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Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

nytimes.com

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Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#301

Post by ajford »

gopalv wrote: post #254
jamesblonde wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal evidence. I live in Stockholm. I talk at a conference about once/month, nearly always outside Sweden. Nearly every industrial conference has problems with wifi. Never in Sweden. Anywhere do we have problems at hotels, venues, massive conferences. We have the bandwidth. Most other countries do not, and leaving Sweden is always like going back in time, tbh. Everybody i know has fibre to the home, irrespective…

> The suburban house people complain that it costs them 1-2k Euro to pay for the fibre, but they pay for it. I think that's the difference - the costs are upfront, not paid by capital/loan with the subscriber having to pay for it eventually. Rationally, most people wouldn't want to pay that much into a US cable/net provider, considering their historical experience with them.

I would totally pay 1-2k upfront (assuming I owned the home or was planing to stay at least 5 years) if I "owned" the fiber and could choose my own ISP.

At that level of competition, it could easily drive the prices down into the $10-20 range for high bandwidth, which would probably break even with current cable internet prices now.

I pay nearly $100/mo for 300Mbps/20Mbps since I have about 9 active users in my home. I pay about $1.2k per year in internet, so $1-2k upfront for cheaper monthly pricing and more competitive features.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#302

Post by kmicklas »

rayiner wrote: post #204
kmicklas wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No urban area in the U.S. is as dense as Stockholm's (3,500). NYC is at the low end of that range (2,000), and is less dense than a bunch of Swedish cities with just ~50-100k people. Wat. NYC is over 10k/km^2. Manhattan is over 25k/km^2.

The "NYC" urban area encompasses NYC + Westchester + Long Island + Newark + parts of CT. Half of the population that lives/works in/around New York lives outside of the city proper.

Okay but then you can't compare that to Stockholm proper. It should be exceedingly obvious to anyone who has even Google image searched the two cities that NYC is much denser.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#303

Post by johndevor »

Symbiote wrote: post #259
johndevor wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, I have 250/100 mbit/s for free. This isn't "free" - your taxes pay for it.

No, his pays for it with his rent, the same way my rent includes heating. The owner of the building has probably signed a deal to get a good rate for everyone. Fine if you like it, but a waste of money if you'd prefer a different provider.

Nope.

> The municipalities own (most of) the networks

The municipalities use his tax money.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#304

Post by j3097736 »

josh2600 wrote: post #81

I wrote about this elsewhere and am pasting my thoughts here as I think they're relevant to this community: 1) Google Fiber is dead. Long Live Google ISP. Google cannot afford to lay fiber in the ground because it's a long game and Google doesn't really want to play the long game (they just want to put pressure on competitors so they can move more bits along the wires, generating more searches and more streams with w…

>What I wonder about, given that we have no cities running on majority wireless point to points, is what happens when you hit scale?

As long as there is line of sight, the tower has fiber, the hardware upgraded as the network grows and beamforming technology continues to improve it shouldn't be an issue.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#305

Post by selectodude »

Retric wrote: post #231
rayiner wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that Blacksburg and Charleston have 50,000 people, while Munich has 1.5 million people.

Las Vegas has 600,000 people and the same thing. While less extreme, Chicago has over 2.5 million people and farmland is very close by.

The farmland is over 7 million people away from the city.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#306

Post by sunflowerfly »

gopalv wrote: post #254
jamesblonde wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotal evidence. I live in Stockholm. I talk at a conference about once/month, nearly always outside Sweden. Nearly every industrial conference has problems with wifi. Never in Sweden. Anywhere do we have problems at hotels, venues, massive conferences. We have the bandwidth. Most other countries do not, and leaving Sweden is always like going back in time, tbh. Everybody i know has fibre to the home, irrespective…

> The suburban house people complain that it costs them 1-2k Euro to pay for the fibre, but they pay for it. I think that's the difference - the costs are upfront, not paid by capital/loan with the subscriber having to pay for it eventually. Rationally, most people wouldn't want to pay that much into a US cable/net provider, considering their historical experience with them.

In the US we typically capitalize utility projects over long time periods, e.g. 30 years. When you pay your water bill the loan is added into the base payment before usage. We built electricity to virtually every home in the US, we could build fiber too.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#307

Post by RyJones »

garrettgrimsley wrote: post #298
josh2600 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put the fiber in the ground. There are pieces of conduit that we run fiber through into your building. Inside your building there's a fiber termination point that hands off to ethernet. On the other end is a repeater/node that boosts the signal from the other termination point back in the DC.

I'm not expert on this, but I think that the use of a horizontal drill is more common. Check out this horizontal drill: http://www.ballantineinc.com/sites/default/files/img/Copy%20... See this diagram for how they're used: http://www.ajvac.ca/images/directional%20drill%20diag2.jpg

For a city like San Francisco, only a fraction of what is in the ground is mapped. The only reasonable option is many places is to dig up the ground and look at what you're working with.

Even in the area I live in, ripping up the streets is how it's done. I've only seen horizontal boring machines deployed a few times around here. Maybe they're used a lot and I don't notice them because I don't have to drive around them, but I do keep a eye open for them in the wild. I considered renting or buying one for a project and was impressed how cheap they are, but the benefit of burying things versus the price - no contest.

What I learned, though, is there are eBay-like markets for TBMs and it seems most people buy one with so many hours on it, use it for a project, and sell it +so many hours. I didn't find the thriving rental market I expected.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#308

Post by Aloha »

pjlegato wrote: post #291
Aloha wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general, democracies have corruption problems, the US doesn't seem any worse than the median.

I would go even farther and assert that the US is much less corrupt than the vast majority of democracies in the world.

I'd agree with you, I'd go further to say that there are very very few less corrupt than us either.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#309

Post by ryao »

mikeash wrote: post #250
ryao wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding is that view only applies when the federal government is doing it. If a local government is doing it, the only ones that claim this are the people who would be losing business.

Laws restricting or prohibiting local governments from providing internet access to inhabitants are pretty common. I'm sure the actual underlying reason involves regulatory capture and lobbying from incumbents, but the unfair competition angle is convincing enough for the legislators in question to go ahead with it and not get ejected from office.

A big problem there is that no one knows what laws are on the books in their own states regarding this. I know I do not in New York. I want to look it up at some point, but I don it yet know how.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#310

Post by jakelarkin »

mmanfrin wrote: post #295
SEJeff wrote: post #13

Well google announced they were exploring a fiber rollout in Chicago. Now both AT&T along with Time Warner Cable have 1G service throughout parts of the city. Alternatively, one can look at this not as a failure, but as a success. The point of Google fiber was to force carriers to get faster internet to everyone. It appears that it has been working. This benefits google directly as their properties such as Youtube ca…

Chicago is 1% of the country. I live in the Bay Area (Berkeley). My only choice above 20mbits is Comcast. AT&T's lines near me are old, I can get a max of 18mbits with them; Sonic says I can get about 12. I own my own home, so I can't get Webpass. LMI and the other local ISPs offer things like 3mbps for $90. I have literally zero reasonable choice other than Comcast. I'd happily pay double what Google charges for Fib…

Lmi and Paxio started a 1G fiber rollout but it only covers a few streets in West Berkeley.

It took 5 weeks to get Comcast wired at my house in Berkeley. Terrifying that the next best options available to me were Unwired 10Mbps (burst & shared) wireless for $90/month or 1.5Mbps DSL (gah).

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