Nationwide Google Fiber Deployment Would Cost $140 Billion

An anonymous reader writes "For a lot of U.S. internet users, Google Fiber sounds too good to be true — 1Gbps speeds for prices similar to much slower plans from current providers. Google is testing the service now in Kansas City, but what would it take for them to roll it out to the rest of the country? Well, according to a new report from Goldman Sachs, the price tag would be over $140 billion. Not even Google has that kind of cash laying around. From the report: '... if Google devoted 25% of its $4.5bn annual capex to this project, it could equip 830K homes per year, or 0.7% of US households. As such, even a 50mn household build out, which would represent less than half of all U.S. homes, could cost as much as $70bn. We note that Jason Armstrong estimates Verizon has spent roughly $15bn to date building out its FiOS fiber network covering an area of approximately 17mn homes.' Meanwhile, ISPs like Time Warner aren't sure the demand exists for 1Gbps internet, so it's unlikely they'll leap to invest in their own build-out."

Comments

Time for some grass roots activism

[symbolset]

I guess it's time for all of us to tell our power utility that fiber is essential infrastructure. They need to standardize on the Google Method and wire our streets so that they're ready when Google comes here. Otherwise this is going to take too long.

First communities to make it a downhill run for Google win the digital economy.

Almost the whole world wants Google fiber.

And if they won't do it - maybe they'll show us how we can do it for ourselves.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[alen]

sorry, verizon is way ahead of google

and the only way google did it in kansas city was by paying off local officials to allow them to put their fiber on the poles at lower rates than everyone else's lines. not going to work everywhere. ISP's and others are already suing kansas city for allowing this

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[s73v3r]

Those assholes had plenty of time to try and do the same thing. I have no sympathy for them that someone got a better deal.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[perpenso]

the only way google did it in kansas city was by paying off local officials to allow them to put their fiber on the poles at lower rates than everyone else's lines. not going to work everywhere. ISP's and others are already suing kansas city for allowing this

Giving local officials some sort of deal seems to be a well established practice that has worked in many locales. See the cell phone industry. A cellular tower is opposed until the provider offers to put equipment to support local police and fire communications up there. I suspect that the initial opposition is just a gambit to get such freebies in some locales. I'd be surprised if such practices have not already been ruled on by the courts.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[symbolset]

Property values are up. Jobs are up. KC is in the national spotlight in a good way. Every local official that got behind this is a local hero who just amplified his political opportunities. Those folks are assured reelection in perpetuity. They didn't have to be bribed to let Google hang fiber: they had to beg Google to come hang the fiber. They were changing the honorary name of the city to "Google". They were promising the name of every first-born son...

Seeing how this is working out, Google won't lack for cities to beg them to come hang fiber for quite some time.

Over 1,000 cities competed for the opportunity to be first. And over 1,000 cities were disappointed to lose the chance.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[Seeteufel]

No. I don't need that for now. In any case I would start with densely populated areas

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[neokushan]

This is the part that I'm pretty sure Goldman Sachs hasn't accounted for. That whole "could cost up to $140Bn" thing sounds very inflated.

Look at it this way. According to them, if Google spends 1/4 of its $4.5Bn it could equip 0.83million homes. That's $1.125Bn for 0.83million homes.
On the other hand, Verizon has spent $15bn and equipped 17million homes. For google to pass 17million homes, using the above calculations, it would cost them $25bn. Those numbers don't make a lot of sense to me.

Now factor in the above - that cities are clamouring for Google to come there and are willing to give them as much help, tax breaks and discounts as possible to encourage it and that $140Bn could potentially halve, or at the very least drop by 1/3. Still expensive for Google to network the entire country, but they only have to hit a small portion of it before the other cable companies feel the pressure and start rolling out their own fibre.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[TigerTime]

With the need for the Federal Government to "Save our Economy" the last 5 years, I wish they had decided to put that money toward replacing the entire copper phone system with Fiber Optic. It would have produced thousands upon thousands of jobs of long lasting jobs and left us with a country that is much more prepared to move forward in this century. Instead with threw away hundreds of billions of $$$ on stupid projects that no long lasting benefit.

Depressions/Recessions are the PERFECT time to handle issues like this. It's one of the issues I have with Washington over the last 5+ years. I can't think of one long lasting project that produced long term results for the entire country and produced long term results. There are many public projects during the Great Depression that are still being felt today. I don't know if the same could be said 80yrs from now about and public projects from this Recession.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

I think LTE is gonna do the job for folks, without bustin' up concrete.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

This will be approved as an essential part of the NSA's outsourced domestic surveillance infrastructure.

You'll have all the bandwidth in the world, and sorry that you did, if the trend I fear continues its current trajectory...

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[timeOday]

First communities to make it a downhill run for Google win the digital economy. Almost the whole world wants Google fiber.

Since this whole story is a pipe dream anyways, I'll take my imaginary gigabit-to-the-livingroom from some other company that's NOT google - from a company that provides bandwidth, and nothing else. I'm getting sick of google being all over the place. Lately they are nagging me for my cellphone number (since you need a google or Facebook login to post to 2/3 of the web boards around the Internet). WTF? Leave me alone. I never even wanted to have to go through an intermediary to have a video conference. But everybody has adopted Facebook and Google or Apple, draining all the demand for developing and adopting open standards.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[zach_the_lizard]

This is the part that I'm pretty sure Goldman Sachs hasn't accounted for. That whole "could cost up to $140Bn" thing sounds very inflated.

Look at it this way. According to them, if Google spends 1/4 of its $4.5Bn it could equip 0.83million homes. That's $1.125Bn for 0.83million homes.
On the other hand, Verizon has spent $15bn and equipped 17million homes. For google to pass 17million homes, using the above calculations, it would cost them $25bn. Those numbers don't make a lot of sense to me.

I think the difference in these numbers is "nationwide" and what it might mean. Google could probably easily equip the same number of subscribers as Verizon with fiber for the same cost or less; however, there are some middle-of-nowhere places that would require a much more significant expenditure per potential customer than the places Verizon has deployed. Maybe to run a line to everyone everywhere costs $140 billion, but to reach, say, 30% of the population would cost $25 billion.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[MrDoh!]

The '140 billion' value is coming from Goldman Sachs remember, a company that invested in companies deploying fiber years ago to prep for this moment, could it be that they're highballing the figure to get a better valuation for their money? If it's that much, Google will deploy it themselves by buying the company that makes the fiber, installs it, creates the routers (oh... Moto Mobility...), and generally run everything at breakeven/loss to make the cash at the point it wants to. 140 billion isn't the amount Google actually needs to spend to implement this.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[MrDoh!]

Oh and from the article "Google has $45 billion in cash on hand. So, if it really wanted to build out a cable company, it would need to take out a loan." And I'm sure Goldman Sachs could help them with that!

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[neokushan]

I initially thought this as well, that would sort of explain the $140bn remark but it doesn't explain why the 25% of Google's $4.5Bn expendature would only hit 0.83million households - you'd think Google would prioritise high-density areas first, just like Verizon did.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[joocemann]

ALSO!

Do the math and it looks awesome.

$180BN / 300M (cost/population) -- and you're looking at about $466/person. Break that down and its basically a year of High Speed internet service that most people pay about 40-50 bux for each month.

For the cost of the SERVICE for one year, the infrastructure can be brought up over 100 fold. THIS IS WORTH DOING.

A few years ago AT&T said (contradicting other PR claims) that they could double bandwidth at a cost of $6/user. What we are seeing is that capitalism for CEOs and stockholders is going to continue taking advantage of business and oligopoly and disregard for consumers. We need people to get behind the companies that actually respect those paying in.

--------

A few years ago we invested a load of money into bringing HSI to rural areas and such.... they should just shift all that into fiber and LTE. Job done.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[Enderandrew]

Google was charging $300 per house for the installation, or waiving that if you pay for a two-year contract.

It does cost Google a lot to build out the infrastructure, but they'll pass some of that cost on to consumers to make it viable.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[PlusFiveTroll]

Coming next year, 1GBps Wireless, 1GB Cap, finish your month in 1 second. Yea, go cell company. At least with Google they want you transferring tons of data so they can learn everything about you.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[russotto]

They were changing the honorary name of the city to "Google".

That was Topeka, not KC. (Leading to Google declaring a name change to "Topeka", the next April 1st)

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[Kotoku]

Yeah, but 50 bucks for 5gb won't cut it. That's not even a blu-ray...compressed...

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[firex726]

Not just time, they have been getting tax breaks and additional fees since the 90's with the express purpose of investing and upgrading the nation's network infrastructural.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[grantspassalan]

I guess it's time for all of us to tell our power utility that fiber is essential infrastructure. They need to standardize on the Google Method and wire our streets so that they're ready when Google comes here. Otherwise this is going to take too long.

First communities to make it a downhill run for Google win the digital economy.

Almost the whole world wants Google fiber.

And if they won't do it - maybe they'll show us how we can do it for ourselves.

$140 billion? That's chicken feed. The federal government deficit is $4.5 billion a day. Simple arithmetic yields that the whole country could be wired for what the government borrows every month.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[bhagwad]

As opposed to your telcos monitoring it now. Question is - who do you trust more?

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[Rockoon]

$180BN / 300M (cost/population) -- and you're looking at about $466/person. Break that down and its basically a year of High Speed internet service that most people pay about 40-50 bux for each month.

You are comparing cost/person to cost/household. It is that sort of week quasi-intellectualism that stands to fuck us all.

For the cost of the SERVICE for one year, the infrastructure can be brought up over 100 fold. THIS IS WORTH DOING

30 years ago state of the art in the home was 128kbps ISDN, nearly 100 times as fast as the average home modem.

Arent you glad that we didnt standardize on it?

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[Pseudonym Authority]

1GBps Wireless, 1GB Cap, finish your month in 1 second.

B-b-but that would take 8 seconds!

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[Cyberllama]

Paying them off? They didn't need to write checks, they got concessions because it was obvious that there was a case for public-benefit there. They were offering literally free broadband. If anyone else was willing to pony up those sorts of concessions, they could get the same deals.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[ceoyoyo]

The guy makes a little mistake that really doesn't affect his point much and you start throwing around things like "quasi-intellectualism." Overreact much? And by the way, you misspelled "weak."

30 years ago state of the art in the home was 128kbps ISDN, nearly 100 times as fast as the average home modem.

Arent you glad that we didnt standardize on it?

Are you suggesting we're going to invent something better than fibre in the near future? You know the wires that ISDN ran over are pretty much the same ones we're still using today, right?

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[Cyberllama]

Actually, that was Topeka not Kansas city. But you make a decent point anyways.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[ceoyoyo]

The ones that make most of their money from me paying them, rather than the one that makes most of it's money selling me to others.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[bhagwad]

How exactly does Google "sell you to others"? And you trust AT&T more than Google?

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[egcagrac0]

10 seconds, actually, what with the packet overheads and the economy and all.

That assumes that your client device and the access point are the only things talking, and you can get duplex transfer (both ends talking at once - not always possible in RF), and that there's enough available upstream bandwidth (network, server, etc) when you're trying to do the transfer.

Still, you should be able to use all your transfer in under 26 minutes.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[Charliemopps]

Yes, every phone company I've ever worked for has had a "Regulatory Affairs" department who's goals include: Political contributions, Lobbying, Getting government grants and more importantly doing everything short of bribing local officials into letting the phone company do whatever it is they want to do. It's how our government works and the only way any utility can get anything done. Utilities sue each other constantly over this stuff, it's nothing new.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[symbolset]

That's sad. Over a decade ago two counties in Washington started their power coop fiber rollouts: Grays Harbor county and Grant county. They offer 100mbps and Gigabit tiers, though admittedly at a higher rate than Google. Then again, they're in cow country and the runs are very long. The state has since banned new muni fiber rollouts to protect commercial interests, so unless the law changes there will be no more. But these two counties and one city were grandfathered in. The city (Tacoma) uses coax, so their bandwidth is less facile.

The fiber that Google is delivering to homes is single mode fiber. There is no need or benefit to stringing slower multimode fiber. It will support 10Gbps now - 40Gbps in some cases. Google will probably offer those tiers to businesses in the downtown corridor. No need to bring that to homes yet.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[symbolset]

I'm not OK with seizing their lines. I don't think that's OK - to take their stuff. I'm OK with laying fiber over their lines, and obsoleting the stuff they wouldn't upgrade with reasonably modern stuff. We don't want their retro stuff anyway. That would be like taking out their trash. Cable companies don't have exclusive rights to any rights-of-way that I know of.

If there is some US place that an Internet provider has been sold exclusive access to public infrastructure for the purpose of network transport I would like to learn of it. The public officials responsible should be in prison.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[Rockoon]

The guy makes a little mistake that really doesn't affect his point much

Doesnt effect his point much? His point is that the cost is only a years worth of broadband, instead of the more than 2 years worth of broadband that it actually is. Thats not a "little" mistake, chief.

"Yeah, I know that I quoted you $466.. but actually you owe us $1037.. but its only a small mistake, see?"

Are you suggesting we're going to invent something better than fibre in the near future?

You mean like maybe microwave wireless networks which can already push 1gbps but can also be scaled to nearly any imaginable bandwidth without stringing up or burying coax and/or fiber? Yeah.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[symbolset]

Gimme a wee bit of artistic license, won't you? Leaving this ambiguous in the grammar was deliberate. Jebus but grammar Nazis are everywhere.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[Bengie]

Cable companies may not have exclusive rights to right-of-ways, but they don't need to ask for permission of property owners either. Naked ISPs that aren't badged as Telcom/Cable must get permission from every property owner. Well, this way in large much of the USA.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[joocemann]

I erred on the side of caution. I understand what you mean, and in doing it your way, it errs on the side of disappointment.

By my math, if it were per household, it would be even cheaper... thus my point resounds to be the gloomiest scenario and things could only play out BETTER in reality.

By your math, not so.

Think about that and quit being a turd/troll.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[joocemann]

I erred on the expensive side (per capita) -- thus the cost could only likely be cheaper. Do some math and quit trollling you sad excuse for a responder.

Re:Time for some grass roots activism

[jjsimp]

That is what I felt the best way to handle the economy would have been. Upgrading our phone system, upgrading Highway system to 6 Lane Roads from the current 4 lane highway, even upgrading cell towers would have been better than Cash for Clunkers, Cash for Banks, and Cash for Auto Companies.

$140B = $50 / person

[ShanghaiBill]

In a country of 300M people, $140B is only $50 per person. Comparing the price to Google's market cap is silly. For a big infrastructure project like this they would, of course, seek new capital to cover the cost. This is affordable.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[kramulous]

It is more like $500. Still ridiculously cheap.

Only governments can do this sort of thing properly. Pity Americans don't trust their government.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[alen]

which is why internet is expensive

people hype how cheap google fiber is but the point is if you're like verizon or Comcast and have to borrow money and pay 5% - 8% or so PER YEAR interest on the debt your service is going to be more expensive

$140 billion at 5% a year almost $8 billion a year in interest costs. and then you have to make enough profit to pay back the bonds after they mature. internet service has this bad trend of always dropping in price

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[Nerdfest]

I don't care who does it as long as it remains open/free.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[symbolset]

The rate they're charging for TV is $140 per month, or $1600 a year. If it costs $500 each, I think you can see where the first few pay for the next few and so on. Google knows about ramping scale. If they pay $1B to do 2,000,000 homes the first quarter, the second quarter those homes pay for the next 2,000,000 homes. The third quarter those 4,000,000 homes pay for the next 4,000,000. The second year those 8,000,000 homes become 64,000,000 homes without any further investment. Year three they wire the rest of the 112,000,000 homes in the US and they can start working on the rest of the world.

Simples. The numbers aren't quite exactly this, but this is how it works. Cable companies keep about 50% of the money you give them instead of improving their product. Google can wire homes cheaper than them, deliver better service, and put that money to work in growth - wrestling away their customers. When they run out of room for growth, they're positioned to start raking in even more insane stacks of cash.

The only problem is that every server on the Internet is going to need a huge upgrade, or it's going to be utterly crushed.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen what the government spends on stuff? By the time the government was done, we'd be lucky to get it for $5,000 per person.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[amiga3D]

Have you ever watched Congress on C-span? If you did you would understand.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[NFN_NLN]

It is more like $500. Still ridiculously cheap.

Only governments can do this sort of thing properly. Pity Americans don't trust their government.

1Gbps fiber to the house is a waste when you consider the options:

For $140B we could exactly bail out the banks after screwing us yet again.
We could extend the war in Afghanistan another 3 years.
Or you could also extend the "war on drugs" another 4 years!

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[Jimbookis]

The $140B figure seems low. Numbers like $40B are being bandied about here for a similar project already underway here in Australia (the NBN) an we only have about 1/15th the population of the USA.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[symbolset]

In that top post I suggested that providing the fiber to the street is an infrastructure problem of the public utility, not Google. Really, it is. Some power utilities already run fiber to every home when they string the first wire - and have done so for over a decade.

But regardless I think Google's got the whole thing figured out financially or they would not be rolling out to Kansas City. They did have a pilot in Princeton after all, to determine what the costs would be.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[alen]

the $140 for TV is only because of the sweet deal in KC which was a tiny deployment

borrowing money and paying all other other costs of running the service it will be just as expensive as Time Warner or Verizon

the equipment they give the customers is worth $500 or so. figure $30 a month paid out to the content owners for licensing. lots of other costs

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[cdrguru]

Americans keep getting slapped in the face with proof after proof that their government cannot be trusted with simple things, like taking out the garbage. Why would be be foolish enough to trust the government with (a) something worth lots of money - that could be stolen or corrupted and (b) something really complicated?

Most likely, a government "Internet for the people" project would be decided that it simultaneously could not present information about gay sex activities and be required to present information about gay sex activities. Obviously when something is both mandatory and prohibited this schizophrenia will seep into everything. If you could get a road map, it would have to be in the public domain from 1925 or earlier. If it were possible to display information about religious events, it would do so only for an obscure sect of aboriginal head hunters that worship the two dollar bills they found in 1880 - only this would pass the censorship filters. Of course it would have to be both government funded and ad supported with an annual lottery to determine what company was to receive the hundreds of billions in ad revenue. Of course when the only winner every year was found to be owned by the Speaker of the House or the Senate Majority Leader hearings would be held and the same company selected the following year.

Trust us, no American with any sense wants the government involved in delivery of Internet services in any way, shape or form.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[godrik]

as said before it is more $1000 per household, still cheap. The main question is how to operate and upkeep that network, how much will that cost be? Also Who will control the network. Somewhat having 100% of the network infrastructure controlled by google does not sounds like a good thing.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[Kral_Blbec]

No, no, no. It's more like $5000 for me, and my unemployed neighbor gets a $500 check.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[Seeteufel]

That is because their government is so bad.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[mysidia]

It is more like $500. Still ridiculously cheap.

They could ask the households to cover the cost. To signup for the service, and have fiber built to you, you agree to sign a contract to pay $500, which you can finance over 2 years at 10% interest; coming to $25 a month for 2 years, then free for life.

Possibly a $2 to $5 / month optional insurance charge to cover any damage caused by backhoes or other disasters. And a $1/month port fee to keep the fiber lit.

Considering the average price of DSL per household is about $50 a month or $600 a year... fiber begins to look darn cheap.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[Anonymous Coward]

Much like the roads, which are say $3500 for you, and a massive check for large freight carriers.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[symbolset]

They actually do this. Pay $25 a month for the first year or $300 once, and you get fiber to the home and 5Mbps service for free for six years. Retain the option to step up to gigabit later.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[schnell]

then free for life

It's a good thing then that Internet bandwidth is all free and doesn't actually cost anything. Or infrastructure upgrades. Or tech support. Or spares and maintenance. Or customer service. Or... you know, all the things that make Internet service cost money.

Seriously, where do people get these ideas about what things should cost? Just because your Gmail is paid for by advertisers (it's not free!) you think that if Google is involved it somehow just magically becomes free to provide services?

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[anagama]

Why trust the government? Our government sucks. It has no qualms about burning up 1.4 trillion making enemies around the world in favor of certain moneyed interests, but can't be bothered to do something actually useful for a fraction of the cost.

http://costofwar.com/

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[mellon]

Then why have the telcos and cable companies spent so much money preventing it from happening? To get it outlawed in every major market? If it's impossible for government to do it, then surely all of that lobbying and all those laws were an unnecessary waste of time.

No, in reality, it's better to lay fiber once to every house and then sell transit on the fiber to ISPs. That's something that a city government can do quite effectively. The reason it hasn't been done is that it would create competition, and ISPs don't want competition. They want to own the market. In my town it's Comcast or nothing. Nothing personal against Comcast, but I'm paying a lot for fairly crappy connectivity. If I had a choice, I'd take it.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[mellon]

Mod parent up please.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[mellon]

The fiber is paid for. You'd still have to pay for transit, and for the running costs of the routing infrastructure. It would be wise to pay into a fund to cover wear and tear over time on the fiber. But Internet service clearly doesn't cost as much as we're paying for it in the U.S. If it did, it would cost the same in other countries like Japan, Korea and Sweden.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[mysidia]

It's a good thing then that Internet bandwidth is all free and doesn't actually cost anything.

I said fiber free for life; free interconnection to a local Transport fabric. Not internet bandwidth

Or infrastructure upgrades. Or tech support. Or spares and maintenance.

When was the last time you needed tech support on your water lines, sewage lines, or electricity lines? Not the transport provider's responsibility. If your fiber breaks, or stops passing light, then that falls under repair costs, that you better have insured against, otherwise, there will be a fee for that repair.

Infrastructure upgrades aren't required to continue to provide the same service level to the same number of users. The cost of infrastructure upgrades gets divided by new users connecting, just as the original infrastructure cost got divided by users signing up.

Spares/maintenance again falls under infrastructure repair; the cost is negligible compared to the cost of installing the fiber. Your cost for the fiber could well include the setting aside of a fund used to buy treasury notes, whose interest payments will be used for the purpose of maintaining equipment.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[mellon]

You might want to read this article. This is an article about what happens when private industry takes money from people to built faster broadband infrastructure. Executive summary: they pocket the money, and don't build the infrastructure.

It may be that government would do the same, but this is an unsubstantiated assertion on your part. How's about you provide some citations to support your claim? Because as far as I know, there have been a lot of successes with municipal broadband, and very few failures (indeed, I know of only one).

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[MrDoh!]

Which is pure genius on Google's part, who would be the best provider of cloud servers than Google? By providing ludicrous speeds to consumers, they're also upping the ante for expectations of service that they either offer themselves or sell that improved service to others. Google really are on the ball with this, making money at every point.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[MrDoh!]

Hmm, wonder how it works out for distance/population density/regulations for Aus/US roll outs of this type of stuff.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[MrDoh!]

Yeah, as awesome as all this sounds, having Google provide the client (android/chromeOS/GoogleTV), the routers (Moto Mobility), the cable (Google Fiber), backend (DNS), services (Gmail, Play), money (Google Wallet), heck, drive to the nearest shop in a Google Car eventually? It could be scary.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[aaarrrgggh]

So, figure $1200 per household. Amortized over 5 years it is $25/month.

The bigger problem is that it would require 250,000 man-years and a whole lot of trenchers, directional boring, and boom trucks to complete according to my napkin. Optimistically you could get 50,000 people up in running in 12 months, but I don't think you could have all the resources needed in less than 10 years. Hand tools would be about 1.2 million man years.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[Tough Love]

Only governments can do this sort of thing properly. Pity Americans don't trust their government.

Pity the governement is flat broke and in debt up to its ears. Look to Korea for how to do this right.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[PlusFiveTroll]

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-02-01/broadband-telecom-lafayette/52920278/1

Pity the cable companies and telcos are the ones fighting Google and incumbents.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[tmosley]

I can't believe I had to scroll this far to find someone who gets it. And it's an AC.

Slashdot, I am disappoint.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[BrowserCapsGuy]

Pity Americans don't trust their government.

It's an even bigger pity that our government has given us so many reasons to distrust it!

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[symbolset]

It's also a 2-year contract with a balance of payments of $3200 for TV+Internet, or $1600 for just Internet. Google isn't going to have any trouble keeping the lights on. They couldn't ramp the deployment that fast anyway: the human resources are just not available.

Goldman Sachs and people in here commenting that Google can't afford this are just nuts.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[tbird81]

I'd trust them more than the UN.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[Tagged_84]

I have great doubts this could be achieved for only $140B. Here in Australia we're doing FTTH at a cost of around $40B, and we're a very small country that huddles along the coastline (inner land gets wireless not fibre). To upscale to the size of the USA and given how spread out everyone is, it just seems like a pipe dream for only 3.5x the cost.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[schnell]

Okay, sorry if I misread your post. But what's the value of free fiber if nothing is connected to it? And how is that different than what happens today?

I used to live where Verizon had installed FiOS infrastructure (fiber) up to the NID on my house. However, I did not use any services from Verizon (Comcast for Internet, no home phone). So Verizon never charged me a dime for having run fiber to my house - it was in essence "free fiber for life."

My overall point is that the transport by itself is almost useless. What people want is cheap, superfast Internet and all a fiber deployment gets you is an extra trench in the yard with some glass in it. You need a provider, and nobody seems to be happy with those today so why would they be happy with their Internet service because they have a "free" fiber hookup to it now?

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[elashish14]

Or, put another way, it's less than ONE QUARTER OF THE ENTIRE US DEFENSE BUDGET for ONE SINGLE YEAR. Not to mention that this would actually return several (hundreds of) times its original investment. That pretty much shows you the value of a nation.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[elashish14]

And you probably wouldn't bitch about it if you had to trade positions with him or her, so I would shut up and be happy I have something worth paying taxes on.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[symbolset]

Burying the cross-country fiber bundles cost well over $20B. Far more was buried than is actually needed. And then the companies that buried the fiber thinking they were going to be routing millions of interstate phonecalls an hour over each strand at $1.00/minute found out that free long-distance phone would become the norm. They went bankrupt. The investors who paid for all that fiber, and to bury it, lost their shirts. This was the beginning of the ".bomb" era, and Google bought up a ton of that fiber at pennies on the dollar of what it cost to buy and bury.

So yeah, there are some hidden costs that have already been paid.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[Rockoon]

so two wrongs make a right, eh?

Nice logic.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[Rockoon]

They could ask the households to cover the cost. To signup for the service, and have fiber built to you, you agree to sign a contract to pay $500, which you can finance over 2 years at 10% interest; coming to $25 a month for 2 years, then free for life.

Hate to break it to you, but that $500 figure was per person, not per household.
,br> Its $1037 per household. For a 2 year loan at 10%, the household pays $1255 or $52.29/month.

And the Google model of $25/month is only for 5mbit/1mbit.

For Googles 1gbps package, you have to pay $70/month.

Not looking so good now, is it?

I like how you folks use numbers without even knowing what they mean.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[mysidia]

Okay, sorry if I misread your post. But what's the value of free fiber if nothing is connected to it? And how is that different than what happens today?

What happens today is a monopoly over the last mile, and little competition for internet connectivity service for consumers, resulting in perpetually propped up costs for the consumer, little incentive for internet providers to provide a better experience, better support, or more reliable service -- crap like data metering, and nickel and diming -- fees like cable modem leases. Only large providers such as Ma Bell, Verizon, and big cable companies. are successful offering an internet service to consumers.

And their support techs are drones following a flow chart. Which by design can't deal with real service issues, without a lot of wheel spinning "You restarted the modem? It still doesn't work? Did you try restarting again?"; by design problems can only be fixed through escalation, which might take days, and good luck with that.

DSL and Cable are "bottlenecked" technologies, meaning, the performance and reliability that can be delivered over them are limited. The DSL and Cable providers are unable or unwilling to bring fiber to everyone.

There are few providers, and the monthly rates for end users are much higher per megabit, than the data rates charged to enterprises who need to buy bandwidth.

Naked fiber to everyone's house, would greatly lower the barrier to entry for ISPs -- it could be back like the dialup days again, where there were literally thousands of local ISPs able to possibly enter the market,, providing reliable friendly, fast service.

Internet speeds would increase, and costs would go down.

There's no real reason your internet service should cost more than your telephone service. The PSTN infrastructure is more complicated, and the equipment massively more expensive!

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[mysidia]

Hate to break it to you, but that $500 figure was per person, not per household. ,br Its $1037 per household. For a 2 year loan at 10%, the household pays $1255 or $52.29/month.

That's still cheaper than $69.99 a month for 3 megabit cable internet, plus modem lease.

And still likely to be much more reliable, than the Cable tech which can't sync up when it's raining, gives only 256k up, and never gives more than a third of the promised download speed.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[Bengie]

http://www.ericsson.com/news/1550083

A new report, conducted jointly by Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC), Arthur D. Little and Chalmers University of Technology in 33 OECD countries, quantifies the isolated impact of broadband speed, showing that doubling the broadband speed for an economy increases GDP by 0.3%.*

A 0.3 percent GDP growth in the OECD region is equivalent to USD 126 billion. This corresponds to more than one seventh of the average annual OECD growth rate in the last decade.

A 100x increase in broadband speed should pay itself back in about 1 year.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[Rockoon]

That's still cheaper than $69.99 a month for 3 megabit cable internet, plus modem lease.

You want service too? That $52.29/moth just covers the installation cost. Note how Google doesnt offer 1gbps for less than $70/month.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[mysidia]

You want service too? That $52.29/moth just covers the installation cost. Note how Google doesnt offer 1gbps for less than $70/month.

They don't charge $70 a month for 5 megabits.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[Bengie]

80% of the USA population lives in dense metro areas. I fail to see how average density over the entire country has anything to do with anything.

In other news, the universe is large, so no point in deploying fiber internet.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[Bengie]

Small town ISPs have installed time-and-time-again, starting with NOTHING, and have paid off all debt and are turning profits after 5-7 years, while charging less money, offering faster speeds, and offering better quality service.

If these large ISPs can't do it, maybe we need thousands of smaller ISPs that can do it.

