Slashdot Mirror
Google Fiber: Why Traditional ISPs Are Officially On Notice
MojoKid writes "A few years ago, when Google was determining which city to launch its pilot Google Fiber program, cities all over the country went all-out trying to persuade the search giant to bring all that fantastical bandwidth to their neck of the woods. And with good reason: Google Fiber offers gigabit Internet speeds and even TV service, all at prices that meet or beat the competition. In fact, the lowest tier of Google Fiber service (5Mbps down, 1Mbps up) is free, once users pay a $300 construction fee. If ISPs were concerned before, they should really start sweating it now. Although Google Fiber looked like it would whip traditional ISPs in every regard, with Time Warner Cable cutting prices and boosting speeds for users in Kansas City in a desperate attempt to keep them, surely other ISPs were hoping the pilot program would flame out. Now that Austin is happening, it's clear that it's only a matter of time before Google rolls out its service in many more cities. Further, this jump from legacy Internet speeds to gigabit-class service is not just about people wanting to download movies faster; it's a sea change in what the Internet is really capable of."
These are our choices: stick with a variety of crappy ISPs, or consolidate on one that's pretty decent, but whose business model consists of stripping us of our privacy and funneling our Internet experience through its pipes.
This is not the 21st century I was told to expect.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Cant come soon enough
Hello,
I think continuing the rollout of Google Fiber is a good move by Google, even if it does not extend to all locations, it forces the competition to upgrade in others to prevent the threat of wholesale abandonment if/when it does arrive. Having a broadband connection connection changes not just the amount of your Internet usage, but what you use the Internet for.
I remember switching from dial-up to cable Internet access with a single-digit megabit speed back in the mid-1990s, and it opened up a whole new world of activities for me. Instead of buying retail packaged software, I could purchase and download it from the author's site. Starting a download of a video and waiting for it to complete became video streaming with services like YouTube.
I really have no idea what sort of change a gigabit Internet connection will bring, but it's just as likely to open up all sorts of new services for consumers and opportunities for revenue for software developers and content providers that were unimaginable a few years ago.
Regards,
Aryeh Goretsky
Dexter is a good dog.
Local power company. Freaked out the established interests to the point where Comcast has targeted advertising claiming people have left EPB to go back to them.
The only problem? The people in those commercials sound like such whiny gits, anybody with sense would walk away from Comcast.
Seriously, what kind of relationship is built on a demand to change your cable service?
All that the dominant ISPs need to do is pretend like they're rolling out faster service.
No way will Google go the full mile and keeping building fiber around the country indefinitely. Their tactic is obviously to motivate the existing ISPs. But the ISPs know full-well the strategy.
So the big question is, who blinks first? Google or the ISPs? And even if the ISPs blink and resume heavy infrastructure investing, how long will it be sustained once Google inevitably pulls out?
This is a media story engineered to generate goodwill. I would not go so far as to call it a gimmick, but it sounds and feels like one.
FTTH, as it's known, costs between $5,000 and $12,000 per home in the rural market and only exists through subsidy. By comparision, FTTH is between $1,500 and $3,000 in suburban markets which is recouped by annual customer commitments.
The only way these costs are made affordable is through government subsidies. Google is subsidizing these customers in a similar way. As with many subsidies, unless they are bonafide charity/goodwill missions, they are not sustainable. This is okay as long as Google has the goodwill of the overall financial markts, by, e.g., having such a huge P/E ratio that they enjoy enough excess money to spend on things like driverless cars, imaging satellites, and hot tub airplaines.
Speeds comparable to FTTH can be achieved for so much less money by using Fiber to the Neighborhood instead of to the home. While I'm no fan of local cable TV monopolies, they already do this today. The problem many local cable TV companies is that they still carry local channels in analog. If they were to convert to all-digital carriage their existing cable plant could compare with FTTH using DOCSIS 3.x but this dream inexplicably escapes them.
Kriston
The ISP oligopoly is not going to sit still. They will get laws passed that put impediments in the way of Google.
1 Gigabit connection for $70 a month?
I understand why we don't get this on average across the US, because population density is low. But why don't we get it in the Bay Area? We have high population density, and surely there is demand. What is wrong with California?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Austin is hardly a city to sneeze at... maybe population-wise, sure, but the sheer number of tech companies moving or expanding here is rather eye-opening. The people who make decisions about moving tech companies here are going to have a much easier decision once the GF infrastructure is done. ISPs are largely regional anyway, so the fact that the "flyover" region is the only one starting to get the Google treatment doesn't mean that your region's ISPs aren't paying very close attention, too.
I think states and cities should be rolling out their own fiber. Sort of like building roads. And then subsidize installation for last mile fiber for any homeowner that can afford $1000. They don't need to install the network equipment but they can or they can lease the lines to businesses. The state could fund a redundant backbone network that the cities could trunk into. Just design the lines to be replaced every 30 years.
Cites could then individually choose to offer "free" internet. Of course that would mean they would just subcontract out to a business to provide the network equipment and service. Cities pay for these sorts of things through property taxes.
I may be libertarian but I classify this as necessary infrastructure that will benefit the vast majority. Everything else is just more expensive.
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn is no longer saying "C'mon Google, we're RIGHT HERE! Okay, fine, if you're going to go give sweet fiber lovin' to Kansas City and not right in your own back yard, we'll just invite Gigabit over for the evening. How ya like that, huh?"
Please, Google, please put my ISP on notice by actually showing up with some fiber. Please. Until I'm writing you a check for $300 for a scheduled install date though, it's nothing but elephant talk.
Basically it's a big "fuck you" to the incumbent ISPs and a wake-up call to the public as to how badly we're being screwed by those ISPs. Data caps, incredible markups for marginal speed increases, etc. Google is proving those are all bullshit and still profitable.
All the companies that have traditionally been in the business of delivering content to people's homes (basically TV and Internet) should be afraid.
Unlike pretty much all of these companies (NBC, Comcast, TimeWarner, AT&T, etc...), Google's business model isn't threatened by you using the Internet. Google isn't going to impose limits on how much internet you can use. Google isn't going to cut you off if you exceed some arbitrary and undefined limit. Google wants you to use the internet as much as possible.
I think a lot of why broadband access in the US sucks is because the providers (Comcast, TW, AT&T, etc.) are in bed with or part of the same corporate hierarchy that contains the content producers for TV, movies, etc. and rather than figure out how to deliver content via the internet, these greedy fucks want to restrict it.
I mean think about it. If you live in a city in the US, there's no *technical* reason that you can't have 100 megabit/sec up and down to your apartment. But if everyone had something like that then people would rapidly realize that paying over $100/month for cable TV is bullshit (where does that money go? Advertisers pay to have their ads shown, why should you pay to view them???). If everyone had 100mbit, people would realize that distributing content peer to peer is actually a very good idea (you can call it piracy if you want). Yet we don't have that, because the providers know that if you're moving terabyte-levels of traffic around, you are probably stealing their content.
I'm not as concerned about the privacy thing, since overseas VPNs are cheap and fast enough to hide any/all traffic from your ISP.
I expect they are rolling out fiber in the middle of the country first to sort out the kinks. KC went well, so now they're taking on a bigger project with Austin. I'd speculate on one, maybe two more cities in between the Alleghenies and the Rockies, and then they'll light up one of the big costal cities.
-It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
I really have no idea what sort of change a gigabit Internet connection will bring, but it's just as likely to open up all sorts of new services for consumers and opportunities for revenue for software developers and content providers that were unimaginable a few years ago.
This is what I was really hoping, but sadly discovered that their initial terms of service prohibited all residential customers from hosting any kind of server. While this is not exactly unexpected, I do consider it a violation of FCC-10-201/NetNeutrality's "blocking" prong. Though traditionally that is understood as residential ISPs blocking a residential client from a remote server, I also believe it applies to the symmetric use of IPv6, i.e. remote clients blocked from residential servers. My FCC 2000F complaint (ref#12-C000422224-1) is currently in "Enforcement review" after 7 months of getting bounced to the Kansas Attorney General who just bounced it back to the quite slow to respond FCC.
Anyway, until we can get some sort of residential internet users bill of rights for what they can expect from their bridge to the global information superhighway, I don't think we'll see remotely the advances in new services that we otherwise would.
$0.02...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3503531&cid=43033891
Those neighborhoods where demand for high-quality service is "high" will get cheap Internet.
To make up for lost revenue in "Google Fiber" cities, nationwide ISPs will likely scale back infrastructure improvements elsewhere and/or raise prices where they still have effective monopolies/cartels.
They will also be more careful about investing "for the long term" if they know someone like Google can come in at any time and make their investment worth less than they expected it to be.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Is it the equivalent of a common cable 1mbit up with 30+ down or will they offer decent bandwidth? Personally i'd wish for a 50/50 split, 500mbit up&down instead of 1gbit down with some ridiculous 10mbit or so of upload.
At the moment we have limited choices of decent internet in the UK.
Unless you are in the middle of london or live next door to the exchange ADSL is useless as our phone networks haven't been upgraded since the victorian era.
We can get cable by Virgin which is copper to the cabinet with world renowned terrible customer service and incomprehensible billing or BT infinity fibre which isn't available in many places outside london.
I'd gladly foot the bill for the installation of fibre from the street to my home for something like 100/50mbit with a sensible monthly fee.
cities in between the Alleghenies and the Rockies
Have about a nice little burg like Chicago.
I wish Apple and Google would kiss and make up..
Then, form a new company, a joint venture, dedicated to rolling out "Google" fiber, er, Gapple Fiber... nationwide before 2015.
Apple has the cash, Google has (most of) the fiber...
This would help both companies more than either will ever benefit from this constant pissing contest they've been in these past few years.
Google broadband is more likely to end up like Google Reader than it is GMail. I'd like to believe in free donuts and bacon, but I suspect that there are a few things about the economics of running an ISP that the utopians at Mountain View have missed when setting their initial price. Happy to be proven wrong, but Google doesn't have a great track record when it comes to predicting the long term viability of its projects.
To quote a recently fired Microsoft games employee: "why would anyonewant to live there?"
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
20k ads per month should be free for all, thats freedom. Oh, that will ruin Google's Business? Hey, its the ads freedom, everyone should be able to promote his business in order to have a better life.
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
Come to brussels :-)
With this pace of rollout it would take a century to get this here in SW Florida. I am not holding my breath.
Lemme try reframing the REALLY sticky question:
Which would you rather have, the ISP whose business model includes Six Strikes programs in league with the Govt, or Google that just might not, but at the cost of stripping your privacy?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If you can deal with the hackers via player policing and general anti-hack techniques, gigabit Internet in theory can make action online computer games with hundreds of thousands to millions of people in the same zone via P2P. 200 bytes(position/facing/velocity/action) per 33 ms(reasonable refresh time) = 6k per second, round up to 10k because the player will have actions too. So you're looking at 1,000,000k / 10k people you can feed your information outbound or 100,000 players.
Then if you just apply some basic theory of who isn't in range of who, you simply update those people less frequently. Instead of updating these people every 33ms + your action time, you update them depending on how long it would take them to get in range if they were traveling full speed into you. For a game with sniper rifles, maybe you can't do this. But lets say your game all involved melee weapons, then you're looking at people who aren't in immediate melee range getting updated every 100 ms. And people slightly further away, every 300 ms. And people really far away, several seconds. The distribution of people means most people don't need the fastest update(only the 8 people standing around you would in fact). So for a melee game, you could probably be looking at 1-100 million people in the same zone. At this point, your video card is probably the limiting factor more than your pipes are though I doubt we could organize 100 million people to want to play your video game unless it is super awesome.
It comes down to three things:
Can you really send out 100,000 packet updates or 200 bytes every 33ms? Technically you could, but would the software and hardware really manage it?
Do you have a strong enough anti hack system and hack resistant code that your game can do client side hit detection, and hackers to be banned when they show up?
Finally it is all irrelevant until 1GB/s fiber is everywhere, because for this feat of gaming to occur, you'd need everyone gaming to have 1GB/s fiber!
God spoke to me
I mean think about it. If you live in a city in the US, there's no *technical* reason that you can't have 100 megabit/sec up and down to your apartment.
Yah, exactly, its almost literally flipping a switch with DOCSIS 3, which is pretty much available everywhere today in the cities.
...they have been pocketing all of the cash as profits and NOW they are worried.
Good!
They SHOULD have been making upgrades.
We aren't even in the top 10.
And there isn't a single US city in the top 30 cities.
http://netindex.com/
I hope Google puts them all out of business!
Plastic casings underground should last forever until disturbed.
Glass cables can handle decades - they'd maybe add some more in 30 years. The cables should last longer than that. The network gear on the ends needs upgrading but the glass doesn't need to be changed - you going to find something faster than light in a glass fiber?
What changes are the devices and their use of light over the glass. Maybe diameter or material changes at some point to allow more or other kinds of light... but the speed is the same, the bandwidth might change but the old cables still work just fine on the new gear.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
I think the fiber is more like the Nexus products, and even Android.
I don't know that Google wants to be an ISP any more than they want to be a device manufacturer or a language house. But they'll do a little of both to push the market the way they want it. They don't want to be rule the world as an ISP, they just want ISPs to have service that makes Google more money.
> "it's a sea change in what the Internet is really capable of." ...watching your every move?
Fiber To The Home (FTTH) is awesome, and how all of America should be connected. Just as the first half of the 20th century was spent wiring all of the homes for the telephone, the first half of the 21st century should be spent wiring for broadband. Gigabit (and higher, in the future) over fiber is what will enable the really interesting applications and increase the entire economic productivity of the nation.
Google Fiber is not the answer. Worse, several replies in this thread have talked about other competitors, multiple people delivering Gigabit to every neighborhood. This is simply crazy. How many water pipes reach your house? How many sewer pipes? How many roads? How many phone lines? How many cable lines?
ONE
Building this sort of infrastructure is a HUGE cost. Much of it is reaching your neighborhood, once there getting to each home is relatively easy. Simply having two competitors comes close to doubling the cost, as the number of homes to bear the cost is cut in half. This is the reason there's no independent company with water pipes in your neighborhood competing for your business. It's also why we granted monopolies for telephone and cable in the past; rather than have government build it we "outsourced" to corporate entities for those services.
There are really two choices moving forward. We will either end up with FTTH providers with government granted monopolies similar to telephone and cable, or with "municipal fiber" where government provides the fiber infrastructure (similar to water, sewer and roads). There is no other viable end game. In that sense Google is a play in the first camp, becoming a monopoly FTTH provider.
Over time I suspect this will be no better than our current monopoly providers. Eventually complacency sets in, and the service degrades. There's no long term incentive for a monopoly provider to be cutting edge.
Unlike water, sewer, and other traditional government services, Government could provide the "pipes" without supplying the "service". Government could operate a Layer 1 or Layer 2 broadband FTTH network, and allow any Layer 3+ provider to connect. Consumers would pay once for the infrastructure (a huge win), and have competition for the service (a huge win). Telephone and cable have no analog. Electricity comes close, where some places let you select the electricity provider; but even there it's fungible asset. Broadband is the only one that provides the layering needed such that the infrastructure can be fully divorced from the service.
In short, is the Google model better than the current telecom and cable monopolies? Yes. Does it compare with municipal broadband with multiple choices of providers? No, not even close. We should all be demanding much, much more.
Opec anyone? You know, the gas station you buy at doesn't make anything off the gas, right?
I do agree on the gov't monopolies suck though. It's really just the gov't paying for the infrastructure and then handing it over to a private citizen for free. If we're gonna have socialism just keep is social. Internet is so useful and essential to better living it should be a public utility. Hell, there was just a story on cnn about how the worst crop yields of the last 10 years are better than the best of the last 50; and it was partially attributed to sharing better farming techniques. Communication is good.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
In the Greater Houston area, Comcast just doubled the connection speeds of ALL price levels. And Google isn't even here! Competition is a wonderful thing!
Comcast (and probably other providers) redirect your DNS misses to their hosted ad pages. How is that for creepy?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I work for a local ISP that started off offering Dialup and recently purchased a fiber network
Our biggest problem to offering FTTH is the cost of attaching to the poles or going underground. The majority of the poles in my city and surrounding suburbs are old and crowded. When we permit them we are spinning a roulette wheel as to how much it will cost us to perform the "make ready" on those poles. Even poles that we cannot find a problem with come back with costs for adjustments. This makes it nearly impossible for us to estimate the cost to build in a neighborhood.
To my knowledge, when Google was evaluating cities, this was a major criteria, and from what I understand they were granted easy access to the poles in Kansas City. I also later read that they were running into problems attaching to some poles after they started.
We would love nothing more than to provide FTTH in our city.
Our local cable company, Time Warner, and phone company Verizon are not investing in this solution. Time Warner Cable has invested in Fiber to the node and we do have DOCSIS 3 in parts of the town.
First, there is no other provider that has Google's backhaul. Not only have they bought up ungodly amounts of interstate and international dark fiber, they've invested in own-brand optical interconnects and low-latency protocols and compression algorithms that are beyond cutting edge. Think terabit, not gigabit, per fiber, and thousands of multiplexed fibers. They do transcontinental failover of entire Google datacenters on a thermal variance. In seconds. Do you have any idea how much bandwidth that requires? They have their own switch tech, with their own ASICs as well.
Google could give a 10gig fiber connection to every Seattle resident and they could simultaneously test it, and Google wouldn't stress at all. It would DDOS every other server on the Internet, but the packets would be delivered.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The current brouhaha happening with WordPress is a good example why residential servers aren't allowed.
Now why didn't Google lay fiber in their home town ?
huh? You mean idiot average users won't have to wait 30 seconds or so while their idiot YouTube videos buffer? Greeeeeeat.
www.chihuahuarescue.com- Help to end dog abuse, abandonment and cruelty
I pay $60/mo and get unlimited 50mbps (100 mbps burstable) download and 10mbps upload. 1gbps will be available soon for $120/mo
No... It's not a matter of flipping a switch on their existing equipment and all of a sudden they have a ton of extra bandwidth to give to customers. In order to provide lots of people higher cable modem speeds you need to spend money on head-end equipment, fiber plant, and then cable plant to segment your network enough to keep it from being over-subscribed. If they already had D3 capable equipment and just 'flipped the switch' any one person might have a whole lot of bandwidth at 4AM, but it will start to slow to a crawl when everyone else is using it.
Cable ISPs don't have a lot of unused bandwidth they're sitting on to just be a-holes to everyone.
This will end up with smaller cities and rural areas subsidizing the lower rates of the large cities that can attract Google Fiber. It will be decades before my little town of ~10,000 will get anything near GB internet. Until then, we'll be paying outrageous rates to keep the corporate profits up.
I admire what Google's trying to do here, but it's going to hurt those of us in the smaller towns for quite some time.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
Sonic.net offers gigabit fiber connections in Sebastopol CA now, and they're expanding next to the Sunset District in San Francisco. They may have more real paying customers on fiber than Google does. They're a small ISP and don't want to overextend themselves, so they're deploying slowly.
Suck it Time Warner!!!!
Google providing content and the connection is not a good thing. Why should people get dependant on these things that are only going to be called into question when they're called for monopoly abuse which is bound to happen.
That or it'll all get shut down in a spring cleaning.
Shame the US can't get broadband from companies that aren't evil.
Google have an awkward habit of developing a product, letting users depend on it then yanking it at short notice.
Granted, that's usually more of a problem with products they give away but even so...
You assume that we have privacy now?
"...this jump from legacy Internet speeds to gigabit-class service is not just about people wanting to download movies faster"
Speak for yourself. For me, it _is_ about downloading large movies faster.
Google = Umbrella Corporation
Think about it a little. They are systematically taking over crucial areas of services and infrastructure that would allow them to grow and expand whilst eroding privacy and any other rights at the same time through lobbying their own agendas... and they are already doing all of the above. Wolf in sheep's clothing, all that I'm going to say here.
Just imagine what'll happen 10 years down the track or even sooner *shudder*
> his is not the 21st century I was told to expect.
The cyberpunk literature and movies about this have been very popular in the 80s (just think Blade Runner as the prime example). What's happening now is *exactly* what got predicted about the 21st century - and that is scary.
VDI. With all that bandwidth, the next step for Google would probably be to fully virtualize your computer. Routers could become thin / zero clients as well.
Unfortunately, the buildout in the Outer Sunset has yet to even begin. Sonic has been mired in the permitting process for the past two years. OTOH, ATT has gotten permission from the City Supervisors to put a little more than 400 cabinets across the city to serve U-Verse. (Yanno, that fiber-to-the-cabinet, but ADSL2-to-the-home service that's all the rage?)
If you're interested in seeing Sonic's plan come to fruition, please, please, please make yourself aware of when the various meetings to discuss their permit come up and attend them. If the City Supervisors start hearing from interested residents, they just might allow Sonic to fucking get started with micro-trenching.
Google's finally getting around to deploying in a second city. At this rate ISPs should start sweating it in 2030, assuming Google doesn't lose interest in the product and discontinue it before then.
Tired of being "punished" by the Slashdot $rtbl since 2002. I'm now over at http://soylentnews.org/ .
It's pretty easy to be profitable when you can pick and choose where you deploy your service. Let me know when they start deploying their service in towns with less than 20k people and the phone companies will have something to worry about.
How many water pipes reach your house? How many sewer pipes?
We got ourselves a city slicker here. Fella, don't know how long it's been since you've seen pasture, but I'm not quite sure you got yourself an understandin' of how things work out in the country. Lemme give ya' a little lesson.
Out in the country, we don't run water & sewer pipes. We drill wells for water, and we use septic tanks to keep our shit.
Now, unless you've found a way to shove a grounding rod in the dirt, jack it to your computer, and pick up internet access free of charge, your analogy's fallin' flatter than a flapjack.
Country bunk aside, my point is simply this: We cannot easily afford to make broadband a "utility" for rural residents. It's not like water and sewer that we can pump out of the ground and then back into the ground. If we're going to guarantee access to all, we collectively have to pay for rural residents, who are much, much, much more expensive to run lines to.
folks, google aint doing this for free, just look at the writeoffs they got from KCK. And then going to the "better Off Suburbs" rather then conslidating their gains fo blocks while going for the gold. They weaseled in in KCK, struck a deal in KCMO, and are on the way to wire up the business areas in both cities. But for the toehold they had too get the public. Now service is great, but add consumers, just like RR and Suckcast the speed don't stay up when consumers get added to the line. Also, as they add consumers, new regs by the sister in charge:
With their backbones so far apart, and having to funnel their signal like all others thru Utah, I believe there will be a reduction of service speed to the enduser to the same or worse then what dial-up was. After all loook at the speed of usenet. Ask the question, is all this government spying on its citizans more intrusive then doing their job normally. But then their job is supposed to be protecting america, which is a collection of people and ideas, not the koch bros, or some thug from congress or the states they have bought.
In CA, for every dollar they spend on fiber, they have to spend ten on regulatory BS - environmental impact studies, energy efficiency certifications, etc etc. CA is a liberal "WE" state, where people think "WE" are building a fiber network, so "WE" (each member of the public) should discuss and decide on each detail. That particular "we" wants the project to run on sunshine and butterflys, and "we" don't care how much it costs. That may result in "fairness", but it doesn't get the job done on time or on budget.
Texas is the opposite - if someone wants to do something cool, they just do it. It's their network their building, not "ours", so we stay out of each others way and we can all get stuff done. That has benefits and drawbacks, but for someone wanting to build a city-wide fiber network in about a year it's very attractive.
CA would take a year per neighborhood because you have to protect the soho knob tailed worm, and you have to make sure that each week you run fiber to exactly as many gay homes as straight homes. In Texas, we just build the shit. If the shovel hits a worm, oh well. br>
Plus, in CA your workers are stoned. ; )
think states and cities should be rolling out thei own fiber. Sort of like building roads.
I understand what you're getting at, but when states build roads it costs up to $400 million per mile. A "cheap" high speed road costs $50-$100 million per mile the way government does it. Not to mention, it takes from a year per mile for the easy part to five years per mile at interchanges. Do you have $4,000 / month to spend on your monthly internet bill? The way roads get built is exactly the WRONG way to build anything. States are the ones to build roads only because private companies normally can't bulldoze houses and such. (But when they do build toll roads, in costs FAR less on average )
[citation needed]
Without raising some investment so that Google doesn't spend all their funds in one place, Google would need outside investment to roll Google fiber over the whole USA. I think what they are doing effectively as the article points out is putting pressure on the ISP's to roll out more at less. If they strategies well enough, we might all be running over 1GB connections. There has been a new development in fiber which is able to carry the entire worlds data over one piece of fiber over long 200 mile distances. This has never been achieved before. This makes it ever more possible that the cable companies could provide high speed service to everyone for cheap cost. http://rawcell.com.
I absolutely agree. I don't know why it hasn't happened yet.
I think it's because US-style government is designed to be, supposed to be, very fair, deliberative, and predictable (aka slow). That's exactly what I tech company should NOT be. Because the government is a rule making body who uses force of arms to compel people to do what they say, it's designed a certain way. It takes a few days for a company to choose a health plan. It took the US government 20 YEARS to choose Hillarycare (renamed Obamacare along the way.)
That's as it should be. To build out a city-wide fiber network in a year, Eric Schmidt needs to be able to make a quick decision on something and have his people carry it out immediately. If each of those decisions required committee hearings like government projects do, the Kansas City build out would start serving customers sometime around 2036. On the other hand, we don't WANT Obama, or the governor or mayor, to be allowed to make snap decisions and force everyone to comply. We WANT public hearings to check the power of the government officials and what they do in our name, with our kids' schools, with our money.
If a network rollout was handled the way government rule making should be handled, we'd have 128K service after twelve years at a cost of $80 / month. It would be done with the utmost fairness, respect for different viewpoints, etc, and would take forever to build something that sort of works.
Google has loads of money. However, they are threatened by EVERYBODY. Every nation wants a BIG cut of them. They all want taxes. Likewise, server hosters want Google to pay them to access those boxes. ISPs esp. ATT and Comcast have threatened to charge Google money to allow users to access Google. All in all, You have everybody wanting to pull the profits out of Google and is being aided by govs.
So, what they are doing is investing those profits back into fibers. They fully intend to continue this. Many many ppl are going to put servers on the net. Watch Austin carefully. My guess is that the next place will be Boulder Co/Denver Basin, Mass, or possibly San Fran.
Google is looking long-term at their profits and is making a VERY smart move. This is not about getting ISPs to upgrade. It is about getting them out of the way or at the very least, being able to keep them from cutting them out.
Google has some of the brightest ppl going, and it continues to show.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I'd imagine Tor and VPNs work much better over Google Fiber than most U.S. ISPs.
At present, I block most google services and urls except search and certain tools everyone uses like Google's jquery.js from my default browser, Chrome. FireFox allows google services, but forbids remembering cookies, local storage, etc.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Where is HBO on Google Fiber?
Lemme try reframing the REALLY sticky question:
Which would you rather have, the ISP whose business model includes Six Strikes programs in league with the Govt, or Google that just might not, but at the cost of stripping your privacy?
Perhaps you can explain how googles high speed internet service will strip you of your privacy any more than any other internet service. Personally I don't see it. Comcast/Time Warner et. al. are already monitoring what you do on the web for their own purposes. If you want unmonitored bandwidth try the Post Office. It's slow but no one reads you mail.. most of the time.
Really though, this is just two sides of one coin, and I don't see how this changes anything, except my bandwidth speed.
once more into the breach
Yep. Wouldn't hesitate for a sec to jump on Google fiber. Good bandwidth and no price gouging crappy ISP trying to nickle and dime me for every damned bit transferred.
i.e. I'd rather be scroogled than macroshafted personally...
What is this "privacy stripping" that you speak of?
Unencrypted traffic across the internet is available to any entity transporting it.
Encrypted traffic only gives the transporter the source and destination.
Where is the "loss of privacy" when using Google as my ISP?
Once Google fiber reaches everywhere, how long til we reach project 2501?
Gigabit bandwidth is somewhat less compelling for the consumer who doesn't stream HD video and/or share movies. Don't get me wrong; it's nice. It's just not as much of a quantum leap as you might expect since most sites on the wider internet don't even exhaust the bandwidth of much slower connections. How much more quickly is espn.go.com going to load with 1Gb/s down compared to 20Mb/s down? Not much.
I might actually be more interested in the "free" option, since I currently pay approx. $40/mo for AT&T's high-end DSL connection that's not much faster than 5Mb/s down. With $300 of sunk cost I could save myself $480/year going forward.
Drastically lower latency to a wider range of sites in the U.S. could be a boon for gamers, though. Anybody in Kansas City care to share some latency stats?
If someone bombed one of your small cities would you be unconcerned until they bombed a major one? Successful deployments in both Austin and K.C. suggest Google is capable of replicating their model. While losing the revenue from Austin and K.C. is not by itself great cause for concern, the prospect of Google scaling up its fiber deployments certainly is.
For what it's worth, Austin is the 13th largest city in the U.S. and Austin/Round Rock is the 35th largest Metro. area. It has the highest projected population (and job) growth of any large metro area.
Google does indeed use some in-house networking gear. Watch Urs Hoelzle's presentation on how Google uses OpenFlow-based routers for its backend backbone. They might be a bunch of arrogant assholes, but they have cutting edge technology.
--
Brandon Downey, security expert.
[citation needed]
You can trust his statement, and participate in an informed discussion or do your own research, asshole. Or you can STFU, because you have nothing to offer. Nobody is hear to spoon feed you.
Google is a spyware company. Everything they do involves collecting as much data as they can. My ISP(CenturyLink) told the Bush adminstration(as Qwest) to come back with a warrant when they asked the telecoms to spy on everyone. They never did. The have no interest in the stupid 6 strikes program. I pay $16.00 a month for a rock solid 20 Mbps connection.
Google 'G-scale', which is the name of their internal network. Yes, they built their own switches. Wired has an overview here:
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/04/going-with-the-flow-google/2/
This paper seems to describe the optical transport as being terabit on the high side. I think that symbolset may have been exaggerating somewhat.
http://www.ngtsummitapac.com/media/whitepapers/2013/Infinera_Software_Defined_Network.pdf
A 5 Tbit/s switch is described.
This slideshow (2012) describes 1TB Ethernet as being impractical from a physical standpoint, so if they have a terabit backhaul, it's not using Ethernet. Wikipedia gives the current (2012) bandwidth record as a bit over a Petabit, but electrons tend to be a bottleneck.
http://www.ethernetalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/Ethernetnet-Alliance-ECOC-2012-Panel-2.pdf
So yeah, a citation would be appreciated.
that when people complain about gov't monopolies and they're not Rand Paul they mean the kind where the gov't does all the work, the tax payer pays for it all, and the 1% get all the money. Like Gore Vidal said: Privatize the profits and socialize the losses.
You're not gonna win this fight. The rich will find a way to get their socialism. They're not hung up on 20 years of American Education about the wonders of capitalism like you are. The question isn't are the rich gonna get theirs, it's are you gonna get yours?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Speeds comparable to FTTH can be achieved for so much less money by using Fiber to the Neighborhood instead of to the home. While I'm no fan of local cable TV monopolies, they already do this today. The problem many local cable TV companies is that they still carry local channels in analog. If they were to convert to all-digital carriage their existing cable plant could compare with FTTH using DOCSIS 3.x but this dream inexplicably escapes them.
They also do not build backhaul capacity. The local cable companies do not offer symmetric speeds, since their networks are predominantly built for you to consume, not produce content, and they tend to cap production of packets. That's partly to prevent peer-to-peer, but it's more commonly because the backhaul capacity is low enough that it's only capable of sustaining 1.5 times the data rate for the ACK packets for the high end download rate.
Add to this that they don't know how to do QOS guarantees on multiple streams on the same segment using TCP window scaling to aboit filling up the upstream buffers, and that Google is actually building its own switching equipment for itself, and you have a significant technology gap when it comes to local cable operators even being able to buy comparable equipment from anyone: it's just not sold commercially by anyone, period.
I imagine Google is getting some economy of scale and some nifty equipment testing out of these deals as well, which will only improve things, not only for Google Fiber, but also for Google's data centers and their private international Internet backbone that they run.
I laughed myself silly over the mental image on this one...
Google has employee Vint Cerf call Comcast CEO.
Vint: "I see you are operating in violation of our patent on packets..."
I'd like to be your sole source supplier of ammunition.
I''ll HALVE the price of what you currently pay, and retire rich...
http://www.chuckhawks.com/factory_ammo_prices.htm
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Sure it's $90 a month, but man I barely notice that little buffer bar any more.
I click and things just happen. I couldn't imagine what 1024/1024gbt service would be like. Who needs bittorrent with those kind of speeds. Rent and rip and send it to your friends.
I also want to point out that Sonic.net gets top marks form the EFF. If they could deliver better than 1 mbps at my home, I'd be with them in a heartbeat.
The conventional wisdom is indeed that most utilities are "natural monopolies," and for the reasons you cite.
But in Lubbock, TX, there are two competing electrical grids--and at least as of a few years ago, among the lowest electrical prices. I've spoken to other economists who have graphed electrical prices by distance from Lubbock.
Competition works even in places where we would expect it not to . . .
doc hawk
Bad --- Google makes money off your information. Once you get hooked on the crack-cocaine of fast interwebz... you will continue to sell your soul to Google and the Feds... that will eventually co-op Google as their willing or unwilling co conspirator in the destruction of property as we understand it today.
Good --- Google exposes the LIE that is bandwidth shortage. All bandwidth shortage is fictional or purpose driven. In order raise prices a demand must be created. The best way to create this demand is to create a fictional shortage of supply... ie... a lack of bandwidth.
Other than the "last mile" problem... (a problem more than a decade old)... there is NO REASON every home should not have the low low standard of 5-10 mbps down and 2-5 mbps up. And have this standard for $10 a month or less.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Cable: Xfinity or ATT Uverse, both suck..... Currently have Uverse, signal drops are par for course, but oddly often to a pattern indicative of when they are fixing someone else they break me and others.
Service sucks..... bullpuckey diagnostics lead to a refurb gateway being sent out leads to field tech coming out led to breaking the land line and a bs double billing I had to fight......
Havent gone to Sattelite YET...... as its only other option for cable,
for ISPs, I bought a Clear modem, and although the speed as just slightly less than UVerse its much more reliable.
I would welcome Google fiber the next day if it came through the NE.
For $4 million per mile, you must be thinking WIDENING a rural road, per lane, as opposed to BUILDING a road.
If you add one lane each direction, that's $7 million - $10 million per mile in rural areas to WIDEN it.
To BUILD a road, in urban areas, government run, typical cost for a 4 lane road is $17M - $75M PER LANE - around $125M per mile for four lanes.
The high end "up to $400 million per mile" is, as I mentioned, interchanges.
This is the case. Whoever installs fiber should be able to milk it for the next few decades, just as the the phone/cable/power have milked their infrastructure for the last 100 years or more.
...is never coming to where I live. Thank you Teleco Monopoly!
Monopolies: Raping consumers and destroying choices since before the internet!
It sure reminds me of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ilMx7k7mso
Extra points for the phrase "oligobble our balls".