," it's probably not tied up in regulatory messes, multiple contracts, competitive bidding, or the like. It takes the school's approval process, which may or may not be slow, but that's the only one; we don't have to ask the county, the city, or AT&T if we can do something - something that definitely speeds our adoption. I'm kinda scared that those kinds of facts might hurt further development of Google fiber.
How many Libraries of Congress can Stanford now download per second?
I live in a rural backwater 100 miles from nearest large metropolis. The ILEC Bell won't even put a DSLAM in my CO.
Fortunately, they missed buying up one of the local CLECs in the 1980s when they were on a spending spree, and said CLEC acquired a large mom-and-pop ISP around Y2K.
The CLEC moved into my area, put a DSLAM of their own in my CO, and gives me 5Mbps ADSL 2+ service (we tested to 16, but I didn't want to pay for more than 5). This uses the ILEC's copper from CO to NID but everything else is done by the CLEC/ISP.
Next month or so, the CLEC will be burying fiber in my yard -- for free -- and the yard of anybody else in the neighbourhood that already has underground services and wants it; whether they are a current customer or not. This is because they just strung fiber on the pole and have a crew in the area that can just go down the street and bang-bang-bang get er' done. Unlike Verizon FiOS, said CLEC is also NOT ripping out the existing copper infrastructure.
So, about 2 months from now, I expect to be running 20 Mbps fiber service from these guys; 6 months or a year later, I'll also have Internet TV through them (they just bought a small traditional cable company in the area). In a rural village. And a few years from now, I bet they'll be pushing a lot more than 20 Mbps through the fiber.
So, no, we don't need Google to get fast internet. We need competition!
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I can't wait.
"Hey Comcast. Fuck you, Google's here."
Back in my day, 14.4 kbs was blazing but there were always those malcontents that wanted images too.
Our expectations will probably always outpace available bandwidth.
Whether it is your cable or phone provider, somebody will give you faster internet and make money doing it. I'd rather that be free from Google than and additional $50/month from my ISP.
According to http://www.google.com/intl/en/about/corporate/company/ they are headquartered in Mountain View, CA and they are providing "high speed" internet access for free to Palo Alto (only a few miles away)
Attaching a high-speed link like this is relatively easy (and cheap), now if they do this for free to some uni on the opposite coast or very far away I will be more impressed.
Experiment is nice, lovely, news-worthy and, I think, kinda pointless. ;) ). Have you seen one that'd be disconnected? Not that it would lack fiber to every dorm room, but rather a complete lack of connectivity? I thought so.
Mostly because Universities never seemed to have suffered from the lack of or "slowness" of internet connection in the first place (though any amount of bandwidth can be readily consumed by students doing whatever students normally do
The more important experiment is that Google Fiber in Kansas. Wiring residential area is way more difficult and costly. Plus most residential areas lack any sort of substantial ISP competition, and a proof of working, profitable (at least a tiny bit) alternative means of connection that gives local telco/cable run for their money would make more difference than wiring any university. Unless you're planning to move into a dorm and live there.
Hyperom.com
Just waiting on Google to press Enter.
Have gnu, will travel.
So, by "us" you mean "world" by which you mean "the US". I like that.
Back to my fifth-world Portugal. I hear it's seen as a province of Spain!
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
They have probably figured out by now what web pages are the most popular according to time, demographic group, previous searches. Add a few shows from hulu and you can pretty much pre-seed the cache. Heck, give them a couple years and they'll send you the content a second before you click on it.
Ads are my biggest problem. Waiting for adblock to deny them, waiting for them to render, etc. What are the odds that Google will help with this?
Think it's time to play the lottery, since my chances are better.
You get poor service/quotas/high prices because a profit oriented company will make more money by jacking up rates and lowering service than in competing. The lack of real competition in internet is because of the last mile problem. The only way around that is to already own right-of-ways to all the houses or spend massive amounts of money to make a new one. Existing: Power, gas, water, wireless, telephone, cable, roads. Either one of these must offer competition or a really big company must put money/leverage to work to beat a path to your door.
