Cox, in Phoenix, miraculously doubled everyone's speeds > 100mbps last year because they were concerned with our general happiness levels and wanted to show their affection.
Nope... that's not it. Ran into two leads at Smash Burger in June of 2014 and asked them on the spot "When are we getting gigabit speed?" and their reply was "End of year, we gotta move before Google Fiber gets here."
None of that would have happened if G Fiber wasn't coming - CenturyLink and Cox were perfectly fine dabbling in 50mbps service for the rest of eternity without true competition.
Now in less than 12 months my 65mbps service was freely upgraded to 150mbps and we are suppose to have a 1Gbps option any month now (there are test neighborhoods live since last year around Scottsdale)
I have no illusions about how fortunate we are being in a well-wired/competitive environment, but damn am I happy and appreciative.
It actually has more impact on me and where I would want to live than I thought... the idea of going back to < 50mbps makes me sad.
1) They want to be an ISP
2) They feel bad for America and want us to enjoy faster internet.
They're doing it because they have plans for products which necessitate nationwide high speed internet. I don't know what those plans are... maybe making YouTube the everything-video-delivery-system, maybe massively collaborative work tools as they expand Google Docs et al... maybe something we haven't even heard about... but they've got something coming that they require Fiber for.
This is a business plan.
It is, but not because they have a plan beyond it, though.
Cox/Time-Warner/etc. basically shook down Google for money a couple of years ago. Google backed down and the last-mile ISPs thought they won.
Google, of course, was extremely unhappy to painfully discover that there was insufficient competition if the ISP's decided to play dirty and block their ads. So, Google now looks at the ISP's as a pure, existential threat that they must neutralize.
So, even if the ISP's upgrade or get really cheap, Google doesn't care. This is about making sure that no company ever has the ability to cut off Google's flow of ads to the consumer ever again.
Google will roll out fiber even if it's somewhat unprofitable just to slowly squeeze the ISP's into obeisance.
I think what's more important is that they're willing to spend money on fiber that they could spend elsewhere to get better returns. Returns on being an ISP probably aren't as good as returns on other kinds of infrastructure, at least up front.
Anti-competitive conduct is good when Google does it?
It's interesting how pure competition and "rational self-interest" got us the likes of Comcast and Cox and Verizon and all these other awful, awful companies. They quickly locked up the market, injected their own lobbyists into Washington, and then were content to provide a poor service for a lot of money.
What is shaking them out of their complacency now is not "the market" or "competition" as it's usually understood. It's a very large company, with tons of cash, led by someone (Larry Page) with goals beyond pure financial gains and rock-bottom self-interest.
Perhaps it's time to go back to the drawing board, and figure out what's wrong with these purely mechanistic models of society and the markets. It seems like it's time to ask ourselves if a dose of self-less-ness is perhaps required to make the whole system work better. Not a very large dose, mind you, but just a little bit; anything over the current level of zero, really.
It takes a lot of money to break into a captured market, which is why it takes a large company to do it. Google entering the ISP market has done more to shake up and spur on the incumbents in the past couple of years than anything regulators have done. And furthermore, you can be assured that their doing so is absolutely self-interested; Google isn't building fiber for the betterment of humanity, they're building it to improve the delivery of their services which make them money.
I've always had the impression that it's more a matter of timescales. Places do what's best for them in the next year, not the next 50yrs. If companies thought further ahead and building long term plans and potential would be a reason to spend capital, then I think we'd see a very different market, in many markets.
This doesn't paint an accurate picture. Google isn't deploying Fiber out of any notion of selflessness. This is a competitive play, and a very good one at that.
You say selfless ideals, I say this is exactly how "the market" and "competition" are commonly understood to function -- in the absence of corruption, regulatory capture and state granted monopolies.
Consider the extreme: in a single second, there aren't any discernible market pressures in the ISP industry, and it would be weird to expect it.
Which is mainly to say that it is important to talk about how quickly you want competition and market forces to come into play (not just that you want them to) when talking about why and how to change "the system".
Ergo, it was not a free market and it was not laissez-faire capitalism.
In a free market, i.e. laissez-faire capitalism, anybody is free to do whatever they want as long as they don't initiate the use of force, including the government, so you could not get into the situation you describe in the first place.
http://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Dont-About-Capitalism/dp/1...
It's either pure competition, or they're injecting lobbyists to tilt the table in their favor, but not both.
EX: 20,000 employs and or contractors and companies can’t own shares of other companies without being included in that cap. Outsourcing seems like the obvious loophole, but hardly an insurmountable barrier.
