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Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

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Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#161

Post by kyledrake »

josh_carterPDX wrote: post #121

They backed out of Portland after spending a ton of money and time with city officials. Sad to hear this is not happening and hope Google finds a way to get back into this because the options today are a joke. This will just embolden companies like Comcast to charge more for horrible service.

Portland spent a lot of time and resources (during a serious housing crisis), bent over backwards to give them everything they wanted... and they decide to just punk out, lay off their operations team and walk away from years of planning because they can "do fast wireless for some apartment buildings". Thanks, guys.

There's a tiny ISP (US Internet) in Minneapolis that's already wired half of the city with fiber with some loans as capital, they're not a public company and they don't have billions in CoH and they still figured it out. They've already started offering 10Gbps to home users. Yes, ten gigabits, that's not a typo. And they're profitable.

Laying fiber is impossible for a megacorp with billions of CoH and access to the overflowing "talent" of Silicon Valley like Google perhaps, but not for a small business like US Internet. Let's hope Portland gets a US Internet of it's own. We're all better off if the future of the web is built by smaller decentralized companies anyways.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#162

Post by hash-set »

technofiend wrote: post #101
staticelf wrote: post #12

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've tried, man. Billions of dollars were given to Verizon, AT & T, etc to build out infrastructure. They took the money and did little or nothing. We have "regulatory capture" which is where an incumbent lobbies and gets state or federal regulations that blocks competition. A widely cited figure states that the average broadband customer costs Comcast less than $2/month for broadband internet. Yet they charge more…

We have worse than that now--we have an FBI and DOJ that have become political enforcement only.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#163

Post by Xixi »

njs12345 wrote: post #128
Ambroos wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only FTTH (fiber-to-the-home) should count as fiber. In Belgium one of the larger cable providers used to advertise their plans as 'FiberNet' while it was only FTTN (fiber-to-the-neighbourhood) and the last step was cable (with significantly lower uplink speeds than what would be attainable with fiber).

We have a lot of fibre-to-the-cabinet in the UK, which means you may only have copper for a few hundred metres. It's obviously nowhere near as good as fibre to the home, but I think lumping it in with plain old DSL is a bit unfair - a lot of people get 60+mbps down and 18+mbps up which isn't too shabby internationally.

I used to have optical fiber in a brand new building in Osaka: the fiber was actually only going to the building, then it was RJ45 (or something very similar, I'll admit never trying to play with it).

It was much faster, and far more reliable than fios by Verizon that I have now in NYC...

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#164

Post by wrsh07 »

gm-conspiracy wrote: post #23

Anybody know what is going on here? This seems like a page out of Verizon's FIOS rollout. Is Google working on their own cellular network (non-MVNO)? Is this due to the FCC reclassification of internet as a common carrier?

I wonder if they're moving towards something more scalable, like Webpass [http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/22/12009600/google-fiber-webp...].

There's tons of red tape laying actual fiber, and that probably makes it harder to provide high quality internet to as many customers as they'd like to.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#165

Post by dredmorbius »

E6300 wrote: post #91
mikeash wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that in the US, this sort of thing is seen as government unfairly competing with private industry. Of course, we just get private industry setting up monopolies or duopolies instead, often with the help of local laws prohibiting competition. This is worse, but somehow more acceptable to the American electorate.

I didn't know that! What a stupid position to have. Do they also think that the abundance of air competes unfairly with air salesmen?

See coal vs. solar in TX, FL, AZ, NV.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#166

Post by nickpsecurity »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #47
c0nducktr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not skip the middle step and just have the municipalities provide it to the customers directly?

> Why not skip the middle step and just have the municipalities provide it to the customers directly? Because monopolies are wasteful and horrible at things like customer service. The fiber in the ground is a natural monopoly. Connecting that fiber to the rest of the world isn't. You don't want the monopoly to extend one inch more than it has to, regardless of whether the natural monopoly is municipal or Comcast.

As jonathankoren says, the municipal ones rolling out Internet are pretty much all offering better speeds, cost, and service. Further, that Comcast and AT&T are paying legislators millions of dollars to make this illegal shows they would rather intentionally sabotage their customers for profit than benefit them with competition's effects. If private sector was better, they'd welcome the competition with these tiny towns and cities then crush them in the marketplace with superior offerings.

They don't have superior offerings, though. Not at the margins they want. ;)

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#167

Post by [deleted] »

markbnj wrote: post #58
staticelf wrote: post #12

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…

[deleted]

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#168

Post by rbryan71 »

xigency wrote: post #83
markbnj wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ratio+of+land+area+of+...

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#169

Post by nickpsecurity »

walshemj wrote: post #50
staticelf wrote: post #12

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…

Where does the capital come from to do this and how do you serve remote areas outside of towns.

You do it like this:

https://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-bu...

;)

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#170

Post by weberc2 »

amazon_not wrote: post #160
rayiner wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sweden is not very dense, large parts are uninhabited forests. If they're actually uninhabited, then there is no need to build fiber out there, and you shouldn't count them in the density measure. What you're really interested in is the population-weighted density ( i.e. the density of the places where people live). Compare the list of U.S. urban areas to that of Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_…

What you really are interested in is linear density. The only metric that matters when building a network is linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service. There is a single metric you can use to approximate this for any country: people per mile of road. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every…

> Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.

While this is probably true in an absolute sense, Sweden is also a much smaller, more homogeneous country than the U.S.; I don't think governments scale very well, so a small affluent country can likely be more nimble and innovative than a large affluent country (think startups vs enterprises).

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