Re:$140B = $50 / person

[lsatenstein]

In a country of 300M people, $140B is only $50 per person. Comparing the price to Google's market cap is silly. For a big infrastructure project like this they would, of course, seek new capital to cover the cost. This is affordable.

At $50/person, or approximately $225 per household, amortized over 5 years, the cost becomes less than a dollar a week.

How about Apple Fiber?

[jsepeta]

Apple's got the cash. What would it take for them to get in on the game?

Re:How about Apple Fiber?

[Nerdfest]

If Apple did the equivalent of Google Fiber you would only be allowed to use it with Apple devices.

Apple could pay for it ...

[perpenso]

Well, according to a new report from Goldman Sachs, the price tag would be over $140 billion. Not even Google has that kind of cash laying around.

Apple could, they have $120 billion in cash. Maybe that is what they are saving up for ... becoming a national ISP. :-)

Re:Apple could pay for it ...

[Seeteufel]

They should invest in 500 Mio in Wine. So you could ditch windows.

Re:Apple could pay for it ...

[perpenso]

They should invest in 500 Mio in Wine. So you could ditch windows.

Apple already offers a solution for ditching Windows. :-)

Days of War

[Anonymous Coward]

Going by $720M / day, that's less than 200 days of the war in Iraq.

Re:Days of War

[bill_mcgonigle]

Going by $720M / day, that's less than 200 days of the war in Iraq.

Yes, but the Iraq war benefits the bankers, globalists, and components of the military-industrial-media complex. Nationwide gigabit fiber would chiefly benefit the citizenry and small businesses. So, the Legislators simply can't vote for such a thing!

Re:Days of War

[alen]

Afghanistan has $4 TRILLION in mineral deposits. lots of rare earths too.

you can run all the fiber you want but its useless since the devices that use it need rare earth minerals to be produced

Re:Days of War

[MickyTheIdiot]

I wish I had a mod point.

Our current government is so screwed up, allied with corporate interests to the point there is little difference between corporate and government interests, that doing something for the common good is almost unthinkable.

Plus, if you really want stimulus, getting fibre out to rural areas is one of the best projects you can think of. You can't have a business without good network access anymore.

Of course, we've got the worst of the worst of our population making it to all our leadership positions. They are incapable of understanding these facts anre they are incapable of listening to people that are smarter than they are.

Re:Days of War

[MickyTheIdiot]

(I guess to clairfy that I draw a major distinction between "corporate" and small business. I care about the latter as that is the group that is really benefiting the country. I don't have a BS definition like "small business means under 2000 employees" either)

Re:Days of War

[sjames]

So you're saying Afghanistan is the ONLY viable source of Rare Earths?

Re:Days of War

[MrDoh!]

Other major source would be China.

Re:Days of War

[sjames]

We can get them right here in the U.S.

'Rare Earths' aren't actually rare, they're just not found in conveniently concentrated form like other ores.

who can fill a 1Gbps pipe?

[Gothmolly]

If every Slashdot user had a Gig connection - all it would do is bring the site down. Throttling the last mile is an important part of keeping the content providers alive and online.

Re:who can fill a 1Gbps pipe?

[mosb1000]

Do you think a slashdotter could use all their bandwith browsing Slashdot? You'd have to post a lot of comments!

Re:who can fill a 1Gbps pipe?

[Belial6]

Is your data consumption on Slashdot really limited by your bandwidth?

I find this statement amusing...

[Red_Chaos1]

..."Meanwhile, ISPs like Time Warner aren't sure the demand exists for 1Gbps internet,"

At current costs? Of course not. People would *love* to have more speed. But not if it's going to cost $100+ a month to get it like TWC/Cox/Comcast/etc. would charge for it. They create their own stagnation with greed.

Re:I find this statement amusing...

[Anonymous Coward]

It costs 110 dollars / month now for 5Mb download 839k upload on time warner. It would cost $1000+ per month at their current pricing scam er scheme.

Re:I find this statement amusing...

[MickyTheIdiot]

When has Time Warner ever been correct about something relating to the Internet?

Seriously...I can't think of one time.

Re:I find this statement amusing...

[symbolset]

Incumbent internet providers are still trying to sell us the notion that bandwidth is a precious resource that has to be metered and capped per user, or the greedy few will saturate their networks depriving the rest of us of our Netflix. Google's gigabit fiber is not filtered, metered or capped in any way.

This "precious bandwidth" story is either true or it's a lie. It's better for them if it's a lie.

If it's a lie: they can open up the pipes to the max and let everybody use what they will. This will help a little to fend off the Google invasion.

If it's true: they're hosed because Google will install more end-user bandwidth in Kansas City in the next six months than they have in their entire nationwide networks combined.

Re:I find this statement amusing...

[mosb1000]

I paid that much for FIOS, and I was very happy with it.

Re:I find this statement amusing...

[Seeteufel]

The move to a normal nation.

Re:I find this statement amusing...

[RicktheBrick]

I find it amusing that they can claim 1Gbps speed. I just tested my internet speed and was told that I have 21Mbps download speed. So I tested how long it took me to get to this article. It took about 5 seconds to download /. and 3 more to download this article with all the comments. So a total of 8 seconds times 21Mbps or a total of 168 million bits or 21 million bytes. I did not come close to downloading that amount of data so my effective speed was much lower than that. I bet even if I did have the Gbps internet speed I would still have to wait for the upload speed on the /. side. It just seems to me if 1000 people were on the internet at the same time than the ISP would have to have a terabit per second speed to keep that speed going. Maybe they can download a Gbps but I am sure that everyone has a time slot that they are downloading to us and that would be a small fraction of each seconed we are waiting for our download to complete.

Re:I find this statement amusing...

[tmosley]

You just accidently your whole comment.

Re:I find this statement amusing...

[Seeteufel]

Sorry, I don't get it.

Re:I find this statement amusing...

[Bengie]

When your rotting copper infrastructure is reserving 90% of its bandwidth for TV, yes, bandwidth is a limit resource. :P

Re:I find this statement amusing...

[symbolset]

Agreed.

I thought I would use your reply to post an interesting figure I calculated. Without a cap a 1Gbps pipe can pass 2.6 Petabytes per month. The pipe has a "natural cap" of 2,600,000 GB (NOT Gb) per month. Each way, both up and down. In the case of Google Fiber, this is per home. Google doesn't offer a "capped" option.

TWC (the KC incumbent Internet provider) offers broadband caps in the range from 5 GB to 100GB per month, with no unlimited option. This is a range of from 1/20,000th to 1/400,000th the total monthly net bandwidth capacity offered by Google, per connection. Yes, the most bandwidth they offer is 1/20,000th of Google's offer. Since they don't have 20,000 subscribers in Kansas City, let alone 20,000 paying their maximum rate, one single Google Fiber $70/month customer could saturate their entire Kansas City network.

Re:I find this statement amusing...

[gravis777]

Its actually true. Shoot, how much bandwidth do you think actually connects one city with the next? Then then owners of those lines lease those out to your ISPs.

http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/uunet_global_99_large.gif

http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/m.dodge/cybergeography/atlas/att_backbone_large.gif

According to that map, AT&T has one DS3 line going to Alaska. How fast is DS3?

http://www.lageman.com/bandwidth.htm

http://www.t1rex.com/ds3.html

What do you think would happen if everyone in Alaska decided to stream 1080p video at once?

Granted, i don't know how old these maps are.

Fiber to the house is a silly idea. Just because you have fiber to the house doesn't mean that you have a fiber connection to every server in the world. Fiber to the house is like having a Ferrari, but being stuck in rushhour traffic. It doesn't matter how fast your car is if the roads are congested.

This fiber buildout needs to be between major hubs - you need more bandwidth between the major cities, and more bandwidth to the outlying areas.

Fiber to the house makes no sense if you are in a rural area, if your ISP only has a T3 or a DS3 connection to their provider.

Want to test this out? Go to someplace like SpeakEasy and do a bandwidth test. Especially those of you with FIOS or some ISP with a 20Mbps or faster connection. Do a speed test to a relatively close city. What do you get? Now try something on the other side of the country. Now go across the continent. Then start going overseas. Try servers in South America, Scandanavia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East. What kind of speeds are you seeing?

Even more so, try these speed tests at different times of day. What do you see?

The problem isn't the bandwidth to your house, the problem is the bandwidth connecting cities with each other.

Re:I find this statement amusing...

[bhiestand]

A few years ago, they said they wouldn't service my parents' address because it's not worth the price of laying more cable. They still haven't. So they were correct: they won't provide affordable service to large chunks of the community.

And Verizon will never do it.

[danaris]

In a country of 300M people, $140B is only $50 per person. Comparing the price to Google's market cap is silly. For a big infrastructure project like this they would, of course, seek new capital to cover the cost. This is affordable.

I think this can't be stressed enough.

If the numbers in this report are anywhere near accurate, it ought to be easily possible to get a national fiber network. (Financially possible; saying nothing about politically here.)

Furthermore, it highlights just how dishonest and greedy Verizon is being in their decision to stop rolling out fiber. The primary reason they are doing it is to push more people onto 4G wireless—which they can charge much more for, and which is much less regulated than any wireline service. (I can't speak to what AT&T is doing, since to my knowledge, they don't have any wireline deployment in my general area.)

This sounds like the perfect target for some kind of grassroots push. If we can get some of the tech giants, like Google and Apple, on board, it ought to be possible to counterbalance the ISP lobby.

Dan Aris

Re:And Verizon will never do it.

[alostpacket]

Furthermore, it highlights just how dishonest and greedy Verizon is being in their decision to stop rolling out fiber. The primary reason they are doing it is to push more people onto 4G wireless—

I don't think that's the case. I'm loathe to defend Verizon, but from what I understand they stopped rollout because they had this amazing fiber network with no subscribers (relatively speaking), and they were getting low on cash. They even sold part of the fiber network to Frontier. Also, Verizon Wireless is not the same company as Verizon Telecom. VWZ is a company which is owned 50/50 (roughly, I think) between Verizon Telecom and Vodafone.

Re:And Verizon will never do it.

