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

Google Fiber Austin

fiber.google.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 157 posts

Re: Google Fiber Austin

#51

Post by ollebro »

discardorama wrote: post #19
oimaz wrote: post #3

It is sad that silicon valley has been so slow to adopt google fiber

Agreed. Whenever there's a comparison of our pathetic speeds with those in Korea/Japan, people claim "the US is a huge country", etc. However, San Francisco's density (6600/km^2) is higher than that of Tokyo (6000/km^2); why doesn't SF have FTTH?

The denstity where I live is about 20/km^2. Me and all my neighbours have fiber and 1Gbit cost about 30$ a month.

Sweden is spending a lot of money digging down fiber for everyone in Sweden right now.

Re: Google Fiber Austin

#52

Post by nostromo »

freeasinfree wrote: post #30
oimaz wrote: post #3

It is sad that silicon valley has been so slow to adopt google fiber

Because not all cities want to sell their souls to Google: http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/09/11/the-real-cost-of-goog... Edit: Google-washed version of what they demand from cities: https://fiber.storage.googleapis.com/legal/googlefibercitych...

"Free" access to right-of-way and waived fees for permits are a small price to pay.

Better yet, cities should eliminate them entirely to encourage even more competition. All those rules do is create barriers to entry that prop up the existing players.

Re: Google Fiber Austin

#53

Post by avalaunch »

reportingsjr wrote: post #13
justaman wrote: post #6

I still think Google is at risk of forming a monopoly and are at risk of becoming Bell 2.0. Unfortunately due to the lack of quality ISP's, the first to offer residential fiber to the perimeter will rapidly absorb the market.

If they invent and implement as many things as Bell I'm almost ok with that. For what it is worth I have seen the effect of google fiber locally (Cincinnati) even though Google has no plans of expanding to here any time soon. Cincinnati Bell recently unveiled a 1Gbps residential plan for $70/mo. This was a response to the city council approaching Google to see what they would need to do to bring fiber here.

It's only 70/month for the first year and then 80/month after that. Also, they only have 20% coverage of the city so for most of us we're still stuck with the usual slow speeds. And finally their customer service is just as bad (maybe even worse, if that's possible) than Time Warner. I wish they hadn't offered gigabit speeds as I fear that'll slow the arrival of Google fiber which would be so much nicer.

Re: Google Fiber Austin

#54

Post by mtviewdave »

fizzbatter wrote: post #33
bdcravens wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not something an area "adopts" - Google initiates that discussion, as far as I know: https://fiber.google.com/newcities/

I'm not sure who starts it, but they're very clearly (and openly) rolling it out based on not only logical locations, but willingness of cities. Some places are just hard to get into, like Seattle[0]. [0]: http://crosscut.com/2014/03/04/business/118993/google-fiber-...

From an email I got from the Google Fiber team last May:

"We’ve been impressed by how enthusiastic the City of Mountain View has been as we’ve worked with them over the past few months — so let’s take a moment to thank them for everything they’ve done so far."

The City is also working on the physical infrastructure Google needs:

http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2014/09/26/google-fiber-gets-go...

I can't speak for other cities in the area, but for Mountain View, the belief that Google Fiber expansion is being held up by government inaction or unwillingness, is unwarranted.

(The one exception is San Francisco, which is a mess whenever anyone wants to build anything anywhere in the City, but SF's an outlier in that regard)

Re: Google Fiber Austin

#55

Post by drzaiusapelord »

intopieces wrote: post #39
baddox wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I have U-verse in Soma. Apparently my apartment building has a "deal" with AT&T so that no other TV/Internet providers can work there. And if you're curious, the U-verse Internet plans are awful.

That's surprising. I thought the FCC banned those types of deals: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/05/federal-court-uph...

They did. So now you are free to call Comast or whoever and receive a $250,000 invoice to run wire to and into your 500+ unit building with all the regulation, construction, union politics, city permits, bribes, etc it takes to get there.

These contracts aren't these evil things as much as they are there to recoup investment on the work AT&T put into that building. The neat part is that due to the cost of competitors walking in, the contracts don't even need to exist anymore. Its going to be a hard sell to get Comcast in there when AT&T already has the home field advantage.

Re: Google Fiber Austin

#56

Post by eob »

bretthoerner wrote: post #12
justaman wrote: post #6

I still think Google is at risk of forming a monopoly and are at risk of becoming Bell 2.0. Unfortunately due to the lack of quality ISP's, the first to offer residential fiber to the perimeter will rapidly absorb the market.

