Can Google Save Us From Slow Internet 240
CoveredTrax writes "As part of the beta test of their new gigabit fiber network, Google has provided Stanford University with mouthwateringly high-speed Internet. Since the program was announced, the service, which is now being provided free to students and faculty in the Palo Alto area, has got a lot of people to asking (sometimes begging) that their city be next on Google's list for communication salvation. But can Google save us all from inferior web access? And more importantly, is it a good idea to let them?"
God knows... (Score:2)
AT&T can't.
Comcast won't.
Verizon could, if the could afford it, eventually.
Otherwise I'll be waiting on Sonic.net.
Actually power utilities in my state would have (Score:2)
But that unholy trinity sued, and then sponsored a law to prevent it, saying PUDs may not compete for telecommunication services. The only counties that got grandfathered in have gigabit fiber to the premises, for cheap. Two of the least dense counties in the state, and the PUDs are making so much money at it they have to lower power rates to compensate. But somehow those three don't see a profit in it in the most densely populated CITIES, let alone counties.
Somebody needs to explain to Google's wizards
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Don't forget TDS v. Monticello.
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Basically it is either Google or the Government.
Re:God knows... (Score:5, Interesting)
Its intentional, 85% of the fiber in the ground in most areas is not lit.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre#Overcapacity [wikipedia.org]
They took $200 billion taxpayer money and ran off with it,
they are just more of the pirates running the country into the ground.
http://www.tispa.org/node/14 [tispa.org]
We paid for the upgrade already, we got the shaft as usual.
Pirates of the Potomac taking bribes to hand off our money to corporate pirates.
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I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding of where all that unlit fiber is. Virtually all that unlit fiber is long-haul trunks running between metro areas, not last-mile deployments. These companies laid fiber during the dot-com boom to support backbone networks, not home/end-user ISP service. It's not like everyone has a fiber optic cable running to their house and nobody wants to light it up and provide service... that Fiber To The Home (FTTH) is simply not there for the vast majority of US residenti
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I dissagree. Both in the same market trying to subscribe the same customers is doing the job.
I started with Dial Up. Upgraded to Comcast about 4 years ago. 2 Meg down connection.
I dropped Comcast and got Qwest with a lower price and a 6 meg down connection.
This week Comcast had a door to door salesman stop by. They just pulled fiber and are offering 20 Meg down for about $5 less. This does not happen in a monopoly market.
I'm desperate for fiber (Score:2)
Unfortunately the local phone company (Frontier) has a mortal lock on telecom, and of course the usual shitty cable provider (Time Warner) prevents any competition. So we won't be seeing fiber in my area, probably ever.
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Really? I have Frontier, and it's fiber to my house. Of course, they bought it already set up from Verizon.
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I saw a huge upgrade when Frontier took over from Verizon in the area. My telephone line doesn't drop in and out when it rains anymore and there is DLS literally everywhere. Of course, around here, it's a miracle to see any utility company put the effort in. My road doesn't even have cable television, let alone internet.
There will be a time... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Could be, but more likely they'll profit as a result of the increased number of pages that we'd be viewing in a given length of time. That and that we wouldn't need to block ads to get decent speed. I've noticed a ridiculous number of times when a page won't load that it's spending all its time contacting a slow ad server.
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Most likely the problem is on their end, I get the same problem some times, and I'm on 100/100 fiber.. I don't block ads because it takes much longer to load, but because the ads clutter the websites I visit and are an annoying distraction from the content I'm actually after. Since first starting to use the Internet in the mid 90's, the only times I can remember clicking ads was specifically to support the website I was visiting. The ads have never particularly interested me despite all the information Goog
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No, but it will help with latency and probably come with a better modem. Plus, I doubt very much that those ad servers are really that slow.
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No, but (unlike your current ISP) they have an interest in your internet connection being up and running, since their main cash cow is ads. No internet, no ads.
For your ISP, otoh, the financially best situation is your connection being down and you still not canceling the contract. That's about the best situation for him, and that's why keeping you hanging 3-4 days isn't just not a big deal for him but actually a pretty good idea.
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Let's let Google roll out fiber across the United States and then have the government break them into two or more companies.
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If they gave me fast affordable internet speeds then I could hopefully get my own privacy with a nice affordable VPN.
Re:There will be a time... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think people realize how much that web advertising drives Google. If you look at their financial reports, it's the majority of their revenue. They're not so much an IT company as they are an advertising company that happens to use IT.
