No Albuquerque?
Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham
171–180 of 287 posts
Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The competition got serious. It's interesting how pure competition and "rational self-interest" got us the likes of Comcast and Cox and Verizon and all these other awful, awful companies. They quickly locked up the market, injected their own lobbyists into Washington, and then were content to provide a poor service for a lot of money. What is shaking them out of their complacency now is not "the market" or "competi…
You don't think that the core of the issue is regulatory capture, rather than a failing of "the market"? It takes a lot of money to break into a captured market, which is why it takes a large company to do it. Google entering the ISP market has done more to shake up and spur on the incumbents in the past couple of years than anything regulators have done. And furthermore, you can be assured that their doing so is abs…
People trot out "regulatory capture" but can never give a straight answer about what is being captured and how that leads to a lack of competition.
Verizon wants to wire up the yuppie neighborhoods here in Baltimore with FiOS. That'd be major competition for Comcast, because those yuppies subscribing to triple play are where all the money comes form. The city won't let them do it, because they demand Verizon wire up all the poor neighborhoods too (which cost just as much to service but won't turn a profit).
Is the theory that Comcast has regulatory-captured the Baltimore city government, forcing them to impose this requirement? Because I've seen absolutely zero evidence for that proposition.
When Google goes into cities, they demand exemption from regulation. The regulations they get exemption from are not ones that give benefits to incumbents. They are liberal public policy choices: you have to wire up poor neighborhoods if you want to wire up rich ones, you have to kick in money to support public access TV, you have to get permits and your fiber cabinets can't be too big, etc.
Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also worth noting that Google isn't doing this because: 1) They want to be an ISP 2) They feel bad for America and want us to enjoy faster internet. They're doing it because they have plans for products which necessitate nationwide high speed internet. I don't know what those plans are... maybe making YouTube the everything-video-delivery-system, maybe massively collaborative work tools as they expand Google Docs et…
> This is a business plan. It is, but not because they have a plan beyond it, though. Cox/Time-Warner/etc. basically shook down Google for money a couple of years ago. Google backed down and the last-mile ISPs thought they won. Google, of course, was extremely unhappy to painfully discover that there was insufficient competition if the ISP's decided to play dirty and block their ads. So, Google now looks at the ISP's…
Vertical integration is a powerful business strategy.
Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also worth noting that Google isn't doing this because: 1) They want to be an ISP 2) They feel bad for America and want us to enjoy faster internet. They're doing it because they have plans for products which necessitate nationwide high speed internet. I don't know what those plans are... maybe making YouTube the everything-video-delivery-system, maybe massively collaborative work tools as they expand Google Docs et…
> This is a business plan. It is, but not because they have a plan beyond it, though. Cox/Time-Warner/etc. basically shook down Google for money a couple of years ago. Google backed down and the last-mile ISPs thought they won. Google, of course, was extremely unhappy to painfully discover that there was insufficient competition if the ISP's decided to play dirty and block their ads. So, Google now looks at the ISP's…
> Google will roll out fiber even if it's somewhat unprofitable just to slowly squeeze the ISP's into obeisance.
Anti-competitive conduct is good when Google does it?
Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
The cable industry has been working on ramping up speeds for the last decade starting with DOCSIS 3 to compete with Verizon FIOS. The development of DOCSIS 3.1 for gigabit speeds over cable actually started before Google Fiber existed. It seems like people don't want to give Verizon credit for this because perhaps Google offers a more compelling story or maybe because it would suggest that competition in the telecom…
Yeah, and Verizon couldn't exist without the government taking away the rights to my land and giving it to Verizon to run their cables without compensating me in the slightest. What's your point? Verizon could be selling gigabit FIOS today but they don't because there is no competition in most markets. FIOS is profitable, just not as profitable as wireless. Guess what Verizon uses to provide wireless? (Hint: public a…
It's impossible to talk about this in general terms, but in most places, the utility poles are owned by the power company and Verizon pays to string fiber along them. It's unclear whether FiOS is profitable when taking into account the capital investment. They're running a small operating profit, but they have $23 billion to recoup. Almost all the traffic on Verizon's network runs on LTE, and that is spectrum Verizon bought the license to for billions of dollars in auctions.
It's staggering how much FUD there is on these issues. This is stuff you can just Google to inform yourself about.
Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is a business plan. It is, but not because they have a plan beyond it, though. Cox/Time-Warner/etc. basically shook down Google for money a couple of years ago. Google backed down and the last-mile ISPs thought they won. Google, of course, was extremely unhappy to painfully discover that there was insufficient competition if the ISP's decided to play dirty and block their ads. So, Google now looks at the ISP's…
I learned a new word today.
Glad to provide a valuable public service. :)
Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is a business plan. It is, but not because they have a plan beyond it, though. Cox/Time-Warner/etc. basically shook down Google for money a couple of years ago. Google backed down and the last-mile ISPs thought they won. Google, of course, was extremely unhappy to painfully discover that there was insufficient competition if the ISP's decided to play dirty and block their ads. So, Google now looks at the ISP's…
I learned a new word today.
Yeah me too.
obeisance: noun: deferential respect.
Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
> This is a business plan. It is, but not because they have a plan beyond it, though. Cox/Time-Warner/etc. basically shook down Google for money a couple of years ago. Google backed down and the last-mile ISPs thought they won. Google, of course, was extremely unhappy to painfully discover that there was insufficient competition if the ISP's decided to play dirty and block their ads. So, Google now looks at the ISP's…
> Google will roll out fiber even if it's somewhat unprofitable just to slowly squeeze the ISP's into obeisance. Anti-competitive conduct is good when Google does it?
Seems like the opposite of anti-competitive from my perspective.
Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's no money in building "dumb pipes" to the internet. Verizon's wireline margin over the last couple of quarters has been under 5% ( http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/verizon-nears-the-en... ). Note Google has never revealed how much profit Fiber actually makes. The existing networks are fast enough to service what makes the money: video services. The cable companies will only upgrade the pipes to the exte…
And, for most purposes, modest (e.g. 25 Mbps) is all that most people have any need for. Admittedly, I don't have a house full of people using high bandwidth services, but my home 25 Mbps and my work connection are subjectively pretty much equivalent. Maybe if I'm loading big files from somewhere that isn't throttling me, but I'm certainly unconvinced I should pay Comcast more for something faster than my current con…
In my building we have FiOS and Comcast. In Baltimore, Verizon doesn't have a video license, just internet. But it's 50/15 for $50/month, and I always get 50/20.
One day, the ONT on my floor went out and nobody noticed but me. Apparently, I was the only person on the floor (of dozens of apartments) to subscribe since the building was built 5 years ago. People on HN like to believe that what the market really wants is a fast dumb pipe for watching Netflix/Youtube, but it's a fantasy world.
The reality is that there's little money in the dumb pipes. The money is in content: in Comcast's case video content, and in Google's case, web apps and ads. Existing cable networks are plenty fast enough for video, so Comcast doesn't bother upgrading. They're not fast enough to enable the future Google envisions, where you store all your content "in the cloud" (and they datamine it to sell you ads), so they're building fiber. It's that easy to understand.
Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Google will roll out fiber even if it's somewhat unprofitable just to slowly squeeze the ISP's into obeisance. Anti-competitive conduct is good when Google does it?
Seems like the opposite of anti-competitive from my perspective.
Dumping a product on the market at below-cost in order to force your competitors out of business is classic anti-competitive conduct.