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."

Comments

Oy.

[greenguy]

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.

Re:Oy.

[Anonymous Coward]

You say that like the current variety of crappy ISPs don't already strip us of our privacy and funnel our internet experience through its pipes.

Re:Oy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure that Google is better in every single respect than the traditional ISP. I'm pretty sure none of them protect your privacy and in fact do the shitty DNS ad serving for unknown domains which Google does not do. Google is much closer to an ideal provider than anything else out there.

Re:Oy.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't think your own isp mines the hell out of any data they can get about you in order to sell it to someone else? You're delusional.

At least google is pretty up front about what they are doing.

I'll drop comcast sooooo fast if google ever comes here. Just on price alone it blows the fuck out of comcast. Not to mention comcast being incompetent and clueless most of the time when you need service... And the price keeps going up but the quality does not. AND the invisible cap to our limited unlimited connection. AND all the other bullshit.

Nobody would ever CHOOSE to use comcast if they had some real choices available. And google is a real choice in two places now. Lets hope they bring it to everyone.

If i was a ceo of one of these large monopolies... I'd be really worried.. People are cutting their cable for tv in droves.. Soon they'll be cutting it for their connection too. Just because we're all so very very sick of their bullshit and tired of them beyond belief.

Re:Oy.

[Culture20]

What industry offers consumers a perfect combination of freedom of choice and customer service?

Pretty much any that doesn't involve government-enforced monopolies. Just imagine how much worse buying gasoline would be if certain companies purchased rights to supply all gasoline to individual cities, locking out competition.

Re:Oy.

[soundguy]

They aren't going to "crush" Comcast and Frontier. My FIOS fiber is already capable of 1 gb, but the interface on the side of the house says it's only good for about 250 mbps. They'd just need to change that and add some new stuff at the head end. I'm currently paying for 30/30, but I can see them offering 100 for the same price if Google starts sniffing around. Comcast is already offering 100 mb in some markets and they can probably steal more bandwidth from their cable TV spectrum to ramp up to a gig if it really becomes necessary. Coax has a lot of room in it as long as it's in good physical shape.

Remember that "Seattle" (including the suburbs) is about 100 miles long and 50 miles wide. Comcast covers nearly all of that. It took Verizon (who recently sold their local plant to Frontier) about 10 years to connect a few small areas in the 'burbs. It would be decades before Google could cover the whole thing. Comcast only has to beef up the areas that Google entered and that probably wouldn't include the FIOS areas. Remember that even though per capital income is pretty high here, the customer density is pretty low compared to the major metropolitan areas like NYC, LAX, etc. I think the whole region still only has about 2 million people. Google might do the East side just to piss off Microsoft though :-)

Re:Oy.

[gagol]

This! Now Google, please run a trial somewhere in Canada, in the eastern part if possible. Our broadband choices are real crappy.

Re:Oy.

[cjsm]

Pretty much any that doesn't involve government-enforced monopolies. Just imagine how much worse buying gasoline would be if certain companies purchased rights to supply all gasoline to individual cities, locking out competition.

I agree with this, and I'd like that add the cause of this problem isn't just governments being corrupt, it's the businessmen and corporations corrupting governments.

Re:Oy.

[Gerzel]

I read cyberpunk novels. Things are pretty much on course.

Re:Oy.

[Martin Blank]

What I'm hoping for are some other upstart competitiors to Google Fiber.

Google has said several times that this is exactly what they're trying to foster. Google gets an advantage from deploying fiber aside from the privacy issues that most people consider. They get loyalty. When one of their features is to "[r]ecord up to eight programs simultaneously, just because you can," it engenders a loyalty that the others can't touch.

From what they've said, I expect they don't really want to be in the ISP business, but as their core business depends in large part on growing bandwidth, they felt they had to do something to push the boundary. I would gladly pay $300 (or even more) for gigabit service. I moved to my current location specifically for FiOS availability and pay $105/month for 150/65 service. I am considering moving from Dallas to Austin in the near term mostly because I like the community, but also now in large part due to Google Fiber coming to the area. Everybody (Austin, Google, and me) wins then.

Re:Oy.

[tmosley]

Yeah, having the price drop by 90% over the course of their monopoly, which was enforced only by the superiority of their product and the efficiency of their business practices (else their competition, which had 10% of the market share, would have taken over).

