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Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

nytimes.com

141–150 of 382 posts

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#141

I wrote about this elsewhere and am pasting my thoughts here as I think they're relevant to this community: 1) Google Fiber is dead. Long Live Google ISP. Google cannot afford to lay fiber in the ground because it's a long game and Google doesn't really want to play the long game (they just want to put pressure on competitors so they can move more bits along the wires, generating more searches and more streams with w…

May the solution be Project Loon?

That depends on how you feel about airspace rights.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#142
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A more reasonable comparison would be between Sweden and ... New Jersey Except that Sweden is 20 times larger than New Jersey in area. The continental US is 18 times larger than Sweden, so it is actually a better (if terrible) comparison geographically. Maybe in your argument you should compare Sweden with Michigan, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, or Minnesota instead of New Jersey, which each have at leas…

I'm not sure you can just look at just total population and total land area. The pattern of development in Europe is very different. I just got back from Munich. You go 15 minutes outside the city and it's farmland! In the U.S., it's low-density suburbs for hours in every direction outside a major city. Incidentally, I didn't get LTE service in the farmland between Munich and the airport. That would be quite unusual…

Look at Google maps around say Blacksburg VA or Charleston WV. Which are both is city, city, city, forest. Which is fairly common across much of the US. The eastern seabord being basically one big city is very much an exception not the rule. The US has ~1/3 it's population in ~1/20th of it's land.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#143

That sucks for citizens of the US. I think the Swedish (Nordic?) model for bringing internet connectivity to it's citizens is superior. The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded. For example, I have 250/1…

That model is useful for environments with high population density living with relatively compact terrestrial coverage. The costs will vary wildly when you apply this model to wire up Arizona, Nebraska, or even greater Los Angeles area.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#145
post #53

That sucks for citizens of the US. I think the Swedish (Nordic?) model for bringing internet connectivity to it's citizens is superior. The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded. For example, I have 250/1…

The question is whether the Nordic model is scalable. Here is the OECD data on broadband deployment: http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/1.2-OECD-WiredWirelessBB-2... . It breaks down DLS, cable, and fiber subscribers per 100 residents. Sweden: 11.4 DSL, 6.6 cable, 17.5 fiber. U.S. 8.2 DSL, 18.5 cable, 3.4 fiber. U.K. 30.6 DSL, 7.2 cable, 0.0 fiber. Germany: 28.9 DSL, 8.1 cable, 0.6 fiber. France: 33.3 DSL, 4.5 cable,…

Its not clear that the Nordic model is being used in any other European country, so I'm not sure that we can count low fiber rates in e.g. Italy, Germany of evidence of the model's lack of scalability.

Perhaps more significantly, (data from the same table), I'm interested to know what the deployment models look like in Japan and Korea.

Japan: 2.6 DSL, 5.3 cable, 21.8 fiber. South Korea: 2.8 DSL, 8.5 cable, 28.3 fiber.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#146

That sucks for citizens of the US. I think the Swedish (Nordic?) model for bringing internet connectivity to it's citizens is superior. The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded. For example, I have 250/1…

While this is true to a certain extent I wouldn't go as far as calling this the Swedish model.

There are plenty of companies that own and are continually rolling out new fiber in Sweden, especially when you start looking outside the large cities. I would guess that IP-Only (Bynet) and Telia alone are currently putting more fiber in the ground than the state run networks combined.

For rural areas a lot (most?) of the new fiber is built by local organisations and payed for by the members, EU-subsidies and partnerships with companies that take over the operations of the networks once they have been built.

That said, both IP-Only and Telias fiber networks are Open networks that allow the customers to choose from a number of different ISP for their internet connectivity.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zero fiber in the UK? That looks wrong. Although, a lot of "fiber" sold in the UK is not actually fiber all the way to the home.

Indeed, there's very little fibre in the UK. VDSL (DSL in that list) is being sold as fibre, and cable (cable in that list) is being sold as fibre, but cruicially, are not fibre. Very few even vaguely close to fibre-like services (e.g. Hyperoptic) in the UK

I have 330mbs fttp in the UK, and I live in the countryside.

2% have fttp cover now, relatively few take it though.

There are very few use cases right now, I had 12mbs vdsl before, and I hardly notice that there is a difference to be honest, although my wife is a photographer and the high speed upload is a god send for her.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#148
post #113
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded. well that would be socialism. Sorry comrade, here in the US we have this thing called FREEDOM. It Trumps your smart/efficient/reasonable solutions any day.

I do wonder what would happen, if networks for water, waste, electricity or even streets would have to be build on a large scale in the political climate of the US today.

Implying the political climate has ever been any different.

Something something past, rose-tinted glasses.

Political climate is a function of the people in charge. People in charge, due the nature of power and its effects, are always the same. Therefore the political climate is always the same.

You're just inadvertently filtering out.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#149
post #58

That sucks for citizens of the US. I think the Swedish (Nordic?) model for bringing internet connectivity to it's citizens is superior. The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded. For example, I have 250/1…

When you say "citizens of the US" you're talking about a continent that would take roughly five days to cross at highway speed, driving ten hours a day. You may as well say "citizens of Europe." If you haven't done that drive, by the way, you should. It will add some perspective to these comparisons. A more reasonable comparison would be between Sweden (population 9.5m) and the state I live in, New Jersey (population…

After giving it some thought, I can not figure out why the time to drive from Boston to Seattle is relevant to whatever argument is trying to be made here.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#150

That sucks for citizens of the US. I think the Swedish (Nordic?) model for bringing internet connectivity to it's citizens is superior. The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded. For example, I have 250/1…

We're trying. Our not-too-far-off alternative is to require whoever owns the physical cable within the city to sell services to other providers (usually for a regulated fee).

Basically what we did for long-distance phone service. The recent FCC ruling stopped short of doing just that, but it isn't a stretch of the imagination for the FCC to apply full teleco rules to cable providers in the US.

Of course, every ISP is going to lobby extremely hard against that. But one can only hope...

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