This is also why you get things like Google refusing to implement the Do Not Track feature in Chrome [computerworld.com] as well as the absence of anonymity on Plus.
Re:There will be a time... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:There will be a time... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Google is never perfect, in general it is only significantly better then the alternative, and it forces the alternative to work for the better.
For *decades*, this would have been an apt description of Microsoft. In the early days, *nix was a disjointed, proprietary mess dominated by sneering, long-haired elitists, computers were out of reach of average people, and costs for everything was high.
Microsoft has gradually ossified, and now stands in a strange position: it seems to want to be a startup, but its a
Re:There will be a time... (Score:4, Insightful)
Do our current ISPs offer better privacy?
YES.
As long as the US has legislation like the PATRIOT ACT and the federal courts are fine eroding the 4th amendment, there will not be better alternatives.
The difference is that PATRIOT act stuff is limited in scope. The feds show up and demand the tracing of specific users. Google is all about wholesale data-harvesting of each and every user because that's their business model.
Don't even try to take this as a defense of the PATRIOT act. But, at least so far, we do not have a legal requirement for ISPs to record anything about all of their customers. Fear-mongering politicians keep trying to get such laws passed, but it hasn't happened yet.
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What I would like is my local municipality simply state that they are OPEN for business and for proposals for bringing fiber to every house in the city limits, and what kind of guarantees will be offered. THEN give the person who wins a ten year (or whatever) contract to the best proposal.
Government should get out of the way and PROMOTE improvements to infrastructure, not make excuses as to why we should limit it, under the premise of "progressive" politics.
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That may be, but the ISPs are probably already selling our information to advertisers.
The only way a Google ISP would be different in this regard is that people would just become more aware of it.
Re:There will be a time... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you care about privacy, you use encryption to communicate and you obfuscate tracking no matter who your ISP is.
The internet is not private.
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We are already under communications dictatorship, when someone comes along appearing to be a benevolent dictator, the worst it could be is a lateral move.
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Re:There will be a time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Because it's to their advantage to provide fast internet - fast internet = more youtube(etc) watching, more of their ads shown.
Comcast(etc), on the other hand wants exactly the opposite: They make no money off of providing fast internet, and lose money as people watch less TV.
So, yes, google would be better.
Hop In, L'il Girl. I've Got Candy. And Bandwidth. (Score:2)
is it a good idea to let them?
No, of course not. Obviously. It's kind of like a neighborhood that's had a spot of high crime deciding to let policemen with cameras station themselves inside each bedroom 24/7.
"Oh, gee, I dunno about that... but maybe it'll be okay if their badges are really, really shiny. I like Shiny...
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That's a really, really bad analogy.
This is like a town where there are two stores that have high prices and poor service and a new store moving in with better prices and better service.
Google doesn't want to set up networks all across the country, what they do want is to shame the ISPs into doing what they should have been doing years ago. And if shame doesn't work, there's a stick in the form of them making the ISPs obsolete. It's absolutely inexcusable that one can live in a major city and be restricted
Slow Internet is not the problem (Score:2)
Slow Internet is not the problem. The problem is that we (or rather, our applications) demand more and more data. When 480p video used to suffice, now 1080p is all-important, and soon some 3D variation of that. Where text used to be just fine now it's necessary to watch a Youtube video. Where you used to get animated GIF banner ads now you get full video ads. Where before our preferred content format was local files saved on our hard drives and distributed via home networks, now we store everything in "the
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Every problem you name has a technical workaround that your average Slashdotter could name off the top of their head.
Don't buy what Google is selling if you don't want it.
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The problem is that Google has a search monopoly and is leveraging it in more and more services to lock people in. Google is practically the gatekeeper of the web, and it's not even an open source search engine. It's surprising that there isn't more outcry from the FSF crowd over the fact that a closed-source platform now drives almost all web traffic.
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It's surprising that there isn't more outcry from the FSF crowd over the fact that a closed-source platform now drives almost all web traffic.
Because it wouldnt work. Even if you release only parameters (and not the values you set them to) and people will still manage to game the system.
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They're not practically a gatekeeper of the web. I switched to Bing for a while and found that I was getting the same quality that Google was providing if slightly less fresh. And then I switched to duckduckgo which was a bit better than both.
