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Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

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Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#361

Post by Symbiote »

johndevor wrote: post #303
Symbiote wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You appear to have an agenda here.

Please read the original comment in its entirety, beyond the first half of the two sentences you misleadingly quote.

> municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee.

> For example, I have 250/100 mbit/s for free. My rent pays for this.

He pays rent to the landlord, the landlord pays the broadband company for service to all the apartments, the broadband company pays the municipality to use the fibre network.

The fibre network might have used tax money initially, or it might have been laid with income from usage fees from other areas. There's no ongoing use of tax money for the network.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#362

Post by Grishnakh »

staticelf wrote: post #12

That sucks for citizens of the US. I think the Swedish (Nordic?) model for bringing internet connectivity to it's citizens is superior. The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded. For example, I have 250/1…

>I think the Swedish (Nordic?) model for bringing internet connectivity to it's citizens is superior.

That's no surprise. The Scandinavian countries are superior nations to every other country on Earth, except maybe Switzerland. Every quality-of-life study ranks them at the very top.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#363

Post by z3t4 »

rayiner wrote: post #359
z3t4 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The carrier owns the fiber, but you still have to pay $2500 upfront plus a $100-500 monthly fee. Most of the time you can choose the ISP though. If you live in a co-operative you can own the fiber yourself and buy transit. Then there's the municipal fiber carriers that will own the fiber, but you only pay the prime cost resulting in lower upfront and monthly fees, and if you live on the countryside you can get a gove…

Is this in Sweden? In the U.S., if a carrier wants to build fiber in a town or suburb, they have to build all the fiber first, then hope people sign up for $70-$100 per month with no money paid up front. What you describe sounds like a great model. It'd be very difficult to do it in the U.S.

Yes Sweden. The Carriers only own the last mile, then they rent fiber from the backbone. Some carriers have backbone fiber, but most of it is owned by government funded Tier 1 Carrier "Telia" that makes sure all providers and Carriers get equal access.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#364

Post by josh2600 »

j3097736 wrote: post #304
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.

I know of no city in the world that operates a primary network of point to points. I think it's a fascinating engineering problem with a bunch of unknown problems that will arise in the process of attempting to deliver the solution.

Things break in exciting ways at scale :).

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#365

Post by smartt »

arenaninja wrote: post #32
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…

That's nice for Chicago, and Austin, but what about LA, Houston, etc.? I pay $75/month for 150Mbps via Comcast... and most days a speed test will say around half of that, and there's infrequent outages (averaging roughly one every month). The only other service where I live is AT&T: 18Mbps for $50/month. And whatever you may think of Comcast, my experience with AT&T's service and customer service has been far, far wo…

Just to be clear, Google Fiber in Austin is more marketing than reality. A small area of town has it--most do not. And while the other players have now introduced fiber, their coverage is also limited to select neighborhoods.

So, I don't agree that it's nice for Austin. This removes the incentive for the other providers to continue expanding coverage, and the core of the city will likely be stuck on the old cable lines for much, much longer.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#366

Post by AnthonyMouse »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #277
chimeracoder wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Because a monopoly isn't inherently bad, if regulated properly. My monopoly water, gas, and electric providers do just fine; all highly reliably (and either a small or no profit right is granted). A monopoly provider is always bad for the consumer. (Occasionally, it is less bad for the consumer than any feasible alternative, but it is always a sign that the consumer is receiving the "short end" of the stick)[0]. Fo…

> A monopoly is pretty much inherently bad; it just so happens that sometimes it's unavoidable. But, as OP said, there's no reason to sanction a monopoly provider for an industry (or part of an industry) in which it is avoidable. But it is clearly not avoidable . If one of the largest tech companies in the world (with enormous profits and cash reserves) cannot afford to deploy fiber in major cities, it is clear that…

> But it is clearly not avoidable. If one of the largest tech companies in the world (with enormous profits and cash reserves) cannot afford to deploy fiber in major cities, it is clear that the private sector cannot reliably and affordably provide this service on the scale required.

