Advancing our amazing bet • Hacker News Board

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#201

Post by Ajedi32 » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 3:36 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #5

This announcement needs a little bit of translation from the marketing language it's written in: > And thanks to the hard work of everyone on the Access team, our business is solid: our subscriber base and revenue are growing quickly, and we expect that growth to continue. "We're not yet profitable." > We have refined our plan going forward to achieve these objectives. It entails us making changes to focus our busine…

At least "Importantly, the plan enhances our focus on new technology and deployment methods to make superfast Internet more abundant than it is today." sounds promising. Maybe Google "Fiber" is going to be replaced by some new technology which achieves similar results but is easier to deploy.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#202

Post by ensignavenger » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

mozumder wrote: post #154

Inconel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very interesting that you say the biggest hurdle was regulatory capture, that is certainly depressing. This leads me to another question that maybe you or someone else can answer, although I understand if you can't for various reasons. There seems to be a ton of very smart people working at Google and I can't imagine that they would go about trying to set up their own ISP without taking into account the huge pus…

> It's very interesting that you say the biggest hurdle was regulatory capture, that is certainly depressing. Why is that depressing? Do you feel any company should be allowed to build a phone line above your street, instead of being a regulated monopoly? This is what happens when you do that: http://io9.gizmodo.com/photos-from-the-days-when-thousands-o...

A lot of those pictures seem to be due to limitations in the technology they were using, not limitations of regulation... however, to address your question- if society decided to grant someone a monopoly, it should be to the government, not a private entity. So, for example, if society decided we only wanted one set of fiber cables ran throughout the city, they would decide that the city would run them, and then lease access (using VLANS or similar tech) to any service provider that wants to use them.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#203

Post by titzer » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 4:01 PM UTC

15charlimit wrote: post #174

titzer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, returning home to the USA a couple times a year, I am really struck by how many freaking power and phone lines are everywhere. It seems like every single street, except for the very core of cities downtown, and only the very wealthiest neighbors, have buried lines. In Germany, almost every town and every highway is free of these (IMO) ugly poles with lines everywhere. It's really an eyesore when you finally…

Germany is also a significantly smaller area with more of the population in high density zones compared to most of the USA. Aboveground cables are easier to repair and much less expensive to string up over thousands of miles.

I hear this argument a lot and it doesn't really hold water. Essentially every little town, village, city, even along highways, everywhere in Germany, the cables are buried. Even in low density towns. Even to farms out in the country. Pretty much the only things that aren't buried are high-tension lines.

Lines exposed to the elements wear faster than buried lines and are subject to more outages due to weather and accidents.

It's just that in the USA towns and cities are either too disorganized or too cheap to invest properly in infrastructure. Burying lines seems like such a small thing until you realize how ugly lines strung everywhere are. It makes me feel like I am coming home to a third world country sometimes.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#204

Post by stephenmm » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 4:24 PM UTC

I live in Austin and they literally just yesterday marked up my yard where the fiber is supposed to go. Does anyone know if they will finish the job or am I left out to dry here?

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#205

Post by yuhong » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 5:38 PM UTC

paulsutter wrote: post #80

thaumaturgy wrote: post #5

This announcement needs a little bit of translation from the marketing language it's written in: > And thanks to the hard work of everyone on the Access team, our business is solid: our subscriber base and revenue are growing quickly, and we expect that growth to continue. "We're not yet profitable." > We have refined our plan going forward to achieve these objectives. It entails us making changes to focus our busine…

This is why I read the comments first, just avoided another painful article. Do people who communicate in spin-speak start to think that way on the inside too?

I remember when Ellen Pao was accused of this when she was CEO of Reddit. I think she also made mistakes like posting private links.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#206

Post by jtbigwoo » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 5:41 PM UTC

15charlimit wrote: post #174

titzer wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, returning home to the USA a couple times a year, I am really struck by how many freaking power and phone lines are everywhere. It seems like every single street, except for the very core of cities downtown, and only the very wealthiest neighbors, have buried lines. In Germany, almost every town and every highway is free of these (IMO) ugly poles with lines everywhere. It's really an eyesore when you finally…

Germany is also a significantly smaller area with more of the population in high density zones compared to most of the USA. Aboveground cables are easier to repair and much less expensive to string up over thousands of miles.

My mother-in-law has a cabin in northern Minnesota. It's three miles outside a town of 150 people. Her utility lines are buried. Meanwhile, I live four miles from the center of a metro area of three million and everything in my neighborhood is above ground.

