The only business model for fiber that will work to produce the competition, low prices, and world-class data transport we need — certainly in urban areas — is to get local governments involved in overseeing basic, street grid-like “dark” (passive, unlit with electronics) fiber available at a set, wholesale price to a zillion retail providers of access and services
That's an interesting assertion, but not supported by any evidence that I can see. And OTOH, there is direct contradictory evidence suggesting that there is another viable business model for building this kind of infrastructure: non-profit member-owned cooperatives. The same kind that provide telephone, cable and electric service all over the country[1].
Note that I'm not saying that cooperatives are a panacea, but their existence is evidence that other options are available. And before somebody screams "but aren't they all subsidized by the government", I would argue that if the kind long-term stable returns that the author of TFA speaks of are really available, then there's no reason to think that a coop couldn't get a loan (or equity investment) from private institutions.
My guess is that the biggest thing preventing this kind of thing from happening more often is exactly the amount of red-tape and government regulation involved.
> My guess is that the biggest thing preventing this kind of thing from happening more often is exactly the amount of red-tape and government regulation involved.
I was briefly and directly involved with the Google Fiber rollout here in Austin. Here's the thing: anyone with firsthand information is unlikely to drop in to set things straight in a way that gives away any amount of detail, purely because in the professional world it would be unbecoming to say the kinds of things that would necessarily come out.
I don't expect that local government intervention and red-tape could be called the major contributing factor here.
From someone involved at the end I was working from, dbg31415's comments are exactly what I would expect the other end to feel like.
The thing you have to understand is this: generally speaking, the people involved with the labor on this kind of project inhabit a completely different world than the one that you or I or the rest of a site like HN lives in. That applies to the boys in the field doing the work, to the boys in the office shuffling paperwork and signing off on their checks.
It's unsurprising to me to hear that the labor costs are out of control, and to hear that Google was halting expansion to other cities this past fall was like hearing someone say that they smashed their fingers in the door and it hurt.
Yes, we have Horry Telephone Cooperative here in Myrtle Beach, SC. They've been laying fiber in the ground for 20 years, and I've been petitioning them for the last few years to offer faster speeds. They just started offering gigabit fiber a few weeks ago for $134.99/mo. I'm thankful to have an alternative to national cable companies, the only disadvantage is that local cooperatives can move slow!
I recently moved to an area where the local coop did step up and is bringing Fiber to one of the least populace continues in California -- Plumas County -- and the spinoff of the coop is Plumas Sierra Telecom. They've been providing some form of internet to the area for 11-12 years (maybe more).
They've been bringing fiber slowly up from Reno to communities along Highways 70 and 89. The condo I just bought, PSREC installed fiber to the unit. I hope to help find ways to invigorate the adoption in the community and maybe some more tech up here. Reno is about an hour away.
Coops and small rural companies are the ones investing in infrastructure (in the town I am in, the cable company folded and the telecom stepped up) rather than the big telecoms which are trying to disinvest from things.
There are many areas, and we can see that in many parts of the world, where the government will do a better (cheaper to the citizens) job compared to private businesses. Among them are public transportation, Internet connectivity, Phone/Gas/Electricity. Google moving out of Fiber or proving that it is not economically viable to them is a disappointment but not a surprise
That was my plan, too. It's already proven out by one rural ISP doing something like that. You also have the angle of people willing to pay extra or sacrifice some features for a good the community owns. There's also a pride aspect that can happen.
One trouble with fiber is that most people (who have cable) think the cable service they have is "good enough" in terms of performance, but they'd rather pay less for it. In fact, fiber is not that much better than cable, particularly when you factor in that TCP can't move a gigabit per second across the public internet anyway. And particularly when you consider that DOCSIS 3.1 is pretty fast and that cablelabs is working on filling in the gaps such as Full Duplex transmission.
In much of Telco land, however, the problem is that fiber already has competition in the way that your phone company sees it. In my area, a double play costs about $90 a month for 2 Mbps internet. Google Fiber costs less than that, maybe people in my area "should" pay a little more because it costs more to provide, but I can't see it going much past $110 a month (what cable internet would cost for 25x better performance if they ever build out in my valley.) It's not that a fiber service could not be profitable, but it is not a rational decision for a company that can make huge profits by doing nothing.
Another problem is that there is always some new technology that is going to "solve" the problem in the sweet by-in-by so that communities don't show the moral fibre to do the right thing. Google's Willy Wonka approach to fiber optics was one of the first of these, but next it is baloons, then it is WiMax, then it is drones, then it is 4G, then it is 5G, then it is large satellite constellations (if those get built, Elon Musk won't have to bother sending astronauts to the space stations and can head straight for Mars or the Moon because the space station gets shredded by space junk.)
One trouble with fiber is that most people (who have cable) think the cable service they have is "good enough" in terms of performance
So wait.. if the customer is satisfied with the service they're receiving (eg, it's "fast enough") then exactly what problem are we trying to solve? The article talks about an "urgent demand" for faster home Internet, but I'm honestly not seeing it. My cable service (from TWC) is "fast enough" to the point that I don't even think about it. I have no idea what bandwidth I have, but I can't recall any time that I felt limited by it.
Would I take 1Gbps (or higher) home service? Sure, I guess. Do I need it? I don't see any reason to say that I do.
Edit: To be fair, I don't live in a rural area. So yes, it is possible that people in rural areas face a more urgent need for higher bandwidth than I do. That said, I grew up in a rural area and when I go home to visit, my friends and family all seem pretty happy with the Internet service they have. So even some rural areas seem to be getting at least a respectable level of service.
