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The future of Fiber

fiber.google.com

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Re: The future of Fiber

#171

Post by drawkbox »

There is such a high demand for this product because it fulfills a great need and requirement to be competitive, but we are being held back by our providers. Our progress, held back due to lack of innovation. Google Fiber will rule the US as soon as it can get rolled out. Cable companies better be really nice and start being competitive. Please bring it to Chandler, AZ.

This article comes to mind, I recently, through normal work, started hitting Cox's 250GB max, I work on games and can easily send 4-8GB per day in assets/code to remote repos. Cringley from 2011...

http://www.cringely.com/2011/07/28/bandwidth-caps-are-rate-h...

This isn’t about capping ISP losses, but are about increasing ISP profits. The caps are a built-in revenue bump that will kick-in 2-3 years from now, circumventing any existing regulatory structure for setting rates. The regulators just haven’t realized it yet. By the time they do it may be too late.

Most U. S. broadband customers don’t get anywhere near that 250 gigabyte cap. The few who do hit those limits are big gamers or file downloaders for the most part. Maybe they do take unfair advantage of the system, but the question is whether this is the proper way to control their consumption? I don’t think it is.

In time we will all bump into these caps and our Internet bills will suddenly double as a result, circumventing competition and ending a 15 year downward broadband price trend.

ISPs win, we lose.

Unless there is competition. Bandwidth is as needed as roads, shipping, airplanes, etc to business and economies. This is an anti-competitive hostage situation we are in in the US. This is also anti-small business as many are run from home offices and co-location etc.

Re: The future of Fiber

#172

Post by pdx6 »

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…

I agree, this is completely lame until Google can serve the western tech capitol, San Francisco.

SF High Speed options:

Comcast. Max out at 100/10.

Sonic offers fiber in certain blocks of the Sunset, but are deploying painfully slow.

I have an ATT U-Verse box permitted to install on my block but it hasn't happened yet, and I'm not thrilled with ATT.

Monkeybrains requires LoS to Sutro tower, and permission from the building landlord.

Webpass requires at least 20 units in a building.

Google remains the only hope; build it, TAKE MY MONEY.

Re: The future of Fiber

#173

Post by caw »

thedufer wrote: post #155
tijs wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In sweden this sort of thing is done by the city/state not 'the market' which makes for a different set of arguments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises_by_count...

What about the actual building wiring? It doesn't matter whether there's fiber to the building if cable has enough bandwidth to fill the copper between the cable box and the apartments.

It might work, assuming the building can support multiple cable providers (e.g. it's not all just 1 trunk from CableCo), but it would cost more in equipment. You would need to convert the fiber to coax (maybe with an intermediate step of ethernet), and then the customer would need a modem to convert from coax to ethernet. It'd be a pricey installation and continual maintenance of hardware.

Re: The future of Fiber

#174

Post by compuguy »

teach wrote: post #76
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.

So far Google isn't "tearing up" anything; they've been targeting cities with overhead power lines they can piggyback.

I guess that cancels out cities and suburbs that have underground power lines.....

Re: The future of Fiber

#175

Post by soperj »

CountHackulus wrote: post #58
adventured wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canada related question. Do all the major ISPs in Canada have bandwidth caps on consumer broadband?

Yes, every major ISP has bandwidth caps, some of which are prohibitively small (20GB). Even the smaller upstart ISPs, like TekSavvy are forced to have a cap (though at 300GB) due to wholesale laws. At least they offer unlimited for a reasonable amount of money. Canada is definitely behind the US for internet access, it's even behind many (if not most) third world countries.

No they don't. Only out east. I'm on Shaw. No caps.

Re: The future of Fiber

#176

Post by jrockway »

Pxtl wrote: post #167
bhousel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing any kind of utility work in NYC is a nightmare. There's lots of stuff underground (power, telecom, water, steam, sewer) that has been built up over the years and is in various states of obsolescence and disrepair, and in many cases isn't really marked on any utility maps. It's not a trivial matter to just dig a new trench for fiber. Here's a interesting story of what happened when an electrician found a 250VDC…

... dangit, I wish I knew more about electrical work. Why was that so dangerous? I mean, besides 250 volts and rotted-out insulation. The writer makes it sound like he just discovered an unexploded bomb.

The steam pipes that blow up every couple years are the unexploded bombs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system

"At least 12 steam pipe explosions have occurred in New York City since 1987."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_City_steam_explos...

Re: The future of Fiber

#177

Post by fuzzywalrus »

tehaaron wrote: post #91

Very excited to see Portland,OR on the list! I'm tired of Comcast and the other options are quite lacking in one way or another.

East Portland is wired up with Fibre backbone DSL from Century Link. Its $30 a month for a connection that's roughly 40 mbps down / 15 mbps up. I generally get 4 megabytes a sec downloads, and my friend who lives south around Holgate and 65th sees about the same. No data caps that I'm aware of either.

Its faster than Comcast's two lower tier internet packages. I've heard North Portland isn't as lucky but its certainly worth checking out.

Also various complexes around town are already offering FiOS.

Re: The future of Fiber

#178

Post by alwaysdoit »

>We’re asking cities to ensure that we, and other providers, can access and lease existing infrastructure.

This is probably my favorite part. They're not just trying to get special privileges for themselves, they are trying to level the barriers to entry so that there is actual competition in this space.

Re: The future of Fiber

#179

Post by ROFISH »

jseliger wrote: post #47
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.

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…

I live in Tucson now and I'm paying $70/month for 50 down / 10 up, but that's for residential. Commercial lines are horrible; $99/month for 10 down / 2 up.

Re: The future of Fiber

#180

Post by soperj »

nousernamesleft wrote: post #149
fidotron wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe so - I have to use a relatively small player that resells Bell infrastructure. The way it works is pick any two of speed, capped usage or reasonable price, but then forget the last one because it doesn't exist anywhere. I consider my, still expensive, 4G mobile way better value than the land line ISP, but I need the capacity for work. Frankly I think 4G is going to wipe out land lines in far more cases than…

>Frankly I think 4G is going to wipe out land lines in far more cases than people realise. Even if it were consistently fast and reliable (which it is neither), at $40/month for half a gig of data? Not likely.

I'm on telus. It's 60 bucks a month for 6gb of data + phone/text ect.
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