131–140 of 333 posts
This is why I'm happy to live in a country like France where the government takes part in deploying those infrastructures (by investing money in the deployment). They planned to equip 50% of the territory by 2017 (which was achieved), and 100% by 2022. Same goes for public service, profit-focused corporations can't provide the same quality of service.
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It would help if the USA was as small as France.
A lot of states are the same size or smaller than France and none of them has achieved to get the same internet price/quality so far. Not to mention the the US has a more concentrated population than most of Europe so it's even easier.
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If Google's survival depended on solving this, they would have solved it 10 times over. Since it's not, they're approaching this problem with a cost/benefit mindset and they seem to think it's not worth it. An ideal solution would be nationalization of the infrastructure, but that's never happening in the US. A possible solution is for the US government to scare the telecom monopolies with antitrust lawsuits so much…
> If Google's survival depended on solving this, they would have solved it 10 times over assuming that's true, can we safely conclude that Google is unworried by the loss of net neutrality? i mean, the broadband providers are still in position and still have their potential anti-neutral leverage. or does google have some other strategy to fight the loss of net neutrality?
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I worked for Fiber for two years. It was both (wanting to succeed as a business and wanting to shift the industry), with a primary focus on succeeding as a business, or at least that was what the internal messaging was. I won't comment on any possible changes in the last couple years or why they may have happened, except to say that to the best of my knowledge, at no point was the sentiment, "We've shifted the indust…
GF suffers the same fate of every other Google initiative: new exec decides it can't advance his career so it's starved to death in favor of something shinier. Google won't save us any more than Musk will. It's billionaires launching cars into space and fighting for personal wealth at the detriment of the rest of the society.
What?
But is wireless seriously an alternative to fiber? I mean with 4k streaming spreading, what will happen on a super bowl night? There is only one shared bandwidth.
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That doesn't take population spread into consideration though; Norway has most people live in the south, like how most people in Canada live near the south / southeast and how there's huge empty / low population areas in the US compared to the more urbanized east and west coast.
62.7% of the US population lives in just 3.5% of land area: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33....
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I worked for Fiber for two years. It was both (wanting to succeed as a business and wanting to shift the industry), with a primary focus on succeeding as a business, or at least that was what the internal messaging was. I won't comment on any possible changes in the last couple years or why they may have happened, except to say that to the best of my knowledge, at no point was the sentiment, "We've shifted the indust…
Google Fiber hit a lot of roadblocks along the way that slowed things down. You have the lawsuit from AT&T against local government in Louisville[0]. There was also a lot of arguments[1][2] around the country for Google trying to access utility poles to hang their wires. Incumbents tried their hardest to prevent Google from hanging new wires. Many of the laws in-place today make it difficult for new companies to hang…
Also, pointing to a couple of lawsuits ignores the fact that Google got huge concessions everywhere else. It got waivers from build-out requirements (obligations to cover whole cities, instead of "fiberhoods" with sufficient demand), fast-track permitting, free use of municipal land for fiber huts, etc: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-kansas-city-....
I think Google rightfully gets the benefit of goodwill that say AT&T does not. But it's a real triumph of narrative over facts to suggest that Google Fiber didn't have the red carpet rolled out for it in nearly every Fiber city.
(Incidentally, a team of four guys with heavy equipment have spent the last three hours trenching fiber 50 feet through my tiny yard. That's the second visit, and there will be one more, and that's not counting running the fiber down the main road which required months of permitting and surveying. I strongly suspect that's why Google pulled out of Fiber.)
But is wireless seriously an alternative to fiber? I mean with 4k streaming spreading, what will happen on a super bowl night? There is only one shared bandwidth.
You have to keep in mind that with enough antennas (and enough VERY high bandwidth connections between the antennas - but only has to exist on the service provider side, plus the antennas can be pretty close together and still work) there is, in theory, 2^n interference patterns, each of which is localized. Each of which can transmit data. If you use the interference patterns to transmit data instead of the signals d…
> And in markets that Google Fiber has been deployed, it has resulted in a dramatic reduction in prices among regional incumbents.
Yeah, that's the main outcome. Gigabit for $70 is a norm today, and if someone charges a lot more, it's viewed as a rip off. And not only in markets where they deployed.
Before Spectrum came into town, Time Warner was "forced" to give me 300Mb/s at my 100Mb/s price simply because the average in the area was significantly higher after most of the city switched to Google Fiber. It made me laugh, thinking they had this capacity all the time but didn't even offer it residentially.
I have the option of using Spectrum @ 940Mbs down now; which probably would have never happened if Google Fiber didn't infiltrate my city.