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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?"
AT&T can't.
Comcast won't.
Verizon could, if the could afford it, eventually.
Otherwise I'll be waiting on Sonic.net.
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
It should be quite easy to implement a fast forward button...
.... Oh I see, that was not what you meant, was it?
If my comment didn't sound as good in your head as it did in mine, then I guess we all know who's to blame
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.
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.
all those problems you mentioned, comrade Lenin has already addressed. Please go see him.
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.
If only America would elect a liberal supermajority for Congress followed by a liberal president so that all that stuff could easily get solved. Oh, wait...
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()?
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.
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.
I'm sure nothing could go wrong in encouraging the gatekeepers of the web with a closed-source monopoly platform on search and advertising, as well as a history of privacy issues, to become your ISP.
The point is obviously why is the bandwidth set at a fixed position. Is this technically sound? Probably. Is it sales wise sound? Mostlikely. If any cable or DSL operator decided to increase the bandwidth at a competing price others will follow. But it seems Google tries to do something else: what is the maximum achievable bandwidth given an acceptable end-user investment in hardware. If this applies to cable: the maximum Docsis3 rate would apply, and to DSL: the maximum VDSL2 rate would apply. Given that in the spectrum of telephone lines and hfc-networks maximum offers tend to be read as: "I demand for what you maximumly promised me" opposed to: "this is the maximum we can technically do" results in understanding the technical argument for a safe margin that helps sales keep their promises. But usually this safety is no more than a sales cap, thus any competition could offer a better deal, get customers and others will have to compete.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
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.
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.
Call me when it happens. We've got a moderate President and the 111th Congress was center-left at best.
If you really want a *liberal* supermajority (friendly reminder that Democrat != liberal), we'd need a lot more folks like Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders replacing the Heath Shulers and Mark Pryors of the Congress.
And then of course, you'd need this liberal supermajority to actually *do something* instead of sitting around being scared of their own shadows.
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"?
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.
Call me when special interests don't hold the media hostage and force politicians to dance to their tune to get any air time during election season.
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.
I'm sure things would be better under a conservative president and conservative congress. Oh, wait...
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?
When has there ever been a liberal supermajority? You mean those few months, where you needed to count people like Lieberman as "Democrats" in order to reach the magic number of 60?
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 indian tribes fixed that for themselves. Single-payer elections. Everyone gets the same amount of money from the tribal nation government, and aren't allowed to privately fund-raise for their political campaigns. It really levels the playing field.
Furries make the internet go.
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.
Oh, you mean like redirecting all customers' voice and data traffic through the NSA, without any warrant or anything, and without telling the victims of the snooping, and all just because they were asked? Yeah, AT&T did that. You bet I trust Google more.
Ya like DNS redirections and Deep Packet Filtering won't stop them from selling your logs to 3td parties. They are saints after all.
A loop, by its nature, continues. If that didn't make sense, start reading this sentence again.
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"?
Unlike any ISP in the history of the internet...
Face it, the only question any ISP will ask when the NSA is coming knocking is whether they may have some lube.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
-tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Just because centralized communism fails miserably when applied to reality doesn't mean that the issues the GP brings up can't be solved or at least vastly improved. The argument can certainly be made that most of socialized Europe outperforms the US in some or all of those areas.
I needn't move, I'm already in a country that addressed those problems. Sure, I probably pay more tax than you do. But then again, I have a university degree and needn't work 'til I'm 40 just to pay the loan off, I have health insurance and our unemployment rate (the real one, not the fixed one) is around 4%.
Keep your perfect world. I'll keep mine.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
We got a similar system for our politics. Every party (that gets more than a few votes, just to keep the lunatics from cashing in) gets their campaign expenses reimbursed from the country. At first, a huge outcry was heard (after all, we should pay with tax money so politicians can lie to us with ads?), but face it: They need money to campaign, and they will get it, one way or another. And this way, I buy the politician. Not some corporation.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oh please, PLEASE let it happen! At least the collapse would not take that long and we could start rebuilding sooner.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I often wonder if the image of communism would be different if it didn't only occur in countries that were falling apart to begin with.
Great Intellect...
Ads are OK. Without ads, we wouldn't be posting here in Slashdot in the first place. I think irrelevant ads are the problem.
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.
I don't think many countries would consider that center-left.
New things are always on the horizon
Democrats controlled Congress and the executive branch; and Obama, Pelosi, and Reid led the liberal supermajority. The only problem was those pesky blue dogs who were trying to remind their party that obsessing over universal healthcare all year while voter polls showed concern over unemployment wasn't such a great idea.
If you're one of those guys who argues that Obama isn't a liberal, you're doing what conservatives did when they accused Bush of not being a conservative.
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.
http://www.physorg.com/news170447728.html
Quote:"The United States ranks 28th in the world in average Internet connection speed and is not making significant progress in building a faster network, ..."
Admittedly, this is dated August 2009, but I did not realize that there was much progress.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
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 $100 a month for two cellular modems with 5GB limits so that means no video streaming or online game playing. I went from fiber to this. At least give us DSL. I love living in the country side but if there is a phone there should be DSL at the very least.
You got the touch!
Obama proposed the old conservative healthcare reform, very similar to what was proposed by Nixon in the 70s, the Heritage Foundation in the 90s, and implemented by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. And even that he ended up watering down; Nixon's proposal was actually considerably better.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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
Sorry, I can't hear you! Your ego is too big! What's that? A bi-party system in which everyone's the same and the people loses? Oh my!
Have you heard about SoylentNews?
Obama proposed the old conservative healthcare reform, very similar to what was proposed by Nixon in the 70s, the Heritage Foundation in the 90s, and implemented by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. And even that he ended up watering down; Nixon's proposal was actually considerably better.
oh great, now you've dragged that pinko commie Nixon into it.
Next you'll be pointing out Obama's actual actions are to the far right of saint Reagan.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
A supermajority of either big party would sink the country. Best to have Congress gridlocked so they can't make things worse.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars