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."
Here in Chattanooga, we have fiber too (Score:5, Interesting)
Local power company. Freaked out the established interests to the point where Comcast has targeted advertising claiming people have left EPB to go back to them.
The only problem? The people in those commercials sound like such whiny gits, anybody with sense would walk away from Comcast.
Seriously, what kind of relationship is built on a demand to change your cable service?
Gimmick media story (Score:5, Interesting)
This is a media story engineered to generate goodwill. I would not go so far as to call it a gimmick, but it sounds and feels like one.
FTTH, as it's known, costs between $5,000 and $12,000 per home in the rural market and only exists through subsidy. By comparision, FTTH is between $1,500 and $3,000 in suburban markets which is recouped by annual customer commitments.
The only way these costs are made affordable is through government subsidies. Google is subsidizing these customers in a similar way. As with many subsidies, unless they are bonafide charity/goodwill missions, they are not sustainable. This is okay as long as Google has the goodwill of the overall financial markts, by, e.g., having such a huge P/E ratio that they enjoy enough excess money to spend on things like driverless cars, imaging satellites, and hot tub airplaines.
Speeds comparable to FTTH can be achieved for so much less money by using Fiber to the Neighborhood instead of to the home. While I'm no fan of local cable TV monopolies, they already do this today. The problem many local cable TV companies is that they still carry local channels in analog. If they were to convert to all-digital carriage their existing cable plant could compare with FTTH using DOCSIS 3.x but this dream inexplicably escapes them.
Re:Oy. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure that Google is better in every single respect than the traditional ISP. I'm pretty sure none of them protect your privacy and in fact do the shitty DNS ad serving for unknown domains which Google does not do. Google is much closer to an ideal provider than anything else out there.
I may be most libertarian but... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think states and cities should be rolling out their own fiber. Sort of like building roads. And then subsidize installation for last mile fiber for any homeowner that can afford $1000. They don't need to install the network equipment but they can or they can lease the lines to businesses. The state could fund a redundant backbone network that the cities could trunk into. Just design the lines to be replaced every 30 years.
Cites could then individually choose to offer "free" internet. Of course that would mean they would just subcontract out to a business to provide the network equipment and service. Cities pay for these sorts of things through property taxes.
I may be libertarian but I classify this as necessary infrastructure that will benefit the vast majority. Everything else is just more expensive.
PSA:Evil-ToS:No Server Hosting Allowed (Score:5, Interesting)
I really have no idea what sort of change a gigabit Internet connection will bring, but it's just as likely to open up all sorts of new services for consumers and opportunities for revenue for software developers and content providers that were unimaginable a few years ago.
This is what I was really hoping, but sadly discovered that their initial terms of service prohibited all residential customers from hosting any kind of server. While this is not exactly unexpected, I do consider it a violation of FCC-10-201/NetNeutrality's "blocking" prong. Though traditionally that is understood as residential ISPs blocking a residential client from a remote server, I also believe it applies to the symmetric use of IPv6, i.e. remote clients blocked from residential servers. My FCC 2000F complaint (ref#12-C000422224-1) is currently in "Enforcement review" after 7 months of getting bounced to the Kansas Attorney General who just bounced it back to the quite slow to respond FCC.
Anyway, until we can get some sort of residential internet users bill of rights for what they can expect from their bridge to the global information superhighway, I don't think we'll see remotely the advances in new services that we otherwise would.
$0.02...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3503531&cid=43033891 [slashdot.org]
Re:Gigabit connection (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Gigabit connection (Score:5, Interesting)
What Google and Verizon have said is that their costs are high due to regulation and hurdles. It is to complex to navigate the CA agencies. There is no one they can just "do business with" but rather dozens of agencies all of which have to be passed through. What's wrong with California is you don't have political machines in CA.
Re:Gimmick media story (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is what I have seen with broadband. Firms, as much as they say they are running the last mile, are really only doing so in high income high density area, mostly the suburbs. In many ares the best is someone like ATT who already has a presence. In other areas the only hope is cable. Not even ATT is going to spend the money to run a few miles of line and only serve a single small neighborhood.
So it would be pretty to think that Google is trying to put official ISPs on notice, but they are not. If they would they would have chosen another city in texas, run fiber to the neighborhoods around the central business district, and completely obliterated cable and ATT, and provided high speed to some people who could really use it. Instead they chose a safe place with a safe population that would return a high profit on relatively little investment. Even if many use the free service, the city is dense enough so that they will have many customers for each mile of fiber run.
Re:Oy. (Score:5, Interesting)
Google has said several times that this is exactly what they're trying to foster. Google gets an advantage from deploying fiber aside from the privacy issues that most people consider. They get loyalty. When one of their features is to "[r]ecord up to eight programs simultaneously, just because you can," it engenders a loyalty that the others can't touch.
