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Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham

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Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham

#181

Post by daniel-cussen »

rayiner wrote: post #172
cheald wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is too true. It's more regulatory moats than regulatory capture. At any rate, it's not profitable after, probably, the first time.

It's strange how cities force companies to wire this way. It's as if they forced a luxury brand, Hermès, say, to open a store in the most shit-hole, criminal part of town in order to gain the right to open a store in the yuppie part of town.

Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham

#182

Post by michaelt »

cheald wrote: post #141
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #103

Earlier 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…

It's not just "regulatory capture" stopping competition in the broadband market.

Let's say I launch a startup fiber ISP that serves a small area, planning to use the profit from that area to expand to cover the entire country, and to show investors there's money to be made so they'll loan me money for the expansion. I invest a bunch of cash digging up the roads to lay new cables.

All the national incumbents have to do is drop their prices and increase their performance - which they can easily subsidize with profits from the vast majority of the country where my startup isn't operating, and economies of scale.

Now I've spent a load of money digging up the roads to launch a service that is lower performance and more expensive than my subsidized competitors. My planned expansion never goes ahead, and my initial investors lose their capital.

Far better to spend my time on a photo sharing app, where you only need nine employees to start a company you can sell to facebook for a billion dollars :)

Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham

#183

Post by Dylan16807 »

rayiner wrote: post #180
enjo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But those companies do the same thing to competition. If all sides are below-cost then it goes back to being fair competition, and it weakens monopoly power.

Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham

#184

Post by mitchty »

pconner wrote: post #127
res0nat0r wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have 105Mb Comcast internet service with no caps. I don't think the cap applies everywhere.

Atlanta was one of the "test markets" for AT&T's data cap (which is expected to be applied to other parts of the country soon). It might be the same for Comcast.

God I hope not, I just looked at my usage and one month (November) I had 800G of transfer.

I backed up a lot that month, been making a lot of videos lately.

Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham

#185

Post by bsder »

rayiner wrote: post #174
bsder wrote: post #140

Earlier 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?

No, but I'm also being generous in my engineering estimates to put Google in the least-flattering light. And the ISP's started this fight by blackmailing Google--don't bring a knife to a gunfight springs to mind.

Google won't take too much of a loss, if any. Once a fiber network is in place, it's almost maintenance-free for several years. In addition, Google built all their hardware from scratch to minimize cost.

Finally, you may find that Google Fiber turns the network over to the locality for anything too unprofitable. That's a win-win--the locality runs the network (and gains the profit of cable TV, etc.) and Google breaks the monopoly of the last mile.

Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham

#186

Post by tel »

jnem wrote: post #87
avn2109 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Excavation projects are famously successful in Boston, so the Google Fiber people are probably chomping at the bit to get their shovels in Beantown dirt. But seriously, your hypothesis about GF's non-evil fundamental DNA is a good one. It makes for a much better user experience.

Lol, I hope that was a joke (i think it was), for those who aren't aware, this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

is short for "end sarcasm".

Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham

#188

Post by Gimpei »

rayiner wrote: post #180
enjo wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not really... Anticompetitive would be if: 1) The entrenched players were selling at "zero profit" or price equal to marginal cost. (I find this dubious, they are monopolies after all. internet services are a fraction of the US price in many European countries) 2) Google were doing this with the intention of raising prices once all of its competitors go out of business. Since they are behemoths in their own rights, I just don't see Google having the desire to push a price war to this point.

In general "dumping" is hard to establish since no one is going to reveal their cost structure. In my experience it is normally an accusation flung by incumbents because that other guys stuff is too cheap.

If it breaks the back of the ISP monopolies and forces them into the role of unprofitable utility, all the better. That's the whole point of market forces, right?

Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham

#189

Post by davidhperry »

cwilson wrote: post #29
chiph wrote: post #25

Advice to all the folks in the new cities: Google deploys per-neighborhood, once signups reach a critical level. So get your apartment manager, your HOA, your neighbors to sign up, even if they don't have any immediate plans to switch. Post tear-off-tag signs in your community with the url: google.com/fiber

Yep, I had to do exactly this here in Austin. I literally went door to door, met many of my neighbors for the first time, and mentioned that we were only a few signatures away from fiber in our neighborhood. Even after getting all of the signatures we have to wait until June for our install, which kind of sucks, but it's better than continuing to deal with Time Warner.

You went around collecting literal signatures, or got your neighbors to enter addresses on fiber.google.com?

I'm in Nashville and willing to do a fair bit of legwork if it means it'll bump my neighborhood up on the install list.

Re: Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham

#190

Post by jusben1369 »

rkalla wrote: post #6

For anyone interested... the whole motivation of Google Fiber to motivate ISPs to stop gouging us does exactly what it is designed to do. Cox, in Phoenix, miraculously doubled everyone's speeds > 100mbps last year because they were concerned with our general happiness levels and wanted to show their affection. Nope... that's not it. Ran into two leads at Smash Burger in June of 2014 and asked them on the spot "When a…

I hear you. The problem is that the response is super local. ie I think Google hoped that just entering the space would spur activity on regional and national levels. So far though it seems to be only those specific cities that Google launches in then respond. I hope that changes but the bigger guys are calling Google's bluff and just matching it in the small cities (like mine wooo hooo!) that Google launches in.
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