Just as expected. It was just to force the network carriers to speed up wasn't it?
If that was so, did it work?
Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
241–250 of 382 posts
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#242The title of this post is pretty deceptive — it clearly implies that the Fiber project altogether is being halted. My understanding from this article amongst others is that they are simply rethinking their approach to, rather than laying down fiber throughout all target cities, beam high speed internet from local way points to the roofs of high rises (like WebPass does in SF, which they acquired). It is pretty reason…
If you think this is deceptive try reading the original announcement.
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference is that Blacksburg and Charleston have 50,000 people, while Munich has 1.5 million people.
Las Vegas has 600,000 people and the same thing. While less extreme, Chicago has over 2.5 million people and farmland is very close by.
And there's farmland in Maryland 20 miles from the White House, despite the DC metro area having 6 million people. Although, in some directions the suburban sprawl does extend much further (30-35 miles in Virginia, and twice that if you draw a line through to the far side of Baltimore).
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Abusive Monopoly" is the definition of most cable providers. Its a long sad history of civic corruption and greed. The actual cable should be turned into a utility, and the content competed for channel by channel, service by service, in an open market.
Well every county has a local county cable commission (or something similar) who set the policies for the cable company operating in that particular county. I did a semester project at Comcast Montgomery County MD which is (or was at the time) a top 5 county for them. Every aspect of their business, from what the prices were to where call centers could be had to be approved by the local commission. You might say that…
Why are they a monopoly then? That was decided early on for most areas. The whole setup is designed to profit a few.
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> You could cover 90% of the population of Sweden while only covering a small fraction of the roads. Is this just a guess or do you have anything to back this up with? > You could probably cover 98.5% of the population without covering much of the road network. Here's a map of xDSL coverage: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20110... Let's see how you propose to cover that land area without also…
Look at the HSPA map on page 5. Look at how little of the country you need to cover to hit 99.6% of the population.
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#246Building infrastructure is hard. Even 100 years later we still have original AT&T (Verizon and AT&T) as the dominant telecommunications company. Google also seems to just give up on a lot of its products: Google+ Hangouts Project Ara Google Buzz Google video Orkut Talk Meebo etc. http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/visuel/2015/03/06/google-memori...
DISCLAIMER: I'm a contractor who works at Google. My musings are my own and in no way represent the thoughts of any other entity. I've dwelt on this quite a bit and have come to the conclusion that while Google is amazing at a lot of things it is not necessarily great for leveraging network effects - a domain handled much better by Facebook. Google's core product is search, an awesome web utility. The next product of…
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Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#247Earlier 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_…
Anecdotal evidence. I live in Stockholm. I talk at a conference about once/month, nearly always outside Sweden. Nearly every industrial conference has problems with wifi. Never in Sweden. Anywhere do we have problems at hotels, venues, massive conferences. We have the bandwidth. Most other countries do not, and leaving Sweden is always like going back in time, tbh. Everybody i know has fibre to the home, irrespective…
What you don't understand is that you are experiencing a kind of confirmation bias. Although you are partially correct and Sweden does have a great network, there is significant weight behind the argument that the small scale networking of a few population dense centers in Sweden is nothing on the scale of something like rolling out a comparable network in the USA. It's such a different level of scale that totally different forces are at play and factors that are not even measurable or noticeable on the Swedish scale are amplified to the point where they have fundamental impacts.
I do agree though that in America, the main problem is public policy on the Federal level that essentially prohibits competition or even just consequences. We will see in a couple of days how the election goes, which will also determine whether the centralization of power and corruption at the Federal level expands though Hillary Clinton, or if market forces with compulsion to become the best and improve everything will drive Donald Trump to enact market competition and bust the de facto monopoly on internet the cable companies have a death grip on.
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Do you have any proof Comcast being the monopoly is "better" than your municipality (who doesn't have to show a profit)? Or is this just how you feel?
GP said "regardless of whether the natural monopoly is municipal or Comcast", i.e. both are bad options. Not sure why you are asking the GP to defend a claim that wasn't made.
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's much worse than that, NYC is 789 km^2 of land, the metropolitan area is 8,936:
https://censusreporter.org/profiles/31000US35620-new-york-ne...
Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
#250Earlier 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.
My understanding is that view only applies when the federal government is doing it. If a local government is doing it, the only ones that claim this are the people who would be losing business.
Laws restricting or prohibiting local governments from providing internet access to inhabitants are pretty common. I'm sure the actual underlying reason involves regulatory capture and lobbying from incumbents, but the unfair competition angle is convincing enough for the legislators in question to go ahead with it and not get ejected from office.