Google Fiber's Austin, Texas Rollout Confirmed 128
skade88 writes "As earlier rumors suggested, Google Fiber will indeed roll out in Austin, Texas, with the first homes receiving service in mid-2014. The delay is due to the need for a whole new fiber network to be deployed for the service. It will only be deployed within the Austin City limits. Google says in early 2014 they will allow people in Austin register their address for service. They plan to deploy to the neighborhoods with the most interest."
Why not Houston? (Score:5, Interesting)
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the channel selection is so so. i bet google is doing their research and picking markets where this won't be an issue
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austin is a hipster town where SXSW takes place every year
Houston has 2 sports teams that i know of
google's fiber channel list has no HBO and no expensive sports packages. I bet houston has a lot more sports fans than austin.
no HBO option
and the spanish language stations seem to be missing a few big names
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Are you kidding? You don't know Austin do you?
Houston has 4 Major league teams (Score:1)
I'm not a big sports fan, but I enjoy seeing any game live. Houston has a great set of sports teams now.
Houston Major league Teams with Dedicated Stadiums:
Houston Astros - Baseball
Houston Texans - Football
Houston Rockets - Basketball
Houston Dynamo - Soccer
----
Houston Aeros - Minor League Hockey - They share the Toyota center with the Rockets.
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Yo! I hear you like bandwidth, so Google should have googled Houston so you can have fiber with your fiber.
Re:Why not Houston? (Score:5, Informative)
I feel your pain, living in Chicago. Google fiber is never coming here. Even AT&T can't buy decent 4G speeds here.
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I remember hearing that public transit or even biking was near impossible in houston due likely to gas and car companies' influence.
Well, that's not entirely true. There's been huge improvements for bikers in general by the upgrades and construction of miles and miles of bike trails. Here's some more info on those trails. [houstonbikeways.org] You can get from most suburbs all the way to Downtown by staying on (nicely maintained) trails these days, which is pretty nice.
Now as far as public transport is concerned, you're somewhat correct in terms of the quality not being very high, nor extensive. We have one measly light rail track, but completely focused on
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However, don't forget that in a city as sprawling as Houston, connecting suburbs is a nightmare. We're spread out over roughly 600 square miles. That's a LOT of land to cover for any kind of public transportation. Cars are a daily part of life in a city like this. No car almost equals no job nor social life around here.
And yet Chicago, roughly 10,000 square miles, manages to do so nicely (contrary to what locals bitch about).
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And yet Chicago, roughly 10,000 square miles, manages to do so nicely (contrary to what locals bitch about).
The Chicago area is 234 sq miles (606.1 km) [google.com]. Jacksonville, FL [google.com] at 885 sq miles (2,292 km) is the largest city in the 48 contiguous states and is more than twice Chicago's size but still is not nearly as big as 10,000 square miles.
Falcon
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Metropolitan_Area [wikipedia.org]
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Had you read my previous response in this very thread, you'd have noticed I was talking about metro Chicago.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Metropolitan_Area [wikipedia.org]
That post must of been below mine. Am I supposed to read all posts before replying? Now interestingly the wiki article you link to says that the Chicago area encloses parts of 3 different states, Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin. While I thought the greater Chicago area may include Gary, Indiana, I didn't know it included any of Wisconsin.
So, to follow up, can a person take public transit to go from Wisconsin to Gary, Indiana? That is other than Greyhound and other national or regional transportation system
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So, to follow up, can a person take public transit to go from Wisconsin to Gary, Indiana?
Yes, you can. You would need to use two different train transit systems, but they're well timed and run many routes each day.
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Houston isn't exactly known for having honest public officials [...]
And Austin is?
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I feel your pain, living in Chicago. Google fiber is never coming here. Even AT&T can't buy decent 4G speeds here.
I doubt google will come to Chicago any time soon. Too big of a city, too many regulations, too much paperwork.
That said, I don't seem to have any issues with AT&T in the Chicagoland area. Sitting in an office building downtown (the largest one), I'm getting 67ms ping, 4.39Mbps down, 2.73Mbps up in the middle of the afternoon. It is fast enough that I don't even bother connecting my phone to our wifi network, it's actually faster except for when everyone goes home. Then our wifi is much faster, but
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4.39 Mbps?
Yessiree, the time AT&T spent ten years giving people speeds just barely fast enough that they wouldn't tear the cable out of the wall then tear the executives in two for charging $75/mo, oh those were the good years. Golden years! Wish we had'em back yessirree.
We had about 7-9Mbps up in Andersonville when I was living there last year and it was adequate, but could have been better. The upstream was awful, though.
It is 2013, we should demand better for all the money we pay to these yahoos.
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You realize we are talking about cellular internet speeds, right? 4.39Mbps on my phone is just fine for such a crowded area. Just checked at my house, and I get 21.84Mbps down, 7.00Mbps up... On my phone, over the AT&T cellular network. I don't see how that is "bad".
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. I remember hearing that public transit or even biking was near impossible in houston due likely to gas and car companies' influence.
Nah, that's just a guess because in Texas, I'd often see choices where they spent *more* money to make it bike unfriendly. My car broke down when I was driving myself to school in Dallas (there was no bus option from near me), and I had to take a bus once. 15 minute drive, 2 hour bus, one transfer. When I entered the working world, I always checked bus schedules. One was a 10 minute drive (under 5 in no traffic), and 4 hours by bus, 2 transfers. It would have been faster to walk to work than take the b
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Just throwing this out there: perhaps google figured that Houston public officials were already bought and paid for by one or two telecoms,
That doesn't really differentiate them. The answer is probably more banal, like they were offered a better tax deal, or Austin just happens to have the specific population and density they were looking for, or they decided they'd rather work in Austin than in Houston. The more I think about it, the more I think that last one is the answer. If you've been to both places, you understand. Also, Austin's politicians are not precisely known for their integrity.
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Actually, having lived many years in both cites, and as an Austin native back in town for the last 15 years, I can affirm that Austin's public officials are *far* more corrupt and "bought and paid for" than Houston's, especially when it comes to telecom.
There is effectively no broadband competition in Austin - good high speed connections here cost several times what they do in Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio. (This is only partly due to the notably superior fiber infrastructures that MFS built in those oth
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Houston has a lot of exclusivity deals, lived all over the place and they have all had a monopoly provider.
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Houston has no software development close to Austin. Oh wait, they gave us that horrible Aliens: Colonial Marines in Sugarland. Forgot about that one. If only they had Google Fiber it would have been better, then they just needed it Dallas so Gearbox could hook up.
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Yeah, if only Houston had more high tech companies. I mean, having NASA headquartered there with all of those subcontractors is nice and all, but I'd hardly call it high tech, ya know?
Sarcasm aside (and despite the fact that I did three internships in the space industry in Houston while in college), I do agree that Austin makes more sense, since Google will get a better bang for their buck. Austin is a trendy place that hosts a major festival (SXSW) that attracts a lot of tech journalists and has a reputati
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Not really, Carmack is teaching NASA more than ever and making code changes to his software at the pad and actually building rockets. He says a modern game is far more complex, and Austin, not Houston has the game developers.
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Okay...but that's irrelevant. What we care about in this context is how much data is getting pushed through the pipes (remember, this is fiber for Internet connectivity), not how complex the code is, and some of those different NASA systems are pushing absolutely massive amounts of data back and forth, even though the complexity of the systems involved is relatively low.
So, sure, a modern game may be more complex than a rocket, but that doesn't mean that a modern game is pushing more data down the pipe than
Re:Why not Houston? (Score:4, Informative)
Because Austin, like KC, owns its own electric utility. That makes it way easier to string fiber along the power right of ways. Plus, yeah, Austin is cool.
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1. Owning their own electric utility.
2. I am guessing there is already a pretty good amount of fiber in the city already....
3. High levels of actual city official interest. Meaning they are will to actually make the difficult choices happen to make this happen.
4. High visibility when South by Southwest rolls through every year.
5. Tons of apartments and properties that will go out of their way to install this stuff to lure the kids in. I used to live in apartment in Austin that was one of the first in the
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7. Austin is a Liberal Oasis in the otherwise Conservative state.
8. It's a hip college town, and the Capital of Texas.
9. Quake Con and other Gaming Cons.
10. Austin is the Silicon Valley of the South.
11. Crytek, ID, and slew of other technology & game companies call Austin Home.
12. The plan fits right in with: "Keep Austin Weird"
I live in H-town and was thinking of Austin as a future home for my indie game company just to be nearer to all the amazing talent and tech (esp. game) companies there.
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1. Owning their own electric utility.