The only reason to use Google is if you demand the absolute most recent results, which in most cases aren't going to differ significantly from the slightly less recent results from the competition.
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So just how does Google "lock people in" exactly?
I'm pretty sure every single Google service (including search) is 100% voluntary.
And people love to throw around the term 'monopoly' as if its somehow bad. Nope - a monopoly isn't illegal on its own, and all you're doing is giving Google credit for becoming one - its not an easy feat, unless your market is tiny.
If Google are big because people want to do business with them, how is that bad?
oh wait, that's right - Google are going to fry us all and the whole
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More bandwidth is great, it's awesome, really. But the problem is really bandwidth creep and a bigger pipe doesn't solve that. It's the same problem hardware manufacturers and highway builders have, the capacity gets filled uselessly. Those workarounds are always janky and require technical expertise, time, and don't always work, and inevitably become unrealistic as you try harder to cling to what becomes your more and more outdated notions of what is enough bandwidth.
A more generalized approach is needed,
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That's really not the problem you seem to think that it is. We've got plenty of capacity, or we would if ISPs would upgrade their capacity with currently available technology. In many parts of the world it's common to have connections that kick the ass of my 5mbps DSL line.
Ultimately, the assumption that the use is just going to spiral out of control forever ultimately neglects to take into account the fact that at some point it becomes good enough. I'm not sure when that's going to be, but it will happen.
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This is right up there with "640k is enough for anyone" and other similar statements. Also, are you aware that the WHOLE of human recorded history shows you to be wrong? (how many libraries of congress is that now anyway?)
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-- . / - --- ---
Go away filter error!
The first one is always free (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who thinks that Google is doing this out of the kindness of their hearts is silly.
Google doesn't care whether you have high-speed access. They want to be able to trace your browsing and other internet usage habits, and they want to make sure they can serve up their ads in a way that minimizes the requirements on their resources.
Re:The first one is always free (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, they care to the degree that it drives more Google ad views. However, their PR department has been quite successful in convincing techies that everything they do is in the name of engineering and open technology rather than driving their core business of web ads.
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I'm not saying Google's not evil, and we should still be suspicious of free goodies, but maybe we should
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Well I need decent Internet and no one else seems to be able to provide it. Verizon won't, Time Warner can't, and the government can't afford to because we need to give ever-increasing kick-backs to rich people. If Google's willing to do it because it's in the best interest of their business, then I don't mind.
I mean, who do you think *is* going to provide fast Internet out of the kindness of their hearts?
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Nobody thinks that and nobody really cares. They've never promised to give the technology away, they've always been pretty clear about the fact that they'll ultimately be charging for the connection. Granted they weren't clear about how much, but they are going to be making money on the proposition.
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The problem with this objection is that the government already tracks all your long-haul packets if they are interested in you. Not only can they track them but they can also perform deep analysis. The only security implication of this decision is that more local traffic (to another customer of the same ISP) will be logged, but since that is a vanishingly small slice of current usage this is effectively a non-issue.
Sure, Google will know everything I am doing on the internet. But my government can know that
Delicious Possibilities (Score:2)
Just in time!
I have been working on a project that would need to pump massive amounts of data through the pipes.
We live our lives mostly in the fleeting moment... but there is a way for that to change...
I'm In (Score:2)
And more importantly, is it a good idea to let them?
I'd go with SatanCo and their service powered by burning babies for a gigabit fiber.
Story's wrong (Score:5, Informative)
More importantly, though, Google is *not* installing fiber in Palo Alto. One of the things that likely helped Stanford's case when we were selected is that the school owns *all the land* and even, as far as I know, all the utility lines on our campus. When you buy a house at Stanford, you actually only buy the building – you only lease the land. Because of that, when Stanford says "we're gonna install fiber," it's probably not tied up in regulatory messes, multiple contracts, competitive bidding, or the like. It takes the school's approval process, which may or may not be slow, but that's the only one; we don't have to ask the county, the city, or AT&T if we can do something - something that definitely speeds our adoption. I'm kinda scared that those kinds of facts might hurt further development of Google fiber.
LoC? (Score:2)
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How many Libraries of Congress can Stanford now download per second?
14,400 Toyotas' worth
Google? Possibly. What we need is competition. (Score:3)
I live in a rural backwater 100 miles from nearest large metropolis. The ILEC Bell won't even put a DSLAM in my CO.
