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New Google Fiber Cities Announced
New submitter plate_o_shrimp sends word that Google has announced the next group of cities set to receive gigabit fiber infrastructure. They're concentrating on cities around four metro areas: Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, and Raleigh-Durham. "We’ve been working closely with city leaders over the past year on a joint planning process to get their communities ready for Google Fiber—and now the really hard work begins. Our next step is to work with cities to create a detailed map of where we can put our thousands of miles of fiber, using existing infrastructure such as utility poles and underground conduit, and making sure to avoid things like gas and water lines. Then a team of surveyors and engineers will hit the streets to fill in missing details. Once we’re done designing the network (which we expect to wrap up in a few months), we’ll start construction." Google also said they're currently looking into Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, and San Jose.
...guess I'll still have to keep service with those COX for awhile longer...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The Portland Metro officials have been saying that they have been bending over backwards (and maybe forwards too) to get Google to start building, but they aren't really getting any traction. I'm wondering if Google did a build out in a few initial cities to prove that they are serious, but now they are just threatening to go into other cities to force the telecoms hand to do their work for them.
Seriously, Modesto could use both a bart station AND fiber.
Might be bearable at that point.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Atlanta: that mix tape no one wants at the park can now be uploaded faster than ever to soundcloud, where people will now have the ability to tell everyone else they dont want it.
Charlotte: You'll enjoy vastly improved connectivity when alerting the public of the news that Obama is a kenyan muslim socialist dictator funding fema camp anchor baby death squads in mexico to gay marry your medicare
Nashville: those 32,768 church videos you swore the holy ghost compelled you to upload to YouTube are now ready to go. Dont forget to include footage of the local abortion clinic, and a rambling "vlog" about incandescent lightbulbs, gay marriage, and the conspiracy of the one world government installing video cameras in the walmart.
Raleigh-Durham: Internet at home will now be like internet at work...so...one less reason to ever leave the city to experience smoked pork products, country music, and whatever the hell a boiled peanut is.
Los Angeles: As for us, back to the shootings, lootings, homeless, traffic, pollution and OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD PLEASE GIVE US FIBER GOOGLE
Good people go to bed earlier.
They are way away from reaching me but the more cities they get into, the more competition the provide against the other companies. I can only hope this helps me eventually.
Great: Gb internet. Not so great: provided by Google, who now have even more access to your internet activity. My ISP may be a stodgy old fart incumbent telecoms company, but at least it's not got an advertising agency as its main profit center.
And that's why we need to make sure every Congressional Representative and Senator (not to mention the President, the Judges and other officers) has eat off SNAP, has to get their medical care from Medicaid providers or the VA, has to live in public housing, has to ride public transportation, and to send their own children to public schools. Apply to this to state officials as necessary.
Toronto/GTA? Canadians could use good Internet access too!
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
Note from the pedantic world: there is no city of "Raleigh-Durham". Raleigh and Durham are two very distinct, moderately large cities separated by over 25 miles and a lot of culture differences. It is like saying "the city of Baltimore-DC" and is annoying to all of us in the area. The Raleigh core alone has a population of about 430,000 (less than Boston but considerably bigger than Pittsburg or Cleveland) while Durham is about 245,000.
That being said, hooray for our area! Love the fiber!
I feel like Google's tended to pick places that tend to be underserved in terms of technology and education. The southeast is definitely a good place to start...
Being from the Kansas City Metro your post holds no water. The inner city got high speed internet first. Than your lower middle class neighborhoods. It is just now starting to roll out to the suburbs.
dang nabbit they need to go international with this project. I got a nice gateway city only 30 minutes north of the us border. would love to take my 100 meg to the next level.
or we stop treating our president as a king, and start treating him the way he treats us
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Maybe contratulations is a word that means "condolences," and NotDrWho is just consoling the upper and upper middle class people of those cities because they still have to wait for Google to get around to them.
sounds more like the issue is with the people of Seattle. stop voting in people who restrict your access and get someone in there who is not sucking on the teat
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Can you imagine the red tape trying to do this in NY or Chicago?
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Seattle was a candidate to be the first city to get Google fiber. The culture of bureaucracy there made it unattractive for Google. For example, in Seattle, and nowhere else in the country, they have to get permission from every homeowner within a certain distance before they can install a fiber cabinet. Just contacting every homeowner and getting them to fill out the form to "yes" or "no" would be a giant pain in the ass that slows things down.
http://crosscut.com/2014/03/04...
I'm disappointed that Portland did not make the cut this time. But I don't expect to directly benefit from Google's fiber anyway. I'm on a fixed income and the last I looked, Google would be more than I could afford.
