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Google Fiber Pondering 9 New Metro Areas
New submitter GreyWanderingRogue writes "Google is looking to expand beyond the three current cities using Google Fiber. They're currently still in the discussion stages, but they've invited 34 cities in 9 major metropolitan areas to talk about deployment. They'll need to study 'topography (e.g. hills, flood zones), housing density, and the condition of local infrastructure' in each of the cities, so it will be interesting to see how many make it to completion. Check the map to see if you're one of the lucky few. The Atlanta, Portland and Raleigh-Durham areas each have a cluster of cities being considered. Not in one of these cities? It might be a while yet..."
then go one more day with Comcast. Jacksonville, Fl makes me a sad puppy. Looks like I'm waiting even longer for something good to come along.
Google bought the tax payer funded network in Provo, Utah for $1.
http://transmission.xmission.com/2014/02/19/google-fiber-in-salt-lake-city
A friend of mine has had Google Fiber in Kansas City for several months. She still keeps here DSL as backup because Google Fiber goes down frequently, sometimes several times in one day.
Why not run fiber in the entire valley instead of just Scottsdale and Tempe? The north and west sides of Phoenix has a lot of families that could use 1 Gbs or 10 Gbs Internet.
coworkers & I were just talking about need to proactively appoint an independent prosecutor w/expedited subpoena/investigative power to find/expose and financial ties between comcast/at&t and any politicians who will inevitably try to block/obstruct this!
Kansas Citian here. I've never had problems with Google Fiber going down. I've had instances where my wi-fi seemed to momentarily drop, but that happened occasionally with my old router too and it hasn't ever lasted more than a few seconds. The only prolonged outage that I've noticed was an hour or so when (ironically) I couldn't access google.com, but the rest of the internet still worked fine.
Competition is needed. Meanwhile, for all the people who are pissed off about Comcast, there is a solution.
Buy a controlling share in the company.
Before you scoff, consider all the companies that would benefit from Comcast not being an obstacle (Google, Netflix, Apple, Charter, Twitter, plus about 100,000 startups). For about $67 billion at the current share price, Comcast could be under new ownership.
$67 billion is chickenshit money up against the assets and revenue of all the parties with a horse in this race.
Vote out the board, fire the management, vote in a new board, hire new management, and turn Comcast into a defender of net neutrality instead of a problem.
That's how capitalism works. You know what the best part is? Ain't a fucking thing Comcast can do about it. The company is publicly traded.
Trust an advertising company to give you unfiltered internet access?
Do it trust a company with a history of supporting open source software, and open standards, that lest me see the data the collected when i am using their services and edit and or delete it, more than I trust a cable company or cell service provider? yes I do trust Google more.
Is Google perfect? No they have made mistakes but they try to not be evil more often then not, and that is far more than I can say about most other companies in their line(s) of business.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
In my experience, the problems with Comcast have hardly ever been about poor connection quality; they've always been about deliberate sabotage (e.g. poisoning DNS, throttling Netflix, encrypting local cable channels, etc.) or hostile customer service (imposing sneaky BS fees, making customers go through Hell to get a CableCard instead of a set-top box, etc.)
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Buy a controlling share in the company.
There are tools that corporations use [1] [2] to prevent such efforts. Often it's to protect them from a hostile takeover, but the same tools could be used to prevent a populist uprising as well.
The corporatocracy will not allow us (say even if you did get a kickstarter or other such crowd funded initiative) to dominate Comcast. If this initiative were started, Comcast would have no shortage of tools to put it down.
Majority fan/employee owned ventures are the exception, not the norm, for this reason (amongst others - coordinating large groups of diverse interests is not easy).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
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They might not be so evil at present. But what happens years down the road when they decide to be evil? They'll have this enormous treasure trove of data, and widespread control of information infrastructure.
The cable and phone companies have had more data for over a decade, and they are already evil. Moving from a known evil to a potential evil is s good thing.
You know it's inevitable, right?
It is not inevitable, for two reasons.
First, companies become evil when the people making decisions find it in their interest to be evil. As long as Google is insanely profitable and requires user trust to stay profitable, they have no reason to be evil.
Second, the two founders together have more than half of the voting shares. They can say "no" to anything other shareholders say. They can fire any manager, without any other shareholder's consent. They are already too rich to care about any extra money evil actions might make. They are identified with Google, and any evil Google does reflects on them personally. Google will never do anything they think is evil, and they have a track record of good judgment.
They will not have this anti-evil philosophy forever...and in the meantime they chum the water...we eat happily...they begin pulling the net in around us.
The phone company has a log of your cell phone's location at all times. They are already willing to do anything for a buck. Why not rant about them? If you whine about what the innocent might be guilty of in some imagery future, while tolerating the actions of the truly guilty, you are part of the problem.