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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?
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?
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
It's saber rattling: "You want to double dip on charges, and build a two tier internet"?
"We'll wire everyone up faster and also decide the tiers"
"Really want to go there?"
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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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!
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.
Consider the following:
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.
Back when gmail launched, the typical offering from yahoo/hotmail/etc was about 10MB. Gmail launched with 1GB. It was such a ridiculous proposition at the time that people considered it an april fool.
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..
I wouldn't count on it, because in addition to pushing other providers to roll-out faster service that enables more online applications to replace desktop ones, Google being an ISP is insurance for their core business against other major ISPs, especially given those ISPs legal challenges to net neutrality regulations and the potential that they would act on plans many of them have discussed to seek compensations from major sources of traffic for delivery.
Google Fiber is strategic in much the same way as Android is.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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. ; )
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.
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