I thought I would use your reply to post an interesting figure I calculated. Without a cap a 1Gbps pipe can pass 2.6 Petabytes per month. The pipe has a "natural cap" of 2,600,000 GB (NOT Gb) per month. Each way, both up and down. In the case of Google Fiber, this is per home. Google doesn't offer a "capped" option.
TWC (the KC incumbent Internet provider) offers broadband caps in the range from 5 GB to 100GB per month, with no unlimited option. This is a range of from 1/20,000th to 1/400,000th the total monthly net bandwidth capacity offered by Google, per connection. Yes, the most bandwidth they offer is 1/20,000th of Google's offer. Since they don't have 20,000 subscribers in Kansas City, let alone 20,000 paying their maximum rate, one single Google Fiber $70/month customer could saturate their entire Kansas City network.
I started out assuming the warmist side of this issue and stayed there many years, being big into natural sciences and earth sciences and such. It was just the general dickwad nature of the warmist argument: "sit down and shut up while scientists are speaking!" and the general fear of discussion that led me to investigate the matter for myself. Turns out I was wrong to be so trusting.
He's not saying they're doing away with Steam on PCs. Steam will still be available on Windows, Mac and - soon - Linux. If Steam stops working on Windows it won't be Valve's fault. And if it does stop working on Windows you'll be able to get most of your Steam games without buying them again - complete with all the in-game content - on a platform that is less hostile to successful Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). They'll maintain Windows Steam for as long as it is possible and financially feasible to do so but given the history of Lotus, Wordperfect, Borland, Aldus, Sun, Star, Netscape, Novell and many others, that won't be forever. Sooner or later Windows will be updated in a way that Steam won't run on it, and that won't be Valve's fault. They're hanging in there for you as best they can, but they don't write the platform.
By doing this he's maybe building an intimidating counter-threat to Microsoft: break Steam like you break the OS for other competing ISVs and we'll take our users elsewhere. By doing so he may be incentivizing Microsoft to not break Windows-based steam. By making a platform they DO own, Valve is making a commitment to continue to offer you a platform your Steam games will run on, in as much as their participating developers will support it. They can't make the developers support it, but this is the best they can do. Buy the Steam console, and your Steam games will be able to continue to be supported because they DO own the platform.
That's sad. Over a decade ago two counties in Washington started their power coop fiber rollouts: Grays Harbor county and Grant county. They offer 100mbps and Gigabit tiers, though admittedly at a higher rate than Google. Then again, they're in cow country and the runs are very long. The state has since banned new muni fiber rollouts to protect commercial interests, so unless the law changes there will be no more. But these two counties and one city were grandfathered in. The city (Tacoma) uses coax, so their bandwidth is less facile.
The fiber that Google is delivering to homes is single mode fiber. There is no need or benefit to stringing slower multimode fiber. It will support 10Gbps now - 40Gbps in some cases. Google will probably offer those tiers to businesses in the downtown corridor. No need to bring that to homes yet.
Google's $70 a month is "all fees included, no games or tricks." Their $130 play is "All channels, all digital, all HD. No games, no tricks." There is no fee to rent the router, the cable box, the DVR. No extra charge for extra packages, extra TV boxes, or even freaking remote controls. No extra fee for paying your bill or even receiving your bill.
Cable Internet providers may offer cheaper broadband. But when the bill comes... it's a different story.
BTW: My understanding is that the "free after installation fee" broadband is 5/5 mbps - and uncapped, so it can actually pass more data than other companies' capped 20mbps tiers. As far as I know, Google doesn't offer an asymmetric, capped or metered broadband service of any kind any where.
I wasn't saying they shouldn't do it, nor be banned from doing it, nor that it should be illegal. Only that this other way might be more effective. I fully support the warmist choice to be ineffective. More power to 'em. Just trying to be helpful here.
Burying the cross-country fiber bundles cost well over $20B. Far more was buried than is actually needed. And then the companies that buried the fiber thinking they were going to be routing millions of interstate phonecalls an hour over each strand at $1.00/minute found out that free long-distance phone would become the norm. They went bankrupt. The investors who paid for all that fiber, and to bury it, lost their shirts. This was the beginning of the ".bomb" era, and Google bought up a ton of that fiber at pennies on the dollar of what it cost to buy and bury.
So yeah, there are some hidden costs that have already been paid.
Maybe if the warmists tried persuasion, posting from their login account instead of calling everyone a scientifically illiterate jerkface dweeb as AC, they might be winning more people over to their point of view.
