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The Mere Promise of Google Fiber Sends Rivals Scrambling
Hugh Pickens DOT Com (2995471) writes "Marguerite Reardon writes at Cnet that within a week of Google's declaration last spring that it planned to build a fiber network in the city of Austin, AT&T announced its own Austin fiber network and in less than a year's time, AT&T and local cable operator Grande Communications have beaten Google to market with their own ultra-high speed services using newly built fiber networks. AT&T maintains it has been planning this fiber upgrade for a long time, and that Google's announcement didn't affect the timing of its network but Rondella Hawkins, the telecommunications and regulatory affairs officer for the city of Austin, said she had never heard about AT&T's plans before Google's news came out. Hawkins was part of the original committee that put together Austin's application to become the first Google Fiber city. 'Our application for Google would have been a good tip-off to the incumbents that we were eager as a community to get fiber built,' says Hawkins. 'But we never heard from them. Until Google announced that it was going to deploy a fiber network in Austin, I was unaware of AT&T's plans to roll out gigabit fiber to the home.' Grande Communications' CEO Matt Murphy admits that without Google in the market, his company wouldn't have moved so aggressively on offering gigabit speeds. It also wouldn't be offering its service at the modest price of $65 a month, considering that the average broadband download speed sold in the US is between 20Mbps and 25Mbps for about $45 to $50 a month.
It's not surprising, then, that in every city in AT&T's 22-state footprint where Google is considering deploying fiber, AT&T also plans to bring GigaPower. That's a total of 14 markets, including Austin, the Triangle region of North Carolina, and Atlanta, home to AT&T's mobility division. While AT&T refuses to acknowledge that its gigabit fiber plans are answering the competitive challenge posed by Google Fiber, others say that Kansas City may have been a wake-up call. 'I think all the providers have learned some valuable lessons from Google's Kansas City deployment,' says Julie Huls, president and CEO of the Austin Technology Council. 'What Google did instead was say, "We're going to build you a Lamborghini, but price it at the same price as a Camry,"' says Blair Levin. 'And that's what's so disruptive about it.'"
It's not surprising, then, that in every city in AT&T's 22-state footprint where Google is considering deploying fiber, AT&T also plans to bring GigaPower. That's a total of 14 markets, including Austin, the Triangle region of North Carolina, and Atlanta, home to AT&T's mobility division. While AT&T refuses to acknowledge that its gigabit fiber plans are answering the competitive challenge posed by Google Fiber, others say that Kansas City may have been a wake-up call. 'I think all the providers have learned some valuable lessons from Google's Kansas City deployment,' says Julie Huls, president and CEO of the Austin Technology Council. 'What Google did instead was say, "We're going to build you a Lamborghini, but price it at the same price as a Camry,"' says Blair Levin. 'And that's what's so disruptive about it.'"
Who would have thought that competition is good for progress...
Oh, so competition causes companies to be competitive, who knew.
It is almost as if capitalism only works if you punish cartels and break up monopolies.
Say what you want about Google but I'd always turn to them before the likes of AT&T, Verizon, etc. I just with Google would come to where I live.
When Google Fiber comes to a city and gigabit internet is finally advertised, is it truly gigabit internet or is there massive throttling involved? I've had fiber to my door in Romania (for a little over 10€/month) for many years now, and while upload speeds are somewhat slower than download speeds, you can torrent hundreds of gigabytes a month and no one at the ISP bats an eye. Do Americans get the same goodness, or do the advertised specs come with a boatload of catches?
AT&T : we're gona build you a Camry but sell it for the price of a Lamborghini, just because we know that we're the only dealership you can buy cars from, and only when another dealership moves in, we're going to get you that Lamborghini.
...don't be evil.
Just be the best US Corporation you can be.
And don't ever label it a monopoly. No matter what. Because we all know those are bad.
Or perhaps Google are selling a Camry at the price of a Camry, and the other guys who've been peddling Model Ts are now having to get competitive!
