Google Fiber Reminds People It's a 'Real Business' (dslreports.com) 105
An anonymous reader writes: While Google Fiber gets a massive amount of media hype (justly based on its disruptive speed and price point), the reality is that despite numerous city "launches" -- not that many people can actually get the service. But while many ISPs and analysts have dismissed Google Fiber as an adorable experiment that will never impact them, many of these folks have been forced to changing their tune as Google Fiber's list of planned launch cities grows larger. In a profile piece over at USAToday, the company once again notes that while Google Fiber may have begun as a PR exercise, it's now dead serious about being a large, nationwide disruptive kick in the ass for incumbent broadband providers. "It is indeed a real business, and it's serving to increase competition as well, and that's something that we don't mind," Google Fiber boss and former Qualcomm exec Dennis Kish tells the paper. "We think it's healthy for the market and for consumers."
No it isn't (Score:3, Informative)
It's a subsidiary of a real business, a business with billions of dollars in liquid capital that is currently sitting around doing nothing. They're only going slow because it's a strategy intended to force municipalities to carve out subsidies and dig the trenches for them.
No it isn't (Score:4, Informative)
...and Google Fiber is a subsidiary of Alphabet (Score:3)
or to get the existing ISP's around the country... (Score:2)
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Google should start "tricking" existing service providers into thinking they might enter every market, then..... Force their competitors to make that investment in EVERY potential market, to gain maximum leverage...
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In the end, Google Fiber is near meaningless to a majority of the US.
The majority of the US doesn't have access to 1Gb/s fiber internet service for $70 a month, with no data cap [google.com].
Some Internet service providers currently cap data downloads at 250 GB per month. You can download that much data on a 1 gig connection in about 33 minutes. Good thing there is no limit on your data downloads with Google Fiber!
It'll always be a PR campaign (Score:5, Insightful)
until I can get it...
just sayin'
did that need clearing up? (Score:2)
actually now that I think about it, why did this need to be pointed out? Did people think it was going to be temporary or something?
Re:did that need clearing up? (Score:4, Insightful)
actually now that I think about it, why did this need to be pointed out?
Because it's Google.
Did people think it was going to be temporary or something?
Yes. It's Google. They lose interest in everything that isn't search or email or maps. And maps is iffy. They forgot that search didn't earn billions overnight, and now have unreasonable expectations for everything else. If it doesn't earn hundreds of millions in its first year, it's deemed pathetic and gets abandoned. Google Fiber probably runs in the red. Making physical things happen is expensive. It will pay for itself in the long run, but Google is about as far away from the mindset of a utility as you can possibly get while remaining on the same planet. Waiting for a long run low margin payoff is not in their corporate DNA. The continued existence of Google Fiber is anomalous already. It will only get worse.
So yes, that did need clearing up, and I'm still skeptical.
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It's not running in the red; if they're getting the local governments to pay for the heavy digging. I guess that explains why they are only coming to a few cities?
Limited availablity. (Score:3)
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It's not nearly as simple as that. I have some friends that live in the mountains of east Tennessee. Guess what? They have gigabit fiber. Much faster than what I get in a city millions.
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Without meaning to piss on your point too much:
Texas = 695,662 km^2
EU = 4.325 million km^2 (Both from Google)
Or, the same size as 16% of the EU.
Or, just under twice the size as Sweden with nearly four times the population density of Sweden.
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That does not explain why the areas in the US which are denser than areas outside the US have worse internet service. The distribution matters; it is not like the US lacks for dense metropolitan areas.
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Spying? (Score:3, Insightful)
Is having Google be your ISP just asking for absolutely everything to be spied on?
If I get it, I'm thinking of renting a cheap VPS and running all my traffic through that over an encrypted tunnel. How bad would latency be? Other thoughts?
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Depends on how close the vps is the encrypt/decrypt is pretty quick a few ms each way.
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I'd expect Google to actually be good at it.
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> Other thoughts?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Your Internet traffic _regularly_ flows through equipment owned and operated by companies that are orders of magnitude less scrupulous than Google. If your traffic _ever_ flows overseas (even for a single hop), it's a certainty that it's captured and analysed by the NSA. It's likely that Russia and other such big players do the same for traffic flowing within the US.
