221–230 of 287 posts
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In Phoenix/Scottsdale? What are the major cross streets near him? How much? I'm down near Tatum & Cactus.
I love that in the Phoenix area, you can go across town and still be on something & Cactus.
I would love to see these guys bring us their MVNO Sprint product and/or build a technology park fed by Google Fiber instead, either of which would still have the desired effect of lowering consumer bandwidth costs.
I'm fully aware of the extreme cost of rolling out a fiber infrastructure in new locations, but I still wonder why Google isn't more aggressive with their expansion. While the upfront costs are great, they more or less have guaranteed success in most major cities. Nobody likes the incumbent telcos--they're hated all over the US. I just dream of a world in which we aren't getting raped by Comcast, TWC, and Cox. They a…
> I'm fully aware of the extreme cost of rolling out a fiber infrastructure in new locations, It's really not that much. I could do my entire town for a little under $9m. Fortunately, Google just announced they'd be coming here (Raleigh-Durham) so hopefully I won't have to.
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100?! That's phenomenal... I'll give them a call tonight and ask them to check with Charter and see what is available (for a decent price/a price they are OK with). Thanks for the heads up!
I just checked mine too and they doubled it. It was 30 and now it's 60. Not as great. They said it was already upgraded and I didn't need to call, but my speed tests were 30 before I called and 60 after I called....hmm.
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The big telecom companies got massive tax breaks at various times over the last 20 years to deploy high speed broadband, and essentially defrauded customers and tax payers by not doing what they said they would. One example of many: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131012/02124724852/decad...
Techdirt really has some of the most one sided and consistently terrible articles of any "news" site I've seen. Here is some actual relevant information related to the Google Fiber concessions, mainly in that they don't have to build out infrastructure to the entire city (unlike Comcast etc), and other breaks not given to previous providers: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-kansas-city-t... > Google rec…
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Regulatory capture doesn't have to mean literal corruption. It can cover situations where governments acting on their own and in good faith, assume the status quo and grandfather incumbents. It might not even be on purpose, but rather the logical consequence of a distaste for laws and regulations with retroactive effects. But the end result is the same: legal obligations that impact new players more than old. So the…
The "capture" part of the phrase necessarily means corruption. It's where incumbents control the regulatory process to keep competitors out. Unintended consequences from regulation is not "capture." In every city I've studied, incumbents are bound by the same requirement to build-out their network as potential competitors. I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but the only one that comes to mind is Google Fiber: the…
I guess it could be an argument about what corruption means, but I think that people underestimate how dysfunctional the legislative and regulatory processes can be even without any legal violations.
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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.
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Of course, most competition also died. In terms of free email, there's now... I think Outlook.com is the only one I see semi-regularly? Yahoo's email service is utterly dreadful and I seem to remember a lot of kerfuffle regarding them and mailing lists.
I never understood why people are hating on big companys that produce great effects and big market share. I can understanding people hatin horrible IE6, but gmail was and is fantastic and most people love it. Noting is stopping them from leaving to other provider (and there are still many other) but they are happy. So why is everything that has big market shares bad? How about we switch to a model where we gat bad at…
In any case, it's bad because it means that if I don't want to agree to Google's terms of service for whatever reason or just don't want to interact with them as a company (perhaps I disagree with some corporate policy of theirs), then I have to either deal with a worse experience, self-host, or pay money to a company like FastMail. If there were reasonable competition, I and many others could use them, and Google would have to convince us not to switch.