Fortunately, they missed buying up one of the local CLECs in the 1980s when they were on a spending spree, and said CLEC acquired a large mom-and-pop ISP around Y2K.
The CLEC moved into my area, put a DSLAM of their own in my CO, and gives me 5Mbps ADSL 2+ service (we tested to 16, but I didn't want to pay for more than 5). This uses the ILEC's copper from CO to NID but everything else is done by the CLEC/ISP.
Next month or so, the CLEC will be burying fiber in my yard -- for free -- and the yard of anybody else in the neighbourhood that already has underground services and wants it; whether they are a current customer or not. This is because they just strung fiber on the pole and have a crew in the area that can just go down the street and bang-bang-bang get er' done. Unlike Verizon FiOS, said CLEC is also NOT ripping out the existing copper infrastructure.
So, about 2 months from now, I expect to be running 20 Mbps fiber service from these guys; 6 months or a year later, I'll also have Internet TV through them (they just bought a small traditional cable company in the area). In a rural village. And a few years from now, I bet they'll be pushing a lot more than 20 Mbps through the fiber.
So, no, we don't need Google to get fast internet. We need competition!
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That's fucked up. I live in Seattle and the connection in my neighborhood tops out at 5mbps, there's other neighborhoods where it tops out at 1.5mbps. And we're within a few miles of an IXP.
Just goes to show that Qwest sucks. Hopefully now that Century link owns them we'll see some improvements, but it's been pretty offensive to know that we're paying basically the same rates as those that are on fiber even though we're getting only a fraction of that speed.
Re:Google? Possibly. What we need is competition. (Score:5, Insightful)
Dozens of municipalities here in Sweden laid their own fibers and provided open and equal access to ISPs (and IPTV, IPPhone). Building owners/coop-associations generally have to pay to get the last few meters pulled into the building, but the fibers are there already.
I think publicly owned infrastructure is the only model that can provide true competition, if one of the ISPs own the fibers they will always have a leg up on the others no matter how many laws regulate their behaviour.
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It would be nice to know what town you are talking about. Some slashdotter might be looking to move to a rural area with good internet.
No one can save you from slow internet. (Score:2)
Our expectations will probably always outpace available bandwidth.
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Back in MY day, we took 300 baud and LIKED it. You could almost play Rogue! ("Worms" would overrun the buffer.)
Kinda pointless? (Score:2)
Experiment is nice, lovely, news-worthy and, I think, kinda pointless. ;) ). Have you seen one that'd be disconnected? Not that it would lack fiber to every dorm room, but rather a complete lack of connectivity? I thought so.
Mostly because Universities never seemed to have suffered from the lack of or "slowness" of internet connection in the first place (though any amount of bandwidth can be readily consumed by students doing whatever students normally do
The more important experiment is that Google Fiber in
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I'm in Kansas City, and I can't wait! Gigabit down is wonderful and everything, but the part that sound wonderful is gigabit UP!
I'm currently on Everest/Surewest which sucks less than Time-Warner, but it still sucks. Uploading a 3 minute HD clip to YouTube takes a fricken hour currently.
wget *.xxx (Score:3)
Just waiting on Google to press Enter.
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$ wget *.xxx :P
--2011-08-28 21:58:03-- http://.xxx/ [.xxx]
Resolving *.xxx (*.xxx)... failed: Name or service not known.
wget: unable to resolve host address `*.xxx'
Google knows your needs (Score:2)
Reason for no competition (Score:2)
Why wait on Goog? (Score:4, Interesting)
Chattanooga achieved 1Gb/sec on EPB's network [engadget.com] without any help at all, and both AT&T and Comcast fighting them every step of the way. The fight went well on up the court system hierarchy but the end result is that the fastest service in the U.S. is now here in tiny Chattanooga. I'm proud of that, and can attest firsthand for the quality and cost savings of their service. We went from roughly 600.00 for phone and internet on our business to 100.00/month. Now, why should we wait or expect to burden Google with this, when the very power to attain this resides in your very own communities.. Takes a little doing tho. Good Luck@!
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There will always be watchmen. Watchmen of watchmen even. Personally a bird in the hand is worth two in bush.. jmho...
Paranoia, your name is Charliemopps (Score:2)
Clearly, the only solution is to be your own isp, and only connect to websites you personally control.
Using a web browser you wrote yourself
on an OS you wrote yourself
on a computer you made yourself
assembled from parts you crafted by hand
from scratch.