That said, I expect that when Google does come to Portland that will force its competitors to sweeten their offerings. But maybe that will happen soon anyway, in an economic equivalent of 'spooky action at a distance.' If Google succeeds big time in these other cities, the providers already in the Portland market might realize that it would be advantageous to drop their rates and offer better packages now, and thus make Portland look like a less inviting market to Google.
Well, a couple of providers would also have to improve their customer and technical support (here's looking at you Comcast). But I'm sure they would sacrifice some of their excess profit margin if they felt the Google dragon breathing fire on their butts.
So I for one welcome our new google overlord. Even if he never comes completes the courtship ritual, he might put the fear of loss of market share in the boardrooms where it will do the most good.
Will
Congratulations to all the upper-class and upper-middle-class neighborhoods in Atlanta,
College park is a shithole. Most of Decatur and Smyrna isn't much better. Sandy Springs has some nice areas but has really bad ones too. As a 28-year metro Atlanta resident, I am really wondering what Google was going for with this selection, as they could have done much better. Peachtree City, Woodstock, Roswell, places like that with 300k+ houses extremely common makes sense; not areas with horrible infrastructure and full of run down apartment complexes and old (not "nice" old either) houses.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Come on google! Scare em good, start the NYC and LA rollouts.
Guess what? In the US your local cable company or telephone based ISP sells all of that data in aggregate to Google or some other ad serving company (or more likely multiple ones) already. It's another profit center that only ever really gets talked about when it's Google.
And that's why we need to make sure every Congressional Representative and Senator (not to mention the President, the Judges and other officers) has eat off SNAP, has to get their medical care from Medicaid providers or the VA, has to live in public housing, has to ride public transportation, and to send their own children to public schools. Apply to this to state officials as necessary.
"Publicly run stuff is shitty, so let's make public officials use the publicly run stuff!"
.....
Or maybe we just let industries privatize.
can thank shitty ass seattle laws.
The last Republican mayor of Seattle was in 1968. The City Council is nine people, of which zero are republicans. There are eight Democrats and one Socialist. Whatever you get from your city hall, that's what Democrats do for/to you.
Publicly run stuff doesn't have to be 'shitty', and in fact there are many of us old enough to remember when the city/county power company and other utilities were far and away better and cheaper than the for-profit utilities. The problem is that in order to make people think that government doesn't work and justify privatizing all the public infrastructure the conservatives (mostly Republicans but some Democrats) have spent the last three decades breaking as much of the government as they have been able to.
In three decades of watching privatization efforts all over the world I have yet to see a single one that ended up with better service at a lower price than the previous public system. None. Anywhere. Ever. Can you point at an example of a successful privatization project?
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
So they become even shittier _and_ more expensive? Seriously, I can't remember a single case where privatization of a shitty service caused it to become better (at least without prices going up 10x).
I'm not sure if you're trolling, or just really confused. That big government is textbook democrat. Republicans are all about the free market. Time Warner and Cablevision are heavily invested in trying to get Hillary Clinton elected:
http://www.opensecrets.org/pol...
You want a lot of dead presidents dont you? The president has all that security because without it there is a god chance someone would kill him, regardless of who the president is.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Nonsense, obviously the point is that the person doesn't like the President and wants him to be exposed to assassins. If Presidents had to use public transit in powerful nations, there would be no living Presidents, and Mr Coward would have the random authoritarian dictatorship he dreams of.
Republicans pro free market? Heh, only in theory. In practice that party is pro big business interests, not pro free market. Just ask Tesla
Hold on, hold on, if everybody else gets it first, then not having it yet makes them part of an exclusive group. You just don't have the right mindset.
Anyways, they can just say, "Yes, it is so great the masses got Google Internet first, because they can't afford the Business Class service that everybody in my neighborhood has. Now they can shop online, or engage in remote-learning opportunities to increase their market value." Don't cry over the death of snobbery just yet.
To be clear I wasnt taking a dig at obama. Simply saying the president seriously costs way to much, there jas got to be a better way to keep him safe, and not cost hundreds of millions a year to do
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
The hidden benefit is the increased competition. I live in Austin. Before Google made their intentions clear that they were moving in, the fastest Internet access I could get was 50 Mbps. Now both AT&T and TW are offering 300 Mbps connections at really affordable rates. Personally, 300 Mbps is fast enough for me and I don't intend to make the switch to Fiber, but without their market presence we'd still be stuck in the dark ages here.
Can you name any of these alleged "business-friendly" policies that blue states lack and that might have actually been relevant to Google's decision? How about the NYC- or Chicago-specific "red tape" that would have impacted them?
Totally dude i bet they would have to get permits and stuff. I mean come on. Probably have to call digger's hotline too i bet. Who are these largest cities in the country to do business unfriendly things like require review & approval for infrastructure projects?
