Google Fiber: Why Traditional ISPs Are Officially On Notice 408
MojoKid writes "A few years ago, when Google was determining which city to launch its pilot Google Fiber program, cities all over the country went all-out trying to persuade the search giant to bring all that fantastical bandwidth to their neck of the woods. And with good reason: Google Fiber offers gigabit Internet speeds and even TV service, all at prices that meet or beat the competition. In fact, the lowest tier of Google Fiber service (5Mbps down, 1Mbps up) is free, once users pay a $300 construction fee. If ISPs were concerned before, they should really start sweating it now. Although Google Fiber looked like it would whip traditional ISPs in every regard, with Time Warner Cable cutting prices and boosting speeds for users in Kansas City in a desperate attempt to keep them, surely other ISPs were hoping the pilot program would flame out. Now that Austin is happening, it's clear that it's only a matter of time before Google rolls out its service in many more cities. Further, this jump from legacy Internet speeds to gigabit-class service is not just about people wanting to download movies faster; it's a sea change in what the Internet is really capable of."
Re:Oy. (Score:4, Informative)
They aren't going to "crush" Comcast and Frontier. My FIOS fiber is already capable of 1 gb, but the interface on the side of the house says it's only good for about 250 mbps. They'd just need to change that and add some new stuff at the head end. I'm currently paying for 30/30, but I can see them offering 100 for the same price if Google starts sniffing around. Comcast is already offering 100 mb in some markets and they can probably steal more bandwidth from their cable TV spectrum to ramp up to a gig if it really becomes necessary. Coax has a lot of room in it as long as it's in good physical shape.
Remember that "Seattle" (including the suburbs) is about 100 miles long and 50 miles wide. Comcast covers nearly all of that. It took Verizon (who recently sold their local plant to Frontier) about 10 years to connect a few small areas in the 'burbs. It would be decades before Google could cover the whole thing. Comcast only has to beef up the areas that Google entered and that probably wouldn't include the FIOS areas. Remember that even though per capital income is pretty high here, the customer density is pretty low compared to the major metropolitan areas like NYC, LAX, etc. I think the whole region still only has about 2 million people. Google might do the East side just to piss off Microsoft though :-)
In gaming terms, what this could do (Score:3, Informative)
Then if you just apply some basic theory of who isn't in range of who, you simply update those people less frequently. Instead of updating these people every 33ms + your action time, you update them depending on how long it would take them to get in range if they were traveling full speed into you. For a game with sniper rifles, maybe you can't do this. But lets say your game all involved melee weapons, then you're looking at people who aren't in immediate melee range getting updated every 100 ms. And people slightly further away, every 300 ms. And people really far away, several seconds. The distribution of people means most people don't need the fastest update(only the 8 people standing around you would in fact). So for a melee game, you could probably be looking at 1-100 million people in the same zone. At this point, your video card is probably the limiting factor more than your pipes are though I doubt we could organize 100 million people to want to play your video game unless it is super awesome.
It comes down to three things:
Can you really send out 100,000 packet updates or 200 bytes every 33ms? Technically you could, but would the software and hardware really manage it?
Do you have a strong enough anti hack system and hack resistant code that your game can do client side hit detection, and hackers to be banned when they show up?
Finally it is all irrelevant until 1GB/s fiber is everywhere, because for this feat of gaming to occur, you'd need everyone gaming to have 1GB/s fiber!
FYI (Score:2, Informative)
Gigabit connection: Sonic offers it in parts of SF (Score:5, Informative)
Sonic.net offers gigabit fiber connections in Sebastopol CA now, and they're expanding next to the Sunset District in San Francisco. They may have more real paying customers on fiber than Google does. They're a small ISP and don't want to overextend themselves, so they're deploying slowly.
Re:Oy. (Score:4, Informative)
The difference between Google and ISPs is that the latter do not make it a /business/ of removing its users privacy. Yes, they may glean some additional benefit from the process, but it's a far cry from Google, in whose interest it is to know everything there is about you. For ISPs, it is sometimes in their interest to claim ignorance about their user's activities ... ISPs aren't really that happy that they are being forced to collect info for the government either.
Speak for yourself. My current provider is AT&T, and since I live in central Austin I'll be dropping them in a heartbeat for Google.
Re:Oy. (Score:4, Informative)
Dude, some ISPs are already injecting ads into web content that you access through them [blogspot.com]. If it's a choice between that and Google knowing that I look at Slashdot ten times a day, I'm pretty okay with the loss of privacy.
Re:Gimmick media story (Score:4, Informative)
at 256 QAM (38.8Mbps), 1 Gbps is about 30 6 MHz "channels." Most cable systems are capable of transporting 120-135 channels. Throughput on a cable system with 100% QAM carriers is about 4.5 Gbps (raw speed). There are a large number of systems in the US using all digital service today (Most of Comcast's systems have been or are in the process of being upgraded). Most of that bandwidth is being used for broadcast HDTV.
DOCSIS 3.0 uses channel bonding to add downstream bandwith today. It also specifies a 1024 QAM standard that will increase the channel throughput to about 50 Mbps (raw speed). In addition, new error correction methods will actually make 1024 QAM more robust than today's 256 QAM.
Re:Oy. (Score:5, Informative)
State regulation is what gives the telcos tacit monopolies, and inability for regional and local government to manage their own communications utilities. Think of how free public wifi has been outlawed in numerous states after telcos effectively bribed the legislatures.
I'm in no way an anarchist, but the TCA was designed to yank as much state authority over datacom regulation and give it to a federal level. Look at how well that's worked in the US. The landline "owners" sell crappy DSL derivatives. Comcast/Xfinity & TW/BrightHouse get fat and happy, and offer tiered levels of crap. Verizon and a few others offer fiber, which uses passive 90/10 ratios so that users cannot become "dealers" in services. Google comes along and gives people raw fiber (90/10) and with breathtakingly little effort, scares the crap out of the in situ last-mile purveyors.
State regulation is BOUGHT and PAID FOR by the providers. Consumers were not the ones that made the purchase. I'm no libertarian, but truly, state regulation isn't the answer because the legislators are too easily bribed with campaign contributions, soft money, and other greasings of the legislative wheels.