It's trendy to have a hate-on for Google. What the loudest folks seem to forget is t
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I like to think -- and this is again perhaps a bit naive -- that there's some overlap between what Google wants and what I want wi
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When I had AT&T U-Verse, running a VPN from the St. Louis area to the west coast was *faster* with lower latency and more reliable than the native path. It was even faster for contacting endpoints in the local area.
As far as I was able to tell, AT&T runs various transparent proxies and maybe routes all traffic through a central location for easy government access. The encrypted VPN traffic would be too obtuse for this.
Google giving the Business.. (Score:5, Informative)
One of my small clients was able to get Small Business Google Fiber installed this last year. After the struggles of getting the physical installation going, things have been very nice. They like it very much, the way they expected it. However...
Recently Google has contacted us to say our "introductory rates" will be ending the middle of 2017. They're moving to a 3-tier model for their fiber speeds. For $250 you can keep your 1 gigabit speed, for $150 (I think), you an go down to 250 megabits, and for $75 (or $100 maybe), you can go down to 100 megabits. If we don't update our choice by the end of July, 2017, they'll kick us down to 250 Mbps automatically.
So, with the price change, that means we'll have to pay, basically, double to maintain our 1 Gbps, otherwise we lose 75% of our speed to pay the same price.
Welcome to the "business."
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Do you really send a lot of data over the internet without encryption? Your email should all be over TLS at least, and any important web traffic would be https. Sure, they could tell which sites you visited, but so can any ISP.
Re: Google giving the Business.. (Score:3)
I think you are saying "I fear competent companies, so will only ever use incompetent companies".
I believe that your philosophy dooms you to unhappiness and frustration.
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Re:Google giving the Business.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Where I work, we pay more than $250 a month for 30 by 30 fiber from TWC. Its pretty reliable, but reliably slow at such a low cap speed. The 10x10 fiber we have at some locations comes in under $200 a month, but the symmetric speeds means the download is tough when you need to grab a big file like driver updates and whatnot.
I'd love to pay $250 a month for business gigabit. Or $150 a month for 250.
I'm not saying its completely ok to drop the speeds/increase the price, but as the other sibling post pointed out, they're pretty good prices for business internet even if its not as good as the "retroactively introductory" price.
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That does suck, though...introductory rates and such are never guaranteed. Still, it beats my Comcast by a pretty wide margin - $70 gets me 30/10, and that's consumer-capped. I'd jump at the chance for 100/100 (or even 50) at $75.
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That does suck, though...introductory rates and such are never guaranteed. Still, it beats my Comcast by a pretty wide margin - $70 gets me 30/10, and that's consumer-capped. I'd jump at the chance for 100/100 (or even 50) at $75.
And you're only getting a consumer service level agreement which is, basically, that if it doesn't work they'll fix it when they get around to it. I'm sure the Google Fiber business class service includes a more typical business SLA, with defined maximum response times and compensation for excessive outages. That sort of SLA typically triples the price vs a consumer service with the same bandwidth.
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So, with the price change, that means we'll have to pay, basically, double to maintain our 1 Gbps, otherwise we lose 75% of our speed to pay the same price.
Or, you could drop down to the consumer tier and pay less per month than you currently do... but give up the business-class service level agreement that you have.
If you're getting 1Gbps with a business SLA for $125 per month right now, that's an *amazing* deal. Comcast would soak you for twice that for 100 Mbps. I currently pay $120 per month for 15/3 (Mbps) with a business SLA, though that's because I'm out in the sticks where there are very few options available.
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If I could pay $100 for 100 Mbps I would be fucking ecstatic. I pay $90 for 6-10 Mbps and I have a 90GB/mo cap.
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Basically, meh. (Score:3)
Until it is in my town, it doesn't exist.
Isn't the internet in Latvia good too? (Score:2)
I don't really believe they are a real business. I mean, in the sense that, if you live in those places, you can get amazing fiber, and then everyone else suddenly shifts to compete, sure. It's real.
But I don't live there. I *do* live in suburbs just outside of a city, a major metropolitan area. But no google fiber. Because their total deploy is so damned low, my area could reasonably be next (so in the next couple years) or very far out (long enough not to matter).
