I'm really, really glad they chose Kansas City as the pilot city despite not living there. If they had just gone and chosen San Francisco, Chicago or New York, it would have been no more of an experiment than offering more cable channels to the big cities in the 1990s—It just is completely uninteresting.
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.
I see it the opposite way: Deploying fiber is easy if the city gives you carte blanche as KC did. Doing something easy proves nothing. If Google Fiber wants to prove that their model is replicable they need to deploy it at a profit in a politically hostile environment.
"Meanwhile a sleepy hacker is waking up and making breakfast in the kitchen. The climate is wonderful."
...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 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.
It would go against their strategy. By wiring up all the GF-friendly cities first, people living in GF-unfriendly cities start asking "why can't we have that, too?" Thus ratcheting up pressure on the local political systems.
no better place to wire than Philly...Start with a rollout of the Philly 'burbs
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.
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.
Hah "local politics certifiably insane": understatement of all time! Ahh Philadelphia politics.
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.
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
There is such a high demand for this product because it fulfills a great need and requirement to be competitive, but we are being held back by our providers. Our progress, held back due to lack of innovation. Google Fiber will rule the US as soon as it can get rolled out. Cable companies better be really nice and start being competitive. Please bring it to Chandler, AZ.
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...
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 recently had to restore a 500GB cloud backup over Cox. I called them to ask if they could give me an exemption for one month, and not only did they refuse, but they could not honestly tell me what would happen if I went over the cap, except that I would get an email about it and my Internet "might slow down".
Think about it. It's not about cable internet getting faster. It's about rent seeking monopoly. Once all their subscribers are belong to you, there is no reason to advance any further. Just erect legislative barriers to progress and charge people to your heart's content. Read Tim Wu's the Master Switch. Communications companies have been doing this since the telegraph 160 years ago.
Google Fiber will pass <~0.5% of total U.S. homes[0], even after they build out Austin and take over Provo. They have to start doing things much faster if they will make a dent this decade. Google is selectively building out 'fiber hoods' - neighborhoods that bend over backwards to get the service, pre commit and make construction super easy - not full cities, by any means.
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]
Google Fiber has so far only been an experiment. I see it as a very expensive, very ambitious proof of concept the likes of which only Google is capable of creating. This new announcement is evidence that their experiment of the last 4 years has succeeded.
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.
It always surprises me how excited people get about Google Fiber, yet how up-in-arms they get about GMail, Google+ and other Google services which tend to invade and/or expose your privacy. Do you really think that using a advertising company's fiber as your gateway to the internet is going to offer a private experience? Don't you see how much easier it will make it for them to gather your personal details and habits? Do you really think Google won't use your data to their advantage?
All the other telecoms have far worse privacy records than Google does. Who were the original companies implicated in illegal NSA wiretapping? Verizon, AT&T, and Bell South. [1] What happened to the CEO of the one company that refused, Qwest? He went to jail on trumped-up insider trading charges. [2]
Yes, but Google Fiber is a product I can pay for. I don't mind trading personal information / eyeballs for Google's services but I much prefer to give them money to get a superior service I'm already paying someone else for.
Google flat out tells us that they are using the content of emails to direct ads. Secret, deep-packet snooping on a broadband connection? That's a whole new level of evil.
The Google Fiber Privacy Policy seems relatively strong in the "Google Fiber Internet is a dumb pipe" sense:
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.
We're excited for better service at lower prices, and if you think Google would be (or is) the only one snooping traffic, well I think you're giving a lot of trust to people like Comcast.
More competition in this space can only be a good thing. Besides, Google has done a whole lot more to protect their users from government surveillance than the telcos have.
You are comparing a free service where they are up front about their plans to a pay for service which doesn't detail any plans you describe. I have to ask, do you think they would?
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. Is that it? Or is there something else that makes mid-tier, more spread-out cities more attractive?
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.
Doing any kind of utility work in NYC is a nightmare. There's lots of stuff underground (power, telecom, water, steam, sewer) that has been built up over the years and is in various states of obsolescence and disrepair, and in many cases isn't really marked on any utility maps. It's not a trivial matter to just dig a new trench for fiber.
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 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.
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.
When major Telco players decide how much to invest in opposing Google, the first place they look for a measuring stick is the potential lost revenue numbers.
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.
I wonder if the existance of "dark fiber" is a factor. In the late 1990s a half dozen fiber companies tore up our industrial park street laying new fiber. I doubt if much of it is used. One new fiber was laid last year since then.
I looked at the map and was curious - are these cities each in somewhat close proximity to existing google data centers? It would make sense if fiber, much like app engine is just productizing existing google infrastructure
When Google came to Provo, UT, it wasn't because of the friendly government. It was simply that it already had plenty of fiber and a bankrupt ISP that Google could buy out. There's plenty of fiber that's been buried in the ground since the 80's. Some is in use, some is not. Some has more potential. Here in Utah, we have another fiber company called Utopia... I wouldn't be surprised if Google isn't just going around buying these companies and using the existing fiber. I'm probably way off base.
I think their strategy is to get it out to as many people as possible in the most efficient way possible. I imagine doing construction in SF and NY is a nightmare so it would be a fight to get it done. If you do it in the easy places first, show all the benefits, and get the big cities jealous, you can drum up more demand than if you go through a painstaking multi year process just to get it in one city.
Their rollout to Kansas City was impressively fast. Had it taken years it would have done terrible things for their campaign.
Why couldn't they lay fiber to core areas, then setup some sort of wireless redistribution - there'd be some lack of speed due to more users using same connection, but it would mean less construction required. As they could just setup more and more access points throughout the city, and some sort of wireless login for specific users... --Might be a possible solution.
Woo! Moving to Mountain View in June, so I'm excited to see this.
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.
I've been hearing that there will be no real threat to that merger. If that's true, then I see this as a real threat to the new Comcast; basically Google saying "you will have real competition even if you are massive".
Edit: Otherwise, why would they announce this at this stage? They've only announced other cities when they were certain.
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.
The Denver-Boulder corridor is going to start losing it's place as one of the top tech startup areas in the country if it doesn't get itself on this list of potential fiber installs.
As a resident of greater Denver-Boulder, I, too, was disappointed to see the big empty space on the map around Colorado. At least one ISP here is experimenting with residential gigabit, though -- I'm hoping that maybe someday I can get it in my neighborhood: http://fiber.forethought.net/
The Triangle region of NC would be a great place for Google to start with this.
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.
Cool to see they're expanding, but I'm disappointed to see that there's no love for the upper Midwest. Wouldn't expect it in Chicago but Milwaukee (where I am), Madison, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, Detroit, and possibly a few smaller cities would all seem like reasonable candidates (although I acknowledge there's issues with all of them).
Why not San Francisco, Washington D.C., Boston and NYC?
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.
I can't speak for the other three cities, but San Francisco has a number of problems that would make it difficult for a Google Fiber rollout.
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).
Suburbs of DC (at least NOVA) has a decent number of places that have FiOS.
Also the cable situation isn't that bad if you have Cox rather than Time Warner.
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.
NYC at least because each building is like its own little fiefdom that's already wired for at least one competing service. FiOS has the same problems rolling out, a lot of the older buildings would require substantial building-wide upgrades to support fiber, something Google is likely not interested in at this point.
I think that NYC and DC already have Verizon FIOS, as do the suburbs of Boston, but not Boston proper. Why compete with an existing and decent fiber service when you can stick it to Time Warner- sorry, Comcast and AT&T instead?
I live in DC and I'd love to have Google fiber. We supposedly have a municipal fiber network here, but as far as I can tell it's doing diddly squat and I'm stuck with Comcast.
1. Sacramento would be an odd choice for California.
2. I believe this would have the opposite benefit you intend - if you want lawmakers to be on your side, they need to feel your pain.
>We’re asking cities to ensure that we, and other providers, can access and lease existing infrastructure.
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.
How is the residential Internet in the San Jose area cities listed? I'm in SF, and I can't believe how bad the Internet service is. It's worse and more expensive than what I had 4 years ago in my Midwest town of 100k people.
I live in Sunnyvale where the options are Comcast (who will happily sell a 105Mbit connection for $$$), or DSL from ATT or Sonic. I personally use Sonic since they are a great ISP.
Got my hopes up there for a little bit... if only they came to Santa Barbara -- we have plenty of tech people here willing to pay for awesome internet! (and get away from Cox...)
I wish they'll come to Santa Barbara so badly (As I'm sure everyone also does for their cities). We do have lots of tech here and even good connections to Google, but I feel we're probably too small. Even Verizon pulled out from installing FiOS.
The FAQ does not mention details about bandwidth other than "Internet that’s up to 100 times faster than basic broadband", but Wikipedia says the free service is 5 Mbps down (1 Mbps up) and the pay service is 1 Gbps down and up.
East Portland is wired up with Fibre backbone DSL from Century Link. Its $30 a month for a connection that's roughly 40 mbps down / 15 mbps up. I generally get 4 megabytes a sec downloads, and my friend who lives south around Holgate and 65th sees about the same. No data caps that I'm aware of either.
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.
Nashville is a great city...I was totally unaware of the tech scene. Startups, big companies? I have no idea if I'll ever move away from the west coast, but Nashville is one of the few places in the eastern US that I could imagine living.
Would love to see Google, or anyone, come shake up the Australian market. We are still beholden to low bandwidth, almost non existent upload and data usage caps.
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'...
Still no San Diego, but still happy to see this as the more Google Fiber expands within different regions the more the dinosaur ISPs in those regions will be forced to compete, hopefully rising boats even in areas not yet covered by Google Fiber.
Google needs to bring Google Fiber to Australia. The coalition have plans for a fiber/copper hybrid in which the fibre runs to a box and then you connect via outdated copper from the street to your house. It's like driving a sports car 90% of the way and a horse and cart the rest of the 10% — I think what Google are doing is great, they need to expand though. I know New Zealand could use something like Google Fiber as well.
While I won't argue that Fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) is better than Fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) it is, at the very least, much cheaper.
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]
Which is precisely why a re-nationalized telecommunications provider was such a terrible, terrible idea. Google cannot install fiber in Australia even if it wanted to, because competition to the NBN is illegal. It's now 7 years since it was announced, virtually nobody has it, and private companies like Google are precluded from filling in the gap, and the local telcos have just let their existing network go to ruin because they are being paid to rip it up. A shocking outcome.
It seems one of the biggest costs of fiber is installation; i.e. trenching. Why is it not hung from poles? It must be much cheaper and quicker, surely?
Yes, whereas Europe puts everything underground, US operators will go cheap and string stuff across poles. My supplier of infrastructure management software was astonished when they saw at our data an realized we have almost no aerial spans in France.
When I saw the headline, I cringed. At this point, whenever I see a Google article titled, "The future of [google product]," I assume it's an announcement that the product is being phased out. Needless to say, I'm glad that's not what's happening here, but I'm still not holding my breath that Google Fiber is going to take over the world.
I wish Google would publish more technical information about their fiber project. I am quite interested in what equipment they have chosen, what types of cabling they are using, etc. (and why) Also, any other information that could be used by community internet providers looking to roll out fiber!
Always wondered why they didn't buy out Surewest or Consolidated Communications. Instant fiber subscriber base, right-of-ways, and complementary service areas. And the money found in Google's couch cushions would probably more than cover the costs. Easy way to add 100K subscribers...
San Jose is the nearest major city to Mt. View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto & Santa Clara... they're using it as a Metro area grouping.
EDIT: Yes, these are part of the "The San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area comprising Santa Clara and San Benito counties".
Awesome. They added Leawood to the list of cities. Now they need to complete some of the neighboring areas they have already started on and make some progress. Although I wouldn't complain if they just abandoned those and started on Leawood.
If you want to save money with Fiber, it's okay. But please use VPN with encryption or other traffic-encryption methods to no let Big Brother intercept all of your your data.
I live in Scottsdale and this is excellent news! Cox is the longstanding primary internet/cable provider here and their speeds are good but service is atrocious.
I live near DC... shit! I wanted Google Fiber just for the awesome TV. DirecTV is incredibly awful. Hopefully they can expand to even more cities in the future.
how do people feel about mobile networks? In a lot of locations the speeds are getting as good as or better than broadband. They're cost ineffective right now for anything but short term tethering but that problem could be solved in 2 - 4 years. I just wonder if laying down fiber house to house is going to seem outdated in 5 years or so for anyone except the hard core work at home dev.
I currently live in NYC, and I've lived in Raleigh. It seems pretty clear that tearing up New York City to lay fiber is a much more expensive and tedious process than it would be in Raleigh. The state and local governments also seem much more friendly to that kind of thing.
I currently live in NYC, and I've lived in Raleigh
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.
i just checked online, and it said it was available in my zip code. got super excited, and called Verizon. after 20 minutes on hold I asked them if "Fios is available in my apartment" after which I was asked 20 personal questions and told that there is some "good news" and i'd be transferred to a "Verizon specialist", who asked me 10 more personal questions. Finally i was given a great introductory price of $59.99.. great!! and then he informed that Fios is not available in my apartment, but they can still give me reliable fast internet which will cover all those things i told them i was going to use it for. I told him that it was really misleading how I got conned into answering all these questions all for a marketing pitch of a service i didn't ask for, and the guy said that he was "upfront with me about Fios not being available in my area" he just needed to spend some time to perform this check.. WTF?!
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.
NYC is already quite full of fiber. It's just not accessible to residential customers. Some of the world's major internet exchanges are in NYC, as are any number of datacenters. Most large office buildings in NYC should have a fiber connection from one of the commercial providers.
Nice try Google, I was really happy about Atlanta until I saw the cities listed.
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
You sound like one of those people in the suburbs stunting Atlanta's public transit because it would bring in more black people. The areas you are describing are not high crime areas, just poor.
27182818284|12 years ago
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.
wmf|12 years ago
davesque|12 years ago
...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.