In Soviet Russia, all our base are belong to YOU!
A quick Google search (yeah, not exactly unbiased) doesn't seem to show anything in the top results. I found a reddit thread if you want to look through it, though.
Oh, you mean competition is a good thing and monopolies are bad?
ISPs in the US don't seem to have *real* competition in the majority of locations. It's amazing what happens when *real* competition comes to the market.
When Google Fiber comes to a city and gigabit internet is finally advertised, is it truly gigabit internet or is there massive throttling involved? I've had fiber to my door in Romania (for a little over 10€/month) for many years now, and while upload speeds are somewhat slower than download speeds, you can torrent hundreds of gigabytes a month and no one at the ISP bats an eye. Do Americans get the same goodness, or do the advertised specs come with a boatload of catches?
When you have gigabit speed being delivered to the consumer, bottlenecks tend to point at the other end.
It is literally going to start depending on the rest of the infrastructure, and likely how well your hosting provider is peered. Yet another reason net neutrality is such a critical issue. Gonna be a bitch if we finally get killer speed in our homes at a reasonable price only to find we haven't paid the internet gateway thugs enough to get to our damn content.
...and it's almost as if you only find actual monopolies in places where the government intentionally creates them in the first place.
You know, like all of the cable and data monopolies in the US.
It's a shame you need to depend on a large corporation to fight the other large corporation.
What happens when they decide to join forces and become a cartel?
So, what we learn is that ISPs believe they can build a gigabit infrastructure and make a profit charging only $65/month for service without having to subsidize it with an ad business (like Google can). That's a very nice measure of just how much the rest of us are getting screwed by our ISPs.
It's "Gigapower ®" specifically because it's not "gigabit" by the technical definition. They're offering "up to" 300 Mbps.
it's real gigabit, but only inside google's network
anything outside google's network they have to buy peering points with Level 3 and other Tier 1 backbones and you can bet they don't buy enough to support 1gbps for every customer at any time
but then google has been pretty good about selling space to CDN's in their data centers so you don't really need gigabit since the data is inside google's network already
IF Google or AT&T "Gigapower" was available I'd choose Google because AT&T has been screwing us for too long with their shoddy uVerse and Wireless offerings. Just wait until Google unveils it's own wireless network with truly unlimited 5G data.
One small detail to add to AT&T side of the story - their GigaPower package is only a name - THAT offering tops out at 300Mbps, and this is true for every city it's available in. Not only that, no one has a clue if they'll every make 1,000Gbps service available in any market.
Sorry AT&T, calling it a trout a whale does not make it a whale no matter how big you blow up the picture you took of the trout.
"Courage is being afraid to do the Right Thing, and doing it anyway."
Yet another reason net neutrality is such a critical issue.
Interestingly enough, in places where there are more than a handful of competing service providers available, net neutrality is a complete non-issue.
Some people think that competition is when there are two or three vendors to choose from. The two party system should have taught them otherwise. With just a few competitors they just look at each other and split the market to avoid competition.
For functioning competition you need at least twenty or so alternatives so that there always is someone who doesn't want to play ball with the others.
The cynical side of this, is that this is AT&T and Co. are making sure that Google doesn't make any money with Fiber by making sure the market size for Fiber is drastically reduced wherever its rolled out...and discouraging Google from pursuing this as a business. JMHO...
Google doesn't throttle or have bandwidth caps on their fiber.
From their network management page:
In times of acute congestion, Google Fiber Internet service bandwidth will be fairly allocated among subscribers without regard to the subscribersâ(TM) online activities or the protocols or applications that the subscribers are using.
Google Fiberâ(TM)s Internet services are priced on a flat-fee basis (plus taxes and government fees). Google Fiber does not charge subscribers a usage-based fee for Internet access service and does not employ volume-based data caps.
Most other large ISPs in the US, however, do have bandwidth and data caps.
