Google Fiber To Come To Provo, Utah

An anonymous reader writes "Google announced today that they intend on purchasing the existing iProvo fiber network to make Provo the third U.S. city to have Google Fiber. If approved by the city council, implementation would begin later in 2013. 'As a part of the acquisition, we would commit to upgrade the network to gigabit technology and finish network construction so that every home along the existing iProvo network would have the opportunity to connect to Google Fiber.'" Also at SlashCloud

Comments

Can't wait

[ekimd]

As a current iProvo fiber user, I can't wait to welcome my new Google overlords.

Re:Can't wait

[jensend]

It's true that this is basically a "take this away from Veracity" move.

iProvo was a great idea. It was killed by politics.

The extreme right-wing folks who think there should be no public services managed to force Provo to not provide services directly ("retail model") but rather to cut corporate middlemen in on the deal ("wholesale model"). That privatized all the profits while socializing all the costs. Unsurprisingly, it failed.

Given the political realities in Utah right now, I suppose the Google Fiber deal is the best we could hope for. But we would have had something at least as good way back in 2006 if it weren't for idiotic politicians.

Re:At this rate

[fatalwall]

Maybe because Kansas City is being installed as fast as they want and they figure they can have teams in different locations going at max safe speed for install without conflicts. It could also be due to what the cable/media companies are doing with Caps and Cable subscription requirements to access content on hulu which goes inverse to the point of hulu. How best to shake things up then to have multiple sites being implemented forcing companies to upgrade networks or risk a google takeover of all customers.

Re:Big cities??

[ArcadeMan]

Now imagine how long people in Shawinigan, Québec, Canada will have to wait.

Why not work in parallel in different cities?

[DragonWriter]

I'm not sure why they are expanding when the original Kansas City install is not even 10% completed.

Because fiber deployment (both actual fiber laying and establishing service) in different cities is something that parallelizes quite well providing that you have sufficient capital, so there is no reason to hold off starting work in other cities just because you haven't finished in the first one you started in.

How is it not fair to call it Google Fiber?

[DragonWriter]

AFAICT, Google hasn't laid a single foot of fiber themselves. They've just been buying up existing fiber that has already been laid by earlier projects and calling it Google fiber.

You know what, most airlines have never built an airplane themselves, either, they just buy up (actually, I think "lease" is the more common model now) existing airplanes and slap their names on them. So what?

Since when is it "not fair" to use your company's name on a service you sell, just because some key pieces of equipment used in providing that service were either purchased or leased from someone else? Is it unfair for the (very many) companies selling services built on top of, e.g., Amazon's cloud infrastructure (who haven't even bought the infrastructure from Amazon, but are renting it dynamically based on usage) to use their own name rather than Amazon's for their services?

Re:Big cities??

[rsborg]

I'm getting the impression that LA, Chicago and NY are going to have a long wait for this.

Of course they will. Do those cities also have a municipal fiber setup that Google could snatch up for $1?
When Google is looking at the FIBER_ROLLOUT_CITIES table, they aren't doing an ORDER BY population DESC. More like ORDER BY cost, legal_difficulties ASC.

Re:Stop taunting us!

[Guppy]

Google FIber: The cure for a constipated telecom monopoly. No, seriously -- just one dose, and entrenched ISPs start running :)