And yet there are a great many of us here in Austin and San Antonio that would dearly love nothing more than to be able to choose our own power providers as residents of other Texas cites can. (Yes, I would happily pay more!) Austin Electric is deliberately making corrupt political decisions that must drive the future cost of electricity through the roof, but that's OK with the city council because AE is their invisible piggy bank that's just one more tax on everyone in town...
2. I am guessing there is already a pretty good amount of fiber in the city already....
Not so much as you'd think.
Re:Why not Houston? (Score:5, Insightful)
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50k+ students crammed into per capita income
...50k+ students crammed into < 100 acres), a higher per capita income...
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IBM, National Instruments, Intel, Google, Apple, Dell, Rackspace, Hostgator, Data Foundry, Sematech, Spansion, Applied Semiconductor, Blizzard, EA, Microsoft, NCSoft, Bioware, Flextronics, 3M, Whole Foods, Oracle, you know, not much. But Houston did have Reliant.
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Grande which is what my business has, along with ATT Uverse as a back up, and Time Warner which I have at home. And then ATT DSL. That is it for consumers.
Google is going strictly, and only by demand.
a national roll out is only 100 years away (Score:3)
at the rate they are going
Re:a national roll out is only 100 years away (Score:5, Informative)
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In the very announcement they link to the FCC broadband page about how to build out your own community gigabit municipal fiber network. You don't have to wait for Google. They would rather you didn't.
What FCC broadband page would that be? The only FCC page I found linked to is WCB Announces Workshop on Gigabit Community Broadband Networks [fcc.gov] but it does not say how to build gigabit fiber. It may be in the video on the page, but that is more than 5 hours long. Searching FCC how to build gigabit municipal fiber networks [google.com] doesn't return the how to either in the first five pages of results. Only the first result is an FCC link.
Falcon
Should there be a Law? [ideaspike.com]
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In the very announcement they link to the FCC broadband page about how to build out your own community gigabit municipal fiber network. You don't have to wait for Google. They would rather you didn't.
What FCC broadband page? I didn't see a link this.
Falcon
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at the rate they are going
Why would you expect a national rollout ever? Do you think anybody wants to end up on the 'universal service' hook(unless they get to tack on some serious slush-fund fees on everybody else, of course, just to 'cover expenses') and required to run new lines to the ass end of nowhere?
At least we might be able to get some of the US' major cities up to developed-world levels of connectivity by 2030 or so...
I like the speed (Score:4, Insightful)
but I don't like:
- Google already has access to galaxies worth of data from ads, web beacons, etc.
- Now they will have all that, plus your DNS queries
- They will have your actual name, address, phone number, etc.
- Will they allow you to switch DNS providers?
- Will they allow backdoor boxes in their data centers?
- To whom are they accountable?
Questions, questions...
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You could rent a VPS with lots of data transfer, configure a VPN, and pipe everything through that.
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If you have a public DNS, how could they stop you from using a different one? But really, they'd have the IPs even without the NSLookUp and they can do their own query to get the name if they really needed it.
SOMEONE already has your surfing habits......would you rather be part of a small population where you can be singled out or part of a large population where you become a lot more "anonymous".....
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but I don't like:
- Google already has access to galaxies worth of data from ads, web beacons, etc.
- Now they will have all that, plus your DNS queries
Why wait for fiber? I already send my DNS queries to Google's 8.8.8.8 name server because it's faster than my congested ISP's server.
- They will have your actual name, address, phone number, etc.
Hmm, just like everyone else one the Internet can if they really want it. In fact, if you whois my .com you get my full name, address, telephone. Subpoena your ISP with your IP address and I've got the same, they'll give it to the cops for free. In fact Google's one of the few companies actually standing up for their users when it comes to the Cops' information requests.
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- They will have your actual name, address, phone number, etc.
Hmm, just like everyone else one the Internet can if they really want it. In fact, if you whois my .com you get my full name, address, telephone. Subpoena your ISP with your IP address and I've got the same, they'll give it to the cops for free. In fact Google's one of the few companies actually standing up for their users when it comes to the Cops' information requests.