They aren't building a Lamborghini and pricing it at a camry, att was building a camry and pricing it at a Lamborghini.
For well over a decade Comcast in my rural area was always behind, we had really old DVR boxes and service and about 1/2 the average speed of other Comcast customers in the county. I think I was paying $65 for the top tier internet which was 15 down. About three months before Fios came in, our 6 year old POS DVR boxes were upgraded and my internet went up to 50 down.
Competition works.
Google should say they are going to places they aren't just to trick AT&T into setting up.
While Google garners all the attention, there are some other private initiatives that are popping up that promise even more choice. For example, here in NC there is RST which will be offering service through a combination of FTTH and wireless last mile solutions. http://rstfiber.com/releases/rst-fiber-activates-americas-first-gigabit-state/
'What Google did instead was say, "We're going to build you a Lamborghini, but price it at the same price as a Camry,"' says Blair Levin. 'And that's what's so disruptive about it.'"
Just what Henry Ford did. And some other automakers followed his lead and thrived while others refused to understand the new reality and failed. Now will ATT really follow through? The most disruptive aspect of Google's plan is that it is disrupting regulatory capture by getting the regulators to change the rules and allow something closer to free markets.
and I live in one of Google's target 14 markets...
Hurry up Google this service is killing me.
If this is what happens in the USA when Google Fiber is planned, I'd like to see what would happen in Canada. Bell and Vidéotron are so greedy, their reaction would probably be to increase the prices, lower the speeds and the monthly caps even more, with ads everywhere telling us "Stop Google Fiber or else we'll charge you even more".
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Google has the second most connected network in the world, right behind Level 3 with about 1/4 their size. Google is better connected than most Tier 1s, plus they have a lot of peering with Level 3. I'm sure they have good relations as both Google and Level 3 are on a crusade for net neutrality against most of the other Tier 1s.
So they all announced upgrades here in Austin: Google first, then AT&T Uverse, and now TWC. But. Nothing has really changed. Everyone has announcements, but the coverage areas are so small and nothing has changed. TWC has made the best annoucment that their 300Mbps service will be available all over Austin, but not yet. They have offered some date in the future that I'm sure will be delayed. So competition works, but no one is really being that aggressive.
I'm pretty confident that AT&T looked at their cancellation rate as Google Fiber deployed in the Kansas City neighborhoods and saw their subscription base drop by a large enough margin to be a problem. Their response to the Kansas City market appears to be "Send more junk mail!" but nothing else. No announcements of competing service, no advertised price cuts, or increases in bandwidth. I don't know what exec was asleep during the Google build out but, Google publishes the percentage of pre-subscribed households per neighborhood and AT&T's sound indifference did nothing to dampen that.
That is all.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
As a happy Google fiber customer in KC, I will tell you it lives up to the billing. I consistently get 850-950+MBps both up and down. The only time it is slower is if the resource I am connecting to does not have the bandwidth. In my job I have to upload/download a lot of database backup files of up to 20Gb compressed to Rackspace servers. It takes hours at work. I come home and do it and it takes minutes.
If I had mod points I'd give them to you. Whenever some naive free market idealist gets modded +5 saying the problem is government granted monopolies (a particularly insidious claim due to its speciousness and thus its ability to deceive the uninformed) and the solution is the enticingly simplistic "deregulation" (ignorning hundreds of years of precedent with similar public utilities and the successes of other first world nations that acknowledge this fact), it drives me mad.
Competition works as long as the concept of cooperation is unacceptable between the largest 2 or more factions. The count is irrelevant, if the largest two actors cooperate they can buy out/crush the smallest opposition repeatedly until there is no opposition. Having 20 or so initial factions just makes the inter-faction politics more complicated so that it takes longer to reach an equilibrium.
It's the irrational love of compromise that gets us into 1.3 party politics (there are some dissenting factions, but the majority of both parties on a federal level would rather go drinking together than represent the voters) and economic monopolies.