It's also a 2-year contract with a balance of payments of $3200 for TV+Internet, or $1600 for just Internet. Google isn't going to have any trouble keeping the lights on. They couldn't ramp the deployment that fast anyway: the human resources are just not available.
Goldman Sachs and people in here commenting that Google can't afford this are just nuts.
Sorry, my bad. Expecting Google to hang fiber to every home in America without increasing their capital expenditure seems a bit... odd. They are investing in future revenues, and to put a gigabit pipe directly to the end user that nobody can take away from them. A reasonable person would expect them to invest in that.
Yes. And since that will benefit some and harm others, the prospect of a global unified effort to prevent it - which is required - is pretty much not going to happen. Do you think Russia is really opposed to global warming? Look at a globe.
Google has $45 billion, not $4.5 billion, in cash and short-term investments. With only $6 billion in debt. As of their September financials. Their operating cash flow is about $1 billion a month. They are a really big company, and they have the means to make this work.
They actually do this. Pay $25 a month for the first year or $300 once, and you get fiber to the home and 5Mbps service for free for six years. Retain the option to step up to gigabit later.
In that top post I suggested that providing the fiber to the street is an infrastructure problem of the public utility, not Google. Really, it is. Some power utilities already run fiber to every home when they string the first wire - and have done so for over a decade.
But regardless I think Google's got the whole thing figured out financially or they would not be rolling out to Kansas City. They did have a pilot in Princeton after all, to determine what the costs would be.
Incumbent internet providers are still trying to sell us the notion that bandwidth is a precious resource that has to be metered and capped per user, or the greedy few will saturate their networks depriving the rest of us of our Netflix. Google's gigabit fiber is not filtered, metered or capped in any way.
This "precious bandwidth" story is either true or it's a lie. It's better for them if it's a lie.
If it's a lie: they can open up the pipes to the max and let everybody use what they will. This will help a little to fend off the Google invasion.
If it's true: they're hosed because Google will install more end-user bandwidth in Kansas City in the next six months than they have in their entire nationwide networks combined.
The rate they're charging for TV is $140 per month, or $1600 a year. If it costs $500 each, I think you can see where the first few pay for the next few and so on. Google knows about ramping scale. If they pay $1B to do 2,000,000 homes the first quarter, the second quarter those homes pay for the next 2,000,000 homes. The third quarter those 4,000,000 homes pay for the next 4,000,000. The second year those 8,000,000 homes become 64,000,000 homes without any further investment. Year three they wire the rest of the 112,000,000 homes in the US and they can start working on the rest of the world.
Simples. The numbers aren't quite exactly this, but this is how it works. Cable companies keep about 50% of the money you give them instead of improving their product. Google can wire homes cheaper than them, deliver better service, and put that money to work in growth - wrestling away their customers. When they run out of room for growth, they're positioned to start raking in even more insane stacks of cash.
The only problem is that every server on the Internet is going to need a huge upgrade, or it's going to be utterly crushed.
Property values are up. Jobs are up. KC is in the national spotlight in a good way. Every local official that got behind this is a local hero who just amplified his political opportunities. Those folks are assured reelection in perpetuity. They didn't have to be bribed to let Google hang fiber: they had to beg Google to come hang the fiber. They were changing the honorary name of the city to "Google". They were promising the name of every first-born son...
Seeing how this is working out, Google won't lack for cities to beg them to come hang fiber for quite some time.
Over 1,000 cities competed for the opportunity to be first. And over 1,000 cities were disappointed to lose the chance.
I guess it's time for all of us to tell our power utility that fiber is essential infrastructure. They need to standardize on the Google Method and wire our streets so that they're ready when Google comes here. Otherwise this is going to take too long.
First communities to make it a downhill run for Google win the digital economy.
Almost the whole world wants Google fiber.
And if they won't do it - maybe they'll show us how we can do it for ourselves.
The peak induced earthquake was M 3.4. A quake would have to be almost ten times this strong to even rattle the dishes, directly over the epicenter. And the fools put the geothermal field directly under a town sitting on an active fault that had been levelled in an earthquake previously.
This is not a good reason to be skittish about geothermal. If it were, it's time to shut down every nuclear reactor on Earth.
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Agreed.
I thought I would use your reply to post an interesting figure I calculated. Without a cap a 1Gbps pipe can pass 2.6 Petabytes per month. The pipe has a "natural cap" of 2,600,000 GB (NOT Gb) per month. Each way, both up and down. In the case of Google Fiber, this is per home. Google doesn't offer a "capped" option.
