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...
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.
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.
Google Fiber, on the other hand, has been clean and clear.
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....
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 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.
Google paid the city $3.8M to the city, for the city to clean up the mess themselves.
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.
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 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?
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.
“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!