> One trouble with fiber is that most people (who have cable) think the cable service they have is "good enough" in terms of performance, but they'd rather pay less for it.
This is where I am. My local speeds and offerings (cable or a smaller local company with an ethernet jack in the condo's closet) are much better than yours, and I don't really need anything better. The tech to push speed requirements dramatically higher isn't there yet. For one or two people doing some streaming and light downloading, 20Mbps is fine for now, I'd just rather pay $20 than $50. 100Mbps for $50 would probably cover me into the near future for 4K streaming, too, but currently my local providers charge more than that for the faster speeds.
I'm not sure what the next big thing network-usage wise that pushes me to want more than 100Mbps would be. Heck, I was mostly happy at 5-6Mbps cable/DSL speeds for close to a decade before video streaming starting pushing those limits - downloading linux distros or such at those speeds kinda sucked, but I didn't do it that often to justify paying a lot more.
EDIT: the commercial world looks quite a bit different, both in need and demand, so maybe there are more opportunities there, but it also seems pretty well served currently, at least in big cities. I have hardly any direct knowledge, but have been at or heard of quite a few office spaces with direct fiber links to datacenters or such. When I worked in a small town it was much worse (Charter Business Cable wasn't the greatest, there, reliability- or speed-wise, to share across the small office), maybe there's a market there?
I agree that with better modulation techniques on DOCSIS protocols, you could achieve higher throughput on the downstream.
However, IMO - what should have been the focus for Google Fiber is to come up with applications that consume more upstream traffic. That is where DOCSIS lacks in terms of throughput and a fundamental problem docsis nodes face called "noise funneling". To avoid that - cable companies push fiber nodes closer to last mile.
If Google would have been successful in creating a FTTH marketplace, it wouldn't be that difficult for cable companies to start investing on ONU/ONT and GPON solutions to compete. With competition, Google wouldn't really get the ROI they were expecting unless they really bring about change in applications that utilize the upstream bandwidth heavy.
I have a fiber internet connection, the building I live in is wired for it and I just plug my router into the wall.
Anyway, I'd actually agree that it isn't materially much better than cable internet, except I never have to deal with a cable company. When I've had Comcast internet, the connection itself was fine. So, I can see why this isn't super compelling for anyone who doesn't have a huge need for bandwidth.
I think this is part of why they've embraced microwave internet. I have webpass, owned by google fiber, and it's up to 300 mbps^ for under $50 a month. I think it speaks well to your point though: If I could get 10d/1u for $20/month, I totally would. I don't really use the internet that heavily.
I have 30/5 for around $60CND a month, I can get 100/10 with my current set up $13CDN more a month.
I haven't bothered upgrading. I have no problems with ping or downloads. My SO and I can both watch Netflix at the same time and we both have Backblaze running. When with stream HD TV or movies from iTunes it works fine and we get amazing quality. I get great ping times on WoW or TF2. I'm not sure what fiber would get me that I'm not getting and I'm sure the vast majority of people feel the same.
Now, if real time VR sports or live concerts ever becomes a thing ...
From what I understood, Fiber wasn't a long term solution for Google. I think they anticipated that they could kick a American infrastructural movement into gear if they gave the other ISPs a real reason to compete.
I don't know if this is Google's response to those ISPs taking a different approach than they wanted, or if this is symptomatic of the company changing overall. Judging by the other ISP's marketing campaigns, competition doesn't seem to be the real message. That's a whole other can of worms.
I would venture to guess that given older company's paths, that it's the latter, and the problem is that they don't want to take big gambles like that; play a more conservative game.
It could also be a number of other factors. Maybe Google thinks Trump is looking to make good on infrastructural promises. It would be prudent of Google to capitalize on that momentum rather than spend their own resources.
> The only business model for fiber that will work to produce the competition, low prices, and world-class data transport we need — certainly in urban areas — is to get local governments involved in overseeing basic, street grid-like “dark” (passive, unlit with electronics) fiber available at a set, wholesale price to a zillion retail providers of access and services. There’s plenty of patient capital sloshing around the US that would be attracted to the steady, reliable returns this kind of investment will return. That investment could be made in the form of private lending or government bonds; the important element is that the resulting basic network be a wholesale facility that any retail actor can use at a reasonable, fair cost.
Google Fiber had promised to operate an open access network[1], but they apparently changed their mind before they launched.
If you live in San Francisco, sign-up for Sonic Fiber. Even if Sonic hasn't reached your neighborhood (or city) yet, sign up now because it helps them with financial planning of their build out. If you can't sign up because Sonic has no existing plans for your neighborhood or city, call Sonic and demand to sign up.
I just got Sonic fiber service a few months ago, and it's been great. I had signed up nearly a year prior, as soon as my neighborhood could register, and I'm glad I did.
Sonic is persevering and succeeding. And profiting, apparently, at only $40/month! They're besting Comcast and AT&T without the whinging and excuse making. Not that they don't gripe about the bureaucracy and NIMBY-erected barriers, but they're committed. And they should be supported; not simply to be socially conscious, but because they deliver. The more [prospective] customers they have the more quickly they can build out.
If you don't know the backstory in San Francisco--both AT&T and Sonic spent years working with the City on fiber plans. At some point AT&T decided that if they weren't going to have a monopoly, they'd rather sabotage things by dragging things out in the hopes that Sonic would bleed cash and exit the market. The big hold up, IIRC, was NIMBY opposition to street-level cabinets. Also, Sonic was hoping for permits for micro-trenching. The city refused to permit micro-trenching, and AFAIK the cabinet issue still hasn't been fully resolved. But as best I can tell, Sonic decided to make lemonade from lemons, got permission to hang fiber from utility poles, and began building out a network in the Western half of the city (i.e. the parts with utility poles instead of underground conduits). Instead of making excuses or going home with their ball like the big guys tend to do, they've pushed forward as best they could.
Fiber has operating margins of 99%. Yes there's a big upfront cost. But it recoups quickly and becomes pure profit. Goldman Sachs estimated the cost to wire the whole country at a mere $140 billion [1].
Apple has $230 billion cash on hand. Microsoft has $100 billion. Alphabet has $73 billion. There's no shortage of capital to start with metropolitan areas.
The issue isn't up front costs or capital. The issue is politics and rent seeking incumbents.
Hopefully the more competitive mobile marketplace and 5G will free us from the tyranny of Comcast.
That article appears to be misinterpreting the quote from the Goldman report. It says it would take 70B to wire up 50 million homes, which is less than half. The article then just doubles that figure and assumes that is what a nationwide deployment would cost.
That is flawed for two reasons:
1) First, 50 million homes is more like 40%. "less than half" isn't half.
2) Not all homes are equal. Presumably Goldman meant the easiest/most profitable 50 million homes. It costs much much much much more to wire up rural and exurban homes.
Verizon spent 15bn wiring 17 million houses, but it only did rich areas. And they only got 4 million of those houses to actually sign up. Nearly 4k capital outlay per subscriber is a lot for a service that only costs 75 bucks a month.
>Apple has $230 billion cash on hand. Microsoft has $100 billion. Alphabet has $73 billion. There's no shortage of capital to start with metropolitan areas.
Yea but those companies won't use that capital on a relatively low margin industry like telecom. There is a reason Verizon is selling off as much wireline as it can. It's really not a great investment.
Instead of believing fake news, you could actually look at financial statements. Here's the financials on Chattanooga's gigabit network: https://static.epb.com/annual-reports/2016. Operating revenues from fiber was $122m. Operating cost was $78m.
So if you're paying $70 for gigabit, $45 are immediately eaten up by operating expenses (customer service, maintenance, etc.). Out of the $25 you have left, you gotta pay for the thousands of dollars you spent hooking up that customer, continuing equipment upgrades, etc.
That makes no sense unless we are suggesting that minorities are different in their ability to get internet service. The rest of the sentence uses "poor people" -- which could be accurate, but implying minorities by virtue of being minorities are less able to get internet access is patently racist. Socio-economics does have an influence but being a minority is not in itself a factor. Most rural Americans are white and they are more likely to be "left behind" than a minority living in Jersey City with access to FIOS -- if you adjust for income.
>> But although the cost of fiber — the glass itself — has fallen through the floor, and the gear needed to deliver signals over fiber has gotten cheaper over time, 80 percent or more of the cost of installing fiber is labor.
Surely Google must've known that though. The article seems to say they're just not making money fast enough and that's because of labor, and that cost won't drop, but that seems like a totally obvious thing they would've known about, doesn't it?
My gut reaction is always to wonder how a company this big can miss simple things, but I've worked for enough big companies to know how often critical elements of big decisions get delegated to a single person. You might think, 'how can a multibillion dollar company be so stupid' but it's really some guy named Bill who has 14 direct reports and can't even get enough server hardware unless he tells tall tales.
The soberest people in the organization don't get promoted often, and don't get their ideas approved because they are too conservative. They make small promises and say No a lot. Boring. It's always the loudmouth who goes off half-cocked that gets attention.
Yeah. Everything I've read it's because they've lost the lobbying war with incumbents.
Incumbents (in those locations they are pausing) used their lobbyists, political connections, right of ways, existing contracts, etc. To block, delay and vastly increase the time and costs for Google. Driving Google to go wireless.
[edit] here in Austin (where they didn't lose the lobbying war) it's full steam ahead. They have been continually spreading across city. Dug trenches at coworker's house last week.
I really cannot believe anyone actually though that Google was serious about bringing fiber to a huge area. They cherry picked cheap and easy areas to install. Their purpose was to light a fire under the existing telcos in order to protect their core business which relies on the internet. They never wanted to be in the ISP business, ads are way more profitable.
Digging up the ground or putting wires on the poles is very difficult, and costs a ton of money. This can be improved with regulation and removal of onerous regulation, but it is still the case now.
You have companies like Comcast which are the most loathed in the USA and you would think someone would certainly want to compete in a tremendous industry against a hated competitor. It is just too much to get started. The only real solution is to have the lines built and maintained by the government, and providers can lease them to provide service.
Google Fiber suffered the same fate that many other pet projects do at Google.
Google got bored when it wasn't as easy as a few steps, and just dumped the project. Also the whole needing "customer service" thing doesn't fit with the Google life either.
It was a nice gesture, but if they had put forth any actual effort into it they would have had an actual rollout in the market.
I know this post is old now... but here are some pictures of how Google left my neighborhood. It's been 8 months since they started construction, doesn't seem like they are done and we are told, "A cleanup crew will be by shortly..." We've been told that for 3+ months now.
Snapped these while walking my dogs... these only represent a small sample of the boxes on my street...
The work seems very sloppy... boxes not level in the lawns (means we forever can't use a lawn mower and have to bust out our edgers to trim around it), not enough dirt used, the wrong grass / sod planted (planting the wrong kind of grass is basically planting noxious weeds in a person's lawn... it's a huge pain to fix), sprinkler systems left broken (wastes water / kills the entire lawn if not fixed quickly)...