TWC (the KC incumbent Internet provider) offers broadband caps in the range from 5 GB to 100GB per month, with no unlimited option. This is a range of from 1/20,000th to 1/400,000th the total monthly net bandwidth capacity offered by Google, per connection. Yes, the most bandwidth they offer is 1/20,000th of Google's offer. Since they don't have 20,000 subscribers in Kansas City, let alone 20,000 paying their maximum rate, one single Google Fiber $70/month customer could saturate their entire Kansas City network.
I started out assuming the warmist side of this issue and stayed there many years, being big into natural sciences and earth sciences and such. It was just the general dickwad nature of the warmist argument: "sit down and shut up while scientists are speaking!" and the general fear of discussion that led me to investigate the matter for myself. Turns out I was wrong to be so trusting.
He's not saying they're doing away with Steam on PCs. Steam will still be available on Windows, Mac and - soon - Linux. If Steam stops working on Windows it won't be Valve's fault. And if it does stop working on Windows you'll be able to get most of your Steam games without buying them again - complete with all the in-game content - on a platform that is less hostile to successful Independent Software Vendors (ISVs). They'll maintain Windows Steam for as long as it is possible and financially feasible to do so but given the history of Lotus, Wordperfect, Borland, Aldus, Sun, Star, Netscape, Novell and many others, that won't be forever. Sooner or later Windows will be updated in a way that Steam won't run on it, and that won't be Valve's fault. They're hanging in there for you as best they can, but they don't write the platform.
By doing this he's maybe building an intimidating counter-threat to Microsoft: break Steam like you break the OS for other competing ISVs and we'll take our users elsewhere. By doing so he may be incentivizing Microsoft to not break Windows-based steam. By making a platform they DO own, Valve is making a commitment to continue to offer you a platform your Steam games will run on, in as much as their participating developers will support it. They can't make the developers support it, but this is the best they can do. Buy the Steam console, and your Steam games will be able to continue to be supported because they DO own the platform.
Sorry for the youtube link, but it's a video interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQCP85FngzE
That's sad. Over a decade ago two counties in Washington started their power coop fiber rollouts: Grays Harbor county and Grant county. They offer 100mbps and Gigabit tiers, though admittedly at a higher rate than Google. Then again, they're in cow country and the runs are very long. The state has since banned new muni fiber rollouts to protect commercial interests, so unless the law changes there will be no more. But these two counties and one city were grandfathered in. The city (Tacoma) uses coax, so their bandwidth is less facile.
The fiber that Google is delivering to homes is single mode fiber. There is no need or benefit to stringing slower multimode fiber. It will support 10Gbps now - 40Gbps in some cases. Google will probably offer those tiers to businesses in the downtown corridor. No need to bring that to homes yet.
Google's $70 a month is "all fees included, no games or tricks." Their $130 play is "All channels, all digital, all HD. No games, no tricks." There is no fee to rent the router, the cable box, the DVR. No extra charge for extra packages, extra TV boxes, or even freaking remote controls. No extra fee for paying your bill or even receiving your bill.
Cable Internet providers may offer cheaper broadband. But when the bill comes... it's a different story.
BTW: My understanding is that the "free after installation fee" broadband is 5/5 mbps - and uncapped, so it can actually pass more data than other companies' capped 20mbps tiers. As far as I know, Google doesn't offer an asymmetric, capped or metered broadband service of any kind any where.
There you go. This is how to win friends and influence people.
I wasn't saying they shouldn't do it, nor be banned from doing it, nor that it should be illegal. Only that this other way might be more effective. I fully support the warmist choice to be ineffective. More power to 'em. Just trying to be helpful here.
Burying the cross-country fiber bundles cost well over $20B. Far more was buried than is actually needed. And then the companies that buried the fiber thinking they were going to be routing millions of interstate phonecalls an hour over each strand at $1.00/minute found out that free long-distance phone would become the norm. They went bankrupt. The investors who paid for all that fiber, and to bury it, lost their shirts. This was the beginning of the ".bomb" era, and Google bought up a ton of that fiber at pennies on the dollar of what it cost to buy and bury.
So yeah, there are some hidden costs that have already been paid.
Maybe if the warmists tried persuasion, posting from their login account instead of calling everyone a scientifically illiterate jerkface dweeb as AC, they might be winning more people over to their point of view.