[mellon]

It's worth noting that with the FiOS bandwidth caps and the high speed of the service, you could blow through your entire month's allotment in about an hour. It's not deeply surprising to me that this didn't turn out to be popular.

Re:And Verizon will never do it.

[alostpacket]

What bandwidth caps?

Re:And Verizon will never do it.

[tbird81]

Not Apple. That would be a bad mistake.

Re:And Verizon will never do it.

[danaris]

Not Apple. That would be a bad mistake.

Disclaimer: I'm an Apple fan. You're not likely to convince me they're "teh evil," and thus automatically taint anything they do. (Though unlike some, I don't worship the ground Steve Jobs walked on.)

Why? We're talking about getting financial support for a grassroots lobbying effort. Assuming they'd do it (which, to be sure, is not a small assumption), what are you claiming that Apple's going to do that would be a "bad mistake"?

Dan Aris

Google may not have the cash

[fustakrakich]

But Goldman Sachs sure as hell does. Let's make them cough up some of that bailout money for something useful for a change.

Re:Google may not have the cash

[tmosley]

Got bailed out with $9 trillion in secret loans from the Fed AND IT'S GONE! *Poof*

Proper units

[LinuxInDallas]

The only way to understand the true value of that kind of speed is to use my preferred bandwidth measure: Nipples Per Second.

Re:Proper units

[GodfatherofSoul]

Hmmm, I'll estimate the typical pr0n scene has 1.25 women slightly skewed for gang bangs and FFM scenes. I just calculated the average scene in my collection is 559 MB, so by Stoichiometry:

woman/2 nipples X scene/1.25 woman X 559 MB/scene X 8bits/B X second/1 Billion bits = seconds/nipple = 1.79 seconds/nipple or 0.56 nipples/second. That's impressive, but not quite Burning Man speed.

America's Priorities

[periol]

So we can bailout Wall St. and the banks to the tune of hundreds of billions, but we can't afford to invest in infrastructure. Good to know.

Re:America's Priorities

[martin]

+1 to that exactly what i was thinking. Same for many countries

Re:America's Priorities

[MickyTheIdiot]

Third world and corrupt countries.

Re:America's Priorities

[tukang]

The bailouts were loans that were repaid with interest the bailouts were not expenditures. I remember when the bailout first passed people kept on listing the different things the funds could buy i.e. # of schools, # of people fed, etc. but that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between lending someone money and giving it to them.

Re:America's Priorities

[periol]

perhaps you weren't following what actually happened with TARP very closely. this is only where things are now. suffice to say it won't get better, and will probably end up costing much more than $140 billion.

Re:America's Priorities

[tukang]

and will probably end up costing much more than $140B.

According to your own source it's projected to lose $32B-$70B, so I'm not sure where you come up with "much more than $140B".

While the big banks have paid back their loans, the overall program is now projected to lose somewhere between $32 billion to $70 billion, with $109.1 billion owed as of June 30, according to SIGTARP.

The article doesn't take profits (dividends, interest) into account. The tarp amount disbursed was $417B, $345B was repaid and $42B in profits were made leaving a net of $30B. In the end, most of the tarp losses will come from bailing out the automakers - not wall street. http://projects.propublica.org/bailout/

Also, I would take the article you posted with a grain of salt because the author may be biased by his desire to sell his book.

Re:America's Priorities

[periol]

i said "will probably end up costing much more"

funny how you cut that bit off. that was my personal extrapolation.

regardless, here's the real information:

Altogether, accounting for both the TARP and the Fannie and Freddie bailout, $605 billion has gone out the door—invested, loaned, or paid out—while $345 billion has been returned. The Treasury has been earning a return on most of the money invested or loaned. So far, it has earned $87.8B. When those revenues are taken into account, $172.0B is the net still outstanding as of Oct. 26, 2012.

Re:America's Priorities

[Rockoon]

So we can bailout Wall St. and the banks to the tune of hundreds of billions, but we can't afford to invest in infrastructure. Good to know.

Two wrongs make a right, right?

$500 per person, $1,000 per household

[mosb1000]

$140,000,000,000 / 300,000,000 people = $467/person. But if you go by households you're going to have to pay at least $1,000 each.

Re:$500 per person, $1,000 per household

[bhiestand]

But if you go by households you're going to have to pay at least $1,000 each.

... or less than the price of one year's cable and phone service.

Time Warner isn't sure how to price it you mean

[gelfling]

Should it be $1000/month or $975 with the "Triple Play".

Nightmare

[DogDude]

Apple Fiber would be a fucking nightmare. Imagine: all of the Internet that Apple allowed you to see!

Re:Nightmare

[Flipao]

It'd be the death of porn as we know it :(

66 weeks in Afghanistan

[Rinisari]

$140 billion is 66 weeks in Afghanistan, according to costofwar.com.

rate = 3.51199622774 #per ms
fiber = 140000000000
day = rate * 1000 * 60 * 60 * 24
fiber / day
  => 461.3815805300829
week = 7 * day
fiber / week
  => 65.91165436144041

It's all about priorities

[floodo1]

A mere fraction of the annual defense budget :(

Forgetting one thing...

[portwojc]

"ISPs like Time Warner aren't sure the demand exists for 1Gbps internet, so it's unlikely they'll leap to invest in their own build-out."

The (the big players) will however leap to the effort to squelch it. If Google wants to make this happen which would change the landscape they are going to just have to do it and drag everyone kicking and screaming. As well as give their lawyers something to do.

Re:Forgetting one thing...

[MickyTheIdiot]

A positive job for lawyers (as opposed to the 99.9% negative efforts going on) should be welcomed.

Goldman is not to be trusted...

[RocketRabbit]

Obviously Google is not going to set out to equip every home in the USA. They will string their fiber along major corridors, connecting big cities first.

They may also buy some of the dark fiber optic cabling that is currently largely unused, which already connects to most places in the USA.

Anyway, Goldman Sachs, the company that assfucked the entire USA, should not be trusted or dealt with. Shun them.

Re:Goldman is not to be trusted...

[MrDoh!]

Trouble is, Goldman Sachs invested in a lot of those companies that laid out that dark fiber Google wants.

Re:Goldman is not to be trusted...

[RocketRabbit]

Why is that troublesome?

We paid for the fiber to homes back in the 90's

[Nyder]

The Telcos need to get building what they promised.

Re:We paid for the fiber to homes back in the 90's

[schnell]

We paid for the fiber to homes back in the 90's

I've seen this referenced a few times on Slashdot but I have never seen an explanation of specifically how fiber was paid for and promised but never delivered. Do you have any links to good reviews of what this was and how it happened?

Re:We paid for the fiber to homes back in the 90's

[macemoneta]

Google: 200 Billion Broadband Scandal

Re:We paid for the fiber to homes back in the 90's

[Anonymous Coward]

Here you go.

Re:We paid for the fiber to homes back in the 90's

[witherstaff]

It's now up to 300 billion in accounting. Of course it'd take some politicians with real convictions to hold them accountable so we know that won't ever happen.

It's about priorities.

[Albanach]

The cost to the United States of the Afghan and Iraq wars in 2011 was $160 billion. A further $120 billion will be incurred this year.

Don't need gigabit per home

[Todd Knarr]

For myself, I'd be happy with a solid 20 megabit connection. What I really want is:

• 20 megabits upstream as well as downstream, so things like VoIP don't choke on multiple users and I can upload files to an external server without causing congestion.
• A connection that stays 20 megabits instead of getting choked down to a fraction of that when a bunch of neighbors start using their connections heavily.

Which means gigabit or better to the local distribution point, and neighborhood infrastructure that can handle the aggregate bandwidth. Most of the problems I have aren't my individual connection's bandwidth, it's the shared local infrastructure between my home's connection point and the ISP that's insufficient for the bandwidth of all the connected subscribers. Fix that and give me symmetric bandwidth and I'll be a happy camper.

Re:Don't need gigabit per home

[jo_ham]

For myself, I'd be happy with a solid 20 megabit connection. What I really want is:

• 20 megabits upstream as well as downstream, so things like VoIP don't choke on multiple users and I can upload files to an external server without causing congestion.
• A connection that stays 20 megabits instead of getting choked down to a fraction of that when a bunch of neighbors start using their connections heavily.

Which means gigabit or better to the local distribution point, and neighborhood infrastructure that can handle the aggregate bandwidth. Most of the problems I have aren't my individual connection's bandwidth, it's the shared local infrastructure between my home's connection point and the ISP that's insufficient for the bandwidth of all the connected subscribers. Fix that and give me symmetric bandwidth and I'll be a happy camper.

Virgin started to realise (listened?) that their customers increasingly wanted this and the upstream has been steadily getting better here. A year or so ago they bumped everyone up on the upstream for free, and they consolidated their plans a little recently.

It's far from symmetrical (you can pay them for symmetrical 200/200, but be prepared to fork out), but the basic plans are pretty good now - 20/1, 60/3, 100/5 with no caps (just throttling on upstream if you exceed thresholds at peak times like the evening, but otherwise are non-monitored).

I'm on the 60/3 plan and have found that 3 Mbit upstream is more than adequate for video chatting and file uploads to the campus network etc. 7 MB downstream (and it's consistently as advertised, even at peak times) is just gravy.

I agree though, 1Gbs for the last mile right now is overkill - I can install Fallout New Vegas from scratch on steam in under 15 minutes, and I'm not even on the top plan - but pushing more ISPs into offering better upstream is the key.

Re:Don't need gigabit per home

[cdrguru]

Gigabit to the node doesn't cut it and no "star" or node configuration is going to make it either. The problem is the nodes have too many homes on them currently.

Cox in Phoenix has one of the best forward-looking configurations anywhere in the country and their target is 3Gb to the node and 500 homes on the node. This is 6Mb/sec total bandwidth (in theory) to each home. Except there are substantial carve-outs for phone and TV service, so it is likely limited to 2-3Mb/sec maximum. Again, that is a very forward-looking provider. You average provider in the US is running 1Gb/sec to the node with 1000 homes per node for a theortical maximum of 1Mb/sec and more likely something around 300-400Kb/sec if you want to be real.

