On a side note, If you haven't been to KC's Startup Village, the climate is electric! It feels like something really real is going on there. It is just awesome to see someone with a coding question, you can walk literally a few doors down to a different house to ask one of the startups there. When you walk inside, you see rooms that should be living rooms with hackers on laptops and would-be dining rooms with iMacs setup on tables. Meanwhile a sleepy hacker is waking up and making breakfast in the kitchen. The climate is wonderful.
Sun Tsu would flunk you out of strategy class. Why should Google engage with an evil, bribery-based, rent-seeking competitor, and their bought politicians, until they run out of relatively easier conquests, and have the revenue from those conquests funding further expansion, and their relationships with independent content creators at a much higher value from a larger customer base?
Particularly when those competitors are not seeking to confront Google, and are preferring to play rent-seeking games with anti-neutrality in their networks, thus making their end game even more brittle?
Depends on the audience. Joe Random Voter, seeing his cousin's internet being super fast, will carry that knowledge back to his hometown. He doesn't care how easy it was for Google, only that it's possible.
Well actually no they don't. They're going to prove their model is replicable and profitable, while not deploying to politically hostile environments.
...really? It sounds more to me like that hacker in the kitchen is being overworked and feels compelled to not even go home at night. Going straight from the bed to the computer (or vice versa) is an unhealthy, unsustainable lifestyle.
I don't think you're following. This isn't the company that has had a Series A and Series B.
The guy in that example lives there. There was another place that was hacking away with no air conditioning; It was just a bunch of passionate 18-year-olds with their baby of an idea. This isn't a W2-health-insurance-401k lifestyle, it is a Jobs-and-Woz-in-a-garage-we're-broke lifestyle—and that is one of the huge reasons it is exciting!!!
I implore you to visit. You can't walk away from a tour not feeling energized by everyone involved.
I remember a Comcast exec a few years ago made the point that it was hard to do deals with Hollywood execs because the execs all lived in places in California that didn't have Comcast service, and couldn't really see the innovations Comcast was talking about.
As someone who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs, I'm not sure if Comcast has the stranglehold in our area that you think it does. I only know one person that has Comcast and the only reason that person has it is because they don't have access to Verizon FIOS.
FIOS is faster, more stable and generally cheaper than Comcast Internet. Comcast constantly advertises how their Xfinity is faster for wireless, but they're basing that on the fact that Verizon gives you an 802.11g router while Comcast gives you an 802.11n router.
With FIOS, I pay $74.99 per month for 75 Mbps downstream, 35 Mbps upstream Internet with their Prime TV package and unlimited landline phone (need for alarm system). It's rock- of-gibraltar stable, I consistently get the same exact speed on speed tests that is faster than what I pay for, and it's cheap as hell.
With Comcast, it was ridiculously expensive, the speed was hit or miss and I generally had to reset the router and/or cable modem about once every few days.
So it would be great to have Google Fiber as an option and I hope it happens in the Philly area but there are places that are hurting for good options far more than we are.
But my point wasn't that Philadelphia isn't a competitive market. My point was that, as a Comcast executive, seeing Google fiber trucks all over your neighborhood and coffee shops is a bit of psychological warfare so to speak. Furthermore, you know Comcast has all sorts deals in place that help them maintain their monopoly. Google would bump into each of those head-on and make hay out of it in the local press and online. At a time when Philly is trying to increase its image in the national tech scene, this would be a very interesting place to shine some light.
Also, Verizon just rolled out some FIoS infrastructure in south philly, maybe 2-3 months ago. It was really cool walking around and seeing unfinished junction boxes with these cables running into them with huge "FIBER OPTIC CABLES" orange warnings on them.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climax%2C_North_Carolina
no, I'm not from Climax...but it's an awesome name for a...settlement?
