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

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.