Though, increasing tax load as companies scale is probably a much better option. Not that there is a realistic chance of this passing any time soon, but large companies are harmful to both democracy and free markets so it's likely to be tried by someone.
PS: The only real counter argument I can think of is global completion.
Edit: (3 downvotes no responces.) How odd, looks like I hit one of those things you can't say. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html I wonder why?
A friend and I did a big trip to Southeast Asia and he begged his friends on email not to Include his email in their responses to save space on the server.
And for older folk, I still see plenty of @aol and @<serviceprovider> addresses.
Don't mistake what youre friends are doing for what the world as a whole is doing!
Nobody's done much more than reach parity with GMail since then, so there's been no big incentive to switch back.
Yahoo Mail and Hotmail were terrible then, and they're still mostly terrible now.
So why is everything that has big market shares bad?
How about we switch to a model where we gat bad at companys that are actually selling us shitty products instead.
Anyway, they have Charter cable over there - and for the last decade they have been asking me about 'Getting Netflix' - but with a maximum download speed of 3mbps I kept telling them "It's just not going to work well for you..."
2 months ago Charter bumped them from 3mbps to 50mbps.
My first thought was "well, looks like another cable company is moving into the area..."
Also, I just looked up a price quote for Troy (near city hall) and noticed they indicate their speeds start at 100Mbps for 39.99. Granted you said they live out farther, but they may be able to get more.
My wife's internet at her studio was recently doubled, but only after we called. They said they needed to see if her modem was "too old". It wasn't and they doubled it on the spot. She has a business account for that one.
-- as opposed to winning 1,000s of subscribers in a highly competitive city through marketing and new product/speed offerings.
I'm not TOTALLY discarding the 'all cable companies are evil' element here, just that if I was sitting at the head of that table and my stock price was all that mattered to my board and the exec team, I'd probably make very similar decisions to ignore monopolized markets unless I absolutely had to (i.e. bad publicity)
If you put a 1gbps service in Cincinnati, that forces Cleveland to have to compete with the economic gravity that generates. And they will either respond through attempting to build their own muni broadband or enticing eg Google fiber, or they will suffer and Cincinnati will draw people, capital and talent away from Cleveland.
The existing networks are fast enough to service what makes the money: video services. The cable companies will only upgrade the pipes to the extent that it threatens usage of their video service.
Not for Verizon, maybe -- but Google never struck me as a bunch of chumps or wild philanthropists. I'm betting they're getting more eyeballs in front of Adsense and YouTube ads...
There's no money in building dumb electric lines or dumb sewer lines or dumb phones lines either, so the solution there was to guarantee customers in return for regulating the service.
This would create a common platform upon which video service providers could compete equally. As it stands now, integrated companies like Comcast have no incentive to make sure Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, Sling TV, etc. work well for their customers. Quite the opposite, actually.
10 minutes north of Durham, ya, I'm sure Time Warner will feel the need to 'fight' there, let alone all the neighborhoods in Durham that won't get Google Fiber.
Verizon could be selling gigabit FIOS today but they don't because there is no competition in most markets. FIOS is profitable, just not as profitable as wireless.
Guess what Verizon uses to provide wireless? (Hint: public airwaves, most of which they got for free too)
It's staggering how much FUD there is on these issues. This is stuff you can just Google to inform yourself about.
I'm down near Tatum & Cactus.
Cox probably cares about Chandler even less now it has competition to deal with, we'll be last to get 1Gbps Gigablast that suddenly was announced when Google Fiber picked Phoenix.
EDIT North Scottsdale is generally first because that is where most of the company execs live.
Docsis 3.1 will come out in the next year and you'll see really high rate plans, but I bet they will charge a lot.
Do you (or other Phoenix people reading this) go to Coffee and Code in Mesa on Wednesdays? If not, you should!
It's an awesome coworking event at heatsync labs (a hackerspace I help run).
Okay, sorry again for offtopic comment.
My neighborhood has buried cable, so I don't know if the fiber will come to my house.
I honestly don't know how much work it is to add to the buried cable. If you have to go dig up each piece of conduit, that would royally freaking suck. Maybe there are access tunnels where they can use strings or something to yank the cable through. I would love to hear more about this.
And honestly, fibre to my cul-de-sac would probably be good enough for me.
Why isn't there competition between those two?
Then GFib comes in and suddenly everyone has piles of internet laying around ;)
Sincere question. What are the specific functional improvements that you've seen at a much higher mbps? Better youtube performance? Faster p2p? Faster web page load times? More supportive of a multi-device household?
