Eight Years On, Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption Promised • Hacker News Board

Re: Eight Years On, Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption Promised

#191

Post by talmand » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 5:34 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #173

tehwebguy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but its hard to blame AT&T for not wanting Google contractors to touch its infrastructure Exactly -- AT&T thinks it's their infrastructure, but it's not. It's ours.

"We" (the government) didn't build it or pay for it. Even back in the AT&T monopoly era it was always private infrastructure.[1] AT&T got certain rights ( e.g. easements) but that also came with a lot of strings attached (they had to build in a bunch of rural places they never would've built otherwise). Public ownership of the wires was never part of the bargain. [1] The same is true for power lines. They're mostly p…

I would wonder if the subsidies and tax breaks that have been given over to these companies by the government over the years would count towards the idea us having paid for it. There's always that scandal from decades ago that comes up from time-to-time.

Re: Eight Years On, Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption Promised

#192

Post by cbhl » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 5:35 PM UTC

endtime wrote: post #190

demygale wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is incorrect. Access is an Alphabet subsidiary separate from Google and its CEO reports to the Alphabet executive team. The people working on it are incentivized for it to succeed, and the next person up is Larry Page.

I believe you mean that the next person up is Ruth Porat. /s

Re: Eight Years On, Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption Promised

#193

Post by BatFastard » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 5:37 PM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #129

BatFastard wrote: post #110

GF potential customer here in Atlanta, I will say 5 years in it has been nothing but a series of disappointments. I was in one of the first neighborhoods to get GF actually laid down. I have been promised "any day now" for 2 years. But what it looks like is if your house is not on a direct fiber line, it will never be coming. GF had promised it would get ATT to complete the 1 block connection between their fiber and…

Sounds like GF succeeded in getting you gigabit Fiber Internet for $70/month to me. :-)

It did indeed! Just not on the expected path.

Re: Eight Years On, Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption Promised

#194

Post by rdiddly » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 5:42 PM UTC

andrewla wrote: post #117

> By late 2016, Google executives clearly started becoming disenfranchised by the slow pace ... I assume they mean "disenchanted" -- this sentence makes no sense as written.

There's another malapropism further down too - so-and-so trying to bring financial constraint (restraint) to Alphabet.

Re: Eight Years On, Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption Promised

#195

Post by mattnewton » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 5:45 PM UTC

tehwebguy wrote: post #166

rayiner wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your analysis is backwards. There aren't special laws that "make it difficult for new companies to hang wires." The issue was not Google hanging its own wires, but Google contractors moving AT&T's wires in order to make space on the poles. Louisville passed special laws to enable one company to relocate another company's property on utility poles. I think those laws are a good idea, but its hard to blame AT&T for not…

> but its hard to blame AT&T for not wanting Google contractors to touch its infrastructure Exactly -- AT&T thinks it's their infrastructure, but it's not. It's ours.

The government has precedent to intervene to make sure new competition is allowed in the market. IANAL but I think they should be exercising this right here, otherwise the incentives are for AT&T to move their wires over for a competitor approximately never.

Re: Eight Years On, Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption Promised

#196

Post by Bartweiss » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 5:47 PM UTC

pmarsh wrote: post #182

Bartweiss wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> billionaires launching cars into space Can you help me understand the ire over that launch? It's standard that new rockets are tested with a dummy payload to avoid destroying something valuable. Typically that's steel plates, but the Falcon Heavy was going to go up with a useless payload regardless. Saturn I-IV did the same, and V only had a payload because it was a module test and a launch test rolled into one. I…

Most likely due to the same troll farms that paint the narrative that SpaceX wastes tax payer money. Now who would not want a new private American company to succeed in revitalizing the industry and increasing competition. Hmm, I can think of a few. It used to be "NASA is a bloated waste of tax payer money let private Enterprise in." And now the same people who said that, have been convinced that private industry is…

> the same people who said that

This part doesn't match my experience?

"NASA is a waste" is, broadly, a conservative/Republican stance. Almost everyone I've seen outraged about the Tesla launch was noticeably left of the average Democrat. I don't think a narrative of "they hated the public version, now they hate the private version" holds up for the people I've seen.

Granted, there's a second group on the left who hated NASA before and SpaceX now. But that narrative is usually "space exploration is a waste when people are going hungry", with not much concern about public/private status.

Re: Eight Years On, Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption Promised

#197

Post by core-questions » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 5:57 PM UTC

conanbatt wrote: post #179

ipsin wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"launching cars into space" is a reference to the recent launch of a Tesla into space. https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/6/16983744/spacex-tesla-falc...

I know that, but to the detriment of society?

Sometimes it feels like some folks will only be happy when life is completely hive-like, when there is nothing to differentiate anything from anything else, everything is grey, nothing is whimsical, and nobody can put their mark on the world.

Re: Eight Years On, Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption Promised

#198

Post by martinald » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 5:58 PM UTC

GiorgioG wrote: post #56

I have fiber internet at home (US) and while I'm generally happy with it, the thing I'm most happy about it is I'm no longer giving Time Warner Cable / Spectrum any of my money. In terms of speed, yes it's fast (1gb up/down) but let's be honest, there are very few things that can make use of that bandwidth. As a test I just downloaded an Ubuntu ISO at 40 megabytes/sec (320 megabits/sec.) While it's nice, if I had to…

Agreed entirely, I also have 1gig up/down, even 802.11ac struggles past 300mbit/sec through a couple of walls.

Plus very few servers seem to be able to reliably send at fast speeds, and TCP slow start means small files (The biggest problem I have is that a lot of portable storage I have (SD cards + USB hard drives) is way slower than my internet. I have one SD card which struggles at random file writes at more than 50mbit/sec.

Re: Eight Years On, Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption Promised

#199

Post by sireat » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

apeace wrote: post #175

As you can surmise by reading this article, the rise of the wireless ISPs (or WISPs) is not because the wireless technology is better or drastically cheaper. It's because in so many places, the incumbents are able to prevent you from building out fiber. They simply haven't developed the weapons to destroy the WISPs yet, but unless the political climate in states/cities changes, they will. It is tough for WISPs to com…

Speaking of latency: a well calibrated point to point wireless connection is less latency than fiber jumping a bunch of switches.

Proof: finance industry's wide use of microwave towers.

https://meanderful.blogspot.com/2017/05/lines-radios-and-cab...

There was another set of articles describing microwave towers in Europe, quite fascinating.

Not sure if this was the one: https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/22/hft-in-my-ba...

Re: Eight Years On, Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption Promised

#200

Post by zanny » Mon, Mar 05, 2018, 6:02 PM UTC

rb808 wrote: post #174

One thing is that most people really dont need gigabit connection. I'd think most people couldn't tell the difference between 10mbps & 1gig. Maybe 25-100 mbps is required if you have 8 kids each streaming their own movies. Maybe 5g is enough and the fiber rollout is a waste of resources. Upstream backups are a little different. It doesn't work quick enough with dsl. But isn't that important.

"Nobody needs more than 640k memory!"

We don't see the broad adoption of tech that can utilize 1gbps because too few people have it. If everyone had 1gbps Netflix could increase the bandwidth of their streaming, everyone could do live backups of every file they have in realtime anywhere, hell there are more esoteric use cases like WLAN terminals with centralized compute resources. You could run a normal OS perfectly fine over a gbps connection from anywhere that can maintain that link at low latency. You could use remote GPUs and CPUs to accelerate compute on demand.

None of that is possible as long as most Internet users are stuck on two magnitudes less bandwidth. How incredibly shortsighted to think dramatic improvements to performance in any metric are pointless just because we haven't seen the fruits of such improvements already happen yet.