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Google Networking The Internet

New Google Fiber Cities Announced 147

Posted by Soulskill from the does-not-include-your-city dept.
New submitter plate_o_shrimp sends word that Google has announced the next group of cities set to receive gigabit fiber infrastructure. They're concentrating on cities around four metro areas: Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, and Raleigh-Durham. "We’ve been working closely with city leaders over the past year on a joint planning process to get their communities ready for Google Fiber—and now the really hard work begins. Our next step is to work with cities to create a detailed map of where we can put our thousands of miles of fiber, using existing infrastructure such as utility poles and underground conduit, and making sure to avoid things like gas and water lines. Then a team of surveyors and engineers will hit the streets to fill in missing details. Once we’re done designing the network (which we expect to wrap up in a few months), we’ll start construction." Google also said they're currently looking into Phoenix, Portland, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, and San Jose.
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New Google Fiber Cities Announced More

New Google Fiber Cities Announced

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  • Damn... (Score:2)

    by TWX ( 665546 )
    ...guess I'll still have to keep service with those COX for awhile longer...
  • The Portland Metro officials have been saying that they have been bending over backwards (and maybe forwards too) to get Google to start building, but they aren't really getting any traction. I'm wondering if Google did a build out in a few initial cities to prove that they are serious, but now they are just threatening to go into other cities to force the telecoms hand to do their work for them.

    • Re:Portland (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 27, 2015 @05:15PM (#48918045)

      'State and city officials in Oregon have said they are concerned a quirky Oregon tax law could be deterring Google. The provision in the law, known as "central assessment," levies property tax on communications companies based in part on the value of their corporate brands.'

      http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2015/01/google_fiber_selects_four_citi.html

      • If I were an executive at Google, that law would definately make me blink twice, and swallow before I built anything in Oregon

        • It didn't seem to worry them much when they sited one of their US data centers in The Dalles. So your brilliant prediction of corporate fear of some awful legal tax threat that a minor US state might attempt to bring against Google which would be swatted down by a dozen courts before the legislature wet its pants to repeal that law appears to be just a wee bit... wrong, shall we say?

          • Maybe,
            but Google built their Dalles Data Center in 2006. This change in the tax law occurred in 2009.

            Maybe Google's experience with this new assessment method has them thinking twice about further Oregon expansion

            • I found another tidbit. The data center industry in Oregon is well aware of this law. They lobbied for a 2 year exemption, and received it.

              Google Fiber in Portland would not be covered by the exemption.

        • People who jump to strong (presumably political) conclusions like that based on almost no information other than speculation of un-named people in a local newspaper article... are unlikely to become executives.

          Google hasn't said they are concerned. And none of the people inside the loop have said anything about it they are willing to put their name next to. Nobody has claimed that Oregon has a higher tax burden on internet providers than the places that have received Google Fiber. You can't make any determi

          • I live 1 mile from the Oregon border. I shop and work in Oregon all the time. I am familiar with Oregon.

            It isn't speculation to think that an ISP might want to think twice about opening a new operation in Oregon. Comcast fought this new Central Assessment process for business property tax all the way to the Oregon Supreme Court. They lost just last October. http://www.bna.com/oregon-supr... [bna.com] Comcast says that the new assessment rules will cost them big. It increased their Assessment by $701 million

            • You say a lot of words, but you don't address my points. Everything you say sounds like just typical partisan regurgitation; it neither adds ideas to the discussion, nor responds to the things I actually said. You hate taxes. Yay for you. That doesn't mean that Oregon has high taxes for what Google is doing. That would require an analysis that nobody has done, including the (right wing) politicians who privately suggest it is the reason, but won't put their names (or any numbers) by the claim.

