Chicago and Los Angeles Are Next Up for Google Fiber
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Let's try.
1. All network providers would be allowed to charge a new "infrastructure maintenance fee" to their customers. A fixed $2, plus 40% of the amount of the fee, would go to the city per customer-month. Most of the amount collected would go to a maintenance contractor chosen through a "competitive" bidding process.
2. Public schools, municipal offices, police stations, fire stations, and public libraries would be required to buy network access through a single company, who would also manage their public wi-fi access points. That company could strongarm the providers into selling at a discount, due to its size, yet would charge the municipal customers a grossly inflated price. The wi-fi service sucks for everyone.
3. All fiber work done on city or RTA property must be done by union members, CWA or IBEW, according to their local worksite rules.
4. An alderman stalls the fiber authorization measure in committee until receiving sufficient "lobbying" to move it along.
5. Google required to lay far more dark fibers than strictly necessary. Unknown parties light some up for their own uses, without paying.
6. Google required to give CPD special access to network, supposedly in order to combat CP and terr'ism. Special access instead used to run untraceable server to sell items out of the evidence lockups.
https://www.google.com/search?q=chicago+cop+arrested+for+ste...
This, of course, does not even address the evidence that never even makes it into the lockup. Drug dealer keeps $20000 in cash at home. Raid seizes the $15000. Forfeiture suit filed against the $10000. The $5000 cannot be located in evidence a few months later.
Google is going to have to grease quite a few palms to make this happen, if it ever does.
Politicians here have perpetuated the AT&T and Comcast duopoly for quite awhile, and I have no doubt that they are well compensated to do so.
For a new player to come into town who will raise quality of service and lower prices in a way that will force Comcast and AT&T to do the same in order to compete (resulting in lower profits and a lower payola budget) is not going to endear Google to anybody with an established interest in the status quo.
I almost commented to the effect of, "Go, Google. Even though in general I might prefer a municipal deployment/solution."
I might... in other environments. In Chicago... Well, at least Illinois seems to be in the process of getting away from treating filming public officials as a felony offense. So, when the Fiber team captures all the indirect language and outstretched palms, maybe they will actually have the advantage.
I make this comment with mixed feelings and thoughts. I DON'T like a lot of the outsourcing and privatization as a means for a connected someone to middleman the revenue stream as well as perhaps dump on the actual workers (although sometimes, those workers have been making a killing).
But the City's done little to take on consumer abuse by AT&T, Comcast, etc. I don't see a source for a genuine and effective municipal effort.
So... let overwhelming consumer pressure force Google Fiber onto the poles, and let 'er rip. Google's bread is buttered elsewhere, giving more hope for a relatively clean and effective deployment.
P.S. There is also the business aspect to Fiber. Let businesses -- generally a bit more organized and consistently communicative -- in search/need of a better ISP get behind this, and maybe it will really take off.
Assuming Google doesn't start to flake in its support, as it has with many other "real world" products. One particular concern I would have in considering their viability.
Would that be a bad thing? I'm in New York, and I'll dance in the street if (when?) Preet Bharara charges Cuomo.
What? How?
> The Windy City has kept its crown as the most corrupt major city in the country over the last 40 years. But Houston is starting to give Chicago a run for its money.
> According to new research released today by University of Illinois at Chicago political science professor Dick Simpson, there were 45 convictions for public corruption in 2013 (the latest year available) in the U.S. court district that covers the Chicago area. That's way, way above the 19 convictions in Los Angeles and 13 in the Southern District of New York (Manhattan). But Houston had far and away the most pols convicted on federal corruption charges in 2013, with 83.
Traffic law enforcement going to faulty and corrupt traffic camera companies, based/excused upon arguments that are suspect at best. E.g. red light cameras, particularly but not only with the yellow cycles reduce to or below the legal minimum time apparently solely to increase the number of infractions, leading to increased occurrences of accidents and particularly of more dangerous accidents.
And that's not even getting into the decades of "The Machine" that politicized and monetized anything with a pocket to shake a nickle out of.
Chicago has upsides. Per my first line (in my other comment here, I guess), some even find the politics to be so: As long as you enjoy it as a contact sport.
I'm not even sure what we're arguing about, in fact
Neighborhoods?
[1]http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-parking... [2]http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/redlight/ct-chic...
I'm optimistic about Google Fiber but I'll believe it when I see it.
However, here in the US, I've got a 50mbps connection, and I regularly get 50mbps.
Reference: those name-and-shame articles a while back from a network company (Level 3, from memory?) that produced hard numbers on how little $ US cable/DSL internet companies were willing to put into improving their capacity at the peer link.
