90 Percent of Eligible Kansas City Neighborhoods Sign Up For Google Fiber

puddingebola writes in with a story about how popular Google Fiber is in Kansas City. "The company wrote in a blog post yesterday that at least 180 out of 202 'fiberhoods' have already qualified for the super-high-speed Internet service. Google says that it's still processing verification requests, and should be able to hand over the final list later this week. Since bringing fiber to homes can be expensive, Google is charging each home that hopes to hook up to the service a one-time $300 construction fee."

Comments

I don't get fiber

[slashmydots]

Fiber was a big dream of perfection like 5 years ago. Now I get a 10x1Mb connection for like $30 with Time Warner and it pings at about 19ms. I'm a total geek and even I think going any faster would be pointless. Both my roommate and I can watch netflix in HD at the same time with bandwidth to spare. Even Nvidia driver download finish in like 2 minutes. I do website design quite a bit so a faster upload would be really, really nice but that doesn't apply to a whole lot of other customers out there. Giant Steam game downloads apply to a certain percentage but not even that often for hardware gamers. Is the only reason for fiber (in home personal use) p2p downloading? Because I don't see what else would be driving it other than flashy marketing meets stupid people.

Re:I don't get fiber

[Anonymous Coward]

Because 640kb of ram ought to be enough for anybody right?

Re:I don't get fiber

[Crasoose]

You're a total geek and you can't figure out what to do with a better upload speed than 1Mbps? Turn in your geek card, your time has come.

Re:I don't get fiber

[rtb61]

Think of a family connection. Four people watching different programs at the same time. Now how many people make or receive phone calls whilst watching a video program. Now add in downloading other software whilst watching a program, just for example legally bought steam games. Now ramp up that phone call to a video call and add in email or something you will see more often now that fibre has become available vid-mail.

Now I wont bother totalling that all up because of course that steam game wants it to be downloaded as fast as possible same with the vid-mail. Of course people will be passing a lot more video around the internet especially with phones becoming much more capable at producing it. Even without wanting maximum download speed for the items mentioned a digital family could readily suck 25 MB download and you can see how burst into 100 MB is desirable when people are waiting for the game they have just bought.

Then of course there are things like scenery channel for people without a view but who have a 90inch LED LCD screen, I have a view and believe me they are well worth it. With falling prices in video displays having a live scenery feed, whilst watching a program are feasible. Just as previewing multiple video streams simultaneously is desirable when possible.

Now add in modern age things like live health monitoring when people are suffering an illness so they can be at home rather than in a hospital or for the elderly. Face it you are the cave man, squatting in a cave not knowing or understanding why people would want to live in a timber framed house, what could they possible need or want that is not provided by a cave.

Re:I don't get fiber

[dgatwood]

... so why do we need fiber for homes again?

Because the bandwidth of the fiber is shared among all the people at your node. If everyone simultaneously cranked up iTunes or BitTorrent and started downloading movies at the same time, I doubt you would maintain that 20+ Mbps service speed.

Also because your speeds and cost are so atypical that it isn't even funny. Most Internet service in rural areas seems to average about $50 a month and provides less bandwidth.

Finally, because we're rapidly approaching the point where Internet bandwidth is hopelessly insufficient to meet users' needs. With users wanting to watch downloaded or streaming movies, perform network-based backups, use virtual computers (e.g. using VLC) that are maintained and backed up by someone else, etc., the performance and throughput of the outgoing pipe is getting more and more critical for a good user experience, and it just hasn't kept up with internal infrastructure speeds.

It's hard to even find a switch these days that isn't gigabit, yet as soon as you leave the premises, you're at a clunky single-to-low-double-digit megabit speed—about two orders of magnitude slower. That's just not acceptable. We're at the point where there's little reason to further upgrade the speeds of internal networks, mainly because of the lack of performance upstream. That's really rather bad news for all the industries that depend on the sale of upgraded equipment, and it potentially holds back lots of useful innovations—concepts that we haven't even dared to dream about because they are so completely infeasible over double-digit megabit networks.... Distributed social networking. Mass-market acceptance of video-and-voice-over-IP. True virtual/cloud computing (doing video editing using a hard drive in another state, for example). And so on.

Gigabit (uplink and downlink) to the premises would solve SO many problems.

Re:$300 is a lot of money.

[bluefoxlucid]

$300 is a lot of money? Are you kidding me? Dude, I work a white collar job at like $65k/year. I have a mortgage to pay on an 1800sqft house. $300 isn't a lot of money. They get broadband for 10 years with no fee, that's like $2.50/mo

I spent $350 outright on my Galaxy Nexus so I didn't buy any $50 contract phone for 24 months with a +$20 bill ($480 + $50 = $530 for the phone, no I spent $350). I have a watch that costs more than my mortgage payment. I pay my mortgage and my car payment every month and I still save up an extra 3 mortgage payments and a car payment (I'll have that house paid off shortly).

I mean seriously, the most basic welfare and unemployment necessity costs more than $300 and requires paying more than a $100 monthly fee to use, and burns like $50/mo in electricity.

Re:$300 is a lot of money.

[Cro Magnon]

If you make $65k/year, in some parts of the city, you'd probably be a one percenter. I know people who are on disability, I don't know what they "make", but it's not even remotely near 65K. I also know people with low end jobs that don't approach 65K. What seems reasonable, or even cheap to the average slashdotter, might be quite high for many people.

Re:And...

[Kiyyik]

I know what you mean. I'm south side, and *just* outside of the service area. I swear, I can smell the bandwidth from there. Hopefully they'll come around the other side of 71.

Re:And...

[Githaron]

People and businesses will not be please if they lose internet for more than a few hours. I am going to guess that yanking the backbone lines of copper out and replacing it with fiber is going to take a significant amount of time.

Wonder why?

[Anonymous Coward]

After so many years of getting screwed by AT&T,COMCAST,TIME Warner and others. The people of kansas city can't wait to get google's service, at a much lower cost.