JunkDNA|12 years ago
_greim_|12 years ago
psbp|12 years ago
300bps|12 years ago
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.
bertil|12 years ago
snake_plissken|12 years ago
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.
zacinbusiness|12 years ago
[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?
willidiots|12 years ago
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
jader201|12 years ago
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
drawkbox|12 years ago
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.
sandyarmstrong|12 years ago
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?
twistedpair|12 years ago
jjallen|12 years ago
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...
abvdasker|12 years ago
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.
rufugee|12 years ago
nostrademons|12 years ago
[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-ns...
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30...
teach|12 years ago
pkulak|12 years ago
nandhp|12 years ago
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)
HelloMcFly|12 years ago
Einstalbert|12 years ago
jacoplane|12 years ago
bestdayever|12 years ago
aetherson|12 years ago
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?
tdees40|12 years ago
bhousel|12 years ago
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...
yeukhon|12 years ago
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...
mason55|12 years ago
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.
bgilroy26|12 years ago
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.
shmerl|12 years ago
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.
peter303|12 years ago
rwhitman|12 years ago
nobleach|12 years ago
etler|12 years ago
Their rollout to Kansas City was impressively fast. Had it taken years it would have done terrible things for their campaign.
gremlinsinc|12 years ago
msrpotus|12 years ago
runjake|12 years ago
higherpurpose|12 years ago
turing|12 years ago
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-...
jonlucc|12 years ago
Edit: Otherwise, why would they announce this at this stage? They've only announced other cities when they were certain.
csense|12 years ago
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.
bgilroy26|12 years ago
seanalltogether|12 years ago
simmons|12 years ago
sounds|12 years ago
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 :) )
jcomis|12 years ago
mindcrime|12 years ago
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.
kgermino|12 years ago
mitchty|12 years ago
http://fiber.usinternet.com/coverage-areas/
Barely though to be honest. >.<
Deinos|12 years ago
mabad86|12 years ago
arg01|12 years ago
malandrew|12 years ago
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.
justina1|12 years ago
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).
pdx6|12 years ago
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.
Glide|12 years ago
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.
mason55|12 years ago
theandrewbailey|12 years ago
imgabe|12 years ago
btgeekboy|12 years ago
mikeevans|12 years ago
Moral_|12 years ago
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.
epmatsw|12 years ago
alwaysdoit|12 years ago
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.
tostitos1979|12 years ago
fidotron|12 years ago
Hard as it might be for Americans to believe the ISP scene in Canada is in danger of falling behind even them.
grecy|12 years ago
baddox|12 years ago
ac29|12 years ago
jmgrosen|12 years ago
I'll keep dreaming :)
JaggedJax|12 years ago
teach|12 years ago
cpeterso|12 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber#Technical_specifi...
kickme444|12 years ago
toomuchtodo|12 years ago
statenjason|12 years ago
tehaaron|12 years ago
fuzzywalrus|12 years ago
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.
help_wanted|12 years ago
rybosome|12 years ago
atwebb|12 years ago
pyrocat|12 years ago
mdturnerphys|12 years ago
BlackDeath3|12 years ago
robryan|12 years ago
We also have a national broadband network that most people will never see due to the politics played by the current government.
jimmcslim|12 years ago
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'...
georgemcbay|12 years ago
DigitalSea|12 years ago
geitiegg|12 years ago
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...
brc|12 years ago
mje__|12 years ago
liotier|12 years ago
wmf|12 years ago
jmharvey|12 years ago
ensignavenger|12 years ago
maxmax|12 years ago
dark_night_tim|12 years ago
rit|12 years ago
EDIT: Yes, these are part of the "The San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area comprising Santa Clara and San Benito counties".
mikeevans|12 years ago
izzydata|12 years ago
ck2|12 years ago
Should have an interesting effect on the top-down mentality of price setting.
FCC also needs to rule ISPs as common carriers.
jusben1369|12 years ago
- announce which cities are chosen by the end of 2014? or those cities that will have fiber in them by the end of 2014?
kushti|12 years ago
shaaaaawn|12 years ago
shitlord|12 years ago
carsonreinke|12 years ago
BlackDeath3|12 years ago
Seriously though. Why are most of us still in the bandwidth dark ages?
quarterwave|12 years ago
jusben1369|12 years ago
dav-|12 years ago
thrownaway2424|12 years ago
fredgrott|12 years ago
SimpleXYZ|12 years ago
lukateake|12 years ago
coreymgilmore|12 years ago
unknown|12 years ago
[deleted]
voidlogic|12 years ago
shmerl|12 years ago
allsystemsgo|12 years ago
tmnsam|12 years ago
benihana|12 years ago
jseliger|12 years ago
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.
SonicSoul|12 years ago
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.
dublinben|12 years ago
teach|12 years ago
johnward|12 years ago
godgod|12 years ago
[deleted]
wil421|12 years ago
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
thrownaway2424|12 years ago
Rhapso|12 years ago