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The future of Fiber

fiber.google.com

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Re: The future of Fiber

#31

Post by yeukhon »

aetherson wrote: post #9

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 hold ups in deployments

Yeah. Excuse. I haven't heard any landlord in my neighborhood ever complain about this. A lot of my neighbor landlords (they don't actually live there, just for rent), when they come by we would have conversation about these things (because they know I do some computer stuff and they would come and ask for advice when TW goes down), they say they'd make more rent if FiOS was here.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Verizon-Accused-of-Laggin...

Re: The future of Fiber

#33

Post by baddox »

How is the residential Internet in the San Jose area cities listed? I'm in SF, and I can't believe how bad the Internet service is. It's worse and more expensive than what I had 4 years ago in my Midwest town of 100k people.

Re: The future of Fiber

#34

Post by justina1 »

malandrew wrote: post #10

Why not San Francisco, Washington D.C., Boston and NYC? San Francisco, NYC and Boston because they are big tech hubs where a lot of Googlers live and Washington D.C. because it is the seat of politics in this country and the best way to show what good can happen when we have broadband connectivity. In fact, rolling out Google Fiber in the capital cities of each state makes the most sense in general. You lobby the pol…

I can't speak for the other three cities, but San Francisco has a number of problems that would make it difficult for a Google Fiber rollout.

First, AT&T is already in the process of rolling out fiber to the home, or in some cases, fiber to the node with last mile copper. They have faced nothing but problems trying to do this from people in the city: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Groups-sue-S-F-trying-...

Density can be a nice benefit, but lack of space makes it hard to place the equipment necessary to serve fiber.

Second, a local provider Sonic.net is also rolling out fiber by taking the approach of starting in the closest thing San Francisco has to a less dense suburb (the Sunset). They've faced exactly the same issue (battles over placing Utility boxes).

Re: The future of Fiber

#35

Post by 27182818284 »

I'm really, really glad they chose Kansas City as the pilot city despite not living there. If they had just gone and chosen San Francisco, Chicago or New York, it would have been no more of an experiment than offering more cable channels to the big cities in the 1990s—It just is completely uninteresting.

On a side note, If you haven't been to KC's Startup Village, the climate is electric! It feels like something really real is going on there. It is just awesome to see someone with a coding question, you can walk literally a few doors down to a different house to ask one of the startups there. When you walk inside, you see rooms that should be living rooms with hackers on laptops and would-be dining rooms with iMacs setup on tables. Meanwhile a sleepy hacker is waking up and making breakfast in the kitchen. The climate is wonderful.

Re: The future of Fiber

#37

Post by heartbreak »

shmerl wrote: post #27
aetherson wrote: post #9

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…

I wish Google Fiber could be deployed in NY. However if you consider the cost of deployment, it's much cheaper to do it in a rural area than in the middle of the dense city. I.e. cost per meter of deployed cable can differ a lot.

None of the cities listed on that page are "rural" by any stretch of the imagination.

Re: The future of Fiber

#38

Post by higherpurpose »

aetherson wrote: post #9

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…

Utah: large NSA datacencer -> Good. See how this works?

Re: The future of Fiber

#39

Post by roc »

jonlucc wrote: post #23
turing wrote: post #19

Woo! Moving to Mountain View in June, so I'm excited to see this. On another note, I wonder if this will have any impact on the Comcast/Time Warner merger. Comcast has specifically called out Google Fiber as a source of legitimate competition in defending the merger[1]. With the announcement that Google could increase the number of Fiber cities 10-fold, that claim might have a little more weight. 1. http://gigaom.com…

I've been hearing that there will be no real threat to that merger. If that's true, then I see this as a real threat to the new Comcast; basically Google saying "you will have real competition even if you are massive". Edit: Otherwise, why would they announce this at this stage? They've only announced other cities when they were certain.

> "Otherwise, why would they announce this at this stage?"

Drum up local interest and support to help with any local political roadblocks.

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