Gigabit means you can make decisions on a whim, and not have to schedule down time days in advance. I mean I play video games when I'm physically and mentally exhausted (the couple hours post-gym, for instance).
Also buying digital delivery games (steam or PSN) is awesome :)
So (intentionally) confusing :(
I'm in Nashville and willing to do a fair bit of legwork if it means it'll bump my neighborhood up on the install list.
I suspect the enthusiasm had to do with Google not acting like a phone/cable company. My own hope is that this remains true, and that they come to the Boston area.
Though something I always wanted to try when I lived downtown was netBlazr [1], which beams internet from antennas on the tops of buildings. If you've got your own place or can convince your landlord to install an antenna, they get fantastic reviews.
[0]: http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/10/08/wahlberg-fios...
But seriously, your hypothesis about GF's non-evil fundamental DNA is a good one. It makes for a much better user experience.
We need some faster pipes in Boston/ Cambridge. As a place that wants to be a tech hub, its a little embarrassing...
It makes sense to me that Google went after these southeastern markets, because we are the area where Comcast is already enforcing (I've had to pay a couple times) data caps[1]. It's called a "trial" on their site, but the charges are real.
[1] http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/internet/data-u...
I'm really frustrated by comcast, my fiance and I have a hard time doing bandwidth using things simultaneously (netflix/twitch). I constantly watch our data meter to make sure we don't approach the cap.
Although it's kind of baffling because I recently lived in the bay area. AT&T's UVerse I had wasn't much better in terms of the bandwidth and price, I don't recall a cap though.
I'm here for a few years before fleeing back to CA. I've been researching how to start any sort of movement for reasonable service in town but it seems the town council is pretty alright with comcast, even though some tech business have actually moved from knoxville to Chattanooga for the internet. So really not sure what to do other than give up.
EDIT: Wow, I actually didn't realize how bad the situation is here in Knoxville, read more here http://www.metropulse.com/stories/features/downtown-knoxvill...
Back onto the topic, I seriously feel Comcast is "trialing" their data caps her because the southeast is perceived as less tech-savvy, and they're probably aware they can get away with it more.
EDIT: Thanks y'all, I'll be sending out some emails when I get home.
I agree with your data cap comment. Although it's not just the southeast. Any cornered internet market seems to have them. They're pretty widespread in Canada.
FWIW, It's the same way down here in Huntsville. Google Fiber in Nashville and Atlanta, fiber in Chattanooga, and I'm stuck with a 25 megabit cable connection that I pay out the nose for. We're trying to get something together here with the local utility[0] (a la Chattanooga), but it's still in the very early conception stages. It's still years away, if ever, from actually happening.
(Land prices are super cheap in Knoxville, though!)
It's really not that much. I could do my entire town for a little under $9m. Fortunately, Google just announced they'd be coming here (Raleigh-Durham) so hopefully I won't have to.
Politics/Bureaucrats -- what laws are in place to prevent you from deploying in X fashion? Can you bury fiber? Do you have to string across utility poles? If so, who owns the poles? (It'll either be the city or a utility company) What are their rates? What are the requirements to get quotes for their rates? (CenturyLink requires you to be a part of an NDA/Non-Compete Agreement program if you are reselling competitive services)
Business -- how many people are you looking to service? What's the absolute max you could potentially service? (usually subdivisions are zoned with a specific max amount of households) How many would you like to service? What is an acceptable cost? (I found $100 is the sweet spot for gigabit fiber) What kind of customers will you be servicing? (mostly soccor moms who will browse the internet from 11a-3p, young families who embrace video streaming from 8p-11p, retirees who only care about email and facebook from 9a-12p, etc.)
Technical -- how much bandwidth do you really need? Chances are you can actually service 100 or so residential customers with just a single gigabit ethernet connection. How much fiber will you need to run to everyone? The easiest thing to do is run single-mode fiber connected to a media converter in their house. Depending on how you can do "huts" (as google has dubbed them) you will probably do single cisco ToR switch with 48 spf+ ports for 40 customers. You will dedicate 4 ports for uplink connectivity via LACP and have 4 stand-by ports should one be bad. Scale this out as needed.
This will also be specific to your area -- but expect $10k/mile to run conduit to a hut with an additional $2k/mile for different fiber pulls. You would usually run conduit and some kind of fiber at the same time -- probably 96 strand single-mode. But that's up to you.
Not sure what else you need to know. That should be a good starting ground. The bulk of our capital was for fluid insurance bonds. About 80% of our working capital was going to be tied into those while we laid the fiber.