So to me, no, they aren't real. No o
Nope (Score:2)
I don't see Philadelphia in the list of future or even potential cities for expansion. Shit, not even a single city within a six-hour drive. Nothing in the Northeast. The closest seems to be Raleigh-Durham. At this rate, it just looks like yet another half-assed Google project ready to go on the chopping block.
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Doesn't Philly already have a sort-of competition between FIOS and Comcast? Along with the difficulty of doing anything in the city of nepotism love, they may not see that as a priority.
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There is no competition when there are only two players in broadband. The head of Verizon explicitly stated they would not be competing on price when they moved into areas serviced by Comcast.
Verizon prices are effectively the same as Comcast's for the same service.*
*+/- 5 mbps for the same price.
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That's true, but what I meant was that they probably look at Philly as this den of Comcast and Verizon - Comcast is headquartered there and Verizon has a major presence from when it was Bell Atlantic. They are major players and the broadband coverage is pretty good - I think their mission to provide universal fast internet and the efforts needed to bust into Philly probably conspire to nudge them elsewhere.
And yet it's all just talk (Score:2)
And yet it's all just talk until you actually start getting serious about serving places. Six current cities and four upcoming cities is not a serious business. 12 potential cities? That's great. I've read they primarily select cities based on where dark fiber is already heavily available, which is fine from a cost point, but it doesn't necessarily get them customers.
Besides, I'm likely to pass unless I can get something between the "free" and $70/month plan cause 5 Mbit isn't enough and 1 Gbit is way more
Help us Google Fiber... (Score:2)
You're our only hope!
Wishing on a star (Score:3)
I switch seasonally from a town in the SF bay area that has multiple options in ISP's and a very fast home service of 100mbps to Yuma AZ where I can barely get 15mbps from the only show in town for more money. While it pales in comparison to Gbps service just the addition of another competitor drove down the cost and increased bandwidth in the existing Comcast offerings. BTW I've mentioned before I love Astound/Wave communications, and TWC/Charter to be known as Spectrum communications SUCKS donkey genitalia.
But, Apparently, Rural Communities Don't Exist (Score:5, Insightful)
Out here in rural America (I'm near Lake Tahoe), we hear nothing but Big Business Buzz. I've got the best there is in the County Seat: 12 Mb/s, barely enough for my small business...but nothing near what it would take to attract significant business growth, because we're not "visible" enough, and the Republican congress has made sure there's been no money (even though most rural areas are as Red as Hell) for broadband through the Rural Utilities Service, or other federal medium.
Google could create a massive economic boom in rural America...but "shareholder return" is more important to them than trying to help solve economic problems outside big cities. But, even Jack Welch, the original progenitor of "shareholder value" has now called it "the dumbest idea in the world."
(See http://www.forbes.com/sites/st... [forbes.com])
Even the Tennessee Valley Authority spawned the USDA's Rural Electrification Service to bring electricity to rural areas...back when politicians still gave a damn about their constituents' needs.
So, Google, why won't you return my phone calls about serving rural markets? Are citizens in rural areas less VALUABLE to our Country, in your eyes? Where does YOUR food come from?
Re:But, Apparently, Rural Communities Don't Exist (Score:4, Informative)
Given how massively subsidized rural areas are already (and how overrepresented heavily rural small states are at the Federal level), it's pretty gutsy of you to demand even more. Once you start paying for my urban parking, I'll consider helping to fund your broadband.
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I didn't say fuck the rural poor, thanks for putting words in my mouth. I see no reason to further privilege helping the rural poor over the urban poor, however.
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It has nothing to do with the value of the citizens in rural areas but the substantially higher cost of providing service to them. Or, to put it another way, does it make more sense to spend $100M bringing service to 10,000,000 people or 1,000,000 people?
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It's not to say that they won't eventually roll out fiber to more rural areas, just that when you have a certain amount of capital to invest, a
Thanks Google! (Score:3)
In my neighborhood, the options were city owned cable internet at 30mbps, Comcast at "50mbps" (we all know how accurate THAT really is), or Centurylink at only 3mbps!