Relevant link: Google stands up for Gmail users, requires cops to get a warrant [arstechnica.com]
My message is: I trust them about as much an anyone else I do business with. That is to say: Not much. Fortunately, "Trust" isn't something that should be required these days.
is it worth it? (Score:2)
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you can laugh at the idiots on youtube in HD
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Streaming one HD movie is fine if you live by yourself......but I've got a house where everyone (5 members) is connected and streaming content....not all of it is HD movies, but I do consume quite a bit of bandwidth on a regular basis.
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2 kids doing homework, 1 kid streaming a movie, Dad catching up on some work/laughing at youtube, Mom planning the next weeks meals (or the other way around if you prefer).
IOW, a typical evening. You don't have to be 'together' 24/7.
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> Maybe even something that doesn't require an internet connection?
Isn't that illegal in most states?
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Lots of big, old houses in my city near downtown are populated with 4, 5 couples (~10 people living in one house). 20mbps gets painfully slow very quickly if two people are torrenting and you want to do HD streaming, especially at peak hours like 7-9pm when everyone is winding down for bed.
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- boguslinks, 2013 [slashdot.org]
Seriously, though, I really don't understand your question. Are you honestly asking if there's a benefit to higher consumer bandwidth?
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Telecommuting, it can save more gas than any hybrid pretty much if you work in an office you can telecommute. Huge quality of life benefits from this when combined with flexible hours etc. The huge this is google is the only major thing since modems and ISDN that's symmetric it's a gig down and a gig up.
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Telecommuting, it can save more gas than any hybrid pretty much if you work in an office you can telecommute. Huge quality of life benefits from this when combined with flexible hours etc. The huge this is google is the only major thing since modems and ISDN that's symmetric it's a gig down and a gig up.
Public Service Announcement: Google Fiber requires you contact them for 'details' if you intend to use the service for a business. I believe this is in violation of FCC-10-201 'Network Neutrality' transparency. Of course I'm more concerned with their terms of service prohibitting hosting any server of any kind, as I consider that a violation of the blocking prong of the Network Neutrality rules (though the case of the residential client blocked from the remote server is the more common understanding of t
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This is the same BS every providers gives and has nothing to do with telecommuting. I have not heard any telco try to play the that's business game since ISDN died over a decade ago. Cheap rate for an un-metered gige is about 1k a month from like likes of Cogent, L3, or HE if you were in a lit building.
That all said the we need to separate the access from the last mile. City's and towns are fairly good at infrastructure an all passive optics C/Dwdm could do wonders to freeing up traditional sticking point
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You can actually back up all your stuff to another machine across the Internet in a reasonable amount of time.
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You can actually back up all your stuff to another machine across the Internet in a reasonable amount of time.
That depends on how "reasonable amount of time" is defined. I have a 750 GB hard disc drive in the PC I'm typing this on and it is mostly full. I want to replace the PC with another, as my main computer. Currently I use a 3 TB external drive for backups, along with smaller drives too. I have another PC I want to use as my main PC, it has a 120 GB HDD as well as a second HDD that's 4 TB. The first drive is for the OSes used and software to run so the second one is for my data. Of course as it's a laptop I ca
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With 1Gbit upstream, your 750GB hard drive could be completely transferred in something like two hours.
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With 1Gbit upstream, your 750GB hard drive could be completely transferred in something like two hours.
And my 3TB drive? 8 hours? My 4 TB drive would take more than 10 hours. So again "You can actually back up all your stuff to another machine across the Internet in a reasonable amount of time" depends on how "reasonable amount of time" is defined. Of course 4TB is what I have now, who knows how big my storage will be in 1, 2, or 5 years? Saying "1Gbit upstream is reasonable" is just as ridiculous as saying "nobody will ever need 640KB of memory". Nobody can accurately see what the future will bring. That is
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I'm not sure what you're arguing with me about; this all started with me coming up with a use for which 1Gbit is useful. You make it sound like I'm saying we should all stick with 5Mbps cable modems, when I'm saying exactly the opposite.
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I'm not sure what you're arguing with me about; this all started with me coming up with a use for which 1Gbit is useful. You make it sound like I'm saying we should all stick with 5Mbps cable modems, when I'm saying exactly the opposite.
I am arguing with your statement [slashdot.org] that "You can actually back up all your stuff to another machine across the Internet in a reasonable amount of time." As I've said twice, and will again, that statement depends on how "reasonable amount of time" is defined.
Falcon
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Go back to 1995 and ask this same question using a 28.8 modem.