[Edit] Yup, Level 3. I thought they were interesting because hard numbers at this level seem difficult to come by. Here are the articles from 2014:
http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/chicken-game-played-chi...
http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/observations-internet-m...
for example, symmetrical 10mbps metro ethernet is close to $2k/month here in LA. yes, for real.
commercial service has higher SLA's (which really doesn't mean a damn thing, it's just tradition) and is more expensive.
it's highly dependent on your office building's location. cable companies and fiber operators do not canvas entire commercial districts like they do residential areas.
I bet in Kiev, a fiber provider wanting to lay fiber wouldn't be turned down for not agreeing to wife up the poor neighborhoods that couldn't afford it any way. That's what happens here.
Also most high speed connections in Kiev are not fiber but ethernet cables.
My least favorite aspect of these stories has to be all the people who like to list out the price of internet connectivity as if it lives in a vacuum. It's not really a meaningful datapoint on its own for a number of reasons, and the conversation it engenders is almost never worth reading.
Why? How does the truth of a story have any bearing on its believability.
(Eg some people are literally unable to believe some scientific facts.)
Their service from what I hear is shoddy, crappy customer service and of course they really take you for what's it worth when it comes to the bandwidth / cost ratio -- because they can apparently.
A great solution is to grab a T-Mobile LTE Hotspot for $110 / month (21GB max data limit unfortunately) but you're getting 60-80Mbps downstream. It's solid. Rig it to a router and spread the WAN signal to your LAN.
edit: B b blah. 2,400 seconds.
Honestly, if your options are share a 3Mbit connection with a few people or have a fast connection limited to 21Gbytes / month I could see paying for that out of pocket.
It is sad that I have no other hard line option other than DSL in my area. Satellite and Verizon Wireless for home are other nonfeasable options available.
Edit: 300/20
(also you have a pretty good deal - I have 200/20 for $80)
Then they fixed the TV franchise issues: http://www.geekwire.com/2015/seattle-city-council-approves-l...
As a result of the first CenturyLink started rolling out (expensive) fiber, and after the second CL started offering Prism TV. So I think most of the blocking issues have been fixed now. Remains to be seen if/when Google Fiber will reconsider Seattle.
Wave G has an interesting model - they mainly hook up apartment buildings (it used to be called "Condo Internet"). They are experimenting with hooking up houses on the street as well - they're doing fiber to the home in the Eastlake area, but I don't know if that's working out yet.
I love them. When we moved to Seattle we only looked at apartments that had Wave G service. I'm going to be very sad when we move out of Seattle and have to return to normal Internet. But so far this model is encouraging, if non-inclusive to people outside the nice apartments.
Nice to hear AT&T is planning to roll out gigabit fiber in LA as well. http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/12/att-bringing-gigabit...
For some reason Verizon Fios has avoided LA proper but laid out Fiber along the outskirts and in Ventura County years ago.
Not sure what you mean. I have Fios and I live in Los Angeles proper. The whole city doesn't have Fios, but parts of it certainly do.
They essentially killed FiOS off, but kept servicing customers in areas they already built out in.
So if you're in LA and you have FiOS, lucky you, but those who don't have it never will because they aren't building out at all anymore.
PacBell had grand plans to install fiber optics in SD ~20 years ago, I even remember our front lawn in Mira Mesa getting torn up. Naturally, they never lit it up. See http://newnetworks.com/californiabroadband.html
As a tech worker, this is easily one of the better LA v. SF advantages.
I'd guess you only get 6x the speed for less money in LA in places where fiber is a viable competitor.
I seriously still cannot get over how funny this is.
SF pitches itself as the centre of the tech universe, and yet, it still hasn't "disrupted" its own crappy broadband infrastructure. (Much less the rest of the country's!)
I'm sure there's many good reasons for Google passing them over, but that doesn't keep it from being hilarious.
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/S-F-stalling-Wi-Fi-plans-...
Listen to what happened:
We were seeking to build wifi and wanted to get the city to allow us to put the nema boxes on street lights and stop lights.
I cant recall the officials name now (this was ~2002 or so) -- and they came back and stated they wanted video cameras on all stop lights. They then said that they wanted "at least 60 frames per second" and that they wouldn't allow us to put up the devices as they were already looking to pull fiber to every stoplight to support cameras.
What happened?
Certainly, it's pro-growth (for AirBNB), but I don't see how it's pro-housing for anyone else. Unless you expect to live week to week in AirBNB rentals.
A more relevant metric would be the AirBNB rentals relative to the vacant rental units. A rough estimate indicates:
- There are 300+ "Entire home" units available in SF next week on AirBNB. AirBNB says this represents 15% of the total supply. This would suggest there are 2,000+ such units in total registered on AirBNB (though I presume some of those are occupied units that are only listed when their occupants are out of town).
