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Google Fiber Sheds Workers As It Looks to a Wireless Future (engadget.com)
Mariella Moon, writing for Engadget: Alphabet is making some huge changes to steer Google Fiber in a new, more wireless direction. According to Wired, the corporation has reassigned hundreds of Fiber employees to other parts of the company and those who remained will mostly work in the field. It has also hired broadband veteran Greg McCray as the new CEO for Access, the division that runs Google Fiber. These changes don't exactly come out of left field: back in October, Google announced that it's pausing the high-speed internet's expansion to new markets and that it's firing nine percent of the service's staff. Wired says running fiber optic cables into people's homes has become too expensive for the company. A Recode report last year says it costs Mountain View $1 billion to bring Fiber to a new market.
Google has no business treating infrastructure as a project that they can simply abandon.
Inconceivable!
It has also hired broadband veteran Greg McCray as the new CEO for Access, the division that runs Google Fiber.
Strange name for a tech company. It reminds me of vb access which was, well...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
That sounds good.
Fiber to the pole near a few houses and wireless to those houses.
Now the need both b/w and power at the pole.
AT&T bothered to run fiber to my neighborhood (new development) alongside the cooper lines. For years they didn't offer fiber to the premise, but when Google announced they were coming to town AT&T deployed and offered it.
Not as low price as Google Fiber, but close and since Google has given up on fiber I am lucky to have gotten it.
$90 / month for 24 months with a 12-month contract. No data cap for life. Free gateway for life (no monthly rental fee).
You can string more fiber. Good luck magicing up more bandwidth. the only growth there is to steal it from the military, which has already cost several billion dollars.
For speed, security, and reliability, wireless isn't even close to being a replacement for fiber. Our business only uses wireless for fun stuff for our customers. Our real business is over wired connections, and will be for the foreseeable future.
I don't respond to AC's.
I worked for many years in a secure US government facility operating at the classification of secret and top secret/SCI. Fiber was the only permitted network infrastructure and we spent countless hours chasing down broken fiber tips, and crushed cables. Expertise required to retip fiber was much harder to come by than simply crimping twisted pair cable, which was shielded anyway. Emissions was the reasoning behind using glass to transmit the electrons.
You really believe that none of that came from the 30 MHz sold off in 2008? None of that came from taking LTE-1700 from the military? None of that came from from the 2100MHz band, or the 2300MHz band, or the 2500MHz band?
You're full of shit. The first came from taking it from the TV broadcasters, the others were taken from the military, except 2100 MHz taken from wireless cable investors (MMDS). Improvements in compression and codecs has been incremental, not huge, and only looks big because you're comparing it to morse code.
Very high bandwidth links to wireless access points makes more sense going forward as far as I'm concerned. Continual upgrades to cell and Wi-Fi networks and similar makes more sense than running a strand of fiber to every single home.
Sure, lets do that. And lets see how well it works during bad weather, for apartment buildings, etc. To a certain degree it's like switching from cable to Direct TV. Expect outages....
Sad to hear this. Having a 1 Gbps fiber connection for $70/month is awesome.
Somehow we managed to wire up the whole country with electrical power, and somehow we wired up the whole country with phone lines, and yet laying out fiber is always TOO COSTLY. It can't be done!
They should be counter lobbying states against cable monopolies and allowing cities and regions to lay their own last mile fibre as part of city services. Then any provider can service any customer in the city minus the city's cut to pay off the build-out. I live in Culver City which has a population of 40,000 in 5.2 square miles. Lets say the city goes whole hog and guts all the old infrastructure including the old copper lines. So every service including plain telephone would have to come over fibre. That would mean at least 90% of people would have to sign up. Lets say 4 people per building for 10,000 residential and business buildings. I say $25 per month per building. They would get you a quarter million dollars a month toward paying off fibre layout. That's $3 million a year. For 5 square miles that should be more than completely paid off in 10 years with maintenance fees and upgrades dropping to something like $5 a month. Last mile solved. If they do right with multiple fibre pairs to every building then it should last the next 150 years; longer than the old copper phone lines. Once the cities are built out and paid off I don't see why the state couldn't tack on a $10 fee to provide for rural build out. I'm sure they would do a better job and actually get it done. But I still think rural people should have to outlay at least something like $3000; not including end point equipment. That's way less than the price of a car and actually increases the equity of their home. So forget laying the lines yourself and get lobbying.
Maybe Google should send some engineers to Chattanooga, TN "the gig city". EPB has provided fiber access to every home in its service area which includes even the most rural parts of Hamilton and Bradley Co, TN and in North Georgia. The gigabit service has been in place for several years now and now they are rolling out 10 Gigabit to every home. The first city in the world to do a largescale 10 Gbit network. They are doing it cheap as well, 1Gb is $59 and 100Mb is $49. The 10Gb is pretty steep at over $300, but still not terrible considering. I cannot really imagine what anyone would need or do with that kind of bandwidth to the home. Oh they also have no data caps or throttling either, every run is dedicated and there is no bandwidth sharing. From what I understand EPB has been very profitable and their deployment and equipment costs, I am sure were much higher than Googles, considering they did this much earlier when the technology was more expensive.
The only downside is they will not give you a Static IP on a home account and occasionally they will NAT you. You can call them and they will fix the NAT'ing. Their TV service is not bad either a pretty good HD selection and is much better than the Local Comcast. Their support is responsive and amazing as well. Keep in mind I have not had Comcast in almost 8 years so they may have gotten better.
Let's sort this out...
When TV went digital, channels 2-6 and 52-69 were retired from the TV band... creating as yet unused bandwidth.
