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The future of Fiber

fiber.google.com

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Re: The future of Fiber

#101

Post by bestdayever »

rufugee wrote: post #56

It always surprises me how excited people get about Google Fiber, yet how up-in-arms they get about GMail, Google+ and other Google services which tend to invade and/or expose your privacy. Do you really think that using a advertising company's fiber as your gateway to the internet is going to offer a private experience? Don't you see how much easier it will make it for them to gather your personal details and habits…

You are comparing a free service where they are up front about their plans to a pay for service which doesn't detail any plans you describe. I have to ask, do you think they would?

Re: The future of Fiber

#102

Post by vijayp »

wmf wrote: post #81
27182818284 wrote: post #35

I'm really, really glad they chose Kansas City as the pilot city despite not living there. If they had just gone and chosen San Francisco, Chicago or New York, it would have been no more of an experiment than offering more cable channels to the big cities in the 1990s—It just is completely uninteresting. On a side note, If you haven't been to KC's Startup Village, the climate is electric! It feels like something real…

I see it the opposite way: Deploying fiber is easy if the city gives you carte blanche as KC did. Doing something easy proves nothing. If Google Fiber wants to prove that their model is replicable they need to deploy it at a profit in a politically hostile environment.

The point is not to prove anything but to shame competitors into providing good quality service. Google Fibre is not about making money, it's about driving the industry to provide faster Internet, which Google believes will lead to more ecommerce and thus more profit.

Re: The future of Fiber

#104

Post by adventured »

wmf wrote: post #81
27182818284 wrote: post #35

I'm really, really glad they chose Kansas City as the pilot city despite not living there. If they had just gone and chosen San Francisco, Chicago or New York, it would have been no more of an experiment than offering more cable channels to the big cities in the 1990s—It just is completely uninteresting. On a side note, If you haven't been to KC's Startup Village, the climate is electric! It feels like something real…

I see it the opposite way: Deploying fiber is easy if the city gives you carte blanche as KC did. Doing something easy proves nothing. If Google Fiber wants to prove that their model is replicable they need to deploy it at a profit in a politically hostile environment.

"If Google Fiber wants to prove that their model is replicable they need to deploy it at a profit in a politically hostile environment."

Well actually no they don't. They're going to prove their model is replicable and profitable, while not deploying to politically hostile environments.

Re: The future of Fiber

#105

Post by Glide »

malandrew wrote: post #10

Why not San Francisco, Washington D.C., Boston and NYC? San Francisco, NYC and Boston because they are big tech hubs where a lot of Googlers live and Washington D.C. because it is the seat of politics in this country and the best way to show what good can happen when we have broadband connectivity. In fact, rolling out Google Fiber in the capital cities of each state makes the most sense in general. You lobby the pol…

Suburbs of DC (at least NOVA) has a decent number of places that have FiOS. Also the cable situation isn't that bad if you have Cox rather than Time Warner.

But the dominating factor of what determines where people live in the suburbs seems to be schools more so than internet. Google fiber here would be more of a novelty.

Re: The future of Fiber

#106

Post by nostrademons »

rufugee wrote: post #56

It always surprises me how excited people get about Google Fiber, yet how up-in-arms they get about GMail, Google+ and other Google services which tend to invade and/or expose your privacy. Do you really think that using a advertising company's fiber as your gateway to the internet is going to offer a private experience? Don't you see how much easier it will make it for them to gather your personal details and habits…

All the other telecoms have far worse privacy records than Google does. Who were the original companies implicated in illegal NSA wiretapping? Verizon, AT&T, and Bell South. [1] What happened to the CEO of the one company that refused, Qwest? He went to jail on trumped-up insider trading charges. [2]

[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-ns...

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30...

Re: The future of Fiber

#107

Post by dublinben »

benihana wrote: post #29

I currently live in NYC, and I've lived in Raleigh. It seems pretty clear that tearing up New York City to lay fiber is a much more expensive and tedious process than it would be in Raleigh. The state and local governments also seem much more friendly to that kind of thing.

NYC is already quite full of fiber. It's just not accessible to residential customers. Some of the world's major internet exchanges are in NYC, as are any number of datacenters. Most large office buildings in NYC should have a fiber connection from one of the commercial providers.

Re: The future of Fiber

#108

Post by Moral_ »

At least for SLC there is already _Some_ fiber around the city: http://www.utopianet.org/

Much like Provo, I think google saw that utopia already had some infrastructure in place and wanted to swoop it up.

So while people are asking, why not this x,y,z city perhaps it's due to infrastructure not already being in place.

Re: The future of Fiber

#109

Post by mey »

joekrill wrote: post #87
leviathant wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Philadelphia, where we have a subway station named after AT&T and the tallest building is the Comcast center (until they build their new Comcast building, which will be even taller), and if Verizon can't get fiber to my house (never mind that free wifi movement that sputtered out six or seven years ago) there's absolutely no hope for Google fiber happening here. Between old infrastructure and big players, d…

Well Verizon was finally given approval in 2009 for FIOS in Philadelphia. but they suddenly stopped their FIOS rollout, coincidentally at the same exact time the cable companies gave Verizon a big chunk of their spectrum licenses. Of course everyone involved insists the two are completely unrelated, even though Verizon had been trying for years to get into Philadelphia.

Verizon had started selling off it's Fiber installs before 2009 (which I still scratch my head at). While they may not be directly related, I'm sure it didn't hurt the negotiation.

Edit: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPoint_Communications and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Communications

Re: The future of Fiber

#110

Post by shitlord »

I live near DC... shit! I wanted Google Fiber just for the awesome TV. DirecTV is incredibly awful. Hopefully they can expand to even more cities in the future.
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