Arizona - Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe California - San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto Georgia - Atlanta, Avondale Estates, Brookhaven, College Park, Decatur, East Point, Hapeville, Sandy Springs, Smyrna North Carolina - Charlotte, Carrboro, Cary, Chapel Hill, Durham, Garner, Morrisville, Raleigh Oregon - Portland, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Gresham, Lake Oswego, Tigard Tennessee - Nashville-Davidson Texas - San Antonio Utah - Salt Lake City
Arizona - Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe
California - San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto
Georgia - Atlanta, Avondale Estates, Brookhaven, College Park, Decatur, East Point, Hapeville, Sandy Springs, Smyrna
North Carolina - Charlotte, Carrboro, Cary, Chapel Hill, Durham, Garner, Morrisville, Raleigh
Oregon - Portland, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Gresham, Lake Oswego, Tigard
Tennessee - Nashville-Davidson
Texas - San Antonio
Utah - Salt Lake City
Arizona Phoenix
Scottsdale
Tempe
California San Jose
Santa Clara
Sunnyvale
Mountain View
Palo Alto
Georgia Atlanta
Avondale Estates
Brookhaven
College Park
Decatur
East Point
Hapeville
Sandy Springs
Smyrna
North Carolina Charlotte
Carrboro
Cary
Chapel Hill
Durham
Garner
Morrisville
Raleigh
Oregon Portland
Beaverton
Hillsboro
Gresham
Lake Oswego
Tigard
Tennessee Nashville-Davidson
Texas San Antonio
Utah Salt Lake City
cat jader \
| sed 's/ - /\t/g; s/, /\n\t/g' \
| awk -F'\t' '{ printf "%-18s%s\n", $1, $2 }'This article comes to mind, I recently, through normal work, started hitting Cox's 250GB max, I work on games and can easily send 4-8GB per day in assets/code to remote repos. Cringley from 2011...
http://www.cringely.com/2011/07/28/bandwidth-caps-are-rate-h...
This isn’t about capping ISP losses, but are about increasing ISP profits. The caps are a built-in revenue bump that will kick-in 2-3 years from now, circumventing any existing regulatory structure for setting rates. The regulators just haven’t realized it yet. By the time they do it may be too late.
Most U. S. broadband customers don’t get anywhere near that 250 gigabyte cap. The few who do hit those limits are big gamers or file downloaders for the most part. Maybe they do take unfair advantage of the system, but the question is whether this is the proper way to control their consumption? I don’t think it is.
In time we will all bump into these caps and our Internet bills will suddenly double as a result, circumventing competition and ending a 15 year downward broadband price trend.
ISPs win, we lose.
Unless there is competition. Bandwidth is as needed as roads, shipping, airplanes, etc to business and economies. This is an anti-competitive hostage situation we are in in the US. This is also anti-small business as many are run from home offices and co-location etc.
I work from home, and can't afford any degradation of service, so I've been doing the restore piecemeal and checking https://myaccount.cox.net/internettools/datausage/usage.cox every day. It's annoying but doable.
What happens to you when you hit the cap?
Sadly the next two tiers (yep we are there) only add 50GB (300) and 150GB (400 total), with the speeds of 25Mbps and up to 50Mbps but if you have higher speeds you will download more and be on HD more, get more files, backup more and always go over.
Comcast charges 20 cents per gigabyte in 50GB chunks over 300 after you use up your three "courtesy" overage months. There's a little monthly report in the billing site. The price is thousands of times the actual cost to Comcast, but at least I know the limits and the cost of going over them.
My understanding is that Comcast Business has no caps.
I have a 12/2 package through Cox and routinely go over the 250GB cap. Other than an automated email saying I'm over the cap, nothing happens.
A year ago, I used 750GB in a month after setting up online backup on a computer. Nary a word.
Google Fiber was announced almost four years ago and has only a few tens of thousands of subscribers. While it's fun to get excited about what Google Fiber could be, it will be years before any material percentage of the country has the opportunity to use Google Fiber.
Google is still building out small neighborhoods in Kansas City [1]
[0]https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Q-sGUEiuT9VN__VPsFeo... [1]https://fiber.google.com/cities/kansascity/#zone=Kansas+City...
Google can only move so fast with this given the stranglehold Comcast has on the market right now and the regulatory obstacles. There is a killing to be made by undercutting the monopolistic pricing and terrible service Comcast provides right now (not to mention the ways ownership of distribution might benefit Google's content).
TL;DR This is the next step in Google's big, slow play to become a major ISP.
[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-ns...
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30...
Everything you need to know is written in a very nice book, recently published:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu#The_Master_Switch
... you could have predicted well in advance that google would go this route.
