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Google Fiber Work Hung Up In Kansas City
alphadogg writes "When Google announced last spring that Kansas City, Kan., had landed the tech company's much-pursued super-speed Internet project, the company gushed about the local utility poles. Now it turns out that differences over where and how to hang wires on those poles, and what fees or installation costs may be required, have created a troublesome bump in plans to launch the project."
Maybe I'm missing something, but fiberoptics aren't conductive. That's one of the beautiful things about it. Why would they need steel-coated cables to protect them from the electric lines?
This is when you say "Ok, our #2 city is ______. If we can't resolve this in the next month we're going to go with them." There are PLENTY of small towns and cities around the country that would jump at the opportunity for Google Fiber (as show in the application turnout).
Let everyone in Kansas City know it's local politics holding stuff up.
Dude, it's like 4-8 times more expensive to lay fiber underground and this is a well documented fact. It's vastly superior for sure, but at a very steep price.
If you read through the article, the problem isnt resistance, its disagreement about how to run the fiber. Noone wants Google to abandon the project, they just cant agree on how to implement it.
It's a bit more expensive but the maintenance is a lot lower so the total cost will even out.
That's a misnomer. The maintenance of utility poles, pruning branches, and ensuring service lines don't get cut often fall on the power utility provider, not the cable or telecom companies.
Putting fibre on power poles is in every way a far cheaper option even in the long run than burying it. If you had to build your own poles, and do your own maintenance sure the costs would start to rise, but this isn't the case for most telecom / cable companies. It is why they opt to put them on the poles in the first place.
There will always be objections about the minor details. That's the last line of defense. I'm glad it's not about saving the habitat of the naked gerbil, or whatever.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Now I wonder how ass backward US actually is? I mean can it be that all that bickering and mud throwing and fear of commies eats up so much 'brain' energy that you cannot even think of anything that actually works and is relatively cheap because of economies of scale (for which we need standardized solutions for wide swaths of the country) ? Possibly the economies of scale require communism to work? BTW: we do not apparently need fiber that much here - the good old copper does it for us and I assure you pr0n is as crisp as it should be. I am also pretty sure that if a need arises (for instance we will have our police installing cameras in each corner of our houses to protect our freedoms and feeding this live to a bunker in Berlin) we will have fiber also.
Did you even read the article? Oh wait, this is slashdot. The article talks about unequal treatment. One provider offers the same public service as Google, but they're not getting special treatment and free access to the facilities. Then there's the issue of higher costs associated with hanging fiber near electrical wiring. You don't want your workers or customers getting fried, so there will be additional costs.
I did read the article. The unequal treatment argument is, in a word, bullshit. The local incumbent utilities, if they had been, you know, competitive, could have attempted to sell the same service to the community for the same terms. But they didn't, for the simple reason that they were doing what they've been doing for decades; sitting on their fat asses because they have never had to actually compete.