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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.
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
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?
It would be way more doable if they didn't have to fight the cable monopolies every step of the way. In my city, we had a different article every other day about how Charter was filing one suit after another to prevent Google from doing anything on the poles, delaying the Fiber implementation for so long that Google finally gave up on fully half of the project here. No telling how much money they spent getting exactly nothing accomplished, and the only winner is the cable companies, because they get to protect their market.
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!
They're not fighting cable monopolies, they're fighting cities that allow and enforce cable monopolies. This is purely a municipal issue and in some cases a state issue. I squarely place the blame on the people making the laws and taking money from people to make skewed laws. In many states, cities can address this fairly easily. In some, you have to go to the state level. Or for the nuclear option you go federal. Either way, fix the laws and the rest falls in place. This is not the first time nor the last that this is the solution(the Telecommunications Act of 1996 is just one example that can be cited)
Fuck you and your wireless latency
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.
When they first announced coming here, I told a friend, not in our neighborhood, we are all underground and no way are they trenching. So they rolled out on areas with poles as expected. Low hanging fruit is probably all gone, so time to pull the plug. I've friends who are more central with poles that have it. I admit I am jealous. I do wonder if in a couple more years if they will kill it all. I think they did raise prices a bit.
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.
fix the laws and the rest falls in place.
That's a very nice sentiment, and it is true, but you are skipping the most most important step. You have to put people into office that will fix the laws. So your blame is misplaced.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Another Google project to be asked!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I do wonder if in a couple more years if they will kill it all. I think they did raise prices a bit.
Maybe they will just sell Google fiber to Charter.
They should change the name to Google MESH, and enable Mesh Networking and calls in their cellphones too
How are the doing every run as dedicated at that price?
We're a bit behind you in longmont CO, but I was pretty sure that Chattanooga was using GPON for their 1gig service which is very much a shared bandwidth service (sharing 2.44Gbps down and 1.244 Gbps up iirc between either 16, 32 or 64 homes). Leads nicely to the 10g service since they can do XGPON2 over the same shared fiber using a different frequency.
Which is where legislation like the Telecommunications Act of 96 comes in. Force them to share the wires.
It's the frequency, duh. The PSIP is still 2.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Apparently, I still do not see the sarcasm must be some retarded wiring in my brain, but /sarcasm or some kind of hint at it usually helps.
You must be a little more autistic than most around here.
...so what ever you said I've already forgotten because I know that it's wrong.
I also intend to misquote you.
That wasn't just obvious sarcasm; that was heavy sarcasm. Do you really think he forgot everything you said instantly? And the last sentence is, for all intents and purposes, a </sarcasm> tag. Really, it was clearly sarcasm.
I didn't know that Chattanooga was doing so well. I'd heard about the rollout, and the whining and crying in court from AT&T and Comcast. I hadn't heard that AT&T and Comcast had ultimately been told to go to hell, though I applaud the court that decided that. And one of you swarm of ACs says it was all paid off in 4 years... That's kind of fantastic, for that much physical plant.
Is it just me, or is Google doing it wrong? I think Google is doing it wrong, 'cause their quoted billion dollars per city is nuts. In fact, I'd say that's the clearest evidence yet that Google has become a classic American corporation, in the mold of GM and IBM and Lockheed Martin. They really have jumped the shark, despite all their precious interview puzzle questions. And that's for pole-hung fiber, too! Not even paying for burial. That's outrageous. That's like Lockheed's price tag for launching a payload to orbit, when the real cost should be what SpaceX charges. That's an epic failure of management on Google's part, and Chattanooga is the proof.
5 is an unused frequency now. PSIPs of 2 is still supported.
What's the callsign of the station we are talking about?