Chattanooga achieved 1Gb/sec on EPB's network without any help at all, and both AT&T and Comcast fighting them every step of the way. The fight went well on up the court system hierarchy but the end result is that the fastest service in the U.S. is now here in tiny Chattanooga. I'm proud of that, and can attest firsthand for the quality and cost savings of their service. We went from roughly 600.00 for phone and internet on our business to 100.00/month. Now, why should we wait or expect to burden Google with this, when the very power to attain this resides in your very own communities.. Takes a little doing tho. Good Luck@!
My Internet is plenty fast. Browsers are slow. OK, the browser combined withe the web site is slow. Chrome does JavaScript really well, blazingly fast. That's only half the problem though. The other half of the problem is that YOUR WEBSITE DOESN'T NEED THOSE SCRIPTS. Yes, I'm shouting. If I were a web designer, I would have embedded a video of a guy shouting using Javascript, along with 10 ads and several other embedded videos, and some Flash. At least half the embeds would contain exploits for IE/Windows and attempts at exploits for other browser/OS combos.
Anyway, plenty of bandwidth. We don't need a fatter pipe. We need less shit being flushed into the sewer that the Internet has become.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Considering how bogged down the "regular" 'Net seems to be by buffer bloat (how about a project to unlock the existing 'Net, and rectify that, Big G?), have to wonder what all those over-buffered devices on this net will do.
But that unholy trinity sued, and then sponsored a law to prevent it, saying PUDs may not compete for telecommunication services. The only counties that got grandfathered in have gigabit fiber to the premises, for cheap. Two of the least dense counties in the state, and the PUDs are making so much money at it they have to lower power rates to compensate. But somehow those three don't see a profit in it in the most densely populated CITIES, let alone counties.
Somebody needs to explain to Google's wizards that Mountain View, CA is nice, but Cow Country isn't as close to Oakland. And for about the price you can get for your suburb five-bedroom conversion on 1/6 acre in California you can get almost 4.5 SQUARE MILES of ranch property with over a mile of major river frontage, countless trout and salmon ponds and streams and so on. And if you've got gigabit internet and HD telepresence software, who needs to go in to the office anyway?
Give us the Fiber Google, and the world is yours.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Could be, but more likely they'll profit as a result of the increased number of pages that we'd be viewing in a given length of time.
No.
Eventually, advertisers want to see value for their money. You can have all the benchmarks, numbers, dead chickens, and any other benchmark you can think of to "prove" your worth. Then the advertiser - the customer - asks, "So, where's the bump in my numbers?! I'm not seeing much of an increase in sales."
Unless you can prove your value to your customers, your numbers are shit.
I'd let Google collect all the marketable data they wanted on me if they provided free high speed internet access and they make sure that there are no shady tactics like throttling.
And more importantly, is it a good idea to let them?"
Because letting Comcast and Verizon do it is so much better?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sigh....Can't we solve problems anymore without pining for a benevolent Google dictatorship?
I'm not sure I can say it any better myself. You have municipal broadband, you have playing hardball with your current provider (which isn't actually that difficult; you just never find county commissioners with the knowledge and spine to do so), you have broadband cooperatives. You have a half-dozen options that are simpler and more palatable than holding out the naive hope that a *different* multinational corporation will ride in to save you from the one you presently do business with.
Let's just let them focus on delivering profiles to google apps customers first. All they seem to be able to say on this topic is "soon".
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Back in 1949, George Orwell wrote about TVs that could also watch you, and a government that would use them to keep an eye on their citizenry.
A little later when cable TV came out, a few really paranoid friends said that was the start of 1984, and I said no, the communication is only one way, and to make the connection two way would be too difficult. And then in the 1980's I got involved with the fledgling internet, and I said no, it *still* wasn't anywhere near fast enough or with a high enough penetration to make 1984 happen, and wouldn't be any time soon. And besides, the sheer volume of information would not be manageable.
