Slashdot Mirror
Google Fiber Launches In Provo — and Here's What It Feels Like
Velcroman1 writes "I've seen the future. It's called gigabit Internet by Google Fiber, and it just launched in my hometown of Provo, Utah, the second of three scheduled cities to get speeds that are 100 times faster than the rest of America. 'What good is really fast Internet if the content stays the same?' you may ask yourself. I certainly did, before testing the service. Besides, my "high speed" Internet from Comcast seemed fast enough, enabling my household to stream HD videos, load web pages quickly, and connect multiple devices as needed, largely without hiccup. I was wrong. Using gigabit Internet, even in its infancy, opened my eyes to speed and reminded me of why I love the Internet."
What was your throughput like? If they're providing GigE, you still won't see it on a single workstation. Did you measure the uplink speed?
What was your latency like? You could have GigE, but if it's 1000ms pings, that's going to be worthless for most of this audience.
Where are they peering? What did your traceroutes look like?
There are lots of ways we can quantify how good or bad a connection is. You missed the important parts.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
... I was a researcher in a very advance research facility. At that time we had a (supposedly) "big pipe" to the Net, a 100Mbps line. (That was several decades ago)
I was feeling kinda "proud" that I get to "play" with the "high speed link" to the world, that I, somehow, is on a higher pedestal than the rest of the peons ... until I visited South Korea.
In a friend's home, yes, private house, I experienced for the first time, what raw speed meant.
The 1Gbps speed just blew my fucking mind away, and imagine, they got that in their home, and I, a researcher, only get to play a supposedly "big 100Mbps pipe".
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
That's not entirely true, they amended their agreement to allow servers so long as they're not for commercial use. They also mentioned that they have commercial/business offerings in the pipeline that would bring back services such as static IPs, one of the few things that I will miss from Veracity.
You don't own a Google Fiber modem yet!? You HAVE seen the speeds right? Only Google Fiber has the gigabit speeds I require for BLAST PROCESSING! Google does what Comcan't!
Sounds like they actually listened then. Kudos to Google. Perhaps this will kick the other ISP's into actually competing again.
Chattanooga has symmetric 1gbps internet available to the entire city and suburbs for the same price as google fiber (but no "zero-cost" option for low speed). And, as a plus, it isn't google, it is the local electricity co-op.
https://epbfi.com/internet/
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
At least in the case of Provo, Google Fiber is the ISP. All of the former iProvo customers on Veracity have been given notice to transfer their service by signing up for new Google Fiber accounts (which can be regular Google accounts) before Veracity dumps them completely.
Funny you should mention Net Neutrality, because this is what it's all about. And an example of how farsighted Google is compared to their opposition, always a step ahead in their strategic planning. If Net Neutrality continues to get rolled back, expect Internet companies to get squeezed hard by the big ISPs (I predict Netflix will be the most vulnerable example of this). "Nice Market you got there. Would be a shame if anything happened to it."
Google is anticipating such a development, and demonstrating to those providers that they are not quite untouchable as they think. They don't need to roll out Google Fiber everywhere (though that would be awesome), just do it enough times to demonstrate to ISPs that they can do it anywhere.
I don't see a whole lot of use for the gigabit speed right now, you're right. The biggest thing I see is the symmetrical connection, and significantly lower prices than competitors at similar speeds. 1000/1000 may not be all that useful in the vast majority of cases unless you have a lot of people sharing the bandwidth, but 100/100 for the same price as the 15/1.5 I'm limited to now would be huge. Online backup would be nearly transparent (it took about 3 weeks on my connection, and that was only backing up the "important" stuff - plus actually utilizing the 1.5 upstream brings the downstream bandwidth to a crawl on my Uverse connection, making it an exceedingly tedious process - can't stream netflix or even just browse the web without hiccups), it would no longer be a pain to upload videos or high-res photos to share with family and friends, etc.
I'd probably go with the gigabit service if it was available where I live, but I think the real impact of Google Fiber is the pricing pressure it puts on slower connections that are eminently usable right now (even if Google is currently cherry-picking places they can do things cheaply).
Today, try doing anything other than text-only email over 56Kb dialup.
Broadband uptake enabled a new class of Internet sites and services. Google is betting that history will repeat itself by kicking speeds up by two orders of magnitude. It also has the beneficial side-effect of lighting a fire under AT&T's slothful ass.
Also keep in mind that GFiber offerings are symmetric. That means you get to upload your photos and videos at 1Gb/sec as well, and not through the 768Kb straw that DSL and cable providers decided was "good enough" for consumer-class Internet.
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
He doesn't mention latency, but he does say he clocked 915 Mb/s both up and down.
You could try reading the article.
Google Fiber Launches In Provo — and Here's What It Feels Like
Why all the hate for Google?
Here in New Hampshire we have to choose between Fairpoint or Comcast.
Would you like to know what *that* feels like?
First of all Google Internet was not 100 times faster in Provo. Provo has had fiber that could go 1Gbps for almost 10 years now and everything he said he could was being done 10 years ago. The biggest difference is that Google now owns the $40M fiber network that they paid $1 for instead of Provo City. What makes it even better is the citizens still have to pay for the $40M bond that built the network. But wait, there's more. What they didn't tell you is Google is kicking all commercial customers off their network and now government agencies and schools have to pay for the network instead of getting it for free.
