My story in NC:
Aug 2015: Google Fiber sent me a T-shirt promising Fiber would be available soon!
Jan 2017: AT&T Fiber available to my address. $70/month for 1 Gbps.
Aug 2023: Google Fiber finally available at my address. $70/mo for 1 Gbps, $100/mo for 2 Gbps.
So yeah, Google got AT&T to get off their butts, but it took Google 8 years to get to my address. Meanwhile, AT&T is still $70/mo, includes HBO (er, Max), and is reliable, so I don't really have any reason to switch.
That said, I'm considering having GF installed anyway as long as they're in the neighborhood and running dual-WAN for a while. I can always cancel it and then my home is setup for both ISPs.
This model works -really- well. ISPs compete on price, and service. Fibre folks do the physical stuff. Fibre companies are incentivised to get rolled out in an area first. ISPs can scale up without having to raise huge capital. And the roadside only gets dug up once (mostly the fibre is buried, although some makes use of existing pole infrastructure. )
It's one of those (rare?) cases where good regulation, and a free market collide, and the result us that everyone has fibre.
I say this not to gloat, but rather to show that it can be beneficial to separate access from service for best customer service.
[1] my first ISP went under. I switched to a new ISP within an hour after the cause of the outage was understood.
[2] a couple of outages have been ascribed to the fibre provider, the ISP escalates those for me, and have been rectified within the hour.
Who knew competition could lead to such good customer service...
Physically, they’re negotiating the dig with the appropriate government body and then doing it all at once. Cables are buried by roads. The ISPs connect the network to the individual homes when the home signs up. Large apartments and office buildings have the dig done in advance and are usually restricted to one ISP tenant that the network operator chooses to service those locations/accounts.
Both the fiber operators and the ISPs are raising money to expand faster, in addition to the public money available, because the capital risk of this model is low, as you said.
> It's one of those (rare?) cases where good regulation, and a free market collide, and the result us that everyone has fibre.
I’d argue that good (and certainly not nonexistent) regulation is a necessity of a well-functioning, efficient market.
Man it took some work to get the model up and running though didn't it? Great idea from one party, totally politically destroyed soon afterwards when the other party got into power, and then slowly, over the course of a decade and a half, has almost reached the original vision.
Inspired this book: https://www.amazon.com.au/Frustrated-State-terrible-deterrin...
OpenReach (which was "split off" from BT) puts the infrastructure in place, and OFCOM (our telecoms regulator) defines the price they can charge to ISP's for a connection - so you have a raft of ISP's who compete on price or service.
There are other infra providers though, Virgin Media (DOCSIS Cable) cover some of the country, CityFibre are doing a massive expansion (I now have all three available at my property), Hyperoptic (mostly focuses on apartments).
And then there's Hull ... which is a special case that never became amalgamated to BT back in the day and instead is served by Kingston Communications.
For the most part it works well, but heavy regulations is anethema to some over the US side of the pond and therefore YMMV.
In many if not most areas in the United States DSL (digital subscriber loop) based Internet access was originally delivered over PVCs established through a layer 2 ATM network. There were interesting problems with that so PPP or PPP over Ethernet is more common these days, even when the telco no longer really lets anyone compete with them in the provision of broadband Internet access services at layer 3 over the network they maintain thanks to a rather convenient federal court decision.
Layer 2 mostly Ethernet access over VLANs (virtual local area networks) to a chosen provider does live on in certain mostly municipally owned multi-provider networks though, and in some countries that is normal, although usually with the incumbent telco or ILEC (incumbent local exchange company) installing and maintaining the last mile to homes and businesses rather than a municipal operator as in some parts of the United States. Either way more than one provider can provide layer 3 Internet service on the same physical facilities that way, with layer 2 (e.g. switched Ethernet) virtual lans or virtual circuits operated by one company or municipality.
In my setup I don't think the ISP has any local hardware - they're all national, and run on the hardware provided by the fibre guys.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_car...
https://www.bandwidth.com/glossary/competitive-local-exchang...
But once you could get voice & data from either the telco or the cable company, this all went out the window.
British Telecom own Open Reach who provide infrastructure for the country.
