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Google Fiber To Come To Provo, Utah

Posted by Soulskill on from the stop-making-me-jealous-of-cities-i've-never-heard-of dept.

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

3 of 92 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Big cities?? by ArcadeMan · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

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  2. How is it not fair to call it Google Fiber? by DragonWriter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?

  3. Re:Can't wait by jensend · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.