It's also a 2-year contract with a balance of payments of $3200 for TV+Internet, or $1600 for just Internet. Google isn't going to have any trouble keeping the lights on. They couldn't ramp the deployment that fast anyway: the human resources are just not available.
Goldman Sachs and people in here commenting that Google can't afford this are just nuts.
Sorry, my bad. Expecting Google to hang fiber to every home in America without increasing their capital expenditure seems a bit... odd. They are investing in future revenues, and to put a gigabit pipe directly to the end user that nobody can take away from them. A reasonable person would expect them to invest in that.
Yes. And since that will benefit some and harm others, the prospect of a global unified effort to prevent it - which is required - is pretty much not going to happen. Do you think Russia is really opposed to global warming? Look at a globe.
Very informative. Wish I could mod this up.
Google has $45 billion, not $4.5 billion, in cash and short-term investments. With only $6 billion in debt. As of their September financials. Their operating cash flow is about $1 billion a month. They are a really big company, and they have the means to make this work.
They actually do this. Pay $25 a month for the first year or $300 once, and you get fiber to the home and 5Mbps service for free for six years. Retain the option to step up to gigabit later.
Since it costs less than many of us are paying for cable Internet or cable and Internet, the additional cost problem isn't an issue.
At 1GBps you would hit Comcast's cap in under three minutes. But Google Fiber is uncapped, unmetered, un-fooled-around-with.
In that top post I suggested that providing the fiber to the street is an infrastructure problem of the public utility, not Google. Really, it is. Some power utilities already run fiber to every home when they string the first wire - and have done so for over a decade.
But regardless I think Google's got the whole thing figured out financially or they would not be rolling out to Kansas City. They did have a pilot in Princeton after all, to determine what the costs would be.
Incumbent internet providers are still trying to sell us the notion that bandwidth is a precious resource that has to be metered and capped per user, or the greedy few will saturate their networks depriving the rest of us of our Netflix. Google's gigabit fiber is not filtered, metered or capped in any way.
This "precious bandwidth" story is either true or it's a lie. It's better for them if it's a lie.
If it's a lie: they can open up the pipes to the max and let everybody use what they will. This will help a little to fend off the Google invasion.
If it's true: they're hosed because Google will install more end-user bandwidth in Kansas City in the next six months than they have in their entire nationwide networks combined.
The rate they're charging for TV is $140 per month, or $1600 a year. If it costs $500 each, I think you can see where the first few pay for the next few and so on. Google knows about ramping scale. If they pay $1B to do 2,000,000 homes the first quarter, the second quarter those homes pay for the next 2,000,000 homes. The third quarter those 4,000,000 homes pay for the next 4,000,000. The second year those 8,000,000 homes become 64,000,000 homes without any further investment. Year three they wire the rest of the 112,000,000 homes in the US and they can start working on the rest of the world.
Simples. The numbers aren't quite exactly this, but this is how it works. Cable companies keep about 50% of the money you give them instead of improving their product. Google can wire homes cheaper than them, deliver better service, and put that money to work in growth - wrestling away their customers. When they run out of room for growth, they're positioned to start raking in even more insane stacks of cash.
The only problem is that every server on the Internet is going to need a huge upgrade, or it's going to be utterly crushed.
Property values are up. Jobs are up. KC is in the national spotlight in a good way. Every local official that got behind this is a local hero who just amplified his political opportunities. Those folks are assured reelection in perpetuity. They didn't have to be bribed to let Google hang fiber: they had to beg Google to come hang the fiber. They were changing the honorary name of the city to "Google". They were promising the name of every first-born son...
Seeing how this is working out, Google won't lack for cities to beg them to come hang fiber for quite some time.
Over 1,000 cities competed for the opportunity to be first. And over 1,000 cities were disappointed to lose the chance.
I guess it's time for all of us to tell our power utility that fiber is essential infrastructure. They need to standardize on the Google Method and wire our streets so that they're ready when Google comes here. Otherwise this is going to take too long.
First communities to make it a downhill run for Google win the digital economy.
Almost the whole world wants Google fiber.
And if they won't do it - maybe they'll show us how we can do it for ourselves.
The peak induced earthquake was M 3.4. A quake would have to be almost ten times this strong to even rattle the dishes, directly over the epicenter. And the fools put the geothermal field directly under a town sitting on an active fault that had been levelled in an earthquake previously.
This is not a good reason to be skittish about geothermal. If it were, it's time to shut down every nuclear reactor on Earth.
I had seen this one though. Got anything else?
Many thanks!