There is cable, for a second option in cities, and there are some regional fibre networks that provide a second infrastructure option, but for the most part Open Reach is the only option.
I had massive issues with my line, I had engineers come out and we were able to test the cables and show that there was a fault between my house and the exchange. I don't have a relationship with Open Reach so I had to rely on my ISP opening tickets and it disappearing into a black hole.
After 6 months of basically not being able to use it I had to switch to BT and magically I was able to get an engineer come out and it's all good.
Fuck BT, and the conflict of interest system where the infrastructure is managed by someone who also provides the service.
Luckily an Alt Network is laying fibre outside and should hopefully be able to supply service in the next 6 months and I'll be dropping BT infrastructure as soon as possible.
I don't care whether the system is multiple infrastructure options, or one infrastructure and multiple services over the top but in that case my infrastructure provider should be separate from my service provider.
Line sharing in the US extended to DSL served from COs, but faster DSL came from remote terminals that were closer to users and didn't have space for CLEC equipment.
Under the US Telecominications Act of 1996, the FCC likely could have mandated more line sharing arrangements for cable and DSL from remote terminals, which isn't the same as fully separating wiring from service, but gets some things good enough so people have at least a chance at having an option for getting better routing or getting a static IP or ...
Free markets can’t exist without regulation. Otherwise, literal warlords take over, and if not that, monopolies and oligopolies and anticompetitive behaviour and externalities
Europe as a whole has a fuck ton of congestion and reliability problems because ISPs don't want to build out fiber and these fiber companies are very slow to roll out and increase capacity, because they don't have an incentive to be fast or build fiber to the same places multiple times like in the US. If anyone remembers the Hetzner-DTAG fiasco you'll know what congestion I'm talking about where unless you are directly peering with someone on an internet exchange you can forget about having a good experience.
In Europe outside of the incumbent carriers, most ISPs build a local network and just peer at an exchange while buying the crappiest and slowest IP transit link they can get, meaning most Europeans reading this could just run a speed test to a network not directly connected to your ISP and see how bad their network speeds really are to most of the internet (you also probably don't have IPv6 either). Big ISPs also have zero incentive to peer with anyone because all of those small ISPs can usually only buy Transit from them (transport is out of the question for most small ISPs in most of the continent), unlike in the US where even Comcast has to appease their customers somewhat as there's a lot of competition these days from TMO and VZ.
In the US ISPs build their own transit and transport networks, meaning large ISPs have an incentive to build fast and reliable networks with lots of capacity and redundancy so they can sell access to said networks. This doesn't happen in places like Europe where there might be a single transport network for an entire geographic area. It also means that unless you are as big as Netflix, you can pretty much assume everyone in the lower 48 will have a good experience connecting to your server since congestion is only a hyper-local thing out here, but in Europe congestion is such a big problem the EU had to step in and ask American tech companies to voluntarily lower bandwidth usage so they could keep up.
That's also why you see so much shit from those same telecoms who cry about having to upgrade their network because of said big tech companies, when in reality it was those same telecoms who sat on their asses not building fiber and not upgrading capacity.
When the pandemic hit and ISPs realized they were resting on their laurels, a lot of fiber building companies were unable to handle the request for more capacity because every other ISP in Europe is asking for the same thing, and most ISPs can't build their own fiber as they never invested in their own equipment and training as, again, the government gave that job to someone else.
I don't really understand how a 2" deep nano trench is meant to last any serious amount of time (compared to a regular conduit fully buried under the road), given how asphalt roads (particularly in a city where there is a fixed-height curb, and resurfacing works will regularly be ripping up a layer of the asphalt to be replaced.
It fails basic civil engineering on so many levels.
Google Fiber, on the other hand, has been clean and clear.
I bypass the AT&T router: https://github.com/jaysoffian/eap_proxy
(I'm a crazy person so I also relocated their ONT to inside my home to keep it out of the summer temperatures.)
And while that spurred the AT&T fiber sales critters to come out of the woodwork, that didn't inspire much in the way of actual fiber investment from AT&T.
