Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded.
For example, I have 250/100 mbit/s for free. My rent pays for this. But I could if I wanted to easily upgrade to 1gbit/s up and down. I can change ISP (even if that wouldn't be paid for by my rent) and I would know that I always could get the same internet-connectivity speeds.
Although, while this is true for many parts of Sweden, it's not available for everyone. Some places still have networks owned by one company without any access to the city network.
This is the model that should be used everywhere, if we were to actually consider it a utility.
By default it does nothing, but if you pay some company to terminate it to the internet then you get internet, using whatever speed they can provide. Let the ISPs compete based on the service they provide: internet speed, reliability, support, and other add-ons like (e-mail or malware filters or the best wifi-router-modem included) or even the lack of any add-ons.
Even if this isn't a "municipal service" strictly speaking, if contracted out to a telco of sorts, it should be done the same way, and we should not allow the same company that provides the physical lines to provide the actual service, since it's anti-competitive.
The UK version is that the cables are owned by one highly regulated company (BT OpenReach) which then has to sell on to retail ISP's at a set rate.
Fibre To The Cabinet (that is, using copper for the last few hundred metres), was rolled out to probably 70% of households without subsidy, and from then on it has required government funding for rural or otherwise difficult areas. The speed is nowhere near what you're listing, though. It's something like 10-50 Mb/sec.
Lätt att stava knasigt :-)
> Craig Barratt, chief executive of Access, the Alphabet division containing Google Fiber, also said he planned to step down because the company was shifting to new technologies and methods of deploying high-speed internet.
Fiber is expensive in every way (labor, regulatory hurdles, resistance from existing broadband companies, etc.). If they've found a viable alternative, it could mean they'll be able to accelerate their broadband rollout.
I'm not saying we should assume that's already the case, but we also shouldn't assume this means they're giving up.
They could do Google Fiber today if they could sell it for more. The only other realistic plan is to reduce to cost of the project.
This seems a little hyperbolic. Where I live I can get gigabit either via Comcast or AT&T here in Chicago. The rollout to gigabit is slow, but its coming. Sweden has 9.5m people. We have 320m and a huge landmass. Infrastructure upgrades simply take longer considering our size and population and a variety of other issues.
Its not exactly Google or bust. Its clear Google doesn't have the chops to enter more markets. Its assumed they were never serious about being competitive and wanted to jump-start gigabit for the home. Whether or not they accomplished that is unknown as both AT&T and Comcast had gigabit plans before Google rolled out its own product. I'm sure it helped push things forward a bit.
Lastly, Google is looking towards a WISP-model for its services. The fiber runs are too encumbered with right-of-way and crony monopolistic practices. Even then Google is taking a loss with its service according to some analysts. With the proper wireless bandwidth and licensed frequencies, you can deliver internet services without a fiber run to the home.
Google is also a mobile company much more than an ISP. It makes no sense to have this artificial division between home and mobile internet. With voip over lte it makes no sense to even have things like gsm or cdma anymore or have your phone number 'owned' by some mobile carrier. It seems google is retooling for a more beefy project fi or something similar that will bridge the gap between home and mobile internet. I imagine, in the future, the idea of having a home internet and a separate mobile internet is going to go away.
edit: -3 score? Please reply instead of drive-by hating.
You might say that the county cable commission is corrupt but its probably no more so than the people who regulate power companies.
Florida, for instance, is decided via the state, no local city or county has power at that level.
In other states, it can be set at the city level (different franchise agreements for each city without any county say).
Because monopolies are wasteful and horrible at things like customer service. The fiber in the ground is a natural monopoly. Connecting that fiber to the rest of the world isn't. You don't want the monopoly to extend one inch more than it has to, regardless of whether the natural monopoly is municipal or Comcast.
[0] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/muni-i...
Why not my internet? Why can't it be a regulated utility? Because of fear mongers and corruption.
Full steam ahead on municipal bandwidth it appears, and coming for politicians with pitchforks who oppose it.
A monopoly provider is always bad for the consumer. (Occasionally, it is less bad for the consumer than any feasible alternative, but it is always a sign that the consumer is receiving the "short end" of the stick)[0]. For so-called "natural monopolies", the most that regulation can do is reduce that disparity, but it cannot eliminate it - and it does this for a hefty premium (the price of the regulation).
In most (but not all) markets, utility companies are the textbook example of natural monopolies. But there is no reason to believe that the entire supply chain of residential Internet access is a natural monopoly. Furthermore, natural monopolies aren't really a "good" thing; they're just unavoidable in some circumstances. For example, utility companies, whether privately or publicly run, typically do horribly with customer satisfaction ratings, response times for non-emergency services, and so on. The fact that their customers' demand is completely inelastic is the main reason for this.
A monopoly is pretty much inherently bad; it just so happens that sometimes it's unavoidable. But, as OP said, there's no reason to sanction a monopoly provider for an industry (or part of an industry) in which it is avoidable.
> either a small or no profit right is granted
Just because something is nominally run by the public sector or as a "non-profit" doesn't mean that a profit is not being made off the good/service chain. The difference is where that profit is accounted for on the books.