Maybe in some areas. Here in Austin AT&T, Time Warner and the local ISP Grande are all now offering cheap plans from 300Mbps to full gigabit because Google is coming to town and they need to compete. I pay something around $50 for 300Mbps (no cap) from Time Warner and it works great.

Wow. Just as another data point to show how monopolies stifle progress, in Cambridge MA I pay $50/mo for 6Mmbps. Comcast is the only Internet company available.

Re: Google Fiber Austin

#57

Post by delinka »

underwires wrote: post #40
discardorama wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Whenever there's a comparison of our pathetic speeds with those in Korea/Japan, people claim "the US is a huge country", etc. However, San Francisco's density (6600/km^2) is higher than that of Tokyo (6000/km^2); why doesn't SF have FTTH?

Tokyo's density is more like 8800/km^2

Wikipedia disagrees. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo#cite_ref-population_3-0

Re: Google Fiber Austin

#58

Post by josu »

shittyanalogy wrote: post #43

Damn, one time $300 fee for "Up to" 5 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload. That's like getting free internet for 6 and a half years[1] from current providers after 6 months. And if you want to upgrade you've already got the hardware. I wonder what the minimum time of undercutting at a loss service they can offer is without it being considered anti-competitive. [1] They guarantee 7 years of free service https://fiber.goog…

Is there any evidence that they are operating at a loss?

For 2013 Comcast reported 13.5 billion operating income on 64.6 revenue [1]. This means that they could potentially lower their prices 20% without incurring in losses. If we assume that Google is able to operate more efficiently, which isn't such a bold assumption, they could potentially undercut prices even more. On top of that, we could also assume that in terms of infraestructure the cost of offering 10mbps is simillar to offering 1 gbps.

So I'm not that sure that they are operating at a loss.

[1] http://files.shareholder.com/downloads/CMCSA/3686143613x0xS1...

Re: Google Fiber Austin

#59

Post by psychometry »

fixermark wrote: post #37
psychometry wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that smart people in both business and technology are attracted to hard problems that are intellectually challenging. Dealing with the corruption and the entrenched bureaucracy of local, state, and federal governments doesn't qualify as an "interesting" problem for these types of people. It's why you don't see many scientists in elected office.

I used to feel the same way, except that this really boxes "intellectually challenging" into a fascinatingly narrow set of problems. The meme that dealing with problems of physics and mathematics is somehow harder or more noble than dealing with problems of people should probably be considered harmful.

I don't think my definition is narrow or restrictive at all. You're forgetting all the other fields of human interest, like the humanities, healthcare, transportation, engineering, the arts, etc. That's a pretty wide swath and only a small subset of the "interesting" problems in those fields are dependent on getting your hands dirty with politics.

Re: Google Fiber Austin

#60

Post by logn »

javajosh wrote: post #21

Does anyone know for certain whether Google data mine's their Fiber data?

All information we collect about the use of Google Fiber TV (including use of programs and applications available through Google Fiber TV) may be associated with the Google Account being used for Google Fiber TV.

... information from the use of Google Fiber Internet (such as URLs of websites visited or content of communications) will not be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, except with your consent or to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.

https://fiber.google.com/legal/privacy.html

They don't really mention what information not associated to a Google account is mined except that it follows the company-wide privacy policy. So they probably mine it. It's probably comparable to Google DNS: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/privacy

    Request domain name, e.g. www.google.com
    Request type, e.g. A (which stands for IPv4 record), AAAA (IPv6 record), NS, MX, TXT, etc.
    Transport protocol on which the request arrived, i.e. TCP or UDP
    Client's AS (autonomous system or ISP), e.g. AS15169
    User's geolocation information: i.e. geocode, region ID, city ID, and metro code
    Response code sent, e.g. SUCCESS, SERVFAIL, NXDOMAIN, etc.
    Whether the request hit our frontend cache
    Whether the request hit a cache elsewhere in the system (but not in the frontend)
    Absolute arrival time in seconds
    Total time taken to process the request end-to-end, in seconds
    Name of the Google machine that processed this request, e.g. machine101
    Google target IP to which this request was addressed, e.g. one of our anycast IP addresses (no relation to the user's IP)
Post reply on HN