The sales critters came to our neighborhood several times, but ultimately stopped. I think I may have had some influence there, because I kept asking them if they could actually deliver fiber to our house, and they kept failing to be able to answer the question. I kept showing them the AT&T website on my iPad and to show me where they could actually provide service, and they just walked away.
Still no AT&T fiber here.
But Spectrum was happy to walk around the neighborhood recently, offering their same sub-1Gbps cable modem service that they've had for years and years.
Sadly, when Time Warner Cable was here, they could do symmetric 1Gbps connections, at least if you signed up for business class service. Not so much with Spectrum. They can give you 1Gbps down, but nowhere near that for upstream -- not even with business class.
Sigh....
Sigh....
They bought out TW and then proceeded to make the service even worse.
Aug 2015: Free T-shirt
May 2017: ATT dug up my yard (Everyone was hopping it was google)
Nov 2017: ATT fiber Installed (At least it’s not spectrum cable anymore)
Dec 2021: Google Fiber dug up my yard.
May 2022: Google Fiber installed.
It’s a shame they re-trenched everything 4 years after ATT did.
I'm guessing Google's presence is also what keeps your AT&T bill at $70/mo.
I'm paying $7 / month for 0.5 Gbps. I'd say it's worth the tradeoff.
I don't understand why people are scared of using services that have relatively low switching barriers, because they may be shut down one day.
I've used so many services over the years - big tech and from start ups that I've since moved form because they closed down or remained stagnant over better alternatives, and I never had to give it a second thought.
This suggests there's alternative services available anyway, so why take the risk on Google at all?
I know people who have Google Fiber, and love it - super fast Internet at reasonable prices. If it got turned off, they would just go with someone else. What exactly do you think the downside is? As a municipality, sure, as the article explains. But as an end consumer, what's the problem?
Isn't that for people to decide for themselves? Few reasons I can think of: preference, trust, integrations, better features, don't want to support Comcast, etc.
So if one service has significant advantages, I'll switch. Even if it might not last a long time.
Apple stuff is useless because it only works on Apple devices, and doesn't let me share with friends who don't have Apple devices, and generally isn't friendly to ad-blocking.
This logic doesn’t make sense. I only have Apple devices and it’s quite awesome. Android is buggy as hell and not integrated at all. My Apple devices are completely integrated with the entire Apple ecosystem. Spoken as an android fanboy from the G1 until the pixel 3xl.
I now have Chattanooga's public utility fiber, provided by the local electricity provider (EPBfiber, part of the electric fiber board) to EVERY SINGLE ADDRESS SERVICED BY THE POWER COMPANY.
The latter scenario is SO MUCH BETTER that the state of Tennessee effectively has banned [still cat-and-mouse] other cities from implementing Chattanooga's beloved solution to broadband infrastructure AS A RIGHT. I do not even know why Comcast/AT&T/etc. even send out advertisements when nobody in their right mind would choose anything other than the city-provided publicly-subsidized internet.
<3 from Not Your Electrician
It's bleakly hilarious that politicians of a certain stripe fall over themselves to pass laws against policies that deliver value to the public.
https://www.deseret.com/2014/5/20/20541836/wi-fi-available-a...
Google paid the city $3.8M to the city, for the city to clean up the mess themselves.
Vancouver BC has an extensive microtrenched fiber network in the busy downtown core, crossing many roads, and it's relatively trouble free.
I've seen proper trenching with a 30" diamond saw the last bit from a telephone pole to a commercial building. The fiber ran as far as it could using public right-of-way to save installation labor costs.
I'm curious if anyone knows why there is a GF dead zone in Austin downtown except for the Google offices and a few other buildings. It's bounded by N Lamar to the west, W 30th to the north, I-35 to the east, and the Colorado to the south. Taxes? Permit $? Laziness?
2 Gbps GF ATX customer here. It takes under a week to activate. They have 5 Gbps now but I don't see the point. $70 1 G, $100 2 G, and $125 5 G.
If GF goes under, there's always Spectrum who sends me 5 junkmail ads a week for their overpriced offering.
“It is such a shame to think that we wouldn’t be having any of this conversation if they would have dug their little holes two inches deeper,” Coan said.
Alphabet the Clown compagny!