121–130 of 333 posts
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.
> what will happen on a super bowl night? Wireless multicast means that the superbowl will be sent out once to many subscribers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Spectrum just jacked up the cost of a similar package to $175 in my region.
spectrum, specifically the 2.4ghz band, where google was looking for wireless alternatives is unlicensed no ?
Building a broadband network is an interesting business. I like to describe it as a hyper-local national business. I saw this because every municipality has different rules (eg compare getting pole access in Louisville vs Nashville vs Austin), the ground is different (one area might have a lot of limestone in the ground and make trenching slow, difficult and expensive) and so on. Getting something resolved might be a case of whoever is the construction manager in a given area knowing the right person to call that might otherwise have 11 people standing around for 2 days.
This is something that national ISPs are exceedingly good at because they've spent decades doing it. I mean they go further than that by trying to keep competitors out through regulatory blocks and so forth but this doesn't change the fact that this is a core competency.
It is not nor was it ever Google's core competency. Google is at its heart a technical company that solves technical problems. Making search or Maps or GMail worth with petabytes or even exabytes of data is something Google is exceedingly good at. This is an entirely different business model and core competency.
I don't know this for a fact but I SUSPECT that Google's executives went into Fiber with the naive belief that (a lot of hand-waving here) they were Google and could do anything and somehow they could reduce the cost per household connected from a more normal $1000-3000 to What's more Google has never really had to control costs in the same sense that a large capital project would have to. Worse, Google's culture that it'll ship when it ships (which is great from a software engineering POV) doesn't work when you need to plan for lighting up networks and areas and there are a lot of moving parts to make that happen. It's really a case of what gets measured gets done.
Add to this that there is uncertainty over what the future of fixed broadband is going to be. Will it be wireless or wired? That's the ultimate question. If it's wireless and you've just spent $50B building a national wired network then... woops. If it's wired and you've just invested $25B in building wireless infrastructure then... woops.
I suspect it's one of these cases where doing nothing is worse than doing something but I suspect Google's board was scared off by the large capital costs involved in doing anything and were too risk-averse to be wrong.
Disclaimer: Ex-Fiber Xoogler.
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> I don't think it is a given that Musk ever intended for Tesla's success to be an economic one. What did Musk tell investors?
I have observed a wide range of attitudes towards deception. Both deception of one's self, and of others. For example: For some people being 'a liar' is one of the worst things imaginable, but to others it is perfectly fine. The former judge the latter as being immoral monsters, the latter think the former are rather sweet (and are perhaps also glad the former exist?). Regarding deception of one's self: some people f…
If even Google cannot penetrate this market then it's for all intents and purposes 100% impenetrable. Unless somebody comes up with a radically different strategy, the ISP market in USA should be considered monopolized and should be broken down by the government (fat chance). In any case, it's game over for consumers - abandon all hope.
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…
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?
I wonder, was Google Fibre ever intended to succeed in the traditional sense? Instead, perhaps it was an attempt by Google to change the industry by 1) scaring the incumbents into improving, and 2) expanding consumers' Overton windows[1] regarding what they could/should expect. Google presumably wants to ensure its services can be delivered to consumers, so this would seem towards that end. As another commenter notes…
> I don't think it is a given that Musk ever intended for Tesla's success to be an economic one. What did Musk tell investors?
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.
There's just no way you can draw a conclusion like this. I would be equally right in say that public corporations never have an incentive to improve services due to lack of a market or competition (see mass transit).
The rollout of a nationalised national broadband/fibre network in Australia has been an interesting one for a number of reasons. We've actually seen private companies roll out their own networks to compete with both the public provider AND other private companies.
Ultimately, the quality of these services is going to depend on a whole lot more than "public vs private"
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Exactly. Fiber to the home is the only fiber than really matters. If there is fiber but my last mile is old copper, then that doesn’t do me a lot of good does it? France claiming 100% fiber by 2022? They are dreaming, or perhaps even delusional. No way they can get FTTH by 2022. There are some places that don’t have any connectivity and you have to use Satelite. They’re going to fix that in 4 years?
> Exactly. Fiber to the home is the only fiber than really matters. If there is fiber but my last mile is old copper, then that doesn’t do me a lot of good does it? I wouldn't go quite that far e.g. let's say you're my parents in a village of 300 (and as many cows) with the DSLAM >5km away, the best DSL you can get is 1024k on a good day (and on average closer to 512k with pings in the half-second range), my understa…
The kind of engineering to distribute such a large network seems to mirror the issues with the nationwide power grid that was proposed to allow for consistent solar energy. The USA is just a very, very big place with populations, even urban, that sprawl and are not condensed like in London, Paris, Munich or other countries in the fiber fight.
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…
I wonder, was Google Fibre ever intended to succeed in the traditional sense? Instead, perhaps it was an attempt by Google to change the industry by 1) scaring the incumbents into improving, and 2) expanding consumers' Overton windows[1] regarding what they could/should expect. Google presumably wants to ensure its services can be delivered to consumers, so this would seem towards that end. As another commenter notes…
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 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.