- The rental vacancy rate in San Francisco is 3.6% of 220,000 units, or about 8,000 vacant rental units total.
- This suggests that the percentage of unoccupied units that are serving as AirBNB units ranges from 3.6% (300/8300) to over 20% (2000/10000) Even at the overly conservative rate of 3%, this is a non-negligible fraction in a city with a rental shortage. Rents tend to jump sharply when the rental vacancy rate falls too low, and SFs vacancy rate is among the lowest in the nation.
Surely the commenter upthread was talking about the moratorium on development in the Mission.
You're likely right.
Small potatoes, but still in the "maybe we should build more housing" direction, so, tasty potatoes.
The situation on the ground is... substantially more interesting than you make it out to be. You should really read this partial analysis of the existing short-term rental regulation and the changed proposed by Prop F: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/10/yes-on-f/#comment-164412 Edit: NOTE. You'll need to copy and paste the link, rather than clicking on it. HN triggers JWZ's anti-hotlinking code.
If anything in the prose is unclear, feel free to ask questions.
https://forums.sonic.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1085
According to the CEO, though some of the issues have been related to permitting/bureaucracy, they have also had some contractor-related setbacks as well.
Was paying $100/month for 20Mb Comcast. Now paying $40/month for 30Mb Sonic. Penalty for breaking the 12 month contract early is $150. So after 2.5 months of good service, I'm in the black even if I have to cancel early.
Anecdotally, their technicians were the smartest I've ever met. I learned a lot about DSL and how they get 30MB out of 2 lines. I also learned that my 2014 MacBook pro can't even handle more than ~20Mb over wifi. My iPhone 6S is now running at about 27Mb, and I get 35Mb when wired to the router. I'm in the Inner Richmond.
That's right, their margins on internet are s huge they'd rather pay me $20 a month, plus pay the content providers (including HBO!) for another customer, than lose a "tv subscriber".
Nevermind that the cable box sits in my attic for another year.
I have no idea, but the underground conditions/road closure implications in SF could be even more challenging.
http://www.mercurynews.com/san-francisco/ci_29214143/at-t-bi...
The caveat, of course, being that not everyone in these cities will be covered.
Nor will there ever be universal coverage in those cities. It'll be Fios all over again. (Assuming that ATT even actually deploys the service and this isn't just a zero-cost feint to prevent our City Supervisors from inviting Google Fiber into the city.)
It's probably not actually true in many cases, but you get that feeling.
For example, if SF cabs weren't so horrible, would Uber gotten it's initial traction? Would it exist today?
At a minimum, having Google Fiber that close should spur San Francisco locals to get louder about the problem.
My guess is that the city, being as regulatory happy as it is (and being specifically anti-Google thanks to the bus fiasco), is not interested in working with Google to make fiber happen.
You'll notice San Jose is on the list, and that actually includes a whole bunch of suburbs too (except notably Cupertino).
In fact the buses weren't even really the problem. The protests were largely about rent increases caused by tech workers. The buses were just a symbol of the difference between tech workers and everyone else (and broad inequality).
Plus I struggle to side with the protesters when they do stuff like this[0]:
> Last week, a group of activists stalked a Google engineer at his East Bay house, urging the masses to “Fight evil. Join the revolution.” [..] The group that stalked Anthony Levandowski, an engineer at Google X, the company’s clandestine research laboratory, calls itself the Counterforce, after a Thomas Pynchon novel. About a dozen members, all dressed in black, gathered outside the Berkeley house where Mr. Levandowski lives with his partner and two young children.
> They unfurled a banner and handed out fliers detailing the engineer’s work on Google’s driverless car technology, Street View and Google Maps. The flier read: “Anthony Levandowski is building an unconscionable world of surveillance, control and automation. He is also your neighbor.”
That's pretty messed up. The dude was a random employee, with a family...
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/01/technology/tech-rides-are-...
AT&T has been horrible in Illinois, with years and years of dragging their feet as well as reneging on commitments made to the State in return for e.g. tax breaks and rights of way.
Even with their announced Gigabit service, one really faces roughly twice the cost of Google Fiber if one chooses to opt out of AT&T's connection/data spying. And they impose a 1 TB / billing cycle (month) data cap. At the supposed 1 Gbps maximum speed, that's a bit less than 154 minutes of data -- less than 2.5 hours. For the entire month / billing cycle.
It's not difficult to imagine a 4K household easily exceeding this cap, or even a 1080p household with several users.