              If we were tal

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by linuxguy ( 98493 )

      Seconded. I am anxiously awaiting Google Fiber arrival in Portland, OR. Once the service is available to me, I will switch in a heartbeat.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      The problem with any new infrastructure in a crowded although crap infrastructure market is the ability of incumbents to temporarily change in order to financially cripple newcomers (drop prices, provide better services) and once that is done, the very second it is done, go immediately back to it exploitative practices. That includes buying out the newcomer which is facilitated by corrupt mergers of corrupt businesses to create a corrupt mega business with the cash reserve and the credit ability to buy out

    • Oregon has one of the highest rates of broadband service in the country, even though nearly half the population is rural. Portland itself has free wifi all over the place, and has had since the late 90s. They could do really well in Oregon, but the uptake won't be as high as in cities who want to be as well connected (or better) than Oregonians already are, but nobody has built it out. Places like Oregon where everything is already well built are a second tier of potential profit compared to those places th

  • Seriously, Modesto could use both a bart station AND fiber.

    Might be bearable at that point.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Oh, come on, the central valley is getting a bullet train.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2015 @05:02PM (#48917923)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Just for the record, boiled peanuts are a georgia thing. So that belongs with atl.

      Also, nc is the only place smoked pork products are properly termed barbeque.

      Kindly use proper geolinguistics from here on out.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Cramer ( 69040 )

      Really? A boiled peanut is a Boiled. Peanut. (still in the shell. vs. the common tin can of shelled, roasted crap from Planters.)

    • For the love of god, please just give us a half-way decent internet connection. Please?

      Hell offer it to Glendale or some other "city" in Los Angeles. I'll bet they'll find a way...

  • They are way away from reaching me but the more cities they get into, the more competition the provide against the other companies. I can only hope this helps me eventually.

    • I'm excited. Where I live (San Antonio) there is a choice between Grande Cable and Time Warner. Grande is incredible but only is located in a few places.

      I was really sad when I moved to a home where only Time Warner was available. I'm paying a lot more for less speed and I would actually get the speed Grande offered.
      http://mygrande.com/internet [mygrande.com]
      http://www.timewarnercable.com... [timewarnercable.com]

  • Do you trust them? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by hackertourist ( 2202674 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2015 @05:03PM (#48917937)

    Great: Gb internet. Not so great: provided by Google, who now have even more access to your internet activity. My ISP may be a stodgy old fart incumbent telecoms company, but at least it's not got an advertising agency as its main profit center.

    • Re:Do you trust them? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Bengie ( 1121981 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2015 @05:13PM (#48918029)
      Kind of like saying North Korean may be a bad place to live, but at least it's not driven by money, like the USA.

    • Re:Do you trust them? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2015 @05:39PM (#48918279)
      If you're that worried, you can always route your traffic through a VPS for about $5/mo extra. Google peeking in on your data packets is so easily circumvented it's barely worth mentioning.

      OTOH, with Verizon announcing it's ending FiOS rollouts [slashdot.org], they need a good swift competitive kick in the rear to get them to provide what the market wants, rather than milking their existing infrastructure for as much money as they can. The only reason they're able to do things like stop fiber rollout is because they have a government-granted monopoly in the areas they serve. A competitor - be it Google or anyone else - is exactly what's needed to break up that monopoly and give the people what the want.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The only reason they're able to do things like stop fiber rollout is because they have a government-granted monopoly in the areas they serve.

        God, how long do we have to listen to uneducated Libertarians parrot this? Verizon's FiOS does not require exclusive franchise. In fact, where I live the franchisee is Time-Warner cable and guess what Internet service I have? FiOS, thank you very much.

        What we're seeing is what we'd see a lot less of if ISPs were regulated like telecom companies. It used to be that man

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by antdude ( 79039 )

        Do you trust that VPS? :P http://www.macworld.com/articl... [macworld.com]

    • On the plus side, having Google in the neighborhood (or even just actively building) introduces much-needed competition. It's funny how quickly some of the other players started improving their game in Austin once Google was coming to town. Ideally having Google in town means you'll actually get a choice of their services as well as actually tolerable bandwidth/speed from the current incumbents.

      • Portland already gave out a second cable franchise, and has fiber rollouts in progress, just from the threat of Google coming. They're not waiting for it to happen to improve competition.