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A significant fraction, though. 1x Blu-ray is 36Mbps. That means waiting 1 hour for a 2.5 hour movie to download, or running out of bandwidth if 3 people want to stream different movies at the same time.
Admittedly, content from Netflix, Hulu, etc., is re-compressed to sizes that are considerably lower than that, but that's mainly because they HAVE TO.
Off-site backups are a big one, too.
And with services like dropbox or mega, these speeds could seem
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Is there some benefit to these super duper broadband speeds besides talking about how cool it is? It takes a tiny fraction of this speed to send a HD movie.
640K of memory should be enough for anybody [google.com].
Falcon
SXSW (Score:5, Insightful)
Of all the possible candidates in the U.S., Google chooses to roll Google Fiber out to the city that hosts South By Southwest every year, where countless thousands of media, music & technology movers, shakers and influencers congregate along with the journalists covering them.
Google will recoup the est. $50m rollout costs for Austin in just 1-2 festivals from word of mouth and countless thousands of mentions by journalists in national & international articles. Fifty million, you say? They'll get $200m worth of free advertising back in 2 years, when the "OMFG it's SO FAST" comments start bleeding into every story you see out of South by.
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Yea, makes the ROI on having that conference in Austin pretty incredible.
Seems kinda strange to choose that city though, given how much hi-tech it already is. I don't live in San Francisco but it seems if they wanted to impress the digirati SF would of been a better choice than Austin.
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Time Warner is only offer 50Mbps, and if you are very lucky you can get 110Mbps Grande. I don't call that very high tech. I think you underestimate the extra cost of California in doing business versus in Texas.
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Austin is a huge renters/buyers market of very tech savvy people. Apartment complexes go out their way to install this shit to try and get more renters in Austin. Very friendly city laws and city run utilities top it off. You know a lot of towns that can offer that?
Google fiber isn't some charity project or government funded effort to bring high speed to unprivileged kids in Kentucky or something. They are looking to actually make money. In Austin, they can make money.
Meaning (Score:1)
As in: most interest accrued by bulging bank accounts in the richest enclaves. Ah, well.
PS: Notice they're rolling out only in cities already suffering the plague known as Time-Warner? Nice.
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Google Fiber locations (Score:2)
"Why not San Francisco or Austin or somewhere where all the tech is?"
The better question is why not a place like Kansas City where the front lines of the consumer broadband battle are being fought? Isn't the main point of all this to expose what a farce typical broadband service is like in the US? How do you do that convincingly in a place as saturated with tech?
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Uh....Kansas City was the first city they rolled out? Where have you been? On a desert island?
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Sorry if I didn't make myself clear. I know KC has it, I used to live there. My point was why does it have to be a "tech city" in order to have it. Again, sorry for being unclear.
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People who don't follow tech wouldn't know about the benefits of having gigabit and won't subscribe. That's why people here feel Google should concentrate on tech-savvy locations. People complain about a $5 difference. So people who are ignorant will ask "Why should I spend $70/month when my current habits are satisfied with my $65/month package?"
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Sorry for being unclear, indeed I did mean places like KC.
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Well it is supposed to be coming to Olathe [kansascity.com], although they skipped quite a few of the 'burbs to make that leap.
Both ends of the spectrum (Score:2)
I get that they're showing both ends of the spectrum: a "Hard to get broadband" area, & a high-tech, high-saturation area.
I just hope they don't need to dig much to install that fiber. Austin is on some solid stone & can take weeks to cut a hole big enough for a swimming pool.
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Uhh, my house settles because of the clay it is on. Solid stone? Really? We are widely on caliche. I have dug the fence posts to prove it. We are on top of limestone, about the easiest thing you can dig up. It crumbles.
AT&T announces gigabit network in Austin (Score:4, Informative)
Re:AT&T announces gigabit network in Austin (Score:5, Insightful)
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Damn... (Score:1)
kansas city gives it up for google...., (Score:2)
kansas city gives it up for google...., [blogspot.com] provides the first, third, and last paragraph of six paragraphs on what Kansas City gave up to Google printed in a Harper's Magazine article [harpers.org] of the same title. The online article is only available to magazine subscribers.
In the second paragraph there's this:
"According to its contract, Kansas City must give Google access to its underground conduits, fiber, poles, rack space, nodes, buildings, facilities, and available land. It cannot charge the company for 'access to
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An AOL dial up connection over AT&T quality lines.