So... Go, Google Fiber. I don't hold out much hope they'll get out to me, but I'm glad that they may finally be holding incumbents' feet to the fire in a large urban market -- one that is considered AT&T's "home turf", to boot. (The erstwhile SBC headquarters were/are in the Chicago suburbs, and a lot of corporate management/leadership is or has been in the area.)
It would be neat if they could somehow bring it along the border between LA and Santa Monica so they could play the two cities off each other: "We'll roll it out to the city that promises not to tax the crap out of it. Come on people, you want all those startups in _your_ town, don't you?"
Perhaps Google should also bring their fiber to Burbank (entertainment studio presence + related small service providers).
[1] https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=137035...
500 Internal Server Error
The server has either erred or is incapable of performing the requested operation.
Sigh.
The city is too old.. they don't even have all the schematics for all the gas lines and other pipes and wires laid over the centuries. Digging in Chicago is very dangerous and restricted. It will be interesting to learn how they deploy this if it happens.
As for likelihood this goes through, I can't see this ever happening. It's very corrupt, city employees don't want to work too hard, it's running on borrowed time.
Oh, I'm in Austin now. :) Can't say I care to return to the Windy City but this would certainly help pull in migrants other than native midwesterners.
But if we were to take the set of [Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq] and try to decide in particular which are which, we would quickly find that to be political.
So in America, the political-ness of "war" tends to shift with the times. Right now, those times are 'interesting'.
Iraq has a current price tag of $2 trillion (including benefits owed over time that were caused by the war).
Both wars together are now at around $4 trillion, spanning the last 14 years.
Canada would cost at least 20 times the Iraq war if you count land, financial + household + business assets and natural resources. Canadian households, including real estate, have $5 to $7 trillion in assets (depending on when you calculate due to the currency).
They have ~170 billion barrels of proven oil reserves (it's likely far more than that). Let's go with something reasonable like 150b that is sanely recoverable, but only 100b is economical or environmentally tolerable before the end of the fossil fuel age (but you'd still have to pay for most of it to buy Canada today). That's $4 trillion just in that oil calculation at today's low price. Canada probably has $8 to $10 trillion just in natural resources. Granted, I know it's ridiculous that Iraq was so expensive you could buy maybe 5% of everything in Canada (or 1/3 of all their household assets).
The US certainly could have purchased Greenland for $2 trillion (if such a thing were politically possible today, which it's not). With global warming, not a bad purchase.
Yes it is impractical to cover a "city" but it would be more honest to say "Coming to select areas of X"
(That leaves out all the non-connectivity-related issues you'd also have to handle, such as billing, cutting off service, collections, abuse reports, legal notices/investigations, support requests, etc.)
Disclosure: built my own ISP 13 years ago after a similar "how hard can it be??" moment.
Lots of relevant discussion and links in that thread too. Good luck!
Cities are usually pretty pumped about this, as they can benefit significantly by getting more business and save money on network connectivity.
Google wants free access to poles and low/no cost leases on city property to install infrastructure.
If you want it to be private, then you need to go find funding.
I wish I could say the same for NYC where I live.
Despite the fact that Google owns one of the largest office buildings in the city where many engineers and other staff work, there is no Google fiber here.
Sadly, the mayor seems more focused attempting to slow the growth of Uber until the residents vociferously protested.
Now he is trying to ban the popular horse drawn carriages in Central Park -- or ban most of them. Sigh....
Popular with whom? The minimal revenue it brings from primarily tourists? Most of the backlash has come from NYC residents who deplore the conditions for the horses. The welfare of the horses should take precedence over the minimal revenue they bring.
Why? Animal welfare isn't important. If it were, we wouldn't commit mass slaughters just for the sake of making our meals tasty.
(Asking as someone right outside the Chicago city limits...)
They provide maps of the rollout too: https://fiber.google.com/cities/austin/fiberhoods/
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-google-fiber-lottery...
http://about.att.com/content/dam/snrdocs/GigaPower/FINAL%20-...
I have another, related thought:
These two cities are, without any reasonable dispute, centers of horrific police brutality.
Will Google Fiber drive down internet prices (and promote more public wifi) so as to cause a measurable increase in reporting and uploading of high-definition video of incidents?
So mostly, The Bay is where to ecosystem is.
I bet the city government would welcome it. It's pretty much all Comcast right now, and the city is researching muni fiber.
Plus it's right outside Washington DC and plenty of government officials live there. The effect of competition on broadband quality and price would be highly visible to federal lawmakers.
edit: I'm curious why this is getting downvoted.
I get 75/75 from Fios for 60 bucks in Crystal City.
Cox is rolling out gigabit for 100 dollars in Fairfax county.
This was part of the selection in a lot of the cities, since fiber can be run alongside existing electric supply lines.