PS: Imgur is a fickle bitch this morning. Been slowly trying to add captions but it keeps spitting out errors.
I had a lecturer in a class on infrastructure policy at (German) university who was an ICT exec and always said that the first rule of the business was "Wer gräbt, verliert." (you dig, you lose).
Does anyone know what's going on with Google fiber in Atlanta ? Did they kill it midway, or will they still cover Atlanta ? Don't see much activity on their site.
I remembered the story how Google created a 411 service that would connect to their search product. Microsoft scrambled to make something similar. At some point, Google discontinued it. The reason? By then, They had collected a lot of voice samples for training their voice recognition system. (And likely, it was easier to support a smartphone app than to support a call-in service).
When I was reading about Google Cloud Spanner, something struck me. Google Cloud Spanner was able to do what it does, not because of atomic clocks, but because Google has super-reliable private fiber that connects their data centers together. And I started wondering -- what was the hidden purpose of Google Fiber -- aside from stirring up the consumer broadband market?
One possible reason is that services like YouTube and Google’s messaging-app-of-the-week would require lots of bandwidth and Google definitely benefits from having those services be practical for as many people as possible. If 50% of your friends can’t realistically use online services because $ISP sucks at downloading lots of data, there is a problem.
The reason Spanner was possible is because Google does NOT use standard TCP/IP. Google created a logical circuit switch network that is determinate versus IP nondeterminat.
> what was the hidden purpose of Google Fiber -- aside from stirring up the consumer broadband market?
Isn't it obvious? So they can collect information about you at the packet level. There's only so much information you can get from people visiting your web properties or using your browser. When customers use your pipe, now you can track _everything_.
"... rural stories of telcos cutting off even crappy DSL service any time anyone stops a subscription; realtors are tearing their hair out trying to ensure that some narrow drip of data will be available to a new buyer of a home..."
I've seen this with my own eyes. When my wife's grandmother sold her house on 10 acres in west Georgia just outside of Carrollton (which is a biggish small town), she had to transfer her AT&T account along with her phone number of 30+ years to the buyer just so that they could keep internet service running. This is the kind of place where your cell phone signal drops to nothing as you turn onto the dirt road a mile from the house.
I wonder about using last-mile wireless as a way to distribute fiber internet. Something like a fiber-connected wireless hub that provides service to customers within a quarter-mile. At a density of 10000 households per square mile (pretty high) your service area is about 0.15 square miles and you need 1.5 Tbps bandwidth or so in the air around a hub for 1 Gbps service to the household. Feasible? It's a stretch, but I assumed a very high density of customers and I think many people would be happy with 100 Mbps.
I'm willing to bet the real catalyst to ISP competition will be LEO satellite constellations like the one SpaceX has mentioned they're working on. Much better ping, cheaper/faster than wiring up entire cities and having to dig through streets. This could actually become a huge source of revenue for them to fund their mars initiative. Imagine once several companies do that, you could pick whichever ISP you want and just have them mail you a receiver to put outside your window.
I live in Austin and the rollout in my neighborhood has been a debacle. Dumpster fire from the get go. I can only imagine the mountain of money Google has dumped into Google Fiber at this point.
They started work back in August, marking gas and water pipes. 8 months later (today), I'd say less than 50% of the homes have service hooked up... they still have holes in some people's yards, clear evidence of broken sprinkler lines, and they still have a lot of cleanup left to do.
Every step has been painful. As a homeowner, Google is really miserable to deal with -- opting to punt the responsibility for managing the project to various contractors at each stage. Nobody from Google actually ever replies to issues. Nobody from Google ever actually walks the neighborhood to make sure the job is done correctly.
Round 1... first dig... they went through and dug holes for boxes in our yards. Destroyed a lot of sprinklers. Left it sit in my yard for a month with a big sheet of plywood over the hold... and no movement. Killed large areas of my lawn and flower beds not being able to water them.
Round 2... digging in the street... they dug a small channel in the street, and managed to cut a number of my neighbors water lines or water return lines. For a week some people had to stay in hotels because they had no water / no drainage in their homes. I was lucky, this didn't happen to me but did happen to my next door neighbor.
Round 3... putting the box in the front lawn... It was clear the work was being done by the lowest bidder. Boxes put in crooked, not flush with the lawn, so you couldn't drive a lawn mower over them after. They sent a repair crew around to fix lawns up... they used the wrong grass types, and they put sprinklers back random places... for me they broke 2 sprinklers heads but only put one back... and put it back so it could only really water my driveway. Also they "fixed" the sprinklers with electrical tape joining the PVC and it just broke the moment you turned the system on... more signs they were just using the lowest bidders for the work. Cost me an entire weekend to fix it all up again. (Still my lawn has the wrong grass growing in, looks like shit...)
Round 4... the line from the box to the house... another lowest bidder job. The guy putting it in put in hated sprinklers. That's the only explanation. He broke out 25 feet of line, 5 sprinkler heads -- he had to know he was breaking pipes, if you dig with a shovel you can feel the difference between dirt and digging into a PVC pipe. He also broke a bunch of pavers and just sort of tossed the pieces next to a tree; would have taken him less energy to lift them up. Finally, there were some cut pieces of pipe, some wires... broken pavers... he just tossed them into my flower beds.
