They should have known it's a long term investment and ROI happens only when certain scale is reached. Why change their mind now?
Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
201–210 of 382 posts
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Imagine if in 2009, instead of ephemeral "shovel ready" projects, we invested in building fiber to every home.
Heck, we didn't even invest in "shovel ready" projects. 90% of what we were told was "infrastructure" spending went to shore up state entitlement budgets.
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet the country put people on the Moon, built that highway system that spans edge to edge, has telephone services across it, places cables across oceans, built oil pipelines running crazy lengths, among numerous other ridiculously complex engineering projects. But "bury big tubes with fiber optic cables in them" is somehow too complicated of an engineering task? The reality is we could get it done, there's just no po…
The engineering is not complicated, but it involves fights for right of way and obstructionist land owners and municipalities who will fight against it. This is what's happening in Mountain View, home of Google. We don't have Google Fiber because of local obstructionism.
Agreed. I was being facetious by suggesting the engineering was complicated.
And by "entrenched players", I meant anyone that has a horse in the race, not just ISPs.
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#204Earlier 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_…
> No urban area in the U.S. is as dense as Stockholm's (3,500). NYC is at the low end of that range (2,000), and is less dense than a bunch of Swedish cities with just ~50-100k people. Wat. NYC is over 10k/km^2. Manhattan is over 25k/km^2.
The "NYC" urban area encompasses NYC + Westchester + Long Island + Newark + parts of CT. Half of the population that lives/works in/around New York lives outside of the city proper.
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
I've seen this said many times, but I've never understood why people think this argument makes sense. If anything it's the opposite: the larger the country the larger the economies of scale. If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level. Being a larger country simply gives you the option to organise it at a larger scale.
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#206Earlier 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_…
Jesus Christ, Stockholm is more densely populated than NYC? No wonder getting an apartment around here is so absurdly difficult.
They're comparing to NYC, not Manhattan. NYC includes 5 boroughs (and some of them are _large_), and while Manhattan and inner parts of Brooklyn, Bronx, and Queens are dense, most of Staten Island and outer parts of Bronx and Queens are relatively sparse.
You can use the same trick to come to the surprising conclusion that LA is denser than NYC. Population-weighed density is definitely a better way to measure density if you want numbers that reflect intuition about how dense a place "feels" rather than merely reflecting what arbitrary political boundaries were chosen
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have had Comcast for 7 years, dealt with their customer service <5 times.
Their customer service has been appalling every time I've dealt with them. I moved recently and was forced to sign up with them as the only competitor option was 7mbps. After provisioning my service online successfully, I received a call from them stating that I would not be able to receive the the service I had requested at the price they quoted. I could either cut the speed in half, or increase my bill by $70/month…
I wonder how much this stems from improper mapping systems. They are always changing and potentially the price quoted was due to an incorrect map position given?
This is a big reason why I don't trust quotes until I get some sort of confirmed pricing from the seller.
Shouldn't have to, of course, but we kind of demand instant gratification and I feel this has led to poor service in many.
I've often thought well Century Link handles cost predicting well but maybe that is more due to the quality of the service and the fact they are over-charging for a lower quality service so it's easier to guarantee those prices. That doesn't reflect in the price comparison but it does show when you have the service and your comparing to your neighbor whom has the other.
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#208I think it's hilarious how many people think it's consistent to simultaneously hold the opinion that this is a tragedy and that Google Fiber was the ISP that they wish they could have, while also supporting federally-imposed "net neutrality" and the implicit claim behind it, which is that all ISPs are just dumb pipes that are moving bits, and that consumers are agnostic about who does it. All the sheep on Reddit who…
What is the contradiction here? > "net neutrality" and the implicit claim behind it, which is that all ISPs are just dumb pipes that are moving bits, and that consumers are agnostic about who does it This is consistent with wanting a dumb ISP that moves more bits for less money and with fewer outages. Nobody wants Goog Fibre because it comes with #"google prime video library" or whatever tie-in. They want it because…
That's a fair point, maybe some people don't care about the added services... but Google Fiber comes with a lot of added extras:
* 1TB of Google drive
* A Google-made 802.11AC WAP that doesn't suck.
* Cable box has built-in chromecast and is built on top of SageTV.
* Bill management through a Google website.
Maybe I'm just a pessimist but I don't believe that Google put ~$100MM into Fiber simply because they wanted to be a dumb pipe and put pressure on other telecoms to compete. How do you rationalize that to shareholders?
Maybe they have some people in the public convinced that they entered this market out of the goodness of their heart. But it's pretty clear to me from Fiber and from Project Fi and OnHub and NEST that they believed that they could succeed as an ISP because of the frameworks they would put around their internet services, not simply by outperforming in performance.
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#209This news comes out one week after Comcast informed me they'd be enabling an arbitrary 1 TB data cap. I have to get out of Florida, I guess.
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Switzerland uses a similar model, where any provider can sell services on the FTTH network that many communities are building out.
See e.g. https://www.fiber7.ch/ for a very attractive provider :).