From what they've said, I expect they don't really want to be in the ISP business, but as their core business depends in large part on growing bandwidth, they felt they had to do something to push the boundary. I would gladly pay $300 (or even more) for gigabit service. I moved to my current location specifically for FiOS availability and pay $105/month for 150/65 service. I am considering moving from Dallas to Austin in the near term mostly because I like the community, but also now in large part due to Google Fiber coming to the area. Everybody (Austin, Google, and me) wins then.
You don't really understand what is going on here (Score:2, Interesting)
First, there is no other provider that has Google's backhaul. Not only have they bought up ungodly amounts of interstate and international dark fiber, they've invested in own-brand optical interconnects and low-latency protocols and compression algorithms that are beyond cutting edge. Think terabit, not gigabit, per fiber, and thousands of multiplexed fibers. They do transcontinental failover of entire Google datacenters on a thermal variance. In seconds. Do you have any idea how much bandwidth that requires? They have their own switch tech, with their own ASICs as well.
Google could give a 10gig fiber connection to every Seattle resident and they could simultaneously test it, and Google wouldn't stress at all. It would DDOS every other server on the Internet, but the packets would be delivered.
Re:An experiment, like Google Reader (Score:4, Interesting)
Consider the following:
Google broadband is more likely to end up like Google Reader than it is GMail. I'd like to believe in free donuts and bacon, but I suspect that there are a few things about the economics of running an ISP that the utopians at Mountain View have missed when setting their initial price. Happy to be proven wrong, but Google doesn't have a great track record when it comes to predicting the long term viability of its projects.
Back when gmail launched, the typical offering from yahoo/hotmail/etc was about 10MB. Gmail launched with 1GB. It was such a ridiculous proposition at the time that people considered it an april fool [slashdot.org].
Don't want (Score:4, Interesting)
That or it'll all get shut down in a spring cleaning.
Shame the US can't get broadband from companies that aren't evil.
Re:Is this a troll? (Score:5, Interesting)
Opec anyone? You know, the gas station you buy at doesn't make anything off the gas, right? I do agree on the gov't monopolies suck though. It's really just the gov't paying for the infrastructure and then handing it over to a private citizen for free. If we're gonna have socialism just keep is social. Internet is so useful and essential to better living it should be a public utility. Hell, there was just a story on cnn about how the worst crop yields of the last 10 years are better than the best of the last 50; and it was partially attributed to sharing better farming techniques. Communication is good.
Whether or not govt. 'monopolies' suck depends on what you mean by government monopoly. Is it the role of government to run an ISP? I'd say no unless it is to provide coverage to areas where private companies can't be bothered. Infrastructure is a different topic. Where I live we used to have a what you Yanks would call a 'socialist' ISP run by the govt. and this same ISP also owned and ran the infrastructure. They ended up getting caught using the pricing for access to their network infrastructure to make life hard for competitors. Eventually this company was split up into an ISP part that was privatised and the infrastructure part that is still owned by the government and municipalities and it is now relatively easy for small time ISPs to set up shop and compete with the bigger boys. The lesson is that the owner of infrastructure should have no economic ties to those that use it or you'll quickly start to see anti-competitive behaviour unless multiple competing infrastructure companies build their own duplicateinfrastructure which is wasteful and does not entirely solve the problem of anti-competitive activity. I'm fine with the current system we have here where governmnent builds infrastructure and ensures that everybody has truly equal access to it.
Re:Oy. (Score:5, Interesting)
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 ("Oh, Bob is torrenting copyrighted material 24/7? Hmmm, well, we don't really monitor that sort of thing and anyway, our logs only go back six months..."). Google wants as large a database on each user as possible.
ISPs aren't really that happy that they are being forced to collect info for the government either. They aren't actively resisting (sadly), but if it was something they could opt-out of, you can be sure they would. Data collection is expensive, not only in terms of hardware and software, but in the resultant upset of customers if they learn you are doing it. Even for business use, the data only has limited value because the ISPs are not in advertising; they can use it internally and with a few of their partners, but they don't have the capability to maximize the value of the data. This limits what they can do with the data and how much money they can earn from the data-collection. This finite utility, combined with the cost of the data collection and the potential to upset the customers, restricts the ISPs from going full-bore with stripping user privacy.
Google will never opt-out of data-collection - for themselves or at request of governmental entities - because that is what they do. That is how they make money. Just as data-collection might be a side business to the ISPs, providing internet service is just a side business to Google.
And that is the difference between ISPs and Google.
Google's Ability to Penetrate into the market (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Oy. (Score:4, Interesting)
Just a reminder about AT&T - from the initial disclosure some years back, apparently their traffic goes through DPI with semantic filtering; whether that's just for the coastal nodes or all in-country stuff, I don't know. However, while I rarely use BT for anything but distro iso's, or open, public domain, or paid software and other media, the only time I got a letter about 'forbidden' activities, it was from AT&T - but that was after they got into the content-provider stuff, so I'm guessing they watch your stuff on behalf of studios and networks.