Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Fiber Plans & Pricing

fiber.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 487 posts

Re: Google Fiber Plans & Pricing

#201

Post by wmf »

brlewis wrote: post #179
maratd wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> contemptible customer support Because Google will be so much better? Look, I hate telcos just like the next guy, but the suckage is mostly due to the nature of the business. They form natural monopolies and that sort of thing doesn't lead to customer satisfaction. The only way that sector is going to get truly disrupted is through gigabit wireless internet. You can have multiple competitors in one space with compar…

The free tier? That's $300 up front. I expect some of that $300 defrays their ongoing marginal costs. See also sibling comments by eavc and EthanHeilman. Free Internet $0/mo $300 construction fee (one time or $25/mo for 12 mo)

From what I've read, FTTH installation costs over $700 per house so $300 doesn't sound like it's defraying much.

Re: Google Fiber Plans & Pricing

#202

Post by olifante »

smacktoward wrote: post #141
duaneb wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is $120/mo good? That's more than any other bill I pay except rent.

It's comparable to the price of the usual "Triple Play" Internet+cable+phone service offers from cable companies and telcos.

It still sounds outrageously expensive to me. In Portugal the cheapest fiber triple-play plans cost $40 a month.

Re: Google Fiber Plans & Pricing

#203

Post by bryanlarsen »

azakai wrote: post #58

Does anyone know how they make money from the free option?

They don't. The $300 installation fee doesn't cover the cost of running fiber to your house + the cost of the box.

But it's hugely cheaper to wire your house at the same time they are wiring your neighbours. That's the catch -- the deal disappears once the neighbourhood is connected. They're not going to do a truck roll for $300.

Once your house is connected, upsell potential is a lot better than if it isn't.

Re: Google Fiber Plans & Pricing

#204

Post by sp332 »

tnorthcutt wrote: post #152
betterth wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah! Think: a harddrive writes at what an average of 75MB/s [1], and 1Gbit internet is 125MB/s [2]. (Note, Google currently advertises 'up to 1Gbit up and down'). This means that dropbox no longer "syncs". It's just another harddrive in terms of how it works. Copies to and from just as quickly as your harddrive. Heck, it seems like if you installed an application to your dropbox, and ran your computer off of an S…

First, even if you "installed an application to your dropbox", it would still be running from your local machine - that's just how Dropbox works. Second, even if it were running the application from Dropbox's server(s) (it seems like that's what you mean?), it would still have to read from their servers - you can't magically eliminate a bottleneck just by moving it to a different physical computer; data still has to…

Hm, could you write a client using the Dropbox API wrapped in, say, a FUSE filesystem driver? Just to use the remote storage directly as a filesystem?

Re: Google Fiber Plans & Pricing

#205

Post by kennon »

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #200
api wrote: post #29

Thank GOD they're disrupting this industry. All the telcos are worthless "Soviet bureaus" that deserve death. It's really sort of amazing to think about. In all my years on this planet I have never been pleased with a telecom company. Never. I have always felt like I was paying far too much for inferior service, contemptible customer support, and endless efforts to further "monetize" me through harassing phone calls…

I'm actually somewhat content with my broadband options. No, I'm not ecstatic and am glad this is happening but PLEASE someone disrupt the damn cell phone business. My ISP doesn't install software on my computer, doesn't hit me with mystery fees, and doesn't tell MS or Apple what to do, but cell carriers do all these things and more. >and endless efforts to further "monetize" me through harassing phone calls trying t…

> My ISP doesn't install software on my computer, ...

Not for lack of trying. I recently helped my friend set up Comcast and part of the installation process included downloading a required suite of "configuration" software. We were able to figure out a way around it but most people probably just click through without a thought.

Re: Google Fiber Plans & Pricing

#206

Post by untog »

jevinskie wrote: post #30
untog wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$120/mo for cutting edge consumer entertainment is just a slap in the face to other service providers. I pay $120/mo in New York and get high speed internet, and cable TV with HBO (conspicuously missing from Google's offering) and ESPN. Don't get me wrong, I'd switch to Google in a heartbeat, but I don't actually think that $120 price point is much of a slap in the face to existing providers. EDIT: and this is just i…

How is $70 w/o TV and $120 w/ TV not a slap in the face to other ISPs when it gives you gigabit without data caps?!

Because most customers don't care about gigabit. I'm a tech geek and I don't care about it- my existing speed (around 10mpbs, I think) has rarely posed problems for me.

In any case, $120 in Kansas City is not ever going to translate to $120 in New York City.

Re: Google Fiber Plans & Pricing

#207

Post by danso »

dag11 wrote: post #146
mehulkar wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's different because Comcast/Verizon don't have your email and your calendar and your web surfing habits and your voicemail and your text messages and your contacts and did I mention your email?

Huh? Many people use Comcast/Verizon-provided email services. Most people use them for their home voicemail too. And they can absolutely see your surfing habits if they want to -- excluding encrypted communications, of course.

There's a gulf of difference between having access to your surfing habits and having access to that information via a structured database.

Re: Google Fiber Plans & Pricing

#208

Post by sadga »

potatolicious wrote: post #164
paulitex wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is not a single other industry I can say that about, certainly not one that comes to mind so quickly. Airlines? > contemptible customer support IMHO better than Google's dogmatic avoidance of any kind of customer support.

> "Airlines?" Heh. Flying is a terrible experience because what most people pay for is the transportation equivalent of a Wal-Mart jar of pickles. The price of flying, especially as a proportion of income, has tanked since the golden age we all yearn for. There's a reason airlines no longer serve meals, give out free pillows, and are still going bankrupt every few years - the margins are razor thin and the competitio…

Airline bankruptcy is a normal business activity, akin to an occasional server refresh in the data center.. It doesn't disrupt the overall airline industry, and it's not a catastrophe to a bankrupt airline.

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/unions-and-airlines

Re: Google Fiber Plans & Pricing

#209

Post by agildehaus »

lsc wrote: post #72
stephengillie wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, Amazon cloud storage, et al exist today if we could send data across the US at even just 650Mbps?

yes. They would have to dramatically decrease their bandwidth charges, and they'd have to lower their charges in general (just 'cause the barrier to entry for their competition would be lower) but if anything, having a fat pipe at home would make storing things remotely a lot more attractive. Think about it; with that kind of a pipe, you could boot your desktop off of a drive in my datacenter, two cities away.

You could, but the latency would still suck.

Re: Google Fiber Plans & Pricing

#210

Post by htf »

cryptoz wrote: post #53
Xcelerate wrote: post #25

When I was at Georgia Tech, I got 650 Mbps. You realize the bottleneck isn't your connection at that point -- it's everyone else's. Which means a lot of sites still download just as slow. Although the big sites have optimized data centers, so it was pretty cool downloading an entire OS in a few seconds (although I think my hard drive write speed limited that a bit too). My father works in the fiber optics industry an…

> every person would have more bandwidth than they knew what to do with. I think that is exactly the point. That's why they are doing this; Google doesn't know what exactly will happen when everyone in the USA/world has fiber connections, but they do know that incredible innovation will come. What kind of applications will be built? What kind of applications can be built? Couple this with the increasing computing pow…

Can you give examples you have in mind of AI applications that requires high bandwidth? Something related to vision maybe?
Post reply on HN