And then we got fiber to the last mile, and TVs with network connections built-in, and toys like Kinect, and massive, relatively cheap supercomputers, and huge leaps in facial recognition technology, and now a huge leap in network throughput, all presided over by a government that believes they have the right to fondle my nutsack before they let me on a plane.
And I'm starting to get worried.
I'm not saying that Google is evil, necessarily. Often the people creating the technology don't necessarily know or believe what evil to which it could be put.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Everyone is wondering what's in it for Google. There is a lot in it for Google. This is a really excellent way to shut up the telco's etc... about net neutrality mumbo jumbo. If they want to charge people for bandwidth usage, and premium bandwidth, then Google is saying that if they make it too expensive for google to reach the target eyeballs, google'll go get them themselves, so f*** off. The monopoly co's will be SOL. So they test by asking some small companies to run the fibres for them, and get a good idea of the costing involved. Their business plan will be ready to execute if net neutrality goes south. Google will know exactly when it becomes cheaper to build your own than to pay the bandwith protection ... ahem... premium. Once the break-even gets to a few years, they're off.
I love what google does, but they always have a way of making the good things they do pay for themselves. I'd prefer municipal broadband, treated as a utility with a CO in each town where the fibre terminates and one can connect to the ISP of choice, but it isn't looking like I get to choose, so Google's option is, by far, the best thing on the horizon.
With all this talk about an NBN (National Broadband Network) in Australia, why doesn't the government allow google to use the country as a testing ground for it's gigabit network rather than making the tax-payers pay through the butt?
That's a really, really bad analogy.
This is like a town where there are two stores that have high prices and poor service and a new store moving in with better prices and better service.
Google doesn't want to set up networks all across the country, what they do want is to shame the ISPs into doing what they should have been doing years ago. And if shame doesn't work, there's a stick in the form of them making the ISPs obsolete. It's absolutely inexcusable that one can live in a major city and be restricted from any bandwidth faster than 1.5mbps because the ISP doesn't feel like upgrading capacity.
Clearly, the only solution is to be your own isp, and only connect to websites you personally control.
Using a web browser you wrote yourself
on an OS you wrote yourself
on a computer you made yourself
assembled from parts you crafted by hand
from scratch.
Or you could accept that with access to the internet comes a loss of privacy.
In which case why would you trust a private company as your ISP more than a local public utility?
It breaks my pluginses, my precious!
I disagree, for a site like this, we don't need fatter pipes. But if you're trying to stream Netflix movies on a 1.5mpbs or slower connection, it's going to be painful. Even at 5mbps I have to disable things that I leave running ordinarily in order to not spend hours on end buffering.
The reason the gov asks isp's and telco's for your traffic is because tapping all those lines would involve passing legal hurdles. It's harder for the gov to directly stomp on your legal rights than for a corporation. It seems the people don't trust the gov so they watch them, but corporations get a free pass.
I don't need Google mining my data anymore than it already does. I'm perfectly happy with my 25mbit/25mbit connection. If you really need any faster than that as a consumer you've got serious issues.
Well, it was a bit of a rant. If you've just got 1.5mbps, then yeah, you need a fatter pipe. Your situation might be more common than mine, where I'm sitting on the end of a cable modem that blazes; but my older hardware chokes on 1080p video and script-heavy sites.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
-tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70619 Old news, but I doubt any lawsuit kept them from continuing the practice. Rather than tap individual lines, they just jumped in and tapped the backbones and peering links. Might not get local inter-co traffic, but a bulk of the data is probably routed off-net that way anyways.
A heath shoes are good for people to keep fit, Here we have offered our Shape Ups Skechers shoes, you can have a try when you are walking for a walk, our MBT Shoes Skechers UK shoes may make you more strengthen, on the other hand, this summer the he Skechers Shape Ups Sandals are also necessary for you.
less shit pumped through the pipe.
hmmm...y u no make better filter?
