Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 382 posts

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#341

Post by ralph84 »

RankingMember wrote: post #280
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 nitpick, but crossing the US takes much closer to 4 10-hour days than 5 (New York to Los Angeles): https://goo.gl/maps/dmL1f421DMP2

Google's calculation doesn't include stops for gas, food, and bathroom breaks. Not to mention that with that much driving you're bound to run into a few delays due to construction or accidents, or just bad timing hitting a metro area during rush hour.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#342

Post by refurb »

jonathankoren wrote: post #89
prplhaz4 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my internet connection was maintained in a similar manner to the street I live on, I would be switching to satellite. The US has a severe problem with its ability to maintain infrastructure - which I think is closely related to the ability to scale mentioned in another comment. For reference, Sweden is around the same size as California, with 1/4th the population.

Do you have the same problem with your water and sewer? The problem with infrastructure in the US is simply one of money. We don't want to pay for nice things. It's the 50 year old self-fulfilling prophesy of cut budgets, then complain that nothing is maintained and so the budget needs to be cut more because clearly it must have been wasted. Repeat ad nauseum. (This of phenomenon also plays out on the micro scale whe…

No, it's things like what happened with the Big Dig in Boston...

"However, the project was completed only in December 2007 (instead of 1998), at a cost of over $14.6 billion ($8.08 billion in 1982 dollars, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%)[6] as of 2006"

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#343

Post by josh2600 »

RyJones wrote: post #307
garrettgrimsley wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not expert on this, but I think that the use of a horizontal drill is more common. Check out this horizontal drill: http://www.ballantineinc.com/sites/default/files/img/Copy%20... See this diagram for how they're used: http://www.ajvac.ca/images/directional%20drill%20diag2.jpg

For a city like San Francisco, only a fraction of what is in the ground is mapped. The only reasonable option is many places is to dig up the ground and look at what you're working with. Even in the area I live in, ripping up the streets is how it's done. I've only seen horizontal boring machines deployed a few times around here. Maybe they're used a lot and I don't notice them because I don't have to drive around th…

I can confirm that horizontal boring machines have never been used in any telco digging opportunity I've been a part of :/. I wish it were the case but it is all tear-up-the-streets territory.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#344

Post by StillBored »

csours wrote: post #93
josh2600 wrote: post #81

I wrote about this elsewhere and am pasting my thoughts here as I think they're relevant to this community: 1) Google Fiber is dead. Long Live Google ISP. Google cannot afford to lay fiber in the ground because it's a long game and Google doesn't really want to play the long game (they just want to put pressure on competitors so they can move more bits along the wires, generating more searches and more streams with w…

Do you have to literally dig up the street? If so, why?

No, and AFAIK, in Austin all the early roll outs were in older neighborhoods with physical poles. I'm not sure if google was lashing their cables to existing lines, but I saw TWC doing that a lot when they were splitting nodes here. It was amazingly fast they would show up with a truck and lash a half mile of cable in a couple hours.

Of course one of the early slowdowns was AT&T throwing a fit about google sharing poles owned by AT&T.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#346

Post by jonathankoren »

refurb wrote: post #342
jonathankoren wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have the same problem with your water and sewer? The problem with infrastructure in the US is simply one of money. We don't want to pay for nice things. It's the 50 year old self-fulfilling prophesy of cut budgets, then complain that nothing is maintained and so the budget needs to be cut more because clearly it must have been wasted. Repeat ad nauseum. (This of phenomenon also plays out on the micro scale whe…

No, it's things like what happened with the Big Dig in Boston... "However, the project was completed only in December 2007 (instead of 1998), at a cost of over $14.6 billion ($8.08 billion in 1982 dollars, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%)[6] as of 2006"

Lets be honest here. What would you do when you've dug a hole in the middle of Boston and disrupted traffic and every other piece of infrastructure in that part of city after you run out of budget? Walk away and leaving a gaping pit? Spend more money and fill the pit in, and then be left with your original problem, that's now probably even worse than when you started? Fill in the hole, and then dig a new hole? Or do you effectively throw good money after bad and finish the job?