I think its fun to watch a company that built its fortune on tiny margins move into a industry that has enormous customer hostile margins.
You have that backwards. Google's net margins are 50% higher than AT&Ts and double Comcast's.
Google has a net profit margin of 21.5%. AT&T has a net profit margin of 14.1%. Comcast has net profit margins around 10.5%.
Google is going to fucking destroy the big ISPs everywhere they go.
And your evidence for this is what exactly? While it would make me very happy to see more competition, I seriously doubt Google is going to push AT&T, Verizon and Comcast out of their current monopolies on any sort of widespread basis.
yeah, and they also have A LOT of internal and application traffic that takes priority over their baby ISP business on that fiber
Cable companies are not natural monopolies. You only have to go back to the days prior to railway regulation to see that your argument is flawed. I think we can agree that railroads require a much larger investment than running a cable line. Even so, in the early days of railroad (prior to the massive regulation) there were 6 competing railways between Chicago and New York City. What's even more interesting is that the cost to transport goods across these long haul routes was often less than short hauls. Short hauls were frequently pricier precisely because of government restrictions on leases, property, etc that existed locally. The owners of these short routes made sure to lobby hard to keep those barriers in place and protect their margins.
Consumers complained and a railway commission was formed. Legislation was passed to make prices fairer. The result? Short routes stayed pricey and the long route prices came up to match them.
Cable monopolies are just as much a government creation as the railway or telephone monopolies were. Not necessarily from federal regulations, but certainly from the conglomeration of local and state regulations that provided an unnatural barrier of entry that protected the entrenched monopolies from competition.
Was say, "We're actually going to build the high-speed network that the major carriers have been getting free money from taxpayers and customers for the last 20+ years failed to build."
PLEASE
All the telecoms pretty much own the backbone and long haul systems that move all that precious data around. Those high capacity Sonet systems are not cheap, nor is the fiber infrastructure they ride upon.
:)
The telcos don't have to own the ' last mile ' to get it to your business or home as long as they own the rest of it.
Though, while they won't admit it, Google IS the reason behind this. AT&T has never been a pro-active company, but rather a reflexive one. They're pushing fiber to the business very hard right now, since they don't want to lose their business customers.
Fiber to the home will be selective markets only as I doubt their plans include retrofitting fiber into neighborhoods that would never pay for such services to begin with.
As for the telcos going away, all of them are selling off or have plans to sell off the wireline side of things. ( copper facilities ) They want to get out of that business anyway since it's a pita to maintain and everyone is transitioning to wireless.
Want to know what scares the telcos ?
Anything that undermines the cellular business model since that is their bread and butter going forward. I would think that municipal owned wi-fi networks and wi-fi capable voip phones would scare the hell out of them as it would negate the need for cellular at all for large swaths of folks within range of those systems.
Heh, think about why the telcos fight the deployment of such systems so fiercely
Gonna be a bitch if we finally get killer speed in our homes at a reasonable price only to find we haven't paid the internet gateway thugs enough to get to our damn content.
You could still have one killer LAN party with your neighbors.
I often think when that day comes we could decentralize the web like Tor to make it more difficult for ISPs to target massive cloud hubs with refusal to upgrade peering unless expensive monetary demands are met.
When at the edges of the network during peaks is already over saturated. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/14/05/09/0240252/the-mere-promise-of-google-fiber-sends-rivals-scrambling#
Google doesn't necessarily care who provides the fast internet service to it's online customers.
Yes the do because the ISP who controls the connection to the end users can seriously mess with Google's business. Think about why Google developed Android. Google is an advertising company but if they can't control or influence the devices that actually touch the people they are trying to advertise to then handset makers and telecoms can shut them out or at least badly hurt Google's margins in exchange for access to eyeballs. And it wasn't just the ISPs either. Apple, Microsoft/Nokia and others could have basically refused to carry Google advertising and/or substituted their own. Same problem with ISPs to homes. It's potentially an existential threat to Google unless Google can find ways to make the ISPs play nice.
