Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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.
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.
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)
The problem is that it depends hugely on where it is and how many other people have it.
Citywide our city is doing it for a little more than $2k/home. The parts of town on poles will be cheap and it'll cost more in other places where they need to trench, but because the penetration is so high, the cost is low. It also helps that our city run their own power and water so have a lot of existing poles, trenches, boxes and easements that they can leverage.
We ended up installing it at work in another city and it "cost" $23k to run fiber about 1500'. We ended up not actually paying that and I suspect that was marked up some, but it probably wasn't unreasonable for that kind of underground trench distance.
I'd probably pay $2k to get it at my house, but I'd have a hard time with $23k. And that's only for a 1500' run, it could easily be more than that. I've heard of people with homes in the mountains spending upwards of $200k to get power run to their properties.