Round 5... installation in the home. Was probably the least painful, but still far from professional. Having a contractor wear little boot covers is pretty common... the guy even showed up with them when he first came in, but at some point he just stopped putting them on and tracked mud all over my house. Then he moved my TV stand and left it in the middle of the room. (That's minor, easy to fix.)
So here's what happened when you call Google...
1) Nothing. You don't hear back, you don't get an email. You're like, "Well, I don't... they don't care... what do I do?"
2) Then some random contractor calls you to tell you that they got your message, but it wasn't their fault. They assure you they will talk to the contractor who was responsible and give you his number so you can follow up. When you call the number they give you, they clearly never followed up as it's his first time hearing from you and have you to re-tell / re-send the photos to the new guy's email.
3) Then you get the run around. "Oh, we're sending a crew to fix it all once we are done... may be a few weeks, sit tight." You wait... phone tag, and finally you just say, "Fuck it, I guess I'll eat the cost of fixing this myself." (I was fortunate enough to finally -- after about 30 emails / calls with photos of every step -- to get a refund check for the damages to cover my out of pocket expenses. But when my neighbors asked for the same treatment, they were told, "Sorry it's not in our budget to reimburse people who don't want to wait for our crews to do the repairs.")
It's been such a shit show.
And at the end of the day... I haven't seen speeds over 420 down, 80 up. I was getting 290 down from Time Warner. Can't say it's a noticeable improvement for anything. Not at all worth the hassle we went through to get this.
Well here in metro Atlanta, if you can call being thirty miles or more out still being in metro we have fiber from AT&T. I live in hickville as some would call it, yet the county which is not of the bigger counties in this area has a lot of fiber.
The costs must be horrible, when going through the subdivisions near me they had people digging up lawns, guiding pipe under roads/drives, the whole nine yards. Props to them for not destroying my lawn as they only dug to get the pipe pushing contraption in and went as far as they could.
Now from I could tell AT&T moved because they did not want to have to ride another companies fiber. So unless fiber goes utility like electricity, water, and gas, its going to be who can invest first which isn't conducive to getting fiber deployed because they will certainly only go where density is high
The idea that there is tons of private capital sloshing around wanting to invest in municipal fiber is ridiculous. Baltimore and LA have been soliciting bidders for years to build such networks without success.
[+] [-] mindcrime|9 years ago|reply
That's an interesting assertion, but not supported by any evidence that I can see. And OTOH, there is direct contradictory evidence suggesting that there is another viable business model for building this kind of infrastructure: non-profit member-owned cooperatives. The same kind that provide telephone, cable and electric service all over the country[1].
Note that I'm not saying that cooperatives are a panacea, but their existence is evidence that other options are available. And before somebody screams "but aren't they all subsidized by the government", I would argue that if the kind long-term stable returns that the author of TFA speaks of are really available, then there's no reason to think that a coop couldn't get a loan (or equity investment) from private institutions.
My guess is that the biggest thing preventing this kind of thing from happening more often is exactly the amount of red-tape and government regulation involved.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_cooperative
[+] [-] 13871292throwaw|9 years ago|reply
I was briefly and directly involved with the Google Fiber rollout here in Austin. Here's the thing: anyone with firsthand information is unlikely to drop in to set things straight in a way that gives away any amount of detail, purely because in the professional world it would be unbecoming to say the kinds of things that would necessarily come out.
I don't expect that local government intervention and red-tape could be called the major contributing factor here.
From someone involved at the end I was working from, dbg31415's comments are exactly what I would expect the other end to feel like.
The thing you have to understand is this: generally speaking, the people involved with the labor on this kind of project inhabit a completely different world than the one that you or I or the rest of a site like HN lives in. That applies to the boys in the field doing the work, to the boys in the office shuffling paperwork and signing off on their checks.
It's unsurprising to me to hear that the labor costs are out of control, and to hear that Google was halting expansion to other cities this past fall was like hearing someone say that they smashed their fingers in the door and it hurt.
6d11e0a226cb3b6b24dc05bd96ebb7b176c29b587512fae370d5c825ff5a08bf742152134a1e75c9104b8944fbae2b4640757e2533b41f44ceefbb04be602103
[+] [-] LogicX|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackmott|9 years ago|reply
some might call that government
[+] [-] jmspring|9 years ago|reply
They've been bringing fiber slowly up from Reno to communities along Highways 70 and 89. The condo I just bought, PSREC installed fiber to the unit. I hope to help find ways to invigorate the adoption in the community and maybe some more tech up here. Reno is about an hour away.
Coops and small rural companies are the ones investing in infrastructure (in the town I am in, the cable company folded and the telecom stepped up) rather than the big telecoms which are trying to disinvest from things.
Interesting local article: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/01/today...
[+] [-] jsemrau|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmanfrin|9 years ago|reply
Cable: deeply unregulated.
Electric: deeply regulated.
There's an odd-man-out here.
[+] [-] nickpsecurity|9 years ago|reply
That was my plan, too. It's already proven out by one rural ISP doing something like that. You also have the angle of people willing to pay extra or sacrifice some features for a good the community owns. There's also a pride aspect that can happen.
[+] [-] specialist|9 years ago|reply
Government is the source of all wealth. So says Reagan's conservative economist, Kevin Phillips.
Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich
http://amzn.to/2ntP4eW
Belief in Freedom Markets™ is faith-, not reality-based.