        Interestingly, we don't have government-sponsored cable monopolies in Oregon. People just assume that. But there isn't a hard limit of franchises that can be granted; certainly not a limit of 1. It is just that the companies have decided on their own to only apply in places where there is no competition. Until now.

        We alread

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Do you trust them?

      ...less than any other ISP? No. Just like Google funded Mozilla this is more of a long term effort to push more people and more services online, where Google can get a piece of it. The "old media" advertising budgets are still pretty huge and people willingly sign up to Google's services so there's no need to get shady. In fact their roll-out is extremely slow if they were seriously intending to become a major ISP, they're really just trying to shame the rest of the country into demanding they get the same

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Trust them? That's that's a loaded bullshit question from someone with an agenda. Just put "Fuck Google" in your title and be done with it.

      You want to get on the internet. Trusting someone is implicit since it's a network of interconnected machines, most of which you don't own.

      Do you trust your telco? Your cable company? The back end carriers? The international carriers? Do you have a choice?

      Given what I know about the current state of communications infrastructure I trust Google more than I'd trust most ot

    • My ISP may be a stodgy old fart incumbent telecoms company, but at least it's not got an advertising agency as its main profit center.

      That's why your preferred company sells information about you. If they had their own advertising company, they could do like google, and keep their information about you to themselves, and use it to target the ads directly.

      It really isn't hard to understand the difference, and I'm sure you've been told dozens or more times. Too complicated for you, eh?

    • The hidden benefit is the increased competition. I live in Austin. Before Google made their intentions clear that they were moving in, the fastest Internet access I could get was 50 Mbps. Now both AT&T and TW are offering 300 Mbps connections at really affordable rates. Personally, 300 Mbps is fast enough for me and I don't intend to make the switch to Fiber, but without their market presence we'd still be stuck in the dark ages here.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        How's your latency and jitter with 300Mbs? If all I did was game, I would rather have a stable 10Mb connection than a 300Mb unstable connection. Just wondering, because they tend to have a track record of bad quality, but they're using new tech that I am not familiar with.

  • Hello? (Score:3)

    by johnnys ( 592333 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2015 @05:12PM (#48918015)
    Toronto/GTA? Canadians could use good Internet access too!

    • Let's just start with Montreal and cover an area roughly 600km in radius from there.

    • Become part of the US?

      I don't think Google is considering cities outside the US, but keep trying. I want them to come to Baltimore, as it would be a cash cow for them, and it would be great to have even better internet.

  • Congratulations to all the upper-class and upper-middle-class neighborhoods in Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville, and Raleigh-Durham!

    • Re:Crontratulations to some of you (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 27, 2015 @05:19PM (#48918081)

      Being from the Kansas City Metro your post holds no water. The inner city got high speed internet first. Than your lower middle class neighborhoods. It is just now starting to roll out to the suburbs.

      • Maybe contratulations is a word that means "condolences," and NotDrWho is just consoling the upper and upper middle class people of those cities because they still have to wait for Google to get around to them.

        • Hold on, hold on, if everybody else gets it first, then not having it yet makes them part of an exclusive group. You just don't have the right mindset.

          Anyways, they can just say, "Yes, it is so great the masses got Google Internet first, because they can't afford the Business Class service that everybody in my neighborhood has. Now they can shop online, or engage in remote-learning opportunities to increase their market value." Don't cry over the death of snobbery just yet.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      Congratulations to all the upper-class and upper-middle-class neighborhoods in Atlanta,

      College park is a shithole. Most of Decatur and Smyrna isn't much better. Sandy Springs has some nice areas but has really bad ones too. As a 28-year metro Atlanta resident, I am really wondering what Google was going for with this selection, as they could have done much better. Peachtree City, Woodstock, Roswell, places like that with 300k+ houses extremely common makes sense; not areas with horrible infrastructure and full of run down apartment complexes and old (not "nice" old either) houses.