You're talking about the wrong market. Putting the fiber in the ground is an unavoidable natural monopoly. But connecting that fiber to the rest of the world isn't -- the only reason there is a monopoly today is that the private incumbents are allowed to leverage the monopoly in the first market into a monopoly in the second one.

We could prohibit them from offering termination services and instead require the wires to be leased on the open market. The incumbents will lobby against that just as they do against municipal fiber, because they want to keep leveraging one monopoly into another. We are under no obligation to agree with them.

It's possible that having the municipality own the wires is actually better, or not. That is the whole privatization debate. But that has nothing to do with the fact that regardless of who owns the local wires, it is better to have competition in who terminates them. Because termination is not a natural monopoly.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#367

Post by rayiner »

z3t4 wrote: post #363
rayiner wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this in Sweden? In the U.S., if a carrier wants to build fiber in a town or suburb, they have to build all the fiber first, then hope people sign up for $70-$100 per month with no money paid up front. What you describe sounds like a great model. It'd be very difficult to do it in the U.S.

Yes Sweden. The Carriers only own the last mile, then they rent fiber from the backbone. Some carriers have backbone fiber, but most of it is owned by government funded Tier 1 Carrier "Telia" that makes sure all providers and Carriers get equal access.

Maybe that's why there is so much more fiber deployment in Sweden than in the U.S.? The fact that people are willing to pay the infrastructure costs up front? No carrier would be able to get a franchise under those terms in the U.S.

What do carriers in Sweden do with people who can't afford to pay the up front fee?

EDIT: Looking at Stokab, it looks like they don't require an up-front payment. But Stokab built its network over two decades, starting out in the core city and expanding based on market demand: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/sites/digital-age.... That model is illegal in almost every city in the U.S. Any carrier must agree to wire up a whole city on a very short timeline, even areas where there isn't sufficient market demand. Verizon was given less than 8 years to wire up all of New York City.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#368

Post by keypusher »

Ph0X wrote: post #140
samfisher83 wrote: post #16

Building infrastructure is hard. Even 100 years later we still have original AT&T (Verizon and AT&T) as the dominant telecommunications company. Google also seems to just give up on a lot of its products: Google+ Hangouts Project Ara Google Buzz Google video Orkut Talk Meebo etc. http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/visuel/2015/03/06/google-memori...

Yes, laying fiber line is hard. Which is why I think Fiber is pivoting. Look at this: https://webpass.net/blog/google-fiber-agrees-to-acquire-webp... They do point-to-point wireless transmission. This is perfect for cities, where you can place these on rooftops instead of laying underground fiber.

I have webpass, it's quite good. However it's only available in large apartment complexes, and I'm not sure that will ever change given the nature of their approach.

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#369

Post by a_thro_away »

refurb wrote: post #339
chimeracoder wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anything that is done at cost by the government is viewed by many as a lost potential profitable and taxable business; one that would drive up the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), a well used measure of an economy. No, that's not how GDP works. The GDP measurement is independent of whether the action is performed by the private or public sector. > Problem with using GDP, in my limited understanding, is that taxing thi…

Surprised you're getting downvoted. It's true, if the gov't performs a service, it's included in GDP. And no, taxes don't increase GDP.

I understand GDP as "taxable transactions".

Re: Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

#370

Post by a_thro_away »

chimeracoder wrote: post #223
a_thro_away wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything that is done at cost by the government is viewed by many as a lost potential profitable and taxable business; one that would drive up the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), a well used measure of an economy. Problem with using GDP, in my limited understanding, is that taxing things, even your breathing air, increases the GDP - I'd rather it not.

> Anything that is done at cost by the government is viewed by many as a lost potential profitable and taxable business; one that would drive up the GDP (Gross Domestic Product), a well used measure of an economy. No, that's not how GDP works. The GDP measurement is independent of whether the action is performed by the private or public sector. > Problem with using GDP, in my limited understanding, is that taxing thi…

Taxes are included in the GDP income method, which is why taxing even air (even if free) would increase GDP. The OECD defines GDP as "an aggregate measure of production equal to the sum of the gross values added of all resident and institutional units engaged in production (plus any taxes, and minus any subsidies, on products not included in the value of their outputs).”
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