Honestly, it's like these kids go to high school and just accept whatever crap is fed to them as fact.

Re:Oy.

[Somebody Is Using My]

The difference between Google and ISPs is that the latter do not make it a /business/ of removing its users privacy. Yes, they may glean some additional benefit from the process, but it's a far cry from Google, in whose interest it is to know everything there is about you. For ISPs, it is sometimes in their interest to claim ignorance about their user's activities ("Oh, Bob is torrenting copyrighted material 24/7? Hmmm, well, we don't really monitor that sort of thing and anyway, our logs only go back six months..."). Google wants as large a database on each user as possible.

ISPs aren't really that happy that they are being forced to collect info for the government either. They aren't actively resisting (sadly), but if it was something they could opt-out of, you can be sure they would. Data collection is expensive, not only in terms of hardware and software, but in the resultant upset of customers if they learn you are doing it. Even for business use, the data only has limited value because the ISPs are not in advertising; they can use it internally and with a few of their partners, but they don't have the capability to maximize the value of the data. This limits what they can do with the data and how much money they can earn from the data-collection. This finite utility, combined with the cost of the data collection and the potential to upset the customers, restricts the ISPs from going full-bore with stripping user privacy.

Google will never opt-out of data-collection - for themselves or at request of governmental entities - because that is what they do. That is how they make money. Just as data-collection might be a side business to the ISPs, providing internet service is just a side business to Google.

And that is the difference between ISPs and Google.

Re:Oy.

[SydShamino]

The difference between Google and ISPs is that the latter do not make it a /business/ of removing its users privacy. Yes, they may glean some additional benefit from the process, but it's a far cry from Google, in whose interest it is to know everything there is about you. For ISPs, it is sometimes in their interest to claim ignorance about their user's activities ... ISPs aren't really that happy that they are being forced to collect info for the government either.

Speak for yourself. My current provider is AT&T, and since I live in central Austin I'll be dropping them in a heartbeat for Google.

Re:Oy.

[IICV]

Dude, some ISPs are already injecting ads into web content that you access through them. If it's a choice between that and Google knowing that I look at Slashdot ten times a day, I'm pretty okay with the loss of privacy.

Re:Oy.

[postbigbang]

State regulation is what gives the telcos tacit monopolies, and inability for regional and local government to manage their own communications utilities. Think of how free public wifi has been outlawed in numerous states after telcos effectively bribed the legislatures.

I'm in no way an anarchist, but the TCA was designed to yank as much state authority over datacom regulation and give it to a federal level. Look at how well that's worked in the US. The landline "owners" sell crappy DSL derivatives. Comcast/Xfinity & TW/BrightHouse get fat and happy, and offer tiered levels of crap. Verizon and a few others offer fiber, which uses passive 90/10 ratios so that users cannot become "dealers" in services. Google comes along and gives people raw fiber (90/10) and with breathtakingly little effort, scares the crap out of the in situ last-mile purveyors.

State regulation is BOUGHT and PAID FOR by the providers. Consumers were not the ones that made the purchase. I'm no libertarian, but truly, state regulation isn't the answer because the legislators are too easily bribed with campaign contributions, soft money, and other greasings of the legislative wheels.

Re:Oy.

[kermidge]

Just a reminder about AT&T - from the initial disclosure some years back, apparently their traffic goes through DPI with semantic filtering; whether that's just for the coastal nodes or all in-country stuff, I don't know. However, while I rarely use BT for anything but distro iso's, or open, public domain, or paid software and other media, the only time I got a letter about 'forbidden' activities, it was from AT&T - but that was after they got into the content-provider stuff, so I'm guessing they watch your stuff on behalf of studios and networks.

Good move by Google, even if...

[Aryeh Goretsky]

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

Here in Chattanooga, we have fiber too

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Here in Chattanooga, we have fiber too

[VortexCortex]

Seriously, what kind of relationship is built on a demand to change your cable service?

Her name was Katie.

Gimmick media story

[kriston]

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.

Re:Gimmick media story

[timeOday]

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.