When LTE needed a frequency, there was unused military band numbers that timed out... so it's a loss under "use it or lose it!"
Wireless Cable didn't come close to working... you just couldn't make a signal powerful enough to work and also weak enough to be safe... DirecTV and Dish Network's emitters are so strong they have to spread over wide areas, and no such things work for local. It'd be equal to having broadcasts on every channel or more.
There are some big codec changes ready for MPEG6 developed (HERE ON Slashdot!) years ago... we're just waiting for the MPEG4 chips to go through the retail distribution systems.
If there's something in the sky interfering with your DirecTV system, call 1-800-DIRECTV and they'll tell you to unhook your dish, then let them send a laser from space down your path to clear out whatever's there... if there's nothing interfering with the signal there, you just need to turn up the power with an amplifier in your system.
Network Neutrality means what at the tech level?
The Internet has always been unfair... it's a mess of a network design where servers network-closer to you get to you better. We're not going to one central router with delays for people who get too close!
Google doesn't want to be in the business of providing Internet access, but they saw ISP monopolies and anti-net-neutrality as a threat to their business model. They started an ISP basically to try and improve Comcast and AT&T.
Please do not quote wired magazine, unless you mention that they are pay walled. Yes, asking to turn off an blocker makes them pay walled.
how about this..
I want t recode report that outlines the cost for running fiber to Hawaii from california. Lets use that as our Crown jewel to make our point..
Mountain view where a 1 bdroom apt starts at $4000/month. You cant get a cup of coffee for less than 4 bucks. The land where if you have a pet, not only do you pay the deposit for cleaning (as per a std. contract) but you also have to pay an extra $400/mo just for the privilege.. So, if your a single person with a cat, your rent in Mountain View will start at $4400/month.
Whats the Recode for Nevada, Wisconsin, Chicago, Mississippi, Georga, and or florida??
this is not apples to apples
Google Fiber's rollout in Nashville has not been smooth and is nowhere near complete, and Google itself will likely never make a profit here. But it did its job for me: AT&T FINALLY enabled last-mile fiber rollout in a lot of neighborhoods near their existing hubs, and now I have gigabit for $70/month; the same price Google would charge me. AT&T so far hasn't been any more reliable as an ISP than Comcast was (less, actually) but once the inevitable initial snags with billing are worked through, I'm confident I won't need to talk to them for a long time.
I may actually drop down to a lower tier eventually - gigabit is insanely more than I need, and for $40/month they are offering 45 Mbps symmetric. And let's be honest; it's the symmetric that I'm actually in it for. I just want to upload to the cloud as quickly as I download. Only negative is the lower tiers come with a 1 TB data cap, though I rarely hit that when not backing up EVERYTHING I own (which, of course, I did in about 10 hours as soon as I was activated.)
Regarding towers: And don't forget solar flare disruptions. Even lightning. And believer it or not, wind can affect reception sometimes. It also makes me wonder who's is going to fare better during an earthquake?
... I had no idea someone had invented wireless fiber! Imagine the possibilities! All the speed of fiber with none of the physical medium! I'm going to invest immediately.
Google Fiber had been running gangbusters a year or two ago, with a nice Fiber Hut constructed in a hurry and drilling crews doing their thing down some major roads.
But after two years, the Fiber Hut is still dark. The work crews are gone. Nothing is getting drilled or installed or connected. Nobody has service. Which is fine, I guess, as the Google TV package is awful. Comcast's TV packages blow it away. And we are about to get Gigabit-like service from Comcast.
Really was hoping Google with their deep pockets might be the ones to make this happen. But it turns out they spent a lot for not a lot of results, and like many other Google projects, they will and do pull the plug and walk away.
Had high hopes for Project Fi too but I had to leave that because their pricing is just not competitive. $20 plus $10 a gig fails next to T-Mobile with $30 and 5 gigs. Same network.
Sig for hire.
Fiber is the best thing you can get. Sure it costs more... it's worth more!
Fuck you and your wireless latency
I think it is ingenious to say fiber is too expensive to roll out. I live in a town with just 23,000 people and the most expensive thing about getting fiber was actually an artificially created cost of licensing the poles from the city for the fiber. To give people an idea it cost about $100 per pole to run fiber to my house. This was a labour cost. The cost of my ISP to license each pole on the other hand was about $1,000 USD. I only know that because I have a neighbour who lives a number of houses down who inquired and the difference between me and him was that the ISP hadn't licensed the poles to reach him from the junction box whereas they had already licensed all the poles needed to reach me. I paid $3,000 for about 30 poles. He would have had to pay $17,000 for about 15 poles.
If Google can't afford to eat the cost of FTTP, they should charge consumers for the installation cost. I would pay for it. Not having that as an option sucks.
2-6 weren't "retired", though they proved to be mostly unsuitable for ATSC. There is a local station near here on channel 5. (They were previously on 2 in the analog days.) Also, ATSC allowed adjacent channel frequencies to be used in the same market area (with analog it caused too much interference), which resulted in a similar number of usable TV channels as before.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Check that, is 5 the PSIP or the frequency?
Comcast better what are you smoking?
There HD lineup sucks / bit rates are shit / and the upload sucks.
Another Google project to be asked!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Fired and laid off don't mean the same thing. Does Slashdot have editors?
They should change the name to Google MESH, and enable Mesh Networking and calls in their cellphones too
What have you been smoking? And can I have some?
It's the frequency, duh. The PSIP is still 2.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
5 is an unused frequency now. PSIPs of 2 is still supported.
What's the callsign of the station we are talking about?