This is why anyone buying an IP TV device (Roku, Apple TV, Google TV, etc.) has to understand that if the device does not have buffering to a hard drive built in, it is a short term investment. If the neighbors get on the bandwagon there simply isn't enough capacity to go around and will not be without a huge reworking of the whole system.

What would work? Well, something like 100Gb/sec to the node and 100 homes on each node. Except the land rights aren't going to be there for all those node boxes - some places hang them on poles but new ones are getting a little large for that. All the ones in Phoenix are on the ground and have pretty hefty power requirements.

My guess is that over the next 10-15 years we will see fiber to the home and this will not use neighborhood nodes for distribution but instead have fiber to the head end.

Re:Don't need gigabit per home

[elucido]

For myself, I'd be happy with a solid 20 megabit connection. What I really want is:

• 20 megabits upstream as well as downstream, so things like VoIP don't choke on multiple users and I can upload files to an external server without causing congestion.
• A connection that stays 20 megabits instead of getting choked down to a fraction of that when a bunch of neighbors start using their connections heavily.

Which means gigabit or better to the local distribution point, and neighborhood infrastructure that can handle the aggregate bandwidth. Most of the problems I have aren't my individual connection's bandwidth, it's the shared local infrastructure between my home's connection point and the ISP that's insufficient for the bandwidth of all the connected subscribers. Fix that and give me symmetric bandwidth and I'll be a happy camper.

Virgin started to realise (listened?) that their customers increasingly wanted this and the upstream has been steadily getting better here. A year or so ago they bumped everyone up on the upstream for free, and they consolidated their plans a little recently.

It's far from symmetrical (you can pay them for symmetrical 200/200, but be prepared to fork out), but the basic plans are pretty good now - 20/1, 60/3, 100/5 with no caps (just throttling on upstream if you exceed thresholds at peak times like the evening, but otherwise are non-monitored).

I'm on the 60/3 plan and have found that 3 Mbit upstream is more than adequate for video chatting and file uploads to the campus network etc. 7 MB downstream (and it's consistently as advertised, even at peak times) is just gravy.

I agree though, 1Gbs for the last mile right now is overkill - I can install Fallout New Vegas from scratch on steam in under 15 minutes, and I'm not even on the top plan - but pushing more ISPs into offering better upstream is the key.

It's not overkill. Imagine what you could run or host with that.

Re:Don't need gigabit per home

[Bengie]

Google fiber has "fiber huts", but they don't have the Ethernet ports in there. These huts only work as a central location to aggregate the fiber. Each house has a direct 1Gb fiber Ethernet connection back to the datacenter. From there they plug into their own Ethernet port in a switch.

How many ports per switch and the up-link speeds of those switches, I would like to know.

I know some several companies sell active-ethernet chassis with 960 ports 2Tb-3Tb of back-plane, and 400Gb-800Gb of uplink.

Once you start getting to these speeds, averages start to become predictable and you don't see spikes.

I've seen netgraphs of 2Tb/s internet-exchanges that had perfectly smooth bandwidth usage that was cookie cutter from day-to-day. Congestion is easy to handle at these speeds, because you don't get sudden changes in bandwidth usage.

What's the point?

[amiga3D]

All it'll do is cause you to hit your download cap in an hour or two.

Re:What's the point?

[symbolset]

At 1GBps you would hit Comcast's cap in under three minutes. But Google Fiber is uncapped, unmetered, un-fooled-around-with.

Re:What's the point?

[amiga3D]

Not to mention unavailable.

Re:What's the point?

[dlb]

"But Google Fiber is uncapped, unmetered, un-fooled-around-with."

For now..

Re:What's the point?

[MrDoh!]

Once it's there, it'd be hard to then cap it. I think they WANT you to use it as much as possible, HD+ films from Google Play, Hangouts in hidef. For them to rollout these speeds then stop you using it doesn't sound smart, and so far, Google's shown itself to be smart.

Re:What's the point?

[symbolset]

Sergey Brin was seriously digging on the Google Fiber boss during open discussions about this. "If we had honored those terms of our own ISP in the beginning, there would be no Google." The guy's answer: Legal says we have to put that in the text. We don't have to enforce it. Take it up with Legal.

aren't sure the demand exists for 1Gb internet

[John Hasler]

I certainly wouldn't pay extra for it nor would anyone I know. I'd much rather pay less for the 1.5Mb I'm getting. If I had more money I'd pay a little more than I am now for 10Mb but I have no use for anything faster.

Re:aren't sure the demand exists for 1Gb internet

[symbolset]

Since it costs less than many of us are paying for cable Internet or cable and Internet, the additional cost problem isn't an issue.

Re:aren't sure the demand exists for 1Gb internet

[Rockoon]

Since it costs less than many of us are paying for cable Internet or cable and Internet, the additional cost problem isn't an issue.

Are you so sure it costs less? A lot of people are saying $25/mnth but thats for Googles 5mbit/1mbit service. For the 1gbps service its $70/month which is distinctly not less than most peoples broadband bill.

Re:aren't sure the demand exists for 1Gb internet

[symbolset]

Google's $70 a month is "all fees included, no games or tricks." Their $130 play is "All channels, all digital, all HD. No games, no tricks." There is no fee to rent the router, the cable box, the DVR. No extra charge for extra packages, extra TV boxes, or even freaking remote controls. No extra fee for paying your bill or even receiving your bill.

Cable Internet providers may offer cheaper broadband. But when the bill comes... it's a different story.

BTW: My understanding is that the "free after installation fee" broadband is 5/5 mbps - and uncapped, so it can actually pass more data than other companies' capped 20mbps tiers. As far as I know, Google doesn't offer an asymmetric, capped or metered broadband service of any kind any where.

Re:aren't sure the demand exists for 1Gb internet

[Rockoon]

..all this talk of caps...

Pointing at a bad value service doesnt tell us anything about how good of a value Googles service is. I've got no caps and no throttling for $45/month, and shortly it will be 15mbit/2mbit for no additional cost.

Just to re-iterate.. pointing to a bad service only tells us about the bad service. Its like pointing at a criminal and concluding that non-criminals are saints. Thats not how logic works.

Re:aren't sure the demand exists for 1Gb internet

[symbolset]

You say that you're paying $45 per month for a current bandwidth you don't say what it is, and you're promised no caps and throttling for 15/2 Mbit but don't have it yet. And you think that your ISP promising to upgrade you now to 15/2 from your present capacity is unrelated to Google's symmetric gigabit for $70 offer (67/500 Times as much as you're promised but haven't seen yet), except that you're happy.

I don't know what to say. Yukon? Kivalina? Where the hell are you that this seems like a bad deal? Can I have some of that tea?

Not a problem.

[mosb1000]

If Apple promised to use it to build a nationwide fiber network, I'm sure congress would pass a bill to allow them to repatriate it tax-free.

Re:Not a problem.

[tmosley]

Think again.

Who gives more to your congressman? Google, or all the other ISPs in the US.

More likely they would change the law to tax it at 99.5%.

Imaginary vs. Real money.

[mosb1000]

That was imaginary money. It was just numbers moving around in computers. If you're talking about building infrastructure, you're talking about expending man-hours and equipment, that's real money.

Re:Imaginary vs. Real money.

[periol]

All our money is imaginary. It's all numbers moving around in computers. The difference here is that the money spent on rolling out fiber infrastructure wouldn't end up in the hands of the the 1%. Some of it would, but not enough.

Economic Stimulus

[bromoseltzer]

Yes, but the Iraq war benefits the bankers, globalists, and components of the military-industrial-media complex. Nationwide gigabit fiber would chiefly benefit the citizenry and small businesses. So, the Legislators simply can't vote for such a thing!

There's no bad way to spend $140 B (or more). A lot goes into the pockets of workers who dig trenches and string fiber. (We really need those jobs.) Some goes to electronics manufacturers, but it all stimulates the economy -- and serves somebody's interests. The problem is if AT&T, Verizon, et. al. are locked out, especially if it's a government investment.

As economic stimulus goes, I think I'd rather have bridges that don't fall down and railways that work than 1 Gbps to my home. A mere 100 Mbs should keep me happy for the next 5 years, I'm thinking. I making do with 18 at the moment.

Re:Economic Stimulus

[bill_mcgonigle]

There's no bad way to spend $140 B (or more).

Blowing up children in Yemen would stand out as a bad way to spend that kind of money. vs. being put to productive use in the US economy.

As economic stimulus goes, I think I'd rather have bridges that don't fall down and railways that work than 1 Gbps to my home.

If the USG weren't trying to take defacto control of the majority of the Middle East, you could have both.

Re:Economic Stimulus

[bromoseltzer]

There's no bad way to spend $140 B (or more).

Blowing up children in Yemen would stand out as a bad way to spend that kind of money. vs. being put to productive use in the US economy.

As economic stimulus goes, I think I'd rather have bridges that don't fall down and railways that work than 1 Gbps to my home.

If the USG weren't trying to take defacto control of the majority of the Middle East, you could have both.

Quite so. Of course, end-of-war savings (peace dividends) rarely seem to materialize. Still, spending is good for the economy -- even if you only pay people to dig holes in the ground and fill them up. Of course it's still better if they fix bridges and highways and avoid shooting people.

Increase the installation fee

[macemoneta]

At $1000 per installation, they would get about $120B for 120M households; close enough to start. I would gladly pay a $1000 start-up fee for symmetrical 1Gbps/service. From other reports, Google is charging $70/month, with an operating cost of $5/month. As the early adopters start to accumulate, the revenue stream will offset the cost for the periodically lowered installation charge to increase penetration.

Establish a nation-wide signup. Require a credit card (Google Wallet) for signup; they won't be charged, but they'll separate the wheat from the chaff. Crunch the data to find the highest population density signups and start build-out in those areas. Provide near-realtime online updates on build-out area priority. This lets those interested in an area act as promoters / ambassadors to increase signups, and raise their area's priority. Like the first cities selected, let people compete - providing free word of mouth advertising in the process.

And don't forget the other side of the equation; offer servers reasonably priced 100Gb local Google data center / site interconnects to keep the on-net customers interested and happy.

Re:Increase the installation fee

[macemoneta]

I paid about $300 installation when cable Internet was first offered in my area - back when it was 8Mb/512kb. $1000 for the upgrade seems reasonable.

