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Advancing our amazing bet

googlefiberblog.blogspot.com

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Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#91

Post by red_phone »

toast0 wrote: post #86
red_phone wrote: post #68

I think my experiences as a Google Fiber subscriber here in Provo might help illustrate why things haven't gone as well for Google as they (and we) initially expected. It turns out that delivering gigabit fiber to the home, though a remarkable technical achievement, isn't transformative in the way that all of us living here assumed it would be. It turns out that almost none of the internet resources commonly consumed…

> every technically-inclined person in the city quickly discovered that Ethernet controllers in consumer PC's can't come close to pushing gigabit Ethernet, regardless of what's printed on the box Really? I have a chromebox (CPU is Haswell Celeron 2955U, NIC is Realtek 8168), running Windows and can hit about 950M down/833M up on dslreports speedtest when my ATT fiber is having a good day. I thought Realtek nics were…

Macs also do pretty well with stock NICs.

This is well outside my area of expertise, but I think it may have been as much a chipset or bus issue as anything (e.g. other limitations presented by the motherboard), as all the issues I've observed or heard about have been with onboard NICs. Even the cheapest add-on cards performed loads better...

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#92

Post by NotSammyHagar »

toast0 wrote: post #86
red_phone wrote: post #68

I think my experiences as a Google Fiber subscriber here in Provo might help illustrate why things haven't gone as well for Google as they (and we) initially expected. It turns out that delivering gigabit fiber to the home, though a remarkable technical achievement, isn't transformative in the way that all of us living here assumed it would be. It turns out that almost none of the internet resources commonly consumed…

> every technically-inclined person in the city quickly discovered that Ethernet controllers in consumer PC's can't come close to pushing gigabit Ethernet, regardless of what's printed on the box Really? I have a chromebox (CPU is Haswell Celeron 2955U, NIC is Realtek 8168), running Windows and can hit about 950M down/833M up on dslreports speedtest when my ATT fiber is having a good day. I thought Realtek nics were…

I measured my pcs can all do about 1 gig too. I think that claim is incorrect.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#94

Post by NotSammyHagar »

olegkikin wrote: post #69
cobookman wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its really the same cost. the actual fiber itself is cheap compared to the costs of laying it.

Yes, that's what I said. But you can hook up 5 times the customers at that same cost.

No, the vast majority of the cost is digging the trenches and installing at the house. The cost once that is done is small, the difference between 200 and 1 gig is not that much over 1000 houses.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#96

Post by sakopov »

If Fiber does shut down it's going to be pretty devastating for Google's reputation going forward. We're talking about upsetting a whole different demographic of people that fall outside of typical Google users. These are going to be average Joes and Janes most of whom probably don't even use other Google products. They simply jumped on the internet deal because most of their neighborhood did. You abandon these people and they'll never buy any other of your products again. If Google thinks this is going to go over similarly to the shutdown of Reader than i think they'll be in a for a surprise.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#97

Post by flyosity »

Quick story: here in Apex, NC, Google announced they'd bring Fiber here and everybody was really excited. A few months later when the website went up, everyone I know entered their address to check availability and it turns out that Google decided to draw the "line" just outside our town, stopping short of including Apex (a suburb of Raleigh) but including other suburbs like Cary and Morrisville.

The whole town was pissed. We were excited for Google Fiber and then had it taken away from us when they had previously said Apex would be included.

Fast forward another few months and we heard rumblings that AT&T might be debuting their GigaPower fiber service in Apex. Soon after, AT&T verified this rumor then started running fiber lines all over. My neighborhood (and others in Apex near me) all got gigabit fiber for under $100/mo, AND it turns out Google dragged their feet with the surrounding suburbs and they didn't get Google Fiber till months later, but by then everyone had just signed up for AT&T GigaPower and forgot all about Google.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#98

Post by stevenbedrick »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #63
cr0sh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Here's a box, a wire, and a map of other customers' locations. Plug into their jack, and if you can convince others to plug into yours, we'll give you a discount on your monthly bill based on how many you sign up." How would that break any laws? It's essentially doing a commercial mesh-net of sorts, like many are already doing in Europe and elsewhere. If instead, they gave you a box and a map - and that box suppor…

The box wouldn't be WiFi. That doesn't have enough bandwidth for the target results. It would be a wire or optical fiber, and it probably won't be a continuous stream of direct neighbors: people would run it across the street through storm sewers, string it up on utility poles, bury it an inch deep across the local park or unknowing intermediate neighbors, or even renting a trencher or pipe layer and installing it li…

And that's _exactly_ why Google didn't go that route! I'm all in favor of sticking it to Comcast/Time Warner/whomever, but I very much do _not_ want my neighbors taking it upon themselves to try and run homebrew fiber through the city park by my house, or under my backyard without my knowledge or permission. If I owned utility poles, I would presumably have some opinions about people climbing up to install their own cables, and if I didn't, I'm sure that whoever I buy liability insurance from would!

Look, there are reasons why cities have permitting processes. Those reasons sometimes do include regulatory capture, etc., but generally they have to do with making it possible for large numbers of people to make productive and stable use of shared resources and infrastructure in an organized manner. I'll be the first one to agree that some permitting processes in some areas are imperfect, but that's not a reason to ignore them whole-hog.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#99

Post by dajohnson89 »

duaneb wrote: post #66
cr0sh wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Here's a box, a wire, and a map of other customers' locations. Plug into their jack, and if you can convince others to plug into yours, we'll give you a discount on your monthly bill based on how many you sign up." How would that break any laws? It's essentially doing a commercial mesh-net of sorts, like many are already doing in Europe and elsewhere. If instead, they gave you a box and a map - and that box suppor…

> How would that break any laws? It's essentially doing a commercial mesh-net of sorts, like many are already doing in Europe and elsewhere. I believe—depending on the municipality—if you knowingly and explicitly share internet with others you open yourself up to the sorts of regulation ISPs have to deal with.

For some reason that was the most depressing thing I've ever read about the future of the internet.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#100

Post by rayiner »

Inconel wrote: post #14

I won't be surprised if this news is met with the usual sentiment that Google abandons everything that isn't immediately hugely successful, and while I often share that criticism of Google, I can't really fault them too much in this case. Getting a nationwide ISP up and running from scratch just seems like an almost impossible task. This is disappointing to me nonetheless. Can someone with knowledge of the industry e…

The biggest hurdle is simply the "physics" of building a fiber network. It's not just expensive to run fiber by every household. That expense is effectively multiplied by a factor of three because you can really only ever hope to get about 1/3 of the market. That's about what Fiber plateaued at, and what Verizon FiOS has plateaued at. So if it costs $1000 to run fiber past a house and $500 to connect a house, and you manage to get 1/3 of houses you pass to sign up, your net cost per house is 3 x $1,000 + $500 = $3,500.

The existing telecom companies definitely used legal tactics to discourage fiber rollout. But nobody manages to deploy telecom infrastructure without dealing with lots of lawsuits. AT&T might have complained about Google moving its fibers on AT&T polls, but at any given time it's facing lawsuits over stuff like fiber cabinet siting.

Even with those lawsuits, Google got a much better deal on the regulatory front than incumbent companies. Every Fiber city granted fast-track permitting, and declined to impose build-out requirements. That's huge. Ordinarily, cities force ISPs to build out to all neighborhoods without regard for probable subscribership. Google totally bypassed that with its "Fiberhood" model, where it built out to neighborhoods with demonstrated interest. Nobody else in the industry gets that kind of preferential treatment. Google got it because of the huge amount of goodwill Google has as a brand.

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