Technical information collected from the use of Google Fiber Internet for network management, security or maintenance may be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, but such information associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber will not be used by other Google properties without your consent. Other 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
(Google Fiber TV, not so much)
I'm sure they're both nightmares to deal with permitting processes for. Is that it? Or is there something else that makes mid-tier, more spread-out cities more attractive?
The short answer is: it's much easier to build in a greenfield environment where there is a "helpful" local government, ready access to rights-of-way, and underserved population, easy construction costs, access to labor, favorable tax climate, and a host of other reasons that come before "lots of people who want gigabit speeds".
The economics of building (or overbuilding) a gigabit fiber network drive you towards areas where you can get a high degree of penetration for your investment. That's not going to happen in a place like NYC or SF. The construction costs (directional boring) and tax regime (network cables are "property" for property tax purposes) mean that SF and NYC are probably going to be the LAST places to get Google Fiber.
I see this as a huge step in the right direction and cannot wait to see how it turns out.
Here's a interesting story of what happened when an electrician found a 250VDC feed that was supposed to be abandoned decades ago: http://www.electriciantalk.com/f5/fixture-tails-44009/#post8...
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/97/nyunderground/
I am angry. We need to break this franchises.
> The company also appears to be blaming landlords for any hold ups in deployments
Yeah. Excuse. I haven't heard any landlord in my neighborhood ever complain about this. A lot of my neighbor landlords (they don't actually live there, just for rent), when they come by we would have conversation about these things (because they know I do some computer stuff and they would come and ask for advice when TW goes down), they say they'd make more rent if FiOS was here.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Verizon-Accused-of-Laggin...
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 problems and so is generally just available in newer buildings.
The huge customers in cities on the coasts would give them every reason to fight tooth and nail. Going for small potatoes first represents a larger financial risk for Google, but it gives them a better chance to work out the kinks in their product in relative peace.
However if you consider the cost of deployment, it's much cheaper to do it in a rural area than in the middle of the dense city. I.e. cost per meter of deployed cable can differ a lot.
Their rollout to Kansas City was impressively fast. Had it taken years it would have done terrible things for their campaign.
On another note, I wonder if this will have any impact on the Comcast/Time Warner merger. Comcast has specifically called out Google Fiber as a source of legitimate competition in defending the merger[1]. With the announcement that Google could increase the number of Fiber cities 10-fold, that claim might have a little more weight.
1. http://gigaom.com/2014/02/13/comcast-cites-competition-from-...
Edit: Otherwise, why would they announce this at this stage? They've only announced other cities when they were certain.
Drum up local interest and support to help with any local political roadblocks.
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.
All I can think of is: Google's doing this to put pressure on other cities. Is it working? (Not living in Denver anymore, or I'd just ask around :) )
Seriously, with all of the technology workers working in RTP, and all the university students in the area, as well as the emerging startup hub(s) in Durham and Raleigh, the area could really put Google Fiber to great use.
http://fiber.usinternet.com/coverage-areas/
Barely though to be honest. >.<
San Francisco, NYC and Boston because they are big tech hubs where a lot of Googlers live and Washington D.C. because it is the seat of politics in this country and the best way to show what good can happen when we have broadband connectivity.
In fact, rolling out Google Fiber in the capital cities of each state makes the most sense in general. You lobby the political class by giving their home base (state capitals) excellent broadband.
First, AT&T is already in the process of rolling out fiber to the home, or in some cases, fiber to the node with last mile copper. They have faced nothing but problems trying to do this from people in the city: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Groups-sue-S-F-trying-...
Density can be a nice benefit, but lack of space makes it hard to place the equipment necessary to serve fiber.
Second, a local provider Sonic.net is also rolling out fiber by taking the approach of starting in the closest thing San Francisco has to a less dense suburb (the Sunset). They've faced exactly the same issue (battles over placing Utility boxes).
But the Mayor thinks that WiFi is good enough. :-(
ATT's last-mile copper solution will barely be better than their current "Uverse".
The City (SF) has tons of fiber running all over the City. With some infrastructure investment, it would not be hard to use that as a backbone for municipal fiber. Residents can then sign up with any of the 3rd parties to jump on to the Internet.
SF High Speed options:
Comcast. Max out at 100/10.