Re:Increase the installation fee

[MrDoh!]

And don't forget the other side of the equation; offer servers reasonably priced 100Gb local Google data center / site interconnects to keep the on-net customers interested and happy.

That's a HUGE income for Google. All those subscribers with high speed connections and no-one able to really hammer it? Most people using Amazon's cloud servers could jump to Google for faster speeds perhaps? Google makes money both ends of the equation.

hmm..I wonder if this is where grass roots...

[DarthVaderDave]

could begin? Google, as a company, has always had a decent reputation. What if a grass roots organization could organize support among the 311 million people to fund some of this. Instead of 'hoping' that Google comes to you - make it happen. Google would make good bank; but in return they would agree to charge so much. Kind of a business - community arrangement. Kept above board, this could benefit generations to come. In short, leave the government out - make the agreement beneficial to them, beneficial to joe schmo, & reap the rewards that we, as an advancing civilization, are supposed to.

We keep slipping digits in here somehow

[symbolset]

Google has $45 billion, not $4.5 billion, in cash and short-term investments. With only $6 billion in debt. As of their September financials. Their operating cash flow is about $1 billion a month. They are a really big company, and they have the means to make this work.

Re:We keep slipping digits in here somehow

[neokushan]

Google has $45 billion, not $4.5 billion, in cash and short-term investments.

I'm not sure if you didn't read my comment or didn't read the summary, but let me help you with that:

if Google devoted 25% of its $4.5bn annual capex to this project, it could equip 830K homes per year

I wasn't debating Google's total net worth, I was pointing out that they're claiming Verizon can spend less money to equip the same number of homes. I wasn't debating if Google did or didn't have the capacity to pull it off, rather I was saying that it wouldn't cost $140bn as GS claims.

Re:We keep slipping digits in here somehow

[symbolset]

Sorry, my bad. Expecting Google to hang fiber to every home in America without increasing their capital expenditure seems a bit... odd. They are investing in future revenues, and to put a gigabit pipe directly to the end user that nobody can take away from them. A reasonable person would expect them to invest in that.

Re:We keep slipping digits in here somehow

[neokushan]

I think Google are treating this as an experiment, but not just in terms of laying Fibre and running a service, but in seeing how the other ISPs react. I think all Google really wants is for Verizon/comcast/AT&T/etc. to pull the finger out and start upgrading their own infrastructure. A bit of competition never hurt.

Failing that, I'm pretty sure Google will continue rolling out until they either become the de-facto ISP of the USA, or competition means everyone else tries to take them on.

Re:We keep slipping digits in here somehow

[klui]

Even if Verizon, Time Warner, Comcast, or AT&T could spend less, I would choose Google because all the big ISPs have transfer caps.

Re:We keep slipping digits in here somehow

[PlusFiveTroll]

How you want the world to work.

Google really wants is for Verizon/comcast/AT&T/etc. to pull the finger out and start upgrading their own infrastructure. A bit of competition never hurt.

How the world works

Verizon/comcast/AT&T/etc. start upgrading their lawyers and politicians to fight Google at every step of the way, costing billions of dollars

http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-02-01/broadband-telecom-lafayette/52920278/1

Cox has spent millions fighting the city, and finally has lost.

Re:We keep slipping digits in here somehow

[neokushan]

Sadly this is more true than I'd like to admit. Still, I stand by that this is an experiment for Google in every sense of the word. Now that Cox has lost, they're pretty much down to two choices: Compete with better products by investing, or lose customers left, right and centre. Even the biggest of Apple Fanboys would happily have Google as their ISP if it means getting 50x faster speeds and no throttling. Lesser of two evils and whatnot.

Re:We keep slipping digits in here somehow

[YrWrstNtmr]

Even if Verizon, Time Warner, Comcast, or AT&T could spend less, I would choose Google because all the big ISPs have transfer caps.

Not Verizon FiOS (so far).
Google doesn't because this is a publicity stunt/experiment.

Re:We keep slipping digits in here somehow

[symbolset]

Stanford was the experiment. They learned there what it costs. KC is about learning other things: uptake, legal issues, ramping human resources.

Re:We keep slipping digits in here somehow

[Xeranar]

All calculations like this are based on current income rather than proposed income. I would assume google could get about a 40% market share of the 100+ million households. So 40 million households would need to pay 3500 to cover the build out. So factoring low cost lending and a profit margin of about 50% to cover maintenance it would come out to about 3-5 years to pay everything off and generate a healthy profit. The issue is that the telecoms like their monopoly and thus were unlikely to see google fiber widespread soon. Atleast our children will live in a more liberal anti-corporate world...too bad it's taking another decade or two to see the real results.

Re:We keep slipping digits in here somehow

[afidel]

The funny thing is that Comcast came up with the correct technical fix and now is on the path to abandoning it in favor of an economic fix. The correct technical fix is to apply a rate limiter on the heaviest users when the node is actually under stress, in the middle of the night there is zero marginal cost to the ISP to allow you to use lots of bandwidth so treating those bits as valuable is silly. Treating bits like they are water, electricity, or any other commodity is just wrong, unused bits have zero value and used bits only affect the availability of bits during that moment in time, so applying a speed cap during contention and upgrading the trunk line once some percentage of users have been throttled during a given sample period is the best solution overall, not data caps which do nothing to measure the value of the thing being delivered.

Re:We keep slipping digits in here somehow

[jjsimp]

I would choose Google Fiber easily because of the monopoly Cox Cable has. I'm still waiting for Verizon FIOS to get installed. It's all around my neighborhood, but nothing in my neighborhood. Verizon is sure taking a long time with their roll out. There are houses less than a mile away that have had FIOS for over two years now.

Re:We keep slipping digits in here somehow

[thejynxed]

You'll be waiting forever then, because Verizon cancelled future rollouts.

As a Time Warner Customer...

[cervesaebraciator]

I can confirm that the company does not believe there is demand for fast, reliable internet connections. This is true, at least, where only Time Warner is the only available broadband.

Charge monthly usage rate

[jfdavis668]

That way you make money as you go. You get repaid by each installation sold. Yes, it costs money to operate them, but you charge a little extra. You don't plop down $140B in one lump sum.

Google, Apple, Netflix, et al must do this

[rabtech]

The telcos are slowly strangling the internet... from bandwidth caps, to non-compete agreements with the cable companies, from AUPs that prohibit servers, blocked ports/protocols, to a complete refusal to roll out fiber even in dense urban areas.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, etc should each pony up some cash and begin a nationwide deployment right now. Not with an eye toward making a huge profit, but to ensure they continue to have access to their customers without toll-booths being setup inbetween because you can rest-assured that is exactly where the Telco/CableCo dualopoly is moving us.

This is a matter of long-term survival and they need to act now.

Same reason they should be buying their own media companies, before Big Content buys enough of Congress to make YouTube illegal and slaps a 100% tax on all flash memory.

The RIAA, MPAA, Telcos, and CableCos aren't necessary. It's time to eliminate them but the window on that is closing - soon they'll have too much influence to be assailable and we'll be in the Gilded Age 2.0, stuck for years until a massive depression finally loosens their grip on power.

Re:Google, Apple, Netflix, et al must do this

[Anonymous Coward]

Excellent comment! I 100% agree!

Google Apple MS Amazon alone are worth 80 times what the RIAA, MPAA and Telcos are worth combined

Yawn

[benjamindees]

I'm probably the only person on /. who thinks that the internet is kind of boring lately, and it would be better to focus on getting everyone access to affordable broadband instead of really-really-ridiculously-fast internet for a handful of geeks.

Re:Yawn

[Rockoon]

Exactly.

..but as far as I am concerned the ability to inexpensively consume CSPAN and other government-funded media at realtime rates is the only guarantee that we should be making. So my definition of broadband in this context is quite low. If you can read the on-screen text in the CSPAN stream, its good enough quality for a "minimum standard."

Re:Yawn

[ceoyoyo]

You're not. Once it's fast enough to stream TV and talk on VOIP at the same time I'm not really sure why it needs to be faster. Full high def movies download in about ten minutes. Maybe when someone figures out how to do immersive VR properly we'll all want faster connections but right now 1 Gbps seems kind of pointless.

Re:Yawn

[bhiestand]

I agree with you on the goal, but I think fiber-to-the-home is the best way to make it happen. POTS is ridiculously expensive to deploy, maintain, and provide to rural customers. Cable is expensive to maintain and deploy, has limited coverage, and price gouges everywhere it can. Broadband over POTS, wireless, or cable is a pain in the overpriced ass.

Fiber has "high" installation costs but can also provide much more. Fiber can provide affordable broadband to nearly everyone while also modernizing the phone system and providing a new platform for content providers to actually compete. Why spend $60B extending DSL/cable/wireless a little bit instead of $120B to do fiber right?

Meanwhile, Sonic.net is quietly doing it

[Animats]

Gigabit fiber to the home is quietly being deployed by Sonic.net in Sebastpol, CA. It costs them about $1500 per drop, but they gain back the $20 per month they were previously paying to AT&T for access to copper. Customers pay $70/month for 1Gb/s Internet connections. 20Mb/s for $40. Sonic makes money on this, and is slowly expanding the service.

The big players in cable hate Sonic, one of the last of the independent ISPs. Network neutral, EFF-endorsed privacy policies, no caching or "deep packet inspection". Just bits.

Sonic isn't in the TV business. (They do resell DirecTV if you want that, but that comes in via a dish, not the Internet connection.) So they don't have any bias towards sending their own content.

Re:Meanwhile, Sonic.net is quietly doing it

[Gregory Arenius]

Sonic also has great customer support. You can call them and talk to an actual person without going through some convoluted phone tree. The ones I have spoken with knew their stuff, too. Just a happy customer here.

Why so much?

[guruevi]

Countries like Sweden have been doing it for years at a much lower rate and they are way less populated than the US.

How did we get phones and cable practically nationwide? How did we get electricity and water and sewage nationwide? Those are much more expensive investments than just blowing a fiber through a pipe. And fiber is already nationwide, there are fibers crossing the country in multiple directions, heck most phone companies have fiber in each street already.