Thanks to the push of Google Fiber elsewhere in the country, the local ISP and Comcast have increased their speeds to about 150mbps, and Centurylink has pushed Gigabit Fiber, which I've been greatly enjoying since the beginning of the year. The only downside is that my monthly bill is roughly double that of Google Fiber in other cities. But considering it is only about $30 more than I was paying for the 30mbps down (and 6mbps up), the symmetrical gigabit connection has been more than worth the extra fee!
Finally got gFiber, it's nice. (Score:1)
Verizon FiOS would like to remind people... (Score:2)
that it's a Real Business too.
Except that when FiOS rolled out here, Verizon didn't try to undercut Comcast's prices.
I'll keep waiting for the Googs to get here, but I'm not holding my breath.
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The dude who ran the FiOS roll out has DSL at his house. Verizon has no interest in FiOS anymore. They are busy selling it off to anyone they can.
I have Google Fiber, and it's amazing (Score:5, Informative)
They sent a tech out, who'd never seen anything like it, and he's like "well, I guess I'll replace the network box, because I have no idea what it is." Worked great ever since.
The only major disadvantage is they don't want you running your own router, and have actually hassled me for doing so. They offer just a fiber jack to businesses, but don't offer it for residential customers. Residential customers HAVE to use their "network box" (router). There are actually howtos on the internet of plugging into the fiber jack, if you have a managed switch and set the VLAN tags right.
My speeds:
I get 400 Mbit up/down over wireless (my own router)
I get 900 Mbit up/down wired
Speeds are constant, regardless of time of day, and no weird latency issues at all. I get a reliable 1ms ping to a friend who also has Google Fiber 15mi away, and I get very low pings to the rest of the world. It's hands down the best internet I've ever had. Customer service is friendly, too.
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How the fuck would they know I have my own router, and not just one computer?
This smells fishy.
MAC addresses on routers are different from the ones on PCs (all MAC addresses have two components, one of which identifies the manufacturer). Also you can see a different TTL. Finally, you can also see additional packet latency for systems behind the router compared to the router its self.
OpenBSD has some stuff in it's firewall stack for cleaning this stuff up, so if you run an OpenBSD router you could make it more difficult but not impossible. You would need a little more knowledge with Linux iptables.
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There's of course nothing stopping you from putting your own firewall/router/whatever inside Google's. So no "full access" required.
Austin? (Score:2)
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Far northwest Austin here (just south of Cedar Park), the only thing I've gotten from them is a T-shirt (1XL with no option for a 2XL). The original map made me feel like I was in the boonies. Hell, a freaking Tesla service or showroom place (not sure which yet) even opened nearby in the past few weeks! And I'm moving back to San Antonio, which has at least been chosen as a GF city, so who knows, it might not even set my wait back by much.
If you don't live between, say, Ben White and 2222, you will probabl
I live in Houston, fourth most populace US City (Score:2)
major space flight, technology, and oil and gas hub and we're not even on the roadmap for future deployment according to the pictures in that article.
I have a hard time thinking of Google Fiber as a serious business if they're ignoring us.
Now if they were ignoring us but they were intentionally targeting places like Jal NM, Pecos TX, Nome AK, Vale OR I would consider them serious. SInce they're just cherry picking mid-sized to large cities that already have reasonably good infrastructure - likely loads of
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Google Fibers picks their targets more by political situation of the city than anything else. So many cities have lock ins, agreements, weird contracts, codes that will get in the way, etc, that its really hard to establish a service like Google Fibers.
Cable Internet Cost/Accounts Per Mile (Score:2)
Just out of curiosity...
Does anyone have references for general ballpark figures to build out a mile (or ten) of high speed internet access (say, 5/1 per account), and how many accounts per mile are generally required before a cable company will install the infrastructure?
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According to this [bbpmag.com] the price for rural FTTH is:
Cost per household = $3,072 + $13,365 * (adjusted road miles/households) - 0.8867 * households + $25.04 * frost index + $17,700 * wetlands percentage + $1,376 * soils texture + $165.40 * road intersection frequency
this sux waiting for it (Score:2)
Come on Google, work with netflix, amazon, etc and spread out faster. All it takes is a bit of money from all of you to really his this hard.
why ignore mid-atlantic? (Score:1)
They don't want to be a real company. (Score:2)
Remember as with any of Google's projects when you use them you're not the customer, you're the product.