To sum it up, Provo gave up millions of dollars a year in revenue for the opportunity to have Google come to town and charge them for the same Internet that they already had for free while simultaneously offending all business owners by kicking them off the network and sticking them with the bill.
An interesting side effect of Google's fiber offering is the sudden competition it's putting in some places where it hardly existed before, and allowing us to examine the results.
I have a friend who lives in Provo (about 10 miles south of me) and will be eligible for Google Fiber when they open it up in his area this March. He has had Comcast Internet service for a couple of years now and is planning on switching to Google when he can. However, about a month ago a Comcast representative came directly to his home, unscheduled, to talk about a "new and improved" service level he was now eligible for.
This Comcast rep told my friend that, effective immediately (all he had to do was call Comcast), he could change his current ISP service to a package that offered 250 Mbps down / 150 Mbps up, no bandwidth cap, for $25 / month. To compare, he was currently getting 25 Mbps down and paying $75 / month. A couple of weeks ago he made the switch and has been very happy with the order of magnitude speed increase and 66% price drop.
I understand the concept behind competition and the magical invisible hand, but this sort of behavior sickens me. If Comcast can drop their prices and increase their service offerings so quickly in response to new competition, it just goes to show how badly they are screwing over most of their other customers. And, of course, when I called them to inquire about this amazing new Internet service they were offering, I was told it was a "not available" in my area and that different "geographical regions" have different prices.
There's a real argument here for municipal/state owned and funded fiber networks being leased out to various commercial (or otherwise) ISPs. If Google and Comcast can both offer this kind of bandwidth for these prices, the current state of affairs in most of the rest of the country is completely unjustified. I'm sick and tired of a few "elite" corporations getting an effective monopoly on Internet service offerings in vast areas, able to charge anything they please because people have no other option.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
15 years ago, nobody "needed" broadband. Dialup was, "good enough."
That really isn't true. Dialup was all we had but it certainly was slow as all fuck and EVERYBODY hated it. I had plenty of friends at the time that invested thousands of dollars to have ISDN to their house because dialup sucked that much.
What's the data cap?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Maybe a few years ago. I just did a quick google check and everything seems to point to around 1.2 to 1.3MB. On a 1mb/s connection, that's about 10 seconds to load a webpage. I'm sure popular websites like Facebook and Twitter (with large images and photo galleries) are significantly higher.
You also need to keep in mind all of the things we currently cannot do because of these restrictions. I'm a scout leader and often take lots of photos at our meetings and outtings. For privacy reasons we aren't comfortable posting them on social websites. I would love to be able to put them on my home server and let parents download them directly (possibly with a password or something), but our shit upload speeds (2.5Mb/s is about the max around here) make that VERY difficult. Throw in some videos and the simple act of sharing media with parents has saturated my internet connection to the point where I can't even receive emails.
Even something as simple as uploading a high definition video to youtube can literally take overnight for the vast majority of North Americans.
What bitrate are those "1080p" videos at? Oh, I thought so.
Imagine having that 1Gb connection. Imagine that you can't use it all but that you can do anything you want with it. do you think maybe you might sit down and ponder, that you might try to imagine better ways to use it? Cloud backup service is obvious and done. Video is done and being done. Keep going. Just sit and use your imagination and I suspect that you will eventually think of something new that cannot be done now with existing normal bandwidth. Maybe it's something silly, maybe it's something crazy, maybe it turns out to be something life changing.
THAT is why we need to have bandwidth well over and above what we have now. We need to have enough that people sit down and think up new ways to use, innovate, maybe find a way to save a life or help another. We've done this with CPU and GPU for a long time, disk space too. My first HDD was 40MEG and nearly the size of a shoebox. Suppose way back then someone had spoken as you have and decided that we would never need more and was listened to. We need to bring fuel for dreams and imagination - right now we're WELL behind the curve for that...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Does anyone find it just a little coincidental that this latest Google fiber rollout is only about 20 miles from the NSA's newest datacenter in Bluffdale UT? Lots of bandwidth infrastructure was already in the neighborhood :)
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
First of all, we shouldn't have to rely on offsite hosting, we should be able to do this ourselves. Second of all, some of us like to keep control of our files ourselves, particularly when it comes to banking files, personal photos, tax forms, etc. Third of all, syncing with services like Google Drive can be a P.I.T.A. to set up and can be very disruptive when these services are modified or closed down.
If we had proper (bi-directional) home internet connections we wouldn't need large storage devices with us and could simply remotely access our files from home whenever we want to listen to music or transfer a report we've been working on for work/school/etc.
and yet we apparently have dark fiber all over the place. Aren't we squeezing ever more capacity out of existing fiber? Is bandwidth somehow getting more expensive? That would be odd now wouldn't it?
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
As part of my job some years ago, I would routinely visit Level3 data centers across the US. We were a simple stub network, but where I usually plugged my laptop in, was only a hop a way from the Level3 core routers at each facility. Everything was gigabit, and very fast, but not as fast as you would think, being that close to the backbone. I had to use our own DNS servers for resolution, which were not available in every facility, and, page loads were fast, but you could tell you were always waiting on the web servers to deliver the content. Point: Sometimes raw speed is not where it is at. There is something to be said about an ISP having massive amounts of cache/caching servers and a speedy DNS infrastructure.