It doesn't mean you have to have fiber to every house. The existing copper will do just fine for the last couple of miles, you can get gigabit speeds on it already, the companies simply don't want to invest in the uplink and rather hoard the profits as they have been doing over the last couple of decades.

Re:Why so much?

[Kjella]

Sweden is 450,000 km^2. USA is 9,800,000 km^2. Building infrastructure basically becomes exponentially more expensive as the area increases.

And the world (land area) is 148,429,000 km^2, clearly building an Internet is impossible. Intra-European bandwidth is just as important to us as Intra-US bandwidth is to the US, Sweden is just as well connected to Norway, Denmark and Finland as California is to Arizona, Nevada and Oregon. You just pretend like they're not comparable because you don't like the results of the comparison.

Telecom company dividends are evil

[hwstar]

As I've said in prior posts, telecom dividends are evil. AT&T pays a 6% dividend, and Centurytel pays a 7.4% dividend. Dividend payments cause the telecom companies to put off upgrading infrastructure as long as possible because of the cost of the dividend payout. If dividends were unlawful or heavily taxed for telecom companies, you'd see the incentives change for the better: More overbuilds and therefore more competition which would drive the upgrade of the cable plant.

Additionally, those companies paying high dividends also treat their customers badly since they have a defacto monopoly or duopoly, and thier primary purpose of existance is to ensure management is overpaid, then pay out highest quarterly dividend possible. This is a perverse incentive. Corporations need to have balanced corporate charters which balance the need for profit against the needs of other stakeholders such as customers and employees.Persuing short term profits and quarterly results versus delighting your customers is one of the things which has ruined this country.

Re:80/20 rule?

[Joce640k]

Why do you even need it? Most people only do facebook/messenger/youtube.

Why nationwide?

[CanadianMacFan]

Google wouldn't want to build a nationwide network. They are going to pick out the locations where there is a high demand for the service in small areas in order to get the most customers for the minimum installation costs. There's no way there are going to build fibre networks out in the country where the houses are kilometres apart. Their ideal clients right now are dense suburbs and apartment buildings in well off areas.

Google could build intercity network

[kawabago]

If Google built the inter-city fiber network and terminated it at a city-wide co-op type provider it would offload the build out costs over many more people. For that matter, hi speed wireless for the city tapped into the national fiber would make it even cheaper.

Sounds Familiar...

[bell.colin]

Didn't we (U.S. Tax payers) give $200B to ATT and Verizon (GTE maybe) back in the late 90s to put fiber everywhere within 10-Years (for 45/45 down/up speeds) and got nothing except -$200B Wasted in the end with a "it can't be done response"?

Maybe we should collect it back and give the contract to someone who can actually get the job done.

The demand exists

[nurb432]

But not at the cost and caps that a normal ISP would impose.

How much is it costing us?

[stox]

Not to have this kind of infrastructure?

Re:80/20 rule?

[PlusFiveTroll]

Right, some time in the past we didn't need telephones, just send a letter dammit.

Why not the big cities first?

[future assassin]

Wouldn't it make sense to get the big cities/metropolitan areas first, that way you corner the market while forcing the telcos out and having them concentrate on rural areas to make money. Then you swoop in the kill that market

OR come to Canada first and stop the mass rape that is called internet here.

One things that I'd be wearing about is the same thing that is happening now. Content distributors running the internet networks. No conflict of interest there or nothing like that.

Re:Gov Time

[tmosley]

Sure, but only after we stop all the wars and fold up our military empire.

Fiber as a Utility Model

[cortex]

Along the Wasatch Front we have the excellent UTOPIA project, which brings fiber to the home. The fiber infrastructure is treated like a utility and any ISP can compete for your business - Keeping costs down. It was a great day when I had my symmetric 100 MB connection installed and was able to say goodbye to Comcast.

State government can fund it

[elucido]

This could be funded by State government contracts.

This is a good idea but $1000? $500 is reasonable

[elucido]

At $1000 per installation, they would get about $120B for 120M households; close enough to start. I would gladly pay a $1000 start-up fee for symmetrical 1Gbps/service. From other reports, Google is charging $70/month, with an operating cost of $5/month. As the early adopters start to accumulate, the revenue stream will offset the cost for the periodically lowered installation charge to increase penetration.

Establish a nation-wide signup. Require a credit card (Google Wallet) for signup; they won't be charged, but they'll separate the wheat from the chaff. Crunch the data to find the highest population density signups and start build-out in those areas. Provide near-realtime online updates on build-out area priority. This lets those interested in an area act as promoters / ambassadors to increase signups, and raise their area's priority. Like the first cities selected, let people compete - providing free word of mouth advertising in the process.

And don't forget the other side of the equation; offer servers reasonably priced 100Gb local Google data center / site interconnects to keep the on-net customers interested and happy.

How would most of us get $1000?

The list of nice could've-hads besides the wars

[doug141]

Fiber to every home, Bridges and roads in good repair, A national water grid, A balanced budget, And that's just getting the list started...

We could all start businesses with 1Gb

[elucido]

I think demand is there for anyone who wants to host a site or run a business.

Re:This is a good idea but $1000? $500 is reasonab

[macemoneta]

It eventually will be, you'll just have to wait longer. $500 isn't reasonable if it costs $1000 to install, which it does.

Re:I'd like to have the government do it

[tbird81]

It would also make some government cronies extremely rich from the overinflated price tag they would put on it, and the taxpayer would foot the bill.

You seem quite selfish.

Re:server support?

[BitZtream]

Google, Apple, Valve, and Microsoft to name the few that I thought up in the amount of time it took to read your message.

As much as I would like to see this happen

[Cyberllama]

If I had to choose, I'd prefer Google to launch a Nationwide wireless competitor. I can't tell you how sick I am of AT&T.

Re:A Bargain, too bad Obama is an idiot...

[Cyberllama]

False.

The 2008 budget was Bush's budget, not Obama's. Obama was in office, but the budget was passed in 2007.

I've redone the math

[symbolset]

It seems that just five persons' Google Fiber upload bandwidth is far more than enough to saturate every TWC and Comcast download cap in the US. All of KC Google fiber is overkill by thousands of times.

Re:I've redone the math

[bhiestand]

In other words, Google is highly oversubscribed? They're an incredible company with some ingenious infrastructure, but there's no way they can push those levels of data. Or that the rest of the net could handle it.

However, I would absolutely love to be a P2P user in the KC area right now ;)... I really missing having uncapped fiber at home, and I only had 100 mbps when I had it.

This won't happen for a long time

[asmkm22]

The last thing Big Media wants is even faster downloads of movies. They've pushed hard to make sure data caps are in place to mitigate it all, so there's no way they'll let this fly.

Because the US telco monopolies have great lobbies

[witherstaff]

At first glance your argument appears valid. But even high population areas suck in comparison to other countries. If it was just rural areas and small cities that had bad Internet I would agree with you. However take any of the major metro US markets and compare to any similar major metro markets in other top countries and you'll see the US is vastly underserved by our telco / cable duopoly.

My local congress critter was sitting house chair of the House subcommittee on telecommunications. His entire plan for increased internet presence was given to him by major telcos - roll back the '96 deregulation act that forced competition and they promise they'll make things faster. Telcos were some of his largest campaign donors. That got rolled back, the promises didn't materialize, and the congressman went on to the more powerful Energy subcommittee. Ahh politics!

Get out of the cities

[gravis777]

How do you figure its inflated? There is much more to the US than the East Coast and major metropolitan areas. I got relatives who live out in little towns in Central and West Texas, and some in North Texas - one town has 300 people, is an hour from the closest town of 20,000 people, and 3 hours from a major city. The only broadband they can get in the area is 1.5Mbps DSL, and that is if you live in the CITY - most of those 300 people are ranchers, and they are stuck with dialup or HughesNet. Another piece of myfamily lives in a city of about 1200, mostly ranchers and farmers, and even in the city, if you want broadand, you are stuck with satelite. They are an hour from the closest city of 100,000 people, and 3 hours from a major city. I got family out in North Texas in a town of about 300, which is so spread out and so rural, that they don't even have addresses - they drive into town to the post office to get their mail as there is no mail delivery in this town. They are 10 miles from the closest town of 5,000 people, and an hour and a half from Dallas. They all have HughesNet

How much do yoou think it is going to cost to run fiber out to these rural areas?There is a reason that no one - not AT&T, not Time Warner, no one, has run fiber out into these areas. There is a reason you can't get cable or DSL out there. It's not cost effective.

Most of the US is rural areas. Get out of the major cities and actually see the country. Drive through Kansas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Oklahoma, Wyoming, Montana, etc. It is RURAL! 20,000 is considered to be a large town in many of these areas.Shoot, you have entire states out there that have a lower population than many of your East-Coast cities.

And then, what about trying to lay fiber out in the mountains? What about trying to cover Alaska?

I actually think $140 Billion is pretty conservative. I would have thought it would be much higher.

Measuring cost instead of profit.

[JerseyTom]

This report measures the wrong thing. If GF is profitable purely by itself (no accounting tricks, no assumptions about how much additional ad revenue could be generated, as son on), then the investment would be justifiable no matter the cost.

Also, since Google has released zero actual cost numbers, this is making guesses based on how Time Warner or other highly inefficient companies operate. Why do that?

Nothing terribly new

[Lord Chaos EOG]

I already have 1/1 Gbit fibre. I don't need google for that. The US needs to stop getting bumf*cked by telco's. Bandwith caps, carrier locked cell phones, etc. just sucks.

This is what we have governments for

[WOOFYGOOFY]

This is why we have governments. They are able and have the mandate to do things that corporations are incapable of doing or don't have the motivation to do or as in this case, both. This is how we got the national highway system ion the first place. I would say that private business and the nation as a whole has benefited from having a highway system and that the money spent has been paid back many many many many many times over since it was created.

Of course other ISPs are against it...

[DiEx-15]

...because ISPs like Time Warner, Mediacom, and Windstream would lose their precious, money-making monopolies in areas like mine!

A competitor in my area that offers cheaper service and exponentially better customer service with even better quality of product? Heaven forbid!