[+] [-] PaulHoule|9 years ago|reply
In much of Telco land, however, the problem is that fiber already has competition in the way that your phone company sees it. In my area, a double play costs about $90 a month for 2 Mbps internet. Google Fiber costs less than that, maybe people in my area "should" pay a little more because it costs more to provide, but I can't see it going much past $110 a month (what cable internet would cost for 25x better performance if they ever build out in my valley.) It's not that a fiber service could not be profitable, but it is not a rational decision for a company that can make huge profits by doing nothing.
Another problem is that there is always some new technology that is going to "solve" the problem in the sweet by-in-by so that communities don't show the moral fibre to do the right thing. Google's Willy Wonka approach to fiber optics was one of the first of these, but next it is baloons, then it is WiMax, then it is drones, then it is 4G, then it is 5G, then it is large satellite constellations (if those get built, Elon Musk won't have to bother sending astronauts to the space stations and can head straight for Mars or the Moon because the space station gets shredded by space junk.)
[+] [-] mindcrime|9 years ago|reply
So wait.. if the customer is satisfied with the service they're receiving (eg, it's "fast enough") then exactly what problem are we trying to solve? The article talks about an "urgent demand" for faster home Internet, but I'm honestly not seeing it. My cable service (from TWC) is "fast enough" to the point that I don't even think about it. I have no idea what bandwidth I have, but I can't recall any time that I felt limited by it.
Would I take 1Gbps (or higher) home service? Sure, I guess. Do I need it? I don't see any reason to say that I do.
Edit: To be fair, I don't live in a rural area. So yes, it is possible that people in rural areas face a more urgent need for higher bandwidth than I do. That said, I grew up in a rural area and when I go home to visit, my friends and family all seem pretty happy with the Internet service they have. So even some rural areas seem to be getting at least a respectable level of service.
[+] [-] majormajor|9 years ago|reply
This is where I am. My local speeds and offerings (cable or a smaller local company with an ethernet jack in the condo's closet) are much better than yours, and I don't really need anything better. The tech to push speed requirements dramatically higher isn't there yet. For one or two people doing some streaming and light downloading, 20Mbps is fine for now, I'd just rather pay $20 than $50. 100Mbps for $50 would probably cover me into the near future for 4K streaming, too, but currently my local providers charge more than that for the faster speeds.
I'm not sure what the next big thing network-usage wise that pushes me to want more than 100Mbps would be. Heck, I was mostly happy at 5-6Mbps cable/DSL speeds for close to a decade before video streaming starting pushing those limits - downloading linux distros or such at those speeds kinda sucked, but I didn't do it that often to justify paying a lot more.
EDIT: the commercial world looks quite a bit different, both in need and demand, so maybe there are more opportunities there, but it also seems pretty well served currently, at least in big cities. I have hardly any direct knowledge, but have been at or heard of quite a few office spaces with direct fiber links to datacenters or such. When I worked in a small town it was much worse (Charter Business Cable wasn't the greatest, there, reliability- or speed-wise, to share across the small office), maybe there's a market there?
[+] [-] nitinics|9 years ago|reply
However, IMO - what should have been the focus for Google Fiber is to come up with applications that consume more upstream traffic. That is where DOCSIS lacks in terms of throughput and a fundamental problem docsis nodes face called "noise funneling". To avoid that - cable companies push fiber nodes closer to last mile.
If Google would have been successful in creating a FTTH marketplace, it wouldn't be that difficult for cable companies to start investing on ONU/ONT and GPON solutions to compete. With competition, Google wouldn't really get the ROI they were expecting unless they really bring about change in applications that utilize the upstream bandwidth heavy.
[+] [-] myrandomcomment|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] X86BSD|9 years ago|reply
I have google fiber btw and I have gotten a gb/sec from it.
[+] [-] draw_down|9 years ago|reply
Anyway, I'd actually agree that it isn't materially much better than cable internet, except I never have to deal with a cable company. When I've had Comcast internet, the connection itself was fine. So, I can see why this isn't super compelling for anyone who doesn't have a huge need for bandwidth.
[+] [-] tekklloneer|9 years ago|reply
^ usually around 100 mbps (100/100)
[+] [-] Ensorceled|9 years ago|reply
I haven't bothered upgrading. I have no problems with ping or downloads. My SO and I can both watch Netflix at the same time and we both have Backblaze running. When with stream HD TV or movies from iTunes it works fine and we get amazing quality. I get great ping times on WoW or TF2. I'm not sure what fiber would get me that I'm not getting and I'm sure the vast majority of people feel the same.
Now, if real time VR sports or live concerts ever becomes a thing ...
[+] [-] cosinetau|9 years ago|reply
I don't know if this is Google's response to those ISPs taking a different approach than they wanted, or if this is symptomatic of the company changing overall. Judging by the other ISP's marketing campaigns, competition doesn't seem to be the real message. That's a whole other can of worms.
I would venture to guess that given older company's paths, that it's the latter, and the problem is that they don't want to take big gambles like that; play a more conservative game.
It could also be a number of other factors. Maybe Google thinks Trump is looking to make good on infrastructural promises. It would be prudent of Google to capitalize on that momentum rather than spend their own resources.
[+] [-] nandhp|9 years ago|reply
Google Fiber had promised to operate an open access network[1], but they apparently changed their mind before they launched.
[1] https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-gig-o...
[+] [-] wahern|9 years ago|reply
I just got Sonic fiber service a few months ago, and it's been great. I had signed up nearly a year prior, as soon as my neighborhood could register, and I'm glad I did.
Sonic is persevering and succeeding. And profiting, apparently, at only $40/month! They're besting Comcast and AT&T without the whinging and excuse making. Not that they don't gripe about the bureaucracy and NIMBY-erected barriers, but they're committed. And they should be supported; not simply to be socially conscious, but because they deliver. The more [prospective] customers they have the more quickly they can build out.