Sonic offers fiber in certain blocks of the Sunset, but are deploying painfully slow.
I have an ATT U-Verse box permitted to install on my block but it hasn't happened yet, and I'm not thrilled with ATT.
Monkeybrains requires LoS to Sutro tower, and permission from the building landlord.
Webpass requires at least 20 units in a building.
Google remains the only hope; build it, TAKE MY MONEY.
[1] http://www.fcc.gov/guides/over-air-reception-devices-rule
But the dominating factor of what determines where people live in the suburbs seems to be schools more so than internet. Google fiber here would be more of a novelty.
Much like Provo, I think google saw that utopia already had some infrastructure in place and wanted to swoop it up.
So while people are asking, why not this x,y,z city perhaps it's due to infrastructure not already being in place.
This is probably my favorite part. They're not just trying to get special privileges for themselves, they are trying to level the barriers to entry so that there is actual competition in this space.
Hard as it might be for Americans to believe the ISP scene in Canada is in danger of falling behind even them.
I'll keep dreaming :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber#Technical_specifi...
Its faster than Comcast's two lower tier internet packages. I've heard North Portland isn't as lucky but its certainly worth checking out.
Also various complexes around town are already offering FiOS.
We also have a national broadband network that most people will never see due to the politics played by the current government.
The National Broadband Network is the one policy that had reasonably bi-partisan voter support, but the new conservative government has seen fit to abandon the admittedly more expensive, but more future-proof 'Fiber to the Premises' in exchange for what was going to be 'Fiber to the Node' but is now 'Multi-Technology Mix' or more appropriately 'Massive Telecommunications Mistake'...
The cost per consumer for "last mile" connections can be an order of magnitude more than those used in the core network because of the economies of scale at play. [1]
Most of the UK is currently being set up with FTTC, representing a dramatic increase in the country's average broadband speed over the past few years. [2] [1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/fiber-its-not-all... [2] http://media.ofcom.org.uk/2013/03/14/average-uk-broadband-sp...
FTTC is just delaying FTTH.
EDIT: Yes, these are part of the "The San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area comprising Santa Clara and San Benito counties".
Should have an interesting effect on the top-down mentality of price setting.
FCC also needs to rule ISPs as common carriers.
- announce which cities are chosen by the end of 2014? or those cities that will have fiber in them by the end of 2014?
Seriously though. Why are most of us still in the bandwidth dark ages?
Howdy neighbor: I live in NYC too. A lot of NYC already does have fiber in the form of FiOS. I'll also observe that NYC's overall Internet situation appears to be much better than many places; right now I'm paying $50 a month for 50 Mbs down / 5 Mbs up through RCN. In Tucson, where I used to live, I was paying $70 for 12 down / 1 or 2 up.
Google is presumably targeting the places with the crappiest service and the most amenable local governments; NYC's service isn't terrible and its government isn't exactly known for being responsive.
And I'm paying $54 for 20 Mbs/down on Time Warner, which is already a "discounted rate". (I'm in Manhattan).
The building next door to me has FiOS, but my landlord has no incentive to let them wire my building too.
I agree that New York City isn't the best target for Google Fiber, but the Internet situation here varies very heavily based on where in the city you live (not just the neighborhood, but which physical building and management company).
i feel so violated.. at some point i even asked how those questions are relevant to checking Fios availability, to which i was told "these are just part of standard questions i ask everyone"
if you call Verizon, refuse to answer any questions until they tell you if Fios is available at your address.
A crappy anti-muni broadband law was passed at the state level a couple of years ago (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/cable-backed-anti...), so apparently the network has to be run by a private company?
There is joint initiative by local municipalities and universities to bring in a private company to run fiber (http://ncngn.net). It's not clear to me how this will be affected by the Google announcement. (They released a rather vague statement about it.)
Most of the cities they listed are in very sketchy areas that probably dont even know the difference between their regular connection and a faster fiber connection.
Avondale Estates - not so nice Brookhaven - will probably benefit College Park - crime area, could care less about fiber Decatur - some areas will benefit East Point - crime area Hapeville - crime area Sandy Springs - will benefit, lots of Apartment Complexes Smyrna - will benefit in some areas
If the cities they choose dont have an interest then what is the point?
Who said anything about white people?