I think Google is rolling out some fiber networks in a few areas to provide a credible threat to AT&T, Verizon and Comcast to hopefully force them to behave. Sort of a doomsday weapon which they hope to never need to use. Google is one of the few companies that has the cash to seriously consider rolling out their own network if they were forced to. In fact I could even see them conceivably partnering with Apple and Microsoft on this if the need arose. This would hurt Google's margins rather badly (running an ISP is expensive) but it is an option.
TELECOMS have a monopoly on COPPER PHONE LINES. It has nothing to do with internet.
Really? Because I could have sworn I got access to the internet over those very copper cables. If you have to go through a monopoly to get access to the internet then it is a distinction without a difference.
And you could always get a phone via VOIP or Cellular.
Which requires either those same copper phone lines (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, TimeWarner or Charter) or wireless access through AT&T, Verizon, TMobile or Sprint. Which oligopoly would you like to use today?
Whatever advantage the telecoms had was gone at the turn of the century.
If that were actually true then we would see hundreds of telecoms rather than the local monopolies/duopolies enjoyed by most of the country.
Hello Google,
Please bring Google Fibre north of the border to Canada where we have zero competition. Especially Vancouver-area since it's close enough to Seattle that any buildout here could solve the Pacific-Asia bottlenecks.
"We're going to build you a Lamborghini, but price it at the same price as a Camry,"' says Blair Levin. 'And that's what's so disruptive about it.'"
No, you are giving me a gremlin for the price of a lamborghini because you are the only car dealer in town. Google is offering the camry for the camry price.
Please just mention you're coming to Denver, would love to see how Comcass and CenturyLunk react.
Turner and Comcast still says home users don't want fiber speeds to the house.
I'm looking forward to Berkshire Hathaway destroy the realtor scam merely through competeing business. I've bought 7 houses now (move a lot) and I'm pretty sure that the primary requirement to become a realtor is to have failed in every other get rich quick scheme you've tried.
Lock in the total price to the customer. Watch for extra fees, services, and gotchas. And make that lock-in 15 years.
A quick Google search (yeah, not exactly unbiased)
Google doesn't bias search results.
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It seems odd for Google to go thru with planning a deployment if they were just interested in a high speed service. This leads me to believe AT&T bought off officials, (and I could explain the hundred, or so ways corporations do that but I won't) in order to keep their monopoly. They had the federal money for putting this in years ago, and only now do they find the motivation to finally spend those dollars to install high speed.
I don't see this as competition, if one company threatens the others monopoly only to quickly be eliminated, I see this as an ominous sign that net neutrality is going to lose out. But I don't see Gaagle busting its ass to give people a choice either, so they're to blame for this as well.
yeah, and they also have A LOT of internal and application traffic that takes priority over their baby ISP business on that fiber
But Google also has a LOT of fiber :-)
And, although I don't know and couldn't say if I did, I strongly suspect that ISP traffic is categorized at the highest priority for QoC purposes, alongside all other customer-facing traffic.
(Google engineer here.)
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The local utility has had fiber installed for ~20 years and just the promise of nearby Portland's gigabit service has convinced them to offer gigabit service to their customers.
Let Us Pray to the Google Fiber God for Him to come to my city so that I can drop fucking Comcast and thus unleash much rejoicing.
And this, ladies and gents, is why the free market works when it's allowed to work unhampered by meddling from politicians. AT&T is a shit company. I hate their service and product offerings, but even more I hate their flippant attitude towards their customers. Along comes Google to kick them out of their complacency. If AT&T gets on the ball and delivers good service at good prices, it's good for me. If AT&T drops the ball and Google displaces them, it's good for me. Competition, folks. It's a win-win.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
They appear to lack the expertise to deploy it.