Dynamic generated pages written by incompetent programmers is (slashdot?). Too many pages have too many dynamically generated content. All those database hits, JSON calls and data *processing* is slowing down the web, not the speed of the connections.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
Its not like a company whos motto is "dont be evil" could actually be evil, right? Just like how when Fox News says its fair and balanced, we know they are because its right in their name! Ive never heard of someone actively attempting to decieve in the most blatantly obvious way imaginable.
"its german, for "The Bart, The." "No one who speaks german could be an evil man!"
It's easy, if nobody else helps you with fiber make a neighborhood association and invest in your own last mile. You own it, operate it and can easily get a 1Gbps connection from a large carrier in most places for less than $5.000, now divide that to the 200 households and they each pay $25 for 5Mbps if they all use all the available bandwidth at once (CIR) or more likely 100+Mbps (synchronous) in normal home usage patterns. You can upgrade the bandwidth by renegotiating the contract every 1 year. The real cost of bandwidth at the carrier (excluding the circuit to your POP) is currently at $2-5/Mbps. In Romania the bulk price for guaranteed bandwidth is €2.5 for 100Mbps and lower for higher capacities. The real question when you do this is where do you get a service provider to give you IPTV. Internet is easy to solve, just like voice. ATT probably will refuse to come and provide IPTV over your own infrastructure in order to protect their monopoly. This would be a great business opportunity, to help communities build their own infrastructure and provide them with IPTV, Telephone and Internet at their POP with bulk pricing and letting them figure it out further.
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever ones.
Virgin Media is currently rolling out its 100Mb/s internet.
Just FYI.
All we have are phone lines so it is either dialup or costly cellular. AT&T won't put a DSL station anywhere near us. I think that if a neighborhood has phone lines then AT&T should be required to push DSL out to them.
We have to pay over $100 a month for two cellular modems with 5GB limits so that means no video streaming or online game playing. I went from fiber to this. At least give us DSL. I love living in the country side but if there is a phone there should be DSL at the very least.
You got the touch!
Our survival is not threatened, so no saving needed-
The three laws of thermodynamics:(1) You can't win. (2) You can't break even. (3) You can't even quit.
My Internet is plenty fast. Browsers are slow. OK, the browser combined withe the web site is slow. Chrome does JavaScript really well, blazingly fast. That's only half the problem though. The other half of the problem is that YOUR WEBSITE DOESN'T NEED THOSE SCRIPTS. Yes, I'm shouting. If I were a web designer, I would have embedded a video of a guy shouting using Javascript, along with 10 ads and several other embedded videos, and some Flash. At least half the embeds would contain exploits for IE/Windows and attempts at exploits for other browser/OS combos.
Anyway, plenty of bandwidth. We don't need a fatter pipe. We need less shit being flushed into the sewer that the Internet has become.
We also need world peace, and that's just as likely :)
I dont read
Where I live, AT&T owns everything. It doesn't matter which provider you switch to, it all goes back to AT&T.
So even if your contract with the small ISP says you have unlimited, AT&T will still have the power to throttle you.
I've never seen so many shills cheer on a very obvious impending monopoly.
I bought an 8gb game yesterday and had it down in 2 hours. That is at once a wonderful achievement considering how long that would have taken 10 years ago, and a showcase for the benefit of even faster internet. Digital items are not going to stay at just 8gb, and 2 hours is still a long time. We are no where near diminishing benefit of increased internet speed. We think that RAM is still too slow, so there'd still be a case for faster internet even if it ran at the speed that accessing ram does now, which it is many orders of magnitude from reaching right now both in bandwidth and latency. The internet is fast enough when no one has to care if my data is sitting in cache on my CPU or on the other side of the world. I believe speed of light limitations then implies that the internet can never be fast enough. We need fatter pipes and lower latency and we always will.
Really? The entirety of the Netherlands can get that speed via cable nowadays. The University of Twente campus in the Netherlands has had 100/100Mbit since 2003, including student houses: every room has their own 100/100Mbit connection. By the end of this year, it will be upgraded and everyone will have 1/1Gbit at home.