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Chicago and Los Angeles Are Next Up for Google Fiber

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Re: Chicago and Los Angeles Are Next Up for Google Fiber

#121

Post by davidf18 »

Congrats to the residents of Chicago and LA for having the local government leadership to work with Google.

I wish I could say the same for NYC where I live.

Despite the fact that Google owns one of the largest office buildings in the city where many engineers and other staff work, there is no Google fiber here.

Sadly, the mayor seems more focused attempting to slow the growth of Uber until the residents vociferously protested.

Now he is trying to ban the popular horse drawn carriages in Central Park -- or ban most of them. Sigh....

Re: Chicago and Los Angeles Are Next Up for Google Fiber

#122

Post by carussell »

Qiasfah wrote: post #27
drcode wrote: post #20

In the current fiber cities, does anyone know if the service made it out of the city limits into the burbs? (Asking as someone right outside the Chicago city limits...)

In Austin, no, the map follows closely to the city limits. They provide maps of the rollout too: https://fiber.google.com/cities/austin/fiberhoods/

To be fair, the city limits in Austin are pretty huge, already encompassing lots of what would qualify as the suburbs. Take, for example, the West Gate/South Manchaca/Stassney/William Cannon area (marked as Emerald Forest above), where there's already heavy build out going on.

Re: Chicago and Los Angeles Are Next Up for Google Fiber

#123

Post by ugh123 »

davidf18 wrote: post #121

Congrats to the residents of Chicago and LA for having the local government leadership to work with Google. I wish I could say the same for NYC where I live. Despite the fact that Google owns one of the largest office buildings in the city where many engineers and other staff work, there is no Google fiber here. Sadly, the mayor seems more focused attempting to slow the growth of Uber until the residents vociferously…

> popular horse drawn carriages

Popular with whom? The minimal revenue it brings from primarily tourists? Most of the backlash has come from NYC residents who deplore the conditions for the horses. The welfare of the horses should take precedence over the minimal revenue they bring.

Re: Chicago and Los Angeles Are Next Up for Google Fiber

#124

Post by samstave »

mikeyouse wrote: post #48
scott_karana wrote: post #41

> Yes, San Francisco has been skipped again and I’m going to go cry into my slow internet from Comcast. I seriously still cannot get over how funny this is. SF pitches itself as the centre of the tech universe, and yet, it still hasn't "disrupted" its own crappy broadband infrastructure. (Much less the rest of the country's!) I'm sure there's many good reasons for Google passing them over, but that doesn't keep it fr…

Chris Sacca (of Twitter / Uber investing fame) spent months / years of his life working for Google trying to get San Francisco to agree to install free, city-wide WiFi paid for by Google. It didn't happen. http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/S-F-stalling-Wi-Fi-plans-...

Heh - I was doing this before Chris Sacca was!

Listen to what happened:

We were seeking to build wifi and wanted to get the city to allow us to put the nema boxes on street lights and stop lights.

I cant recall the officials name now (this was ~2002 or so) -- and they came back and stated they wanted video cameras on all stop lights. They then said that they wanted "at least 60 frames per second" and that they wouldn't allow us to put up the devices as they were already looking to pull fiber to every stoplight to support cameras.

Re: Chicago and Los Angeles Are Next Up for Google Fiber

#126

Post by Spooky23 »

mmanfrin wrote: post #34

Does anyone know what it takes to start up municipal fiber? There is a dark fiber line about 4 blocks from my house (in Berkeley), I feel that if I got enough neighbors to sign on to helping fund the initial costs of piping a connection to that, we could all get much better internet service -- but I don't know where one would start with that.

The biggest issue is who owns the delivery infrastructure. Pole real estate ain't free.

Cities are usually pretty pumped about this, as they can benefit significantly by getting more business and save money on network connectivity.

Google wants free access to poles and low/no cost leases on city property to install infrastructure.

Re: Chicago and Los Angeles Are Next Up for Google Fiber

#128

Post by samstave »

scott_karana wrote: post #41

> Yes, San Francisco has been skipped again and I’m going to go cry into my slow internet from Comcast. I seriously still cannot get over how funny this is. SF pitches itself as the centre of the tech universe, and yet, it still hasn't "disrupted" its own crappy broadband infrastructure. (Much less the rest of the country's!) I'm sure there's many good reasons for Google passing them over, but that doesn't keep it fr…

I recall in the 90s, many large areas in San Jose didnt get DSL for a REALLY long time. I have always been floored by this. I tried to meet with the mayor of Alameda last year to see if we could do a community municipal network. Their answer "Oh we used to have one - but we gave the rights to Comcast, so we wont allow another municipal network."

Re: Chicago and Los Angeles Are Next Up for Google Fiber

#129

Post by steve-howard »

arjunnarayan wrote: post #102
WalterBright wrote: post #86

Sadly, Seattle bureaucracy has ruined google fiber here: http://crosscut.com/2014/12/google-fiber-never-come-seattle-...

I'm in Seattle, and I have gigabit (www.gowaveg.com) in my apartment. It's $80/month, and I get ~15ms latency to AWS West (Oregon). It's wonderful. Wave G has an interesting model - they mainly hook up apartment buildings (it used to be called "Condo Internet"). They are experimenting with hooking up houses on the street as well - they're doing fiber to the home in the Eastlake area, but I don't know if that's workin…

One of the biggest losses moving out of my old First Hill apartment was that they had CondoInternet and where I was going they didn't. I don't even care about the throughput, it was just incredibly reliable.
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