Or you could accept that with access to the internet comes a loss of privacy.
In which case why would you trust a private company as your ISP more than a local public utility?
Gov? (Score:3)
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You seriously want the government to be your ISP?
Hell yes. Unlike our local Comcast and AT&T monopolies, our local officials actually have to answer to the electorate.
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The complicated bit is that there are typically already a couple ISPs in most areas and they'll stone wall any city council that tries it. I know that because 6 years ago when Seattle was thinking about putting all our dark fiber to use, Comcast wouldn't comment and Qwest claimed that they were planning to do it, and neither wanted any interference. Fastward half a decade and Qwest explicitly admits that certain neighborhoods are going to be stuck at 1.5 mbps. I can only imagine how much longer the city can
Dalton Kick started it... (Score:3)
My Internet is blazing fast. Browsers are slow. (Score:2, Interesting)
My Internet is plenty fast. Browsers are slow. OK, the browser combined withe the web site is slow. Chrome does JavaScript really well, blazingly fast. That's only half the problem though. The other half of the problem is that YOUR WEBSITE DOESN'T NEED THOSE SCRIPTS. Yes, I'm shouting. If I were a web designer, I would have embedded a video of a guy shouting using Javascript, along with 10 ads and several other embedded videos, and some Flash. At least half the embeds would contain exploits for IE/W
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I disagree, for a site like this, we don't need fatter pipes. But if you're trying to stream Netflix movies on a 1.5mpbs or slower connection, it's going to be painful. Even at 5mbps I have to disable things that I leave running ordinarily in order to not spend hours on end buffering.
really? (Score:2)
And more importantly, is it a good idea to let them?"
Because letting Comcast and Verizon do it is so much better?
Why Google? Why not municipal broadband? (Score:2)
Sigh....Can't we solve problems anymore without pining for a benevolent Google dictatorship?
I'm not sure I can say it any better myself. You have municipal broadband, you have playing hardball with your current provider (which isn't actually that difficult; you just never find county commissioners with the knowledge and spine to do so), you have broadband cooperatives. You have a half-dozen options that are simpler and more palatable than holding out the naive hope that a *different* multinational corporation will rid
It's not kindness, It's net neutrality ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Erm (Score:2)
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Re:There's still hope... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Just because centralized communism fails miserably when applied to reality doesn't mean that the issues the GP brings up can't be solved or at least vastly improved. The argument can certainly be made that most of socialized Europe outperforms the US in some or all of those areas.
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I needn't move, I'm already in a country that addressed those problems. Sure, I probably pay more tax than you do. But then again, I have a university degree and needn't work 'til I'm 40 just to pay the loan off, I have health insurance and our unemployment rate (the real one, not the fixed one) is around 4%.
Keep your perfect world. I'll keep mine.
Re:There's still hope... (Score:5, Funny)
If only America would elect a liberal supermajority for Congress followed by a liberal president so that all that stuff could easily get solved. Oh, wait...
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Call me when it happens. We've got a moderate President and the 111th Congress was center-left at best.
If you really want a *liberal* supermajority (friendly reminder that Democrat != liberal), we'd need a lot more folks like Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders replacing the Heath Shulers and Mark Pryors of the Congress.
And then of course, you'd need this liberal supermajority to actually *do something* instead of sitting around being scared of their own shadows.
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Call me when special interests don't hold the media hostage and force politicians to dance to their tune to get any air time during election season.
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We got a similar system for our politics. Every party (that gets more than a few votes, just to keep the lunatics from cashing in) gets their campaign expenses reimbursed from the country. At first, a huge outcry was heard (after all, we should pay with tax money so politicians can lie to us with ads?), but face it: They need money to campaign, and they will get it, one way or another. And this way, I buy the politician. Not some corporation.
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When has there ever been a liberal supermajority? You mean those few months, where you needed to count people like Lieberman as "Democrats" in order to reach the magic number of 60?
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Oh please, PLEASE let it happen! At least the collapse would not take that long and we could start rebuilding sooner.
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I'm sure nothing could go wrong in encouraging the gatekeepers of the web with a closed-source monopoly platform on search and advertising, as well as a history of privacy issues, to become your ISP.
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Unlike any ISP in the history of the internet...
Face it, the only question any ISP will ask when the NSA is coming knocking is whether they may have some lube.
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