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The future of Fiber

fiber.google.com

181–190 of 288 posts

Re: The future of Fiber

#181
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would go against their strategy. By wiring up all the GF-friendly cities first, people living in GF-unfriendly cities start asking "why can't we have that, too?" Thus ratcheting up pressure on the local political systems.

This is something that works in theory, but not real life. Internet is becoming a utility, and most people only ever have experienced one utility in their life. People in the SF Bay Area choose between AT&T DSL and Comcast cable internet - two of the WORST providers, ever. Verizon FiOS eats both their lunches, yet, nobody rabble rouses to ask for fiber in that area. If people in Silicon Valley won't even pressure the…

We have Sonic DSL as well (with significantly better customer service and uptime than AT&T or Comcast).

That said, I'd definitely be happy to 'cut the cable' with Google Fiber in Palo Alto. There's already a bunch of dark fiber spanning the city, Google Fiber is already active in adjacent Stanford property, the residents are (in general) willing to pay for quality service, and the city is not so large as to make the project untenable.

Of course, Palo Alto has a long history of community / municipal connectivity projects with mixed success, and a notoriously-fractious decision making process, so nobody here is holding their breath...

Re: The future of Fiber

#182
post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's a simple solution - municipal fiber everywhere with companies allowed to lease access. Internet access looks like a utility and quacks like a utility, so it should be treated like one. The timeline for breaking even on the investment has been pretty reasonably short in the examples I've seen.

The municipalities have no money to build, and more importantly, to maintain and continually upgrade, such networks. Heck, they can barely maintain utility systems that evolve far slower than internet connectivity: power and water. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/us/18water.html?_r=0 . People outside of HN won't be anywhere near sufficiently eager to earmark sufficient public dollars to properly maintain such…

Yep, it'll never happen.

Except where it did before the State stepped in to ensure Comcast/TWC didn't have competition.

But other than that it'll never happen.

Re: The future of Fiber

#183

Excited for Salt Lake City. We are growing our reddit office there a lot. It's a really exciting city to be in and this helps us a lot!

Reddit has an office in Salt Lake City?? Need any DevOps? :-P

It's redditgifts.com. Doesn't look like they're hiring for DevOps at the moment, but they are looking for devs (among other things): http://redditgifts.com/jobs/

Re: The future of Fiber

#184

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…

I recently had to restore a 500GB cloud backup over Cox. I called them to ask if they could give me an exemption for one month, and not only did they refuse, but they could not honestly tell me what would happen if I went over the cap, except that I would get an email about it and my Internet "might slow down".

I work from home, and can't afford any degradation of service, so I've been doing the restore piecemeal and checking https://myaccount.cox.net/internettools/datausage/usage.cox every day. It's annoying but doable.

What happens to you when you hit the cap?

Re: The future of Fiber

#185
post #167
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.

Good question! AC voltage is relatively safer because it crosses the zero point 120 times a second. If it passes through your body, your muscles will spasm but you will have an opportunity to pull away. Also, AC voltage will probably not sustain an arc at such a low voltage, again, because it is constantly switching polarity.

On the other hand DC voltage, once a connection has been made, will continue to flow through that path to complete the circuit. You can think of it as the electrons on the hot wire want very badly to get back to the place where they were generated (the source transformer under that covered up manhole). If they find a path through your body, it will continue to flow through your blood vessels until either you or the wire burns up, or the upstream transform faults. You basically become a fuse. If you are part of the circuit, you'd better hope there is somebody nearby to hit you you with a pole, because otherwise you are pretty much stuck that way. Also, DC voltage is much better at sustaining an arc, even below 100 volts, so it can set off an explosion that can ignite whatever dust is lying around the equipment. Google "arc flash" to see what this looks like.

Re: The future of Fiber

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many other countries have built high speed consumer fiber networks, some of them heavily regulated. Something isn't working in the United States.

The U.S. is ranked #8 in average broadband connection speed in Akamai's most recent State of the Internet. That puts it ahead of most of Europe: http://www.akamai.com/dl/documents/akamai_soti_q213.pdf?WT.m... (page 13). If you look at more densely populated coastal states, the U.S. looks even better. Yeah, South Korea has widespread fiber internet. More than half the country lives in the Seoul metro area. You can't c…

Nation-wide averages tell a story that no one is interested in. Do you have data on densely populated coastal states? I want to compare speed and speed/Mbps to areas like Warsaw and Stockholm with high density cities in the US.

Re: The future of Fiber

#188
post #31

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…

Just ask any NYC folks. How many of us are still waiting for that FIOS? I am waiting and waiting. And they promised to complete by 2014. We are almost three months into 2014 and I still have no FiOS access here. A bit above my area has already gotten FiOS two-three years ago and my area still hasn't gotten any! I am angry. We need to break this franchises. > The company also appears to be blaming landlords for any ho…

What's funny is that the rent premium for fiber is higher than the prices people complain about for Cable.
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