If you don't know the backstory in San Francisco--both AT&T and Sonic spent years working with the City on fiber plans. At some point AT&T decided that if they weren't going to have a monopoly, they'd rather sabotage things by dragging things out in the hopes that Sonic would bleed cash and exit the market. The big hold up, IIRC, was NIMBY opposition to street-level cabinets. Also, Sonic was hoping for permits for micro-trenching. The city refused to permit micro-trenching, and AFAIK the cabinet issue still hasn't been fully resolved. But as best I can tell, Sonic decided to make lemonade from lemons, got permission to hang fiber from utility poles, and began building out a network in the Western half of the city (i.e. the parts with utility poles instead of underground conduits). Instead of making excuses or going home with their ball like the big guys tend to do, they've pushed forward as best they could.
[+] [-] jacobolus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forrestthewoods|9 years ago|reply
Apple has $230 billion cash on hand. Microsoft has $100 billion. Alphabet has $73 billion. There's no shortage of capital to start with metropolitan areas.
The issue isn't up front costs or capital. The issue is politics and rent seeking incumbents.
Hopefully the more competitive mobile marketplace and 5G will free us from the tyranny of Comcast.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-it-would-cost-google...
[+] [-] rhino369|9 years ago|reply
That is flawed for two reasons:
1) First, 50 million homes is more like 40%. "less than half" isn't half.
2) Not all homes are equal. Presumably Goldman meant the easiest/most profitable 50 million homes. It costs much much much much more to wire up rural and exurban homes.
Verizon spent 15bn wiring 17 million houses, but it only did rich areas. And they only got 4 million of those houses to actually sign up. Nearly 4k capital outlay per subscriber is a lot for a service that only costs 75 bucks a month.
>Apple has $230 billion cash on hand. Microsoft has $100 billion. Alphabet has $73 billion. There's no shortage of capital to start with metropolitan areas.
Yea but those companies won't use that capital on a relatively low margin industry like telecom. There is a reason Verizon is selling off as much wireline as it can. It's really not a great investment.
[+] [-] rayiner|9 years ago|reply
Instead of believing fake news, you could actually look at financial statements. Here's the financials on Chattanooga's gigabit network: https://static.epb.com/annual-reports/2016. Operating revenues from fiber was $122m. Operating cost was $78m.
So if you're paying $70 for gigabit, $45 are immediately eaten up by operating expenses (customer service, maintenance, etc.). Out of the $25 you have left, you gotta pay for the thousands of dollars you spent hooking up that customer, continuing equipment upgrades, etc.
[+] [-] johnsmith21006|9 years ago|reply
"would raise the company’s adjusted debt to more than $100bn."
https://www.ft.com/content/d0293136-e98b-11e6-893c-082c54a7f...
[+] [-] wmf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walshemj|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briandear|9 years ago|reply
That makes no sense unless we are suggesting that minorities are different in their ability to get internet service. The rest of the sentence uses "poor people" -- which could be accurate, but implying minorities by virtue of being minorities are less able to get internet access is patently racist. Socio-economics does have an influence but being a minority is not in itself a factor. Most rural Americans are white and they are more likely to be "left behind" than a minority living in Jersey City with access to FIOS -- if you adjust for income.
[+] [-] blakesterz|9 years ago|reply
Surely Google must've known that though. The article seems to say they're just not making money fast enough and that's because of labor, and that cost won't drop, but that seems like a totally obvious thing they would've known about, doesn't it?
[+] [-] hinkley|9 years ago|reply
The soberest people in the organization don't get promoted often, and don't get their ideas approved because they are too conservative. They make small promises and say No a lot. Boring. It's always the loudmouth who goes off half-cocked that gets attention.
[+] [-] njharman|9 years ago|reply
Incumbents (in those locations they are pausing) used their lobbyists, political connections, right of ways, existing contracts, etc. To block, delay and vastly increase the time and costs for Google. Driving Google to go wireless.
[edit] here in Austin (where they didn't lose the lobbying war) it's full steam ahead. They have been continually spreading across city. Dug trenches at coworker's house last week.
[+] [-] specialp|9 years ago|reply
Digging up the ground or putting wires on the poles is very difficult, and costs a ton of money. This can be improved with regulation and removal of onerous regulation, but it is still the case now.
You have companies like Comcast which are the most loathed in the USA and you would think someone would certainly want to compete in a tremendous industry against a hated competitor. It is just too much to get started. The only real solution is to have the lines built and maintained by the government, and providers can lease them to provide service.
[+] [-] urda|9 years ago|reply
Google got bored when it wasn't as easy as a few steps, and just dumped the project. Also the whole needing "customer service" thing doesn't fit with the Google life either.
It was a nice gesture, but if they had put forth any actual effort into it they would have had an actual rollout in the market.
[+] [-] bitmapbrother|9 years ago|reply
https://fiber.google.com/about/
https://fiber.google.com/newcities/#viewcities
[+] [-] nikcub|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbg31415|9 years ago|reply
Snapped these while walking my dogs... these only represent a small sample of the boxes on my street...
http://imgur.com/a/Al39Z
The work seems very sloppy... boxes not level in the lawns (means we forever can't use a lawn mower and have to bust out our edgers to trim around it), not enough dirt used, the wrong grass / sod planted (planting the wrong kind of grass is basically planting noxious weeds in a person's lawn... it's a huge pain to fix), sprinkler systems left broken (wastes water / kills the entire lawn if not fixed quickly)...