      • I hate to break it to you, but people live in exurban wastelands (like Woodstock) because they can't afford to live somewhere like Decatur or Sandy Springs. Those Decatur bungalows you think are just "old" are actually $0.5M+. A lot of them are also actually really nice; they're just not designed to show it off from the street McMansion-style. (Bungalows are typically relatively narrow and deep and don't have front-facing attached garages, so they look smaller from the street than they actually are.) And Sa

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

          If your impression is based on just what you can see driving by at 50 mph on Scott Boulevard (or on Roswell Road, in the case of Sandy Springs) then you don't know WTF you're talking about.

          My grandmother lived in Sandy Springs off Johnson's Ferry near Roswell Road my whole life, and I grew up of Roswell Rd near the 120 loop. I know exactly what I'm talking about. Like I said, in Sandy Springs you have older, nicer homes surrounded by horrible run down apartment complexes. Head towards perimeter and Buckhead and yeah, you have mansions. People live in places like Woodstock precisely because they can afford $.5 million homes but want something bigger than a ranch or bungalow. Why pay half

          • Why pay half a million dollars for an 1800 sq foot 30 year old house when you can buy a brand new 3500sq ft house for the same price?

            First of all, in-town bungalows are more like 70+ years old. That means they were better-built than new speculative construction and (if built before WWII) have lots of architectural detail that's too expensive to build today. If they're "the same price" (as opposed to "fixer uppers") then they've been renovated and insulated to modern standards, so utilities are cheaper. And

  • Nitpick - Raleigh-Durham is not a city (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Note from the pedantic world: there is no city of "Raleigh-Durham". Raleigh and Durham are two very distinct, moderately large cities separated by over 25 miles and a lot of culture differences. It is like saying "the city of Baltimore-DC" and is annoying to all of us in the area. The Raleigh core alone has a population of about 430,000 (less than Boston but considerably bigger than Pittsburg or Cleveland) while Durham is about 245,000.

    That being said, hooray for our area! Love the fiber!

  • Lowest hanging fruit. (Score:3)

    by blueshift_1 ( 3692407 ) on Tuesday January 27, 2015 @05:16PM (#48918051)
    I feel like Google's tended to pick places that tend to be underserved in terms of technology and education. The southeast is definitely a good place to start...

    • I asked a friend who works in Google when Dublin would get Google Fiber (given that they have headquarters there). He said since there were already at least 3 companies providing it (Eircom, Vodafone and UPC) among the many wireless 4G options, there's no need for Google to do the same.

      Much of the US has either nobody, or a monopoly providing Fiber, so they are picking the areas where they will have the greatest impact.

  • I don't need to give Google anymore access to my data thanks. Whoever dreamed up this scheme at Google must've earned a bonus or two. "Hey guys, it won't matter which OS or web mail service or social network users use if *we* own the ISPs!"

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Isca ( 550291 )
      Guess what? In the US your local cable company or telephone based ISP sells all of that data in aggregate to Google or some other ad serving company (or more likely multiple ones) already. It's another profit center that only ever really gets talked about when it's Google.
  • dang nabbit they need to go international with this project. I got a nice gateway city only 30 minutes north of the us border. would love to take my 100 meg to the next level.

  • Can you imagine the red tape trying to do this in NY or Chicago?

    • Can you name any of these alleged "business-friendly" policies that blue states lack and that might have actually been relevant to Google's decision? How about the NYC- or Chicago-specific "red tape" that would have impacted them?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Totally dude i bet they would have to get permits and stuff. I mean come on. Probably have to call digger's hotline too i bet. Who are these largest cities in the country to do business unfriendly things like require review & approval for infrastructure projects?

  • I'm disappointed that Portland did not make the cut this time. But I don't expect to directly benefit from Google's fiber anyway. I'm on a fixed income and the last I looked, Google would be more than I could afford.

    That said, I expect that when Google does come to Portland that will force its competitors to sweeten their offerings. But maybe that will happen soon anyway, in an economic equivalent of 'spooky action at a distance.' If Google succeeds big time in these other cities, the providers already in

  • Come on google! Scare em good, start the NYC and LA rollouts.

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