Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet?

#11

Post by georgemcbay » Sat, Jan 12, 2013, 1:37 AM UTC

Shaming won't work when so many places in the USA only have one viable cable provider. Here in my area of San Diego I'm stuck with Time Warner. Even ignoring the relatively slow speeds, I'd be happy just to not have my connection randomly disappear for about 5 minutes 2 or 3 times a day.

I'd switch to a competitor in a second except there aren't any.

The ISPs have no shame, unless you're willing to force real competition with them nothing will change for those in areas with defacto monopoly ISPs.

Re: Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet?

#12

Post by PnuklOEvolu » Sat, Jan 12, 2013, 1:44 AM UTC

All those veritable mountains of wireless routers spread across every city but can we build an easy to use open source mesh network? Hell no!

Re: Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet?

#13

Post by vsbuffalo » Sat, Jan 12, 2013, 1:51 AM UTC

Everyone here is saying the word monopoly, but realistically ISPs are natural monopolies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly). We don't see competition because startups (even incredibly well funded ones) just don't have the funds to start pulling fiber all across cities. This is also why most high-speed internet today is based on some new utilization of older technology: DSL utilizes phone lines and cable utilizes, well, cable — it's even too expensive (and in terms of business, not worth it given their natural monopoly status) for existing companies. This situation will persist for a while, until either Google starts pulling fiber through tunnels in major cities and the threat forces other ISPs to improve. The only other alternative is fast wireless, as then infrastructure investments decrease drastically.

Re: Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet?

#14

Post by pragmatic » Sat, Jan 12, 2013, 1:52 AM UTC

What would you do with more bandwidth?[1]

I've discussed this with several of my friends. In our area, we have multiple providers and can get up to 100MB down/ 30 up with residential service. (You can get all you want if you pay business prices, I work at a company that sells that).

30/5 is the standard. So what would we do with more bandwidth?

Netflix streams in high def. Games from Steam download quickly. My Voip phone works well.

In the future, I'm assuming we will find a use for more bandwidth, but right now, I cannot justify paying for a higher bandwidth connection. (I wouldn't complain if they upgraded our speed for the same price.)

What am I missing? What _could_ I be doing with more bandwidth (besides pirating the entire output of Hollywood and the music and gaming industry)?

By extension then, what argument do we use to force/persuade ISPs and the government (who pays for a lot of infrastructure [2], especially in rural areas) to increase speeds to end users, while maintaining an affordable price structure?

I'm looking for honest answers, I'm not trolling, I promise :-)

[1] Assuming that you already have a relatively fast, stable connection now (somewhere in the 30mb download and 5mb upload range).

[2] BTOP http://www2.ntia.doc.gov/ My father lives on a farm 18 miles from the nearest town. He has fiber.

Re: Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet?

#15

Post by rayiner » Sat, Jan 12, 2013, 1:56 AM UTC

FiOS is already at the point where the bottleneck is usually the wifi network not the internet connection. The market for "tethered to your desk" home internet is probably not that big.

Re: Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet?

#16

Post by pragmatic » Sat, Jan 12, 2013, 1:57 AM UTC

darrenkopp wrote: post #2

I have 100Mb/100Mb for $45/month which is pretty decent I think. It's not 1Gb, but still beats the pants off everything else in the area.

That is really good. What location and what provider, if you don't mind me asking?

Re: Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet?

#17

Post by moistgorilla » Sat, Jan 12, 2013, 1:59 AM UTC

pragmatic wrote: post #14

What would you do with more bandwidth?[1] I've discussed this with several of my friends. In our area, we have multiple providers and can get up to 100MB down/ 30 up with residential service. (You can get all you want if you pay business prices, I work at a company that sells that). 30/5 is the standard. So what would we do with more bandwidth? Netflix streams in high def. Games from Steam download quickly. My Voip p…

When I go to visit my family I would rather not have to wait hours to download a piece of software because my sister is watching a hq movie on netflix, my brother is voice chatting with a friend, and my mom is browsing cooking recipes on websites that load a video advertisement every 20 minutes.

Re: Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet?

#18

Post by luxxx » Sat, Jan 12, 2013, 1:59 AM UTC

Didn't even read the article, but the answer is quite simple: Because people are stupid enough to pay into slow internet. If you refused to pay for it, they would increase the speed.

In addition, Google does it because their profits are almost directly proportional to how many people are using the internet. They are everywhere. It just makes sense.

In addition, Optical Fiber is not new at all, plenty of people have it already and love it.....

Re: Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet?

#19

Post by rdl » Sat, Jan 12, 2013, 2:00 AM UTC

I have Comcast Business 50/10 at home -- it's pretty decent, but there is some crazy Comcast routing going on, so sometimes services like Netflix fail badly. With a VPN to a local server, it's pretty decent, especially since I pay around $60/mo due to a legacy discount (otherwise $200+/mo)

What I really want is fast, reliable, dumb-pipe bandwidth from various locations to my datacenter, so I can do things like back up at ~100MB/sec to a SAN in the colo, move VMs around, etc. The only way that seems likely to happen is if I live immediately adjacent and run fiber, or find someplace in the downtown core of Palo Alto with metro fiber and get on there.

Re: Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet?

#20

Post by tensor » Sat, Jan 12, 2013, 2:00 AM UTC

At least the US isn't as bad as Canada where you can pay $225 a month for 250mbit down and up.

http://www.rogers.com/web/link/hispeedBrowseFlowDefaultPlans

edit: a bit of searching shows that FIOS has a similar price for their top plan. On the other hand, we have a 500GB data cap. Smaller plans have caps that are lower than 100GB.