PS: Imgur is a fickle bitch this morning. Been slowly trying to add captions but it keeps spitting out errors.
[+] [-] hussong|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bubblethink|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hosh|9 years ago|reply
When I was reading about Google Cloud Spanner, something struck me. Google Cloud Spanner was able to do what it does, not because of atomic clocks, but because Google has super-reliable private fiber that connects their data centers together. And I started wondering -- what was the hidden purpose of Google Fiber -- aside from stirring up the consumer broadband market?
[+] [-] makecheck|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnsmith21006|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xienze|9 years ago|reply
Isn't it obvious? So they can collect information about you at the packet level. There's only so much information you can get from people visiting your web properties or using your browser. When customers use your pipe, now you can track _everything_.
[+] [-] rietta|9 years ago|reply
I've seen this with my own eyes. When my wife's grandmother sold her house on 10 acres in west Georgia just outside of Carrollton (which is a biggish small town), she had to transfer her AT&T account along with her phone number of 30+ years to the buyer just so that they could keep internet service running. This is the kind of place where your cell phone signal drops to nothing as you turn onto the dirt road a mile from the house.
[+] [-] scythe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghobs91|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] putsteadywere|9 years ago|reply
Pass!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_Internet_access
[+] [-] dbg31415|9 years ago|reply
They started work back in August, marking gas and water pipes. 8 months later (today), I'd say less than 50% of the homes have service hooked up... they still have holes in some people's yards, clear evidence of broken sprinkler lines, and they still have a lot of cleanup left to do.
Every step has been painful. As a homeowner, Google is really miserable to deal with -- opting to punt the responsibility for managing the project to various contractors at each stage. Nobody from Google actually ever replies to issues. Nobody from Google ever actually walks the neighborhood to make sure the job is done correctly.
Round 1... first dig... they went through and dug holes for boxes in our yards. Destroyed a lot of sprinklers. Left it sit in my yard for a month with a big sheet of plywood over the hold... and no movement. Killed large areas of my lawn and flower beds not being able to water them.
Round 2... digging in the street... they dug a small channel in the street, and managed to cut a number of my neighbors water lines or water return lines. For a week some people had to stay in hotels because they had no water / no drainage in their homes. I was lucky, this didn't happen to me but did happen to my next door neighbor.
Round 3... putting the box in the front lawn... It was clear the work was being done by the lowest bidder. Boxes put in crooked, not flush with the lawn, so you couldn't drive a lawn mower over them after. They sent a repair crew around to fix lawns up... they used the wrong grass types, and they put sprinklers back random places... for me they broke 2 sprinklers heads but only put one back... and put it back so it could only really water my driveway. Also they "fixed" the sprinklers with electrical tape joining the PVC and it just broke the moment you turned the system on... more signs they were just using the lowest bidders for the work. Cost me an entire weekend to fix it all up again. (Still my lawn has the wrong grass growing in, looks like shit...)
Round 4... the line from the box to the house... another lowest bidder job. The guy putting it in put in hated sprinklers. That's the only explanation. He broke out 25 feet of line, 5 sprinkler heads -- he had to know he was breaking pipes, if you dig with a shovel you can feel the difference between dirt and digging into a PVC pipe. He also broke a bunch of pavers and just sort of tossed the pieces next to a tree; would have taken him less energy to lift them up. Finally, there were some cut pieces of pipe, some wires... broken pavers... he just tossed them into my flower beds.
Round 5... installation in the home. Was probably the least painful, but still far from professional. Having a contractor wear little boot covers is pretty common... the guy even showed up with them when he first came in, but at some point he just stopped putting them on and tracked mud all over my house. Then he moved my TV stand and left it in the middle of the room. (That's minor, easy to fix.)
So here's what happened when you call Google...
1) Nothing. You don't hear back, you don't get an email. You're like, "Well, I don't... they don't care... what do I do?"
2) Then some random contractor calls you to tell you that they got your message, but it wasn't their fault. They assure you they will talk to the contractor who was responsible and give you his number so you can follow up. When you call the number they give you, they clearly never followed up as it's his first time hearing from you and have you to re-tell / re-send the photos to the new guy's email.
3) Then you get the run around. "Oh, we're sending a crew to fix it all once we are done... may be a few weeks, sit tight." You wait... phone tag, and finally you just say, "Fuck it, I guess I'll eat the cost of fixing this myself." (I was fortunate enough to finally -- after about 30 emails / calls with photos of every step -- to get a refund check for the damages to cover my out of pocket expenses. But when my neighbors asked for the same treatment, they were told, "Sorry it's not in our budget to reimburse people who don't want to wait for our crews to do the repairs.")
It's been such a shit show.
And at the end of the day... I haven't seen speeds over 420 down, 80 up. I was getting 290 down from Time Warner. Can't say it's a noticeable improvement for anything. Not at all worth the hassle we went through to get this.
[+] [-] Shivetya|9 years ago|reply
The costs must be horrible, when going through the subdivisions near me they had people digging up lawns, guiding pipe under roads/drives, the whole nine yards. Props to them for not destroying my lawn as they only dug to get the pipe pushing contraption in and went as far as they could.
Now from I could tell AT&T moved because they did not want to have to ride another companies fiber. So unless fiber goes utility like electricity, water, and gas, its going to be who can invest first which isn't conducive to getting fiber deployed because they will certainly only go where density is high
[+] [-] rayiner|9 years ago|reply