They previously tried "free" ("must have Google Account") city-wide WiFi in Mountain View. That lasted from 2009 to 2014 and was shut down on May 3, 2014.
One example of many:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131012/02124724852/decad...
Here is some actual relevant information related to the Google Fiber concessions, mainly in that they don't have to build out infrastructure to the entire city (unlike Comcast etc), and other breaks not given to previous providers:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-kansas-city-t...
> Google received stunning regulatory concessions and incentives from local governments, including free access to virtually everything the city owns or controls: rights of way, central office space, power, interconnections with anchor institutions, marketing and direct mail, and office space for Google employees. City officials also expedited the permitting process and assigned staff specifically to help Google. One county even offered to allow Google to hang its wires on parts of utility poles—for free—that are usually off-limits to communications companies.
That said, I'm excited as hell for the roll out. I'm not in one of the target cities, but Google Fiber spreading gives me hope that they'll eventually make it to me. I've lived with Bright House and their terribleness for far, far too long.
Very few countries have competitive access to 1gbps consumer broadband. You can name them on one hand.
What is missing from Google TV?
I would love to see these guys bring us their MVNO Sprint product and/or build a technology park fed by Google Fiber instead, either of which would still have the desired effect of lowering consumer bandwidth costs.
Cox has raised internet rates about 7% twice in the last 14 months.
Carrboro, Cary, Chapel Hill, Durham, Garner, Morrisville, Raleigh
It has it in the hero picture at the top here: https://fiber.google.com/cities/raleighdurham/home/ as well.
Now just to find a written source...
Hopefully it'll at least scare Comcast and AT&T into stepping up their game. I'd be really thrilled if it straight-up killed Windstream.
They have the leverage to ask cities to actively pull down barriers that other ISPs would face, and the cities willing to do that are the ones who get consideration.
Of course, that graphic could have zero to do with their plans and I'm going on about nothing. I do wish you could check by ZIP code alone instead of needing a street address as well. It would be nice to know just how close the service is to me geographically.
I wish I knew the reasons for not picking a city.
Just seems the locations aren't exactly tech hubs so I'm trying to get a better idea of how the expansion works.
Google has taken a pretty good interest in us lately: http://archive.tennessean.com/article/20130925/BUSINESS04/30...
We have the second-fastest growing market of tech jobs: http://fortune.com/2014/12/23/tech-job-trends-2015/
We are attracting a large amounts of college grads: http://www.businessinsider.com/city-observatory-report-on-th...
Of course, I'm partial since I live here. Unfortunately, I'm in an area outside of metro that I'm sure won't get fiber.
Another interesting observation is that all four of the new cities surround Chattanooga, TN which has had municipal gigabit fiber for years now. I wonder if that had anything to do with Google's decision-making process.
For example: Google looked at Seattle's NIMBY laws regarding utility boxes on sidewalks (each requiring a lengthy community approval process) and said, "Nope!"
Seattle's new mayor is now looking how to streamline the process to make the city more Google friendly, should the opportunity arise again.
http://www.geekwire.com/2014/seattle-approves-bill-allows-fi...
Which is good, as sidewalks are for walking, not utility installation pads.
In much of the UK outside conservation areas BT has powers to install cabinets as it sees fit. Combined with utility poles there are now some pavements on my town impassable to prams.
Places like Kansas City and Atlanta are much more development-friendly. In Atlanta, it doesn't matter how ugly your development is--we're talking about a city bisected by a 15 lane highway. Moreover, these are "up and coming" cities who see fiber as a competitive advantage. San Francisco doesn't feel the need to offer fiber to get tech workers to move there. Heck, they're trying to get the tech workers to move out. A place like Atlanta is the exact opposite.
They also have incredibly shitty ISPs, and lots of land to build out other ISPs.
Also, as part of the deal for coming to Provo, Provo city sold the existing fiber network to google for a single dollar and google's job was to upgrade the system to gigabit. The whole infrastructure was in place for the most part, so it was a good deal that they couldn't pass up. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Google-Fiber-Provo-iProvo-P...
"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."
Read about the building of Comcast Tower and how a plumbers union forced Comcast to install unnecessary pipes:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/archive/index.php/t-166039.htm...
I'm not saying it would be easy. It would take a lot of legal work. But if google's missions to not be evil, and disrupt the ISP market are to believed, they could make it easier.
Incumbent broadband providers are upgrading offerings in response to Google, so that doesn't seem like a particularly obvious end result.
