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The future of Fiber

fiber.google.com

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Re: The future of Fiber

#61

Post by skyebook »

res0nat0r wrote: post #49
yeukhon wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

VZW stopped rolling out FIOS across the board I believe.

Yeah I've heard/seen this as well, they've done it in favor of expanding LTE coverage [0]

I'm astounded at how anyone at VZ thinks this could be a good idea.

[0] http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Verizon-Again-Confirms-Fi...

Re: The future of Fiber

#62

Post by kalleboo »

mason55 wrote: post #20
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…

> Why is SF or NY not an obvious candidate? At least in NYC most of the buildings are older buildings that have already been wired for copper and are very tough to rewire. It's a much bigger task to rewire a building than to run a drop to a house. So then you end up having no idea whether fiber is available in any specific building. Plus many buildings have signed exclusivity agreements. FiOS has the exact same probl…

That sounds strange to me. I live in Sweden and went apartment-hunting last year. Not one of the apartments I looked at was without fiber (technically, ethernet in the apartments, fiber to the building). Including buildings that pre-date WW1. They all had pre-existing cable and DSL as well. If there's a will, there's a way. I guess in the US there just isn't much of a will yet.

Re: The future of Fiber

#63

Post by abvdasker »

tdees40 wrote: post #14
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 suspect they mostly want a compliant political infrastructure and relatively easy construction. NYC and SF aren't really known for either. Also, NYC would probably be biting off more than Google Fiber has any interest in chewing at the moment. They're still scaling up, after all.

The beautiful thing about this in the long-term is that if Google Fiber succeeds and becomes more widespread, people will start to say, "Why don't we have this?" If this succeeds — and I have little doubt it will — local governments across the country will be under increasing pressure from their constituents to move away from the monopolistic deals most cities have now with Comcast.

I see this as a huge step in the right direction and cannot wait to see how it turns out.

Re: The future of Fiber

#68

Post by bertil »

JunkDNA wrote: post #41

I know it would be painful, and the local politics certifiably insane, but if Google wanted draw attention to the dysfunctional monopoly of the cable industry, there would be no better place to wire than Philly. Take the competition right into Comcast's back yard. Start with a rollout of the Philly 'burbs where the Comcast execs live and work inward toward the city from there.

I've seen detailed cellphone signal quality map (sensorly.com) and I can only confirm: the block around the CEO’s houses have far better signal. Having acquaintances rejoice over the ten-fold improvement (and how crisp their grand-children are on Skype now!) at the Club House would indeed hurt.

Re: The future of Fiber

#69

Post by res0nat0r »

skyebook wrote: post #61
res0nat0r wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VZW stopped rolling out FIOS across the board I believe.

Yeah I've heard/seen this as well, they've done it in favor of expanding LTE coverage [0] I'm astounded at how anyone at VZ thinks this could be a good idea. [0] http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Verizon-Again-Confirms-Fi...

I believe the FIOS demand wasn't high enough to justify the costs of expanding it any further.

Re: The future of Fiber

#70

Post by csense »

Why is there not a single city in the northeast or the Rust Belt?

Chicago, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh are all major cities that are at least "on the map" as far as tech is concerned. I know for a fact that the local authorities in Detroit, Cincinnati and Cleveland would bend over backwards for any project that has even the slightest whiff of economic development.

I can understand NYC being a special case that they don't want to deal with, but there are plenty of other cities in the region.

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