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
I live just outside of Provo, UT and I had Comcrap install my internet service about a week after Google announced their fiber service was coming here (I had just moved). I'm not in the service area (dammit) but I asked the Comcast tech about how his office is feeling about it. Basically he said the bosses at the local Comcast office are scared to death. In Provo Comcast started offering cut-rate prices about 2 months after the Google Fiber announcement. My grandparents took their offer of $75/month for 30 Mbps internet, cable TV, and home phone service.
This space for rent...
I don't know about that -- Seen what model T's are going for these days?
Rather than upgrade because they can provide better service for less cost, our named monopolists sat on the infrastructure build they claim they had already committed to accomplish...until there was danger of competition. This is where Adam Smith and the Hayekians go wrong. They ignore the drive to monopolism inherent in any Capitalist system. In the end, if we will not govern (limit) profits, the owners of profits will govern us.
Google doesn't bias search results.
So I have to use Bing to find good tube amps?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
Somebody post a link to a speedtest from the aforementioned ATT network, or it doesn't exist.
all things being equal i suspect google would prefer to not be in the business of laying cable. why are they doing it? because the online service they provide depend on high speed internet. more people w/ high speed internet == more people using google music, movies, youtube, and so on. it's the same reason they set the bar with nexus smartphones. they don't want to make smartphones, but they want to ensure that everyone that wants a phone that's capable of delivering google services can get one.
it AT&T jumps in w/ fiber in stead, great, they still get what they want.
To Google:
Please make an announcement that you are planning to expand Google fiber to the ENTIRE country.
Thank You
Because they have been selling us a Camry at Lamborghini prices for a very long time.
"We're going to build you a Lamborghini, but price it at the same price as a Camry,"
Because they have been selling us a Camry at Lamborghini prices for a very long time. "We're going to build you a Lamborghini, but price it at the same price as a Camry,"
i think what he was asking is if it comes with rediculous bandwidth caps like, oh, cableone or mediacom. like "you can have a 1 gigabit per second pipe, but you can only download 50 gigabits before we throttle you to 5 megabits per second. after that, every gigabit costs $50". and since it's america, yeah, there will probably be a boatload of catches. "up to" 1 gigabit, if downloading from a torrent with 800 peers on a tuesday afternoon while doing the macarena in a dress.
i think what he was asking is if it comes with rediculous bandwidth caps like, oh, cableone or mediacom. like "you can have a 1 gigabit per second pipe, but you can only download 50 gigabits before we throttle you to 5 megabits per second. after that, every gigabit costs $50". and since it's america, yeah, there will probably be a boatload of catches. "up to" 1 gigabit, if downloading from a torrent with 800 peers on a tuesday afternoon while doing the macarena in a dress.
Honestly, I can only hope the utter nonsense of bandwidth caps continues, and with even stronger vigor.
Once people realize that the 1-gigabit connection is basically throttled for the rest of the month after 47 seconds of usage, maybe THEN consumers will start calling providers on their bullshit, putting an end to the practice.
Space X would be considered a "vertical monopoly". They control their entire setup from designing and making the parts for their engines, to building and transporting their rocket bodies, through controlling the missions from launch to splashdown. This is one of the forms of monopoly Progressives in the US have historically opposed (it was a "progressive" anti-monopoly "reform" that banned filmmakers from owning and operating the theaters that showed their films). Were it not for Elon Musk's vertical monopoly, however, we would not be currently on the verge of a revolutionary reduction is space launch costs, and the horizontal monopoly called ULA would not be worrying about losing its grip on the taxpayer wallet
As in everything else that is important, DETAILS MATTER. Simple slogans or buzzwords about "transparency", "neutrality", "monopolies", "inequalities", "fairness", etc are very frequently misleading - and political efforts tied to such mantras are often backed by people with deep pockets and nefarious desires that are not at all tethered to those buzzwords.