The franchise laws which bug auto manufacturers including Tesla and GM were passed to limit the power of GM and Ford, mostly in the 1930s and the 1950s. It's weird that you think prohibiting General Motors from engaging selling the cars the way they used to is "pro big business". The purpose was to protect small family businesses from those big bad corporations.
Section 2 of this paper has a good summary of how those come about:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa...
I agree with you completely. However, the article does not refer to Raleigh-Durham as a city, but as a metro area:
18 cities across four new metro areas: Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, and Raleigh-Durham.
appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars
I hate to break it to you, but people live in exurban wastelands (like Woodstock) because they can't afford to live somewhere like Decatur or Sandy Springs. Those Decatur bungalows you think are just "old" are actually $0.5M+. A lot of them are also actually really nice; they're just not designed to show it off from the street McMansion-style. (Bungalows are typically relatively narrow and deep and don't have front-facing attached garages, so they look smaller from the street than they actually are.) And Sandy Springs (along with Buckhead, adjacent to it) is full of actual mansions (not the "Mc" kind) and is the most expensive town in the entire metro area.
If your impression is based on just what you can see driving by at 50 mph on Scott Boulevard (or on Roswell Road, in the case of Sandy Springs) then you don't know WTF you're talking about.
(Now, bear in mind that I am talking about the City of Decatur proper... unincorporated Dekalb with a Decatur address really does suck, except maybe for the parts near Emory.)
Also, it makes more sense to bring fiber to older, closer-in cities precisely because they are closer, more dense, and don't already have (competing) good infrastructure.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Nobody's forcing Comcast to encrypt QAM, you know. That's just Comcast deciding to fuck you over because it can.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If your impression is based on just what you can see driving by at 50 mph on Scott Boulevard (or on Roswell Road, in the case of Sandy Springs) then you don't know WTF you're talking about.
My grandmother lived in Sandy Springs off Johnson's Ferry near Roswell Road my whole life, and I grew up of Roswell Rd near the 120 loop. I know exactly what I'm talking about. Like I said, in Sandy Springs you have older, nicer homes surrounded by horrible run down apartment complexes. Head towards perimeter and Buckhead and yeah, you have mansions. People live in places like Woodstock precisely because they can afford $.5 million homes but want something bigger than a ranch or bungalow. Why pay half a million dollars for an 1800 sq foot 30 year old house when you can buy a brand new 3500sq ft house for the same price? You wold fit in real good with one of my sister's friends who is spending $1400 a month for an 800 sq ft apartment in Brookhaven (just so she can say she lives in Brookhaven) while I pay $1300 a month to rent a 1700 sq ft house out in Woodstock.
Now, I know Google is doing it on a neighborhood basis, so I doubt that most places in these cities won't get it as there are probably not enough people that can afford the $300 up front investment to make a whole neighborhood viable, so it will still be only the rich ones that get this. It just seems to me that picking areas where the income distribution isn't so large would open them up to more customers. Plus it would be much easier to add in fiber to new neighborhoods under construction than existing, older locations; they should have just partnered up with builders and promoted Google fiber already installed in the neighborhood and probably added $5k easy to the house prices.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
That's what Kennedy said...
First of all, in-town bungalows are more like 70+ years old. That means they were better-built than new speculative construction and (if built before WWII) have lots of architectural detail that's too expensive to build today. If they're "the same price" (as opposed to "fixer uppers") then they've been renovated and insulated to modern standards, so utilities are cheaper. And most importantly, they're in walkable neighborhoods and close to jobs, so the commute is shorter and the lifestyle is better.
Why would I do that when I'm paying about $700 a month for a mortgage (including taxes and insurance) on a 1500 ft^2 house in Atlanta (in the Atlanta city limits, near Decatur)? Granted, my neighborhood isn't as nice as Decatur, but it's a damn sight better than most parts of the suburbs.
By the way, before I bought my house (5 years ago) I lived in an 800 sq ft apartment on the south edge of Buckhead for $800 a month, and I'm sure it'd be no more than $900 or so now... unless that apartment is super-luxurious, your sister's friend is getting ripped off.
Just under half the folks in my neighborhood are yuppies who can easily afford the $70/month gigabit service. The other half are older people who've been here for 20+ years, who would benefit from the free service. In fact, I would say that even having the yuppies create a fund to subsidize the installation fee for the others wouldn't be out of the question. In other words, Google Fiber is a great fit for my neighborhood almost because it's mixed-income. Unless it's competitive (where the rollout is limited to only the top X% of neighborhoods, rather than all that meet some threshold), I can see every neighborhood in the city qualifying except for the real slums, like English Avenue or Mechanicsville.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
For the love of god, please just give us a half-way decent internet connection. Please?
Hell offer it to Glendale or some other "city" in Los Angeles. I'll bet they'll find a way...
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