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Advancing our amazing bet

googlefiberblog.blogspot.com

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Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#191

Post by twoodfin »

hydrogen18 wrote: post #179
ethanbond wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What reason did google have to believe Comcast was going to "cut off" access to users?

Comcast and the other ISPs are ever going to "cut off" access to anything. What they have done and will continue to do is to make it extraordinarily difficult to use other companies services that replace their own. For example, many ISPs today are now putting in bandwidth caps. They claim that they only affect the top 1% of users. This may be true today, but once 4k 60FPS content becomes the norm. those bandwidth cap…

Of course, they won't actually affect everyone. But Comcast can use the threat of enforcing them as a bargaining chip with Netflix, Amazon, HBO/Time Warner/AT&T...

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#192

Post by smitherfield »

nixos wrote: post #74

Again Google is shooting themselves in the foot. Google Fiber, like Android, is a moonshot to keep their line of business alive. Failure doesn't mean that Google doesn't profit off a new line of business. Failure means that Google can be shut down. Google lives off open internet. Their profit is primarily off: 1. Android 2. Search 3. AdSense, AdWords. A closed internet means that 2 out of 3 is dead. All they have in…

>If AT&T and Cable monopolize the internet (which they are close to doing) without strong net-neutrality laws, they can (and will) slowly migrate to the internet being limited to the top 100 sites (curated by them).

>In such an internet, search and AdWords/AdSense is useless.

That doesn't make any sense. Hits to 25 KB Wordpress blogs are trivial for ISPs to serve, nor is there usually any practical or economical way to bill the owners for serving them. It would cost many orders of magnitude more to create a blacklist and/or to track down and attempt to collect payment from the owners than just to continue serving them as before. It's the 25 GB 4K 6-hour Netflix binge-watching sessions they'd want to be subject to throttling/charges.

Whether that's a good thing for the consumer is debatable — it probably isn't — but there's no reason for fearmongering. Many countries, including the US for most of the past several decades, have no or have not had "strong net-neutrality laws" without "migrat[ing] to the internet being limited to the top 100 sites (curated by [ISPs])."

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#193

Post by exelius »

Pigo wrote: post #187
exelius wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure Comcast and Time Warner and friends are all breathing a sigh of relief. They were never worried in the first place. Their network architects are not idiots or anything; they know the economics of what Google was trying to do and they knew it wouldn't turn into anything threatening unless Google was willing to sink over $20 billion into it. Their attitude has been "worst case, we buy the infrastructure from…

Since Google Fiber started we got a fiber network in my area from Cincinnati Bell that allowed me to kick Time Warner in the nuts. It was more satisfying than the ending to Breaking Bad. I've saved money and gotten all the speed it promised. I don't know how much Google's example was involved in bringing this to us, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

I'm sure it had some impact in generating market demand for higher speeds; because the reason nobody offered gigabit to the home was that customers value 100 mbps Internet at something like $60/mo and only value gigabit Internet at $75/mo. But it costs the ISPs a lot more to provide gigabit, so the numbers just don't work out. If Google helped to push the "willingness to pay" for gigabit Internet access up a bit, the ISPs are likely grateful for the help.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#194

Post by efa »

exelius wrote: post #183
thaumaturgy wrote: post #5

This announcement needs a little bit of translation from the marketing language it's written in: > And thanks to the hard work of everyone on the Access team, our business is solid: our subscriber base and revenue are growing quickly, and we expect that growth to continue. "We're not yet profitable." > We have refined our plan going forward to achieve these objectives. It entails us making changes to focus our busine…

> I'm sure Comcast and Time Warner and friends are all breathing a sigh of relief. They were never worried in the first place. Their network architects are not idiots or anything; they know the economics of what Google was trying to do and they knew it wouldn't turn into anything threatening unless Google was willing to sink over $20 billion into it. Their attitude has been "worst case, we buy the infrastructure from…

> Their network architects are not idiots or anything

Google architects aren't idiots either are they? What did Google hope to achieve? Or did they really go into this naively thinking it could be done? Serious question - I haven't followed this very closely.

Was this all a test bed to see what type of apps could be built with ubiquitous high speed access?