I suspect the major difference is that the power and phone companies in the little town are customer-owned coops while the utilities in my metro area are huge conglomerates.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#207

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

efa wrote: post #194

exelius wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sure Comcast and Time Warner and friends are all breathing a sigh of relief. They were never worried in the first place. Their network architects are not idiots or anything; they know the economics of what Google was trying to do and they knew it wouldn't turn into anything threatening unless Google was willing to sink over $20 billion into it. Their attitude has been "worst case, we buy the infrastructure from…

> Their network architects are not idiots or anything Google architects aren't idiots either are they? What did Google hope to achieve? Or did they really go into this naively thinking it could be done? Serious question - I haven't followed this very closely. Was this all a test bed to see what type of apps could be built with ubiquitous high speed access?

I don't think they were idiots; but Google's whole operating model is built around taking Very Smart People and throwing them at Hard Problems. Sometimes, a problem may seem to be ripe for disruption because it is held back by what seems like a lot of legacy overhead. The assumption is that you can come in with a different approach, and change the operating model to the point you end up with a structural cost advantage over your competitors.

And sometimes that doesn't happen. What may have looked like a stodgy and ripe-for-disruption industry may actually be one with huge logistical challenges that force the industry to be stodgy and slow -- not the other way around. Still, it was a good bet for Google as part of a portfolio strategy: if you make 10 of these types of bets and only 2 of them pan out, you're still doing pretty well. It's not always obvious which industries are ripe for disruption and which ones are held back by market forces and product constraints.

I think they saw it as "Maybe we can find a new model that can disrupt the market, maybe not, but at the bare minimum we can force the ISPs to do better which benefits every other service we provide." They never provided Google Fiber with the kind of investment it would have taken to be successful on a large scale -- Verizon spends more money on its network in 3 days than Google Fiber spent in its entire existence -- so I don't think they seriously thought it would end up as a success. It's also a big CapEx investment in infrastructure, which has a pretty good salvage value if sold to other telecoms (so they'll likely get a good portion of their investment in GF back).

At the end of the day if they end up losing $20-30 million on the whole Fiber deal, they'd call it a success for raising the mindshare of what consumer Internet can and should be. It also won Google a lot of points in the court of public opinion against the major ISPs, so as a marketing / PR exercise it was likely a positive contribution to Google.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#208

Post by toast0 » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 6:13 PM UTC

alcari wrote: post #200

toast0 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the 2G service is expensive (it's also delivered over 10G fiber, rate limited on the required router), but their 1G service is more reasonable (i saw $140 on http://www.xfinity.com/gig-offer ), not sure what the upload is, and availability is meager, of course.

Those are symmetric(!); the real killer is the contract duration, the installation/activation fees (up to $1000 total), and the installation time frame (up to 8 weeks).

The 2G is symmetric, but I'm not sure about the 1G

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#209

Post by efa » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 7:05 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #207

efa wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Their network architects are not idiots or anything Google architects aren't idiots either are they? What did Google hope to achieve? Or did they really go into this naively thinking it could be done? Serious question - I haven't followed this very closely. Was this all a test bed to see what type of apps could be built with ubiquitous high speed access?

I don't think they were idiots; but Google's whole operating model is built around taking Very Smart People and throwing them at Hard Problems. Sometimes, a problem may seem to be ripe for disruption because it is held back by what seems like a lot of legacy overhead. The assumption is that you can come in with a different approach, and change the operating model to the point you end up with a structural cost advanta…

Thanks for your thoughts. Raising the mindshare sounds like they are just doing a public service out of the goodness of their heart. But you are right, it can't hurt them in the court of public opinion.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#210

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Oct 26, 2016, 8:00 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #177

dredmorbius wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google have been spewing gratuitously specious numbers for some years now. A piece in VentureBeat from 2012: http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/20/google-skews-google-plus-s... "This post on Google+ statistics is a billion* times better than any other post" But what concerns me most is that Google is touting these meaningless statistics in the hopes that journalists will misunderstand them and report that Google+ is seei…

what's the trend on G+ usage? Any chance that in the near future we'll be able to search for anything with a '+' sign in it and get a relevant answer rather than some G+ page?

I haven't run a re-assessment, and I'm not aware that Stone Temple Consulting (who'd greatly expanded sampling based on my methods) have, though Eric Enge's mentioned doing so.

There are a few sources which track online social network usage, and my experience has been that G+ trends are down, sufficiently enough that they've fallen off the survey's entirely.

If you wan to trac total posting activity and trends per year, a Google search on "this site:plus.google.com" restricted by year should give a rough idea of how the relative quantity of English-lanugage posts are trending. I'm suggesting this as a nonsemantic, high-frequency, English word not likely to be biased strongly by annual trends. (Alternatively "upon" and "thus" are suggested by another person who's done similar research.)

My informal sense is that people are tending to defect from the system. I'm very hesitant to apply personal impressions though due to the enormous sampling bias implied.