Comparing a government transportation project to anything in the private sector is a canard. There's literally nothing comparable. That isn't the say that government contracting policies and processes are perfect and not abused. They clearly aren't perfect, and they clearly are abused. See the F-35, and well, pretty much every military purchase since the Cold War. See the vast majority of government infrastructure projects. Most importantly, these cost overruns aren't something that's fundamental about private-vs-public, but rather something about how American governments function.[0] Unfortunately, there's no single smoking gun, and instead everyone falls back to their favorite boogeymen. (My favorites are multiple environmental impact studies, public comment periods, fraud, and of course willful incompetence (i.e. "I don't believe the government should do this, so I"m going to do a really shitty job, and then use my poor performance as evidence that the government is intrinsically incompetent."))

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-i...

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#347

Post by [deleted] »

refurb wrote: post #342
jonathankoren wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have the same problem with your water and sewer? The problem with infrastructure in the US is simply one of money. We don't want to pay for nice things. It's the 50 year old self-fulfilling prophesy of cut budgets, then complain that nothing is maintained and so the budget needs to be cut more because clearly it must have been wasted. Repeat ad nauseum. (This of phenomenon also plays out on the micro scale whe…

No, it's things like what happened with the Big Dig in Boston... "However, the project was completed only in December 2007 (instead of 1998), at a cost of over $14.6 billion ($8.08 billion in 1982 dollars, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%)[6] as of 2006"

[deleted]

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#348

Post by ryao »

consultutah wrote: post #327
ryao wrote: post #326

People in the technology community should start organizing the construction of local government owned municipal fiber networks in their communities. I am abroad right now, but I have decided to start speaking up in mine when I return to the United States because I finally believe that I know how such a thing can succeed. Local communities could use municipal bonds to pay for a 10G-EPON build outs where multiple provi…

Provo Utah did something like this which failed and was bought by Google which now has also apparently failed. Fun times.

Did Provo handle the fiber to the premise while requiring people to purchase internet service from CLECs to use it with the exception of a crippled free tier to get people to bite? If not, they did not do this. Furthermore, they did not stick with it over 30 years, which is the time frame required for such an endeavor to be a success. The entire point of the idea is to divide responsibilities so that no one organization takes on too much and do so in a way that fosters competition. That includes funding via municipal bonds where pay back is expected to take ~3 decades. Had they done this, Google could have just been one CLEC among many and Provo would still be at it.

Local governments ought to focus on building roads while businesses focus on building the services that are provided through them. Having each business build its own network of private roads is infeasible. It sounds absurd when stated in this way, but that is what is happening. We need the local government to do the one thing it is good at doing, which is enabling transportation for private industry. Private industry can do the rest. That includes IP transit in such a way that tier 1 ISPs like Hurricane Electric would have a very low barrier to becoming CLECs. If each subscriber pays a fee dedicated to repaying the municipal bonds over a 30 year period, this would pay for itself.

If people operating it mess up, they can be replaced. The CLECs are interchangeable from the customer's standpoint. The contractors running the infrastructure are interchangeable from the community advisory board's standpoint. The members of the community advisory board overseeing are replaceable from the local politicians' standpoint. The local politicians are replaceable by the public. It is very different than what we have now where if people are unhappy, they cannot replace the incumbents and have little ability to voice grievances. This is the sort of system that I want in my community. I am abroad right now, but when I get back to the US, I intend to start gathering people to discuss how this could become a reality in my area.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#349

Post by rak00n »

seangrogg wrote: post #200
samfisher83 wrote: post #16

Building 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…

Google's social projects were clones of models that were already successful. Buzz was a Twitter clone. G+ was a Facebook clone. A clone can get traction only if it's better than the original. That they were not apart from other factors.

I don't think it has anything to do with "core competency". Google was just the last (copycat) dog in the social game trying too hard to figure out what the cool kids want.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#350

Post by Dylan16807 »

refurb wrote: post #335
RankingMember wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A nitpick, but crossing the US takes much closer to 4 10-hour days than 5 (New York to Los Angeles): https://goo.gl/maps/dmL1f421DMP2

A nitpick, but that would assume you eat in the car and pee in a jug.

No it doesn't; you intersperse that with the 10 hours of driving. Ten hours of driving, two hours of generous breaks and lunch, twelve hours for dinner/sleep/shower/relaxing.
Post reply on HN