The real question, and the one that the article doesn't answer is whether an advertising company is a better ISP than a telecom.
It's obviously much better from what they announced so far.
Why Google makes the perfect ISP
11–20 of 59 posts
Re: Why Google makes the perfect ISP
#12The real question, and the one that the article doesn't answer is whether an advertising company is a better ISP than a telecom.
In the UK, most ISPs are marketing outfits running on BT's monopolised infrastructure.
BT are bad enough on their own as a telco. The marketing companies are even worse than going direct.
Also, Google are renown for having literally zero support.
Perhaps I'm a cynic, but the marketing looks good but the reality will be bad.
Re: Why Google makes the perfect ISP
#13> It gets better: For people that don’t need a super-fast connection, Google is offering a 5Mbps connection for free — yes, free. If Google Fiber expands, there’s no guarantee that this will remain the case, but it could totally upset the market for entry-level broadband. Even the “catch” isn’t that much of a catch. Google is planning on charging a one-time $300 fee to run the fiber to each residence, but if you opt…
The antitrust implications for this are massive. Google would clearly be subsiding the cost of the broadband with advertising/sales from their online properties. If you are someone like Vimeo, Hulu, Netflix etc then you would forever be at a disadvantage to Youtube due to bandwidth costs. Similarly the proven importance of speed in site popularity and conversions means that an entire raft of competitors would again b…
How is this any different from Comcast buying NBC?
Re: Why Google makes the perfect ISP
#14There's always been a touch of Willy Wonka style unreality about Google Fiber. Municipalities across the U.S. know that their broadband sucks, and they wrote proposals to Google in lieu of real action, hoping Google could solve their problems with their magic wand. Google still has a "non-evil" and academic reputation in some quarters, although anybody who makes a living on the streets of the internet knows that Goog…
> anybody who makes a living on the streets of the internet knows that Google is the most dangerous and rapacious company on the net.
I make a living on the streets of the internet, and could not disagree more with your conclusion.
You don't speak for everyone, because you certainly don't speak for me.
Re: Why Google makes the perfect ISP
#15> It gets better: For people that don’t need a super-fast connection, Google is offering a 5Mbps connection for free — yes, free. If Google Fiber expands, there’s no guarantee that this will remain the case, but it could totally upset the market for entry-level broadband. Even the “catch” isn’t that much of a catch. Google is planning on charging a one-time $300 fee to run the fiber to each residence, but if you opt…
On the Help page:
How long will the Free Internet service be free?
The Free Internet service will be free of a monthly service charge for at least seven years. At the end of seven years, we will begin charging the market price for comparable speeds—which, if Google Fiber is successful, will be $0.
Re: Why Google makes the perfect ISP
#16They are perfect because they charge $70 for gigabit fiber. period. :-D
Re: Why Google makes the perfect ISP
#17Whether they succeed or not with Fiber, whether it expands to every American city or not and whether they get sued because of antitrust laws (which I don't believe they will), the fact is that they're changing the status quo. Even only scaring the telecom companies enough for them to offer decent plans is a win for Google AND for the customer. Sure Google pursues its own commercial goals but in the end it benefits th…
Indeed. It's the same as their chrome gambit. Releasing chrome kicked the IE development team into gear and lit a fire under firefox's ass. Today if I launch any of the 3 most popular browsers on this machine each of them will score 100/100 on the acid 3 test and render it smoothly and seamlessly. That certainly wasn't the case when chrome 1.0 was released a bit more than 3 years ago. Now the installed base of folks who have truly modern browsers is vastly higher and the sort of browser-side capabilities one can safely assume when they build web apps is very much expanded.
Re: Why Google makes the perfect ISP
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
The antitrust implications for this are massive. Google would clearly be subsiding the cost of the broadband with advertising/sales from their online properties. If you are someone like Vimeo, Hulu, Netflix etc then you would forever be at a disadvantage to Youtube due to bandwidth costs. Similarly the proven importance of speed in site popularity and conversions means that an entire raft of competitors would again b…
If they can make the money from the other plans, why would it be an anti-trust issue? Isn't anti-trust about hurting the users, not the competition, anyway?
Isn't anti-trust about hurting the users, not the competition, anyway?
It's about hurting the consumer by hurting the competition.
Re: Why Google makes the perfect ISP
#19There's always been a touch of Willy Wonka style unreality about Google Fiber. Municipalities across the U.S. know that their broadband sucks, and they wrote proposals to Google in lieu of real action, hoping Google could solve their problems with their magic wand. Google still has a "non-evil" and academic reputation in some quarters, although anybody who makes a living on the streets of the internet knows that Goog…
Maybe I'm missing the point, but what's the problem? It seems to me that the worst senario here is that Google supplants traditional telcos, and essentially becomes another monopoly for >1Gbps web access. Compared with what we have today, I'm pretty happy with that outcome.
Actually, the worst outcome will be that the general public doesn't care enough, Google fiber flops, and the traditional model becomes further entrenched.
I would also be a bit happier with a real, innovative, public broadband program. I don't think the US has the political culture to pull that off.
> In fact, Google has gained "question answering" capabilities in the last few years thanks to web spam farms run by companies like eHow.
I was under the general impression that they're trying to minimize this. It also seems like this kind of plague would affect any dominant search engine.
Re: Why Google makes the perfect ISP
#20Sorry for the weak pun, but I really couldn't help myself: I wish the title had been "Why Google is an acceptable ISP".
Apropos of the article, I'm increasingly unconvinced that free markets work well enough when they're dealing with infrastructure--roads, train lines, phone lines--that have an expensive one-off set-up cost and then a larger cost of switching while the original provider attempts to recoup the set-up subsidy. Certainly Britain's experience with train lines, and the US's existing telco network, among others, seems to demonstrate that it doesn't tend towards a free market. (Compare, of all places, Somalia's mobile network, which is thriving--at least relatively, for a country that's been in a civil war for two decades-- in the absence of a set-up cost).