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#195

Post by gm-conspiracy »

rayiner wrote: post #166
Inconel wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading your response as well as others' really illustrates to me how depressingly difficult this task is. I honestly have to give Google a lot of credit for Fiber, even if it ends up being a failure, in fact I now have a bit more respect even for the big telcos, its pretty amazing that such a convoluted system functions at all. I tend to be somewhat skeptical of large government programs, although not fanatically so…

In most places, it's the power company that owns the poles because it's the power company that builds and maintains them. In a few places, the phone company does it. In theory, though, they are supposed to offer non-discriminatory access to the poles. Re: preferential treatment, Google definitely didn't get away scott free. Building an ISP in any municipality means agreeing to a grab bag of concessions. Build out req…

Did Google Fiber use a municipal cable franchise agreement?

Also, doesn't the FCC have the power in certain states to regulate pole attachment rates?

So, where I live, on one side of the street, the electric company owns the poles, on the other side of the street, the phone company owns the poles. The franchise agreement does not have anything about payments to support public access TV, nor anything PEG related.

In a neighboring municipality, the municipality owns the the electric company and thus the poles.

I believe some of the original AT&T telegraph poles were placed by the Union army after the Civil War?

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#196

Post by gm-conspiracy »

petra wrote: post #59
nkw wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only speaking with knowledge of their first market (Kansas City), I would guess it is a combination of three things: * Buildout costs Google was using the same contracts as everyone else for the fiber infrastructure install. The guys running the trenchers and directional drills where the same guys that do it for AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, whomever. Google built at such a pace they certainly were not getting any deal…

It seems that a lot big players are betting fixed wireless for the urban market(instead of the smaller rural market) . It's probably the main purpose of 5G. And there's some nice technical innovation(cohere promises to solve fading, tarana talks about working in urban non-line-of-sight) . And even LTE-A offers nice capacities in that context. So why are you betting against it ?

By its very nature, it is inherently more unreliable than a "wired" connection.

Additionally, as usage of a particular endpoint increases, capacity for each individual user decreases proportionally.

There was an article some days ago about how we used to get these amazing LTE speeds, but now they are horribly congested and feel like low-grade DSL.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#198

Post by mark-r »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #189
orangecat wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shit's not even selling on the inside. Googlers are quite good at translating executive messages. I wish I could see the internal memes for this.

I'm almost sure that by now, a Googler is inspired to train an AI to translate PR messages to what they really are.

I think this is an area where humans will have an advantage for some time to come. Would be a fun experiment though.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#199

Post by Pigo »

exelius wrote: post #193
Pigo wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since Google Fiber started we got a fiber network in my area from Cincinnati Bell that allowed me to kick Time Warner in the nuts. It was more satisfying than the ending to Breaking Bad. I've saved money and gotten all the speed it promised. I don't know how much Google's example was involved in bringing this to us, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did.

I'm sure it had some impact in generating market demand for higher speeds; because the reason nobody offered gigabit to the home was that customers value 100 mbps Internet at something like $60/mo and only value gigabit Internet at $75/mo. But it costs the ISPs a lot more to provide gigabit, so the numbers just don't work out. If Google helped to push the "willingness to pay" for gigabit Internet access up a bit, the…

I guess I see what you're paying. So right now you can get a 50 mbps plan for $50 through CinBell Fioptics or $65 through Time Warner. I've only ever paid up to the 100 mbps plan for Fioptics though, and then went down one grade because the speed was far more than I needed. I've had every time warner plan, and was ecstatic when Netflix wouldn't buffer constantly. Maybe it's just the far less traffic on the fiber making it superior, but everything about my Fioptics experience has been pleasant. They don't charge extra for a modem or router, and the reps have always been easy to deal with.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#200

Post by alcari »

toast0 wrote: post #87
magila wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While Comcast does offer higher speeds, it's prohibitively expensive. In a typical market where Comcast has an effective monopoly the 2Gb service is $300/month and even just 250Mb is $150. Their upload speeds are also pathetic, the 250Mb service is only 30Mb up.

Yes, the 2G service is expensive (it's also delivered over 10G fiber, rate limited on the required router), but their 1G service is more reasonable (i saw $140 on http://www.xfinity.com/gig-offer ), not sure what the upload is, and availability is meager, of course.

Those are symmetric(!); the real killer is the contract duration, the installation/activation fees (up to $1000 total), and the installation time frame (up to 8 weeks).
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