Pfft, those prices are right in line with the total price for a two year contract on an iPhone, which I don't have but lots of people do. I've had Comcast cable Internet (@home initially) for 14 years now, which is somewhat over $15,000 in total. Customers are laying out enough money is being laid out to justify some re-investment now and then.

Re:Gimmick media story

[fermion]

It is also a gimmick because Austin is a small, compact and well wired. Google is picking the low hanging fruit, not really helping anyone. If they would have gone into any other city, it might have done some good.

Here is what I have seen with broadband. Firms, as much as they say they are running the last mile, are really only doing so in high income high density area, mostly the suburbs. In many ares the best is someone like ATT who already has a presence. In other areas the only hope is cable. Not even ATT is going to spend the money to run a few miles of line and only serve a single small neighborhood.

So it would be pretty to think that Google is trying to put official ISPs on notice, but they are not. If they would they would have chosen another city in texas, run fiber to the neighborhoods around the central business district, and completely obliterated cable and ATT, and provided high speed to some people who could really use it. Instead they chose a safe place with a safe population that would return a high profit on relatively little investment. Even if many use the free service, the city is dense enough so that they will have many customers for each mile of fiber run.

Re:Gimmick media story

[grumling]

at 256 QAM (38.8Mbps), 1 Gbps is about 30 6 MHz "channels." Most cable systems are capable of transporting 120-135 channels. Throughput on a cable system with 100% QAM carriers is about 4.5 Gbps (raw speed). There are a large number of systems in the US using all digital service today (Most of Comcast's systems have been or are in the process of being upgraded). Most of that bandwidth is being used for broadcast HDTV.

DOCSIS 3.0 uses channel bonding to add downstream bandwith today. It also specifies a 1024 QAM standard that will increase the channel throughput to about 50 Mbps (raw speed). In addition, new error correction methods will actually make 1024 QAM more robust than today's 256 QAM.

DC Lobbyists are burning the midnight oil

[schwit1]

The ISP oligopoly is not going to sit still. They will get laws passed that put impediments in the way of Google.

Re:DC Lobbyists are burning the midnight oil

[Secret Agent Man]

And the beautiful thing is that Google has the assets to fight back.

Gigabit connection

[phantomfive]

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?

Re:Gigabit connection

[AmazinglySmooth]

If you have to ask... Actually, the big benefit in Austin is the city owned utility. It will make it easier to procure right-of-way.

Re:Gigabit connection

[jbolden]

What Google and Verizon have said is that their costs are high due to regulation and hurdles. It is to complex to navigate the CA agencies. There is no one they can just "do business with" but rather dozens of agencies all of which have to be passed through. What's wrong with California is you don't have political machines in CA.

I may be most libertarian but...

[BlueCoder]

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.

PSA:Evil-ToS:No Server Hosting Allowed

[jdogalt]

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

Re:stripping us of our privacy

[TaoPhoenix]

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?

FTTH is awesome, but Google is all wrong.

[Above]

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.

Is this a troll?

[rsilvergun]

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.

Re:Is this a troll?

[theVarangian]

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.

Whether or not govt. 'monopolies' suck depends on what you mean by government monopoly. Is it the role of government to run an ISP? I'd say no unless it is to provide coverage to areas where private companies can't be bothered. Infrastructure is a different topic. Where I live we used to have a what you Yanks would call a 'socialist' ISP run by the govt. and this same ISP also owned and ran the infrastructure. They ended up getting caught using the pricing for access to their network infrastructure to make life hard for competitors. Eventually this company was split up into an ISP part that was privatised and the infrastructure part that is still owned by the government and municipalities and it is now relatively easy for small time ISPs to set up shop and compete with the bigger boys. The lesson is that the owner of infrastructure should have no economic ties to those that use it or you'll quickly start to see anti-competitive behaviour unless multiple competing infrastructure companies build their own duplicateinfrastructure which is wasteful and does not entirely solve the problem of anti-competitive activity. I'm fine with the current system we have here where governmnent builds infrastructure and ensures that everybody has truly equal access to it.

Re:An experiment, like Google Reader

[isorox]

Consider the following:

• Google often jumps into things without considering all of the details.
• If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

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.

Gigabit connection: Sonic offers it in parts of SF

[Animats]

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.

Don't want

[thetoadwarrior]

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's Ability to Penetrate into the market

[wanfuse123]

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.