Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#221

Post by Spooky23 » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 5:54 PM UTC

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…

Good for you. You probably had a bunch of former AT&T employees on the local board negotiating with cable company twenty years ago. Unfortunately, you're the exception because cable companies are able to exploit gaps in the regulatory framework.

The scaling up of a system to the national level isn't the challenge -- it's the need to scale down to the municipal level that creates the monopoly problems.

The POTS network was regulated by FCC and State utility commissions, and were run very well. Cable is government by franchise agreements at the local level, which results in poor governance because local governments aren't equipped to negotiate these types of contracts.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#222

Post by neuromancer2701 » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 5:54 PM UTC

amazon_not wrote: post #151

oldmanjay wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These arguments are now decades old and unresolvable since everyone is trying to extract a meaningful comparison from a single dimension of a complicated metric. I'm pretty over them. Can we call a halt?

If you want to use a single metric, why not use people per mile of road? This correlates well with the only network metric that matters, linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service. 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 inhabitant in the country. Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The U…

Isn't people/mile still incorrect because you basically have islands of large dense cities with roads between them that nobody lives on.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#223

Post by chimeracoder » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 5:54 PM UTC

a_thro_away wrote: post #171

E6300 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Anything that is done at cost by the government is viewed by many as a lost potential profitable and taxable business; one that would drive up the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), a well used measure of an economy. Problem with using GDP, in my limited understanding, is that taxing things, even your breathing air, increases the GDP - I'd rather it not.

> Anything that is done at cost by the government is viewed by many as a lost potential profitable and taxable business; one that would drive up the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), a well used measure of an economy.

No, that's not how GDP works. The GDP measurement is independent of whether the action is performed by the private or public sector.

> Problem with using GDP, in my limited understanding, is that taxing things, even your breathing air, increases the GDP

No, that's not how GDP works either.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#224

Post by henrikschroder » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

ryen wrote: post #199

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…

>ensure that the networks are continually upgraded. How is that ensured? At least in the US, munis and federal govt are notoriously slow on upgrading tech. Often requiring legislative (slow) approval and tax increases to get it done.

The Stockholm municipal fiber company is wholly owned by the city, makes a profit, and reinvests every single krona into upgrades and expansion.

It took 20 years or so, but they started with the most lucrative routes in the inner city, serving companies and universities, and then slowly expanded their network over the years until they're now at a point where I think they've covered almost every home in the city.

No tax money used beyond the initial funding, since it's a profitable company, and no legislation required, since it's just a company. And the competition can't whine either, because this company isn't doing anything they couldn't do.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#225

Post by johndevor » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 5:56 PM UTC

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…

> For example, I have 250/100 mbit/s for free.

This isn't "free" - your taxes pay for it.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#226

Post by rayiner » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

amazon_not wrote: post #218

rayiner wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But neither the U.S. nor Sweden puts fiber on every road and street. Only 60% of Swedish households have fiber, and you can reach that figure without serving households outside of relatively dense towns. Also, it looks like you're counting Sweden's vast unpaved road network, which makes up about 75% of its roads. I bet very few of the 60% of households with fiber live on an unpaved road. If you compare paved roads on…

> But neither the U.S. nor Sweden puts fiber on every road and street. Firstly, Sweden pretty much intends to do so. The official goal is to bring at least 100 Mbps service to at least 90% of the population by 2020. Many municipalities/states have programs to build out fiber to everybody. Sweden also already has a cable running to almost every premise, so in practice every road and every street is already passed. In…

You could cover 90% of the population of Sweden while only covering a small fraction of the roads. You could probably cover 98.5% of the population without covering much of the road network.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#227

Post by adamt » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 6:00 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #53

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…

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,…

This misses the fact that much of that UK figure is FTTC (Fiber to the Cabinet). E.g. I live in the rural UK and have a 'Cable' line that is 200Mbps down/12Mbps up.

Given most consumers use wifi within the home, and at these speeds it becomes the gating factor, is there any advantage (excluding nerd edge-cases of the average HN reader!) of faster speeds than that?

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#228

Post by Spooky23 » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 6:05 PM UTC

badmadrad wrote: post #219

amazon_not wrote: post #160

Earlier 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 does "x" better argument is getting tired. Sweden has a lot of negative outcomes as well from socializing so much. Our problem isn't that fact that internet isn't socialized its that its monopolized by 3-4 companies. The incentive to innovate at rapid rate is not there but rather keep the status quo. That being said Google and Verizon are two fiber companies that are leading innovation and forcing other compan…

In the US, it's locally monopolized with a single provider.

Sometimes you can get DSL, but since Verizon employees get fired for fixing outages now, that will be gone soon.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#229

Post by rootusrootus » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 6:07 PM UTC

hash-set wrote: post #157

talmand wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by America you mean the citizens, yes we want to do it and have made it quite clear we've wanted it for quite a while. First problem is the cost of the infrastructure for such a huge space. We did offer to subsidize it to a point and the companies took the money without delivering. As usual, no repercussions. Second problem is very few politicians, in office or wishing to run, will listen to the citizens and prefe…

The US has a corruption problem.

While true, it's not the entire explanation. Apathy is far more of a factor here than corruption; average citizens don't care enough about their Internet access choices to lobby their politicians about it. The incumbent providers do a pretty good job of offering just enough service to keep average people satisfied at a price that is not quite high enough to make customers really angry.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#230

Post by weberc2 » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 6:12 PM UTC

jules wrote: post #205

weberc2 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> If anything it's the opposite: the larger the country the larger the economies of scale.

Democracies aren't businesses. Getting some kind of consensus from a huge, diverse populace is hard. I think you end up with diseconomies of scale.

> If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level

This requires the federal government to now maintain 50 distinct sets of policy, or delegate to regional bureaucrats. Both of these are diseconomies of scale.

These kinds of problems are hard to solve within a large enterprise with a hierarchical power structure; the United States is a much larger, more diverse entity with a distributed/consensus-driven power structure.