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The future of Fiber

fiber.google.com

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Re: The future of Fiber

#121

Post by bicknergseng »

tdees40 wrote: post #14
aetherson wrote: post #9

I guess I fundamentally do not understand what makes a city a good or bad candidate for this kind of service. Why is SF or NY not an obvious candidate? Density means that there are lots of customers for a given physical length of infrastructure rollout, they're both wealthy cities with a large proportion of techies who could use faster internet... I'm sure they're both nightmares to deal with permitting processes for…

I suspect they mostly want a compliant political infrastructure and relatively easy construction. NYC and SF aren't really known for either. Also, NYC would probably be biting off more than Google Fiber has any interest in chewing at the moment. They're still scaling up, after all.

To be fair, San Jose has a pretty awful political climate as well. I mean look at VTA.

Re: The future of Fiber

#122

Post by avlasov »

leviathant wrote: post #72
psbp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You live in Philadelphia, don't you?

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…

I live in Philly and got FIOS fiber recently. Girard station area.

Re: The future of Fiber

#123

Post by rsync »

nostrademons wrote: post #106
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…

... and google is racing to catch up. There is a monopoly to be created and rent to be extracted and no matter how "not evil" an organization is, if they play in this sphere, they must adhere to this model or they won't be in business.

Everything you need to know is written in a very nice book, recently published:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu#The_Master_Switch

... you could have predicted well in advance that google would go this route.

Re: The future of Fiber

#124

Post by lflux »

kalleboo wrote: post #62
mason55 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is SF or NY not an obvious candidate? At least in NYC most of the buildings are older buildings that have already been wired for copper and are very tough to rewire. It's a much bigger task to rewire a building than to run a drop to a house. So then you end up having no idea whether fiber is available in any specific building. Plus many buildings have signed exclusivity agreements. FiOS has the exact same probl…

That sounds strange to me. I live in Sweden and went apartment-hunting last year. Not one of the apartments I looked at was without fiber (technically, ethernet in the apartments, fiber to the building). Including buildings that pre-date WW1. They all had pre-existing cable and DSL as well. If there's a will, there's a way. I guess in the US there just isn't much of a will yet.

Same for me. My apartment building in Stockholm is from 1943. It has copper for phone (DSL) and cable, plus fibre right into my hallway.

Re: The future of Fiber

#125

Post by ericd »

chimeracoder wrote: post #117
jseliger wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I currently live in NYC, and I've lived in Raleigh Howdy neighbor: I live in NYC too. A lot of NYC already does have fiber in the form of FiOS. I'll also observe that NYC's overall Internet situation appears to be much better than many places; right now I'm paying $50 a month for 50 Mbs down / 5 Mbs up through RCN. In Tucson, where I used to live, I was paying $70 for 12 down / 1 or 2 up. Google is presumably targeti…

> right now I'm paying $50 a month for 50 Mbs down / 5 Mbs up through RCN And I'm paying $54 for 20 Mbs/down on Time Warner, which is already a "discounted rate". (I'm in Manhattan). The building next door to me has FiOS, but my landlord has no incentive to let them wire my building too. I agree that New York City isn't the best target for Google Fiber, but the Internet situation here varies very heavily based on whe…

Hear hear. I've never been more frustrated about the ISP situation than when I lived in NYC. I have some friends that had such a bad experience with TWC (daily outages) that they voluntarily dropped down to ridiculously slow DSL, their only other option.

Re: The future of Fiber

#126

Post by genghisjahn »

leviathant wrote: post #72
psbp wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You live in Philadelphia, don't you?

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…

I got FiOS in Germantown.

Re: The future of Fiber

#127

Post by [deleted] »

Glide wrote: post #105
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.

[deleted]

Re: The future of Fiber

#128

Post by 300bps »

JunkDNA wrote: post #41

I know it would be painful, and the local politics certifiably insane, but if Google wanted draw attention to the dysfunctional monopoly of the cable industry, there would be no better place to wire than Philly. Take the competition right into Comcast's back yard. Start with a rollout of the Philly 'burbs where the Comcast execs live and work inward toward the city from there.

no better place to wire than Philly...Start with a rollout of the Philly 'burbs

As someone who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs, I'm not sure if Comcast has the stranglehold in our area that you think it does. I only know one person that has Comcast and the only reason that person has it is because they don't have access to Verizon FIOS.

FIOS is faster, more stable and generally cheaper than Comcast Internet. Comcast constantly advertises how their Xfinity is faster for wireless, but they're basing that on the fact that Verizon gives you an 802.11g router while Comcast gives you an 802.11n router.

With FIOS, I pay $74.99 per month for 75 Mbps downstream, 35 Mbps upstream Internet with their Prime TV package and unlimited landline phone (need for alarm system). It's rock- of-gibraltar stable, I consistently get the same exact speed on speed tests that is faster than what I pay for, and it's cheap as hell.

With Comcast, it was ridiculously expensive, the speed was hit or miss and I generally had to reset the router and/or cable modem about once every few days.

So it would be great to have Google Fiber as an option and I hope it happens in the Philly area but there are places that are hurting for good options far more than we are.

Re: The future of Fiber

#129

Post by simoncion »

jseliger wrote: post #50
tdees40 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect they mostly want a compliant political infrastructure and relatively easy construction. NYC and SF aren't really known for either. Also, NYC would probably be biting off more than Google Fiber has any interest in chewing at the moment. They're still scaling up, after all.

Good answer. I always post this: http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/att-ordered-stop-u-verse-... when people ask why SF isn't at the top of the list. Existing telcos already can't easily roll out faster service!

ATT is now rolling out U-Verse in San Francisco:

http://www.noevalleyvoice.com/2013/May/Att.htm

The challenge to ATT's plans was manifold:

1) ATT refused to put their equipment underground. SF's sidewalks don't need more cabinets.

2) U-Verse is DSL service. Sonic.net already offers 40mbps DSL service in SF, so U-Verse is not that much faster. Why does SF need more cabinets to get pretty much the same data service from the incumbent telco?

3) ATT is putting cabinets on the sidewalks, and running fiber to those cabinets to serve ~45mbps connections to folks ~800 feet away. If ATT had planned to run fiber from those new cabinets into residences ~800 feet away and provide 100mbps or 1gbps service, folks would have welcomed their project.

4) Monkeybrains [0] and Sonic.net [1][2] have had (for several years) workable plans to eventually deliver 1gbps service to the whole city with (they say) far fewer aboveground boxes that ATT "requires" for U-Verse, and don't even need to dig up the street to lay the fiber. I'm not sure why they've been ignored by the Mayor's Office and the DPW.

[0] https://www.monkeybrains.net/DPW-MonkeyBrains-March-2011.pdf

[1] http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2010/07/14/micro-trenching-at-soni...

[2] http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/12/15/sonic-net-plans-gigabit...

Re: The future of Fiber

#130

Post by wil421 »

Nice try Google, I was really happy about Atlanta until I saw the cities listed.

Most of the cities they listed are in very sketchy areas that probably dont even know the difference between their regular connection and a faster fiber connection.

Avondale Estates - not so nice Brookhaven - will probably benefit College Park - crime area, could care less about fiber Decatur - some areas will benefit East Point - crime area Hapeville - crime area Sandy Springs - will benefit, lots of Apartment Complexes Smyrna - will benefit in some areas

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