[0] This can be illustrated very easily using cost curves; I'm speaking in colloquial terms like "short end of the stick" specifically to avoid the need for economics jargon, but it's a pretty straightforward and fundamental lemma from basic supply and demand.
But it is clearly not avoidable. If one of the largest tech companies in the world (with enormous profits and cash reserves) cannot afford to deploy fiber in major cities, it is clear that the private sector cannot reliably and affordably provide this service on the scale required.
No further proof is necessary that the marketplace will resolve this issue.
First of all, the fact that one company tries something and fails doesn't mean that the entire problem is intractable. It means that that particular attempt didn't work. Other variants might. Pretty much every single successful startup you read about is doing something that was previously attempted unsuccessfully or with less success.
And to that point, Google's model wasn't fundamentally different from the model used by existing ISPs[0] - they were doing almost the exact same thing (deploying {fiber, cable} from Tier 1 networks to the last mile) and structured their pricing in the same way. Their main goal was to force competition, not to dramatically change the fundamental business model of ISPs.
For example, one proposal that has been thrown around is the unbundling of the last mile, in which the lines are deployed and maintained by one entity but leased out to multiple private ISPs who actually service the customers[1]. There are other possibilities as well that haven't been tested yet either. Google failed at being a "better traditional ISP", but that doesn't mean that:
1) anyone who tries to be a "better traditional ISP" is doomed to fail, or 2) Google (or someone else) can't be successful as an ISP by using a different, non-traditional model altogether
[0] with one exception: they sought (and received) carve-out agreements
[1] Incidentally, this is what's already done with wireless networks (MVNOs) and in some places (like NYC) for electricity supply (supply only, not the wires).
You're talking about the wrong market. Putting the fiber in the ground is an unavoidable natural monopoly. But connecting that fiber to the rest of the world isn't -- the only reason there is a monopoly today is that the private incumbents are allowed to leverage the monopoly in the first market into a monopoly in the second one.
We could prohibit them from offering termination services and instead require the wires to be leased on the open market. The incumbents will lobby against that just as they do against municipal fiber, because they want to keep leveraging one monopoly into another. We are under no obligation to agree with them.
It's possible that having the municipality own the wires is actually better, or not. That is the whole privatization debate. But that has nothing to do with the fact that regardless of who owns the local wires, it is better to have competition in who terminates them. Because termination is not a natural monopoly.
They don't have superior offerings, though. Not at the margins they want. ;)
Works well especially when the company receiving such funds is only focusing on building the infrastructure to then rent it back to the ISPs that will leverage it to provide services to the customers...
A similar model is also used here in Italy to provide mobile network coverage in certain areas: the mobile operators "teamed up" and deployed "shared" infrastructure instead of having to deploy and mantain each one its own. This is the way in which they cover remote (less profitable) areas or special areas like the entire subway lines.
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/this-rural-community-is-bu...
;)
As an example, here in Italy we have a separate company ran by a utility provider (which is used to handle infrastructure at a scale and can leverage existing assets) taking care of deploying fiber in the cities and then they make it available to multiple ISPs (bitstream).
In this way you have an entity who is solely focused on building and managing the infrastructure, which is able to make investments that single ISPs would not be able to do (while trying to still be profitable).
The end result for the consumers is that here in Milan, as an example, multiple operators started offering 1 Gb/s FTTH connections for around 30 EUR/month.
Such fees are only possible if you do not have to try to be profitable while having to absorb the hit from deploying your own infrastructure.
Sweden: 11.4 DSL, 6.6 cable, 17.5 fiber.
U.S. 8.2 DSL, 18.5 cable, 3.4 fiber.
U.K. 30.6 DSL, 7.2 cable, 0.0 fiber.
Germany: 28.9 DSL, 8.1 cable, 0.6 fiber.
France: 33.3 DSL, 4.5 cable, 2.1 fiber.
Spain: 16.5 DSL, 5.5 cable, 6.8 fiber.
Italy: 21.1 DSL, 0.0 cable, 0.6 fiber.
The U.S. does better than every big European country, whose residents are by and large stuck on DSL.
It was much faster, and far more reliable than fios by Verizon that I have now in NYC...
Very few even vaguely close to fibre-like services (e.g. Hyperoptic) in the UK
2% have fttp cover now, relatively few take it though.
There are very few use cases right now, I had 12mbs vdsl before, and I hardly notice that there is a difference to be honest, although my wife is a photographer and the high speed upload is a god send for her.
I've asked BT about that one and it looks like it's select exchanges only (even after FTTC has been rolled out), which is a shame as I'd happily pay for it.
The only "superfast" option I've got at the moment is a full leased line, whcih isn't a viable prospect for residential Internet..
Note that outlier amongst the rest of the European countries excluding Sweden. Spain is a year or two into rolling out FTTP everywhere, replacing the copper twisted pair everywhere it can. 0 cost upgrade for the end user, with a speed upgrade from "Up to 10Mbps" to 30Mbps/10Mbps of actual throughput.
Perhaps more significantly, (data from the same table), I'm interested to know what the deployment models look like in Japan and Korea.
Japan: 2.6 DSL, 5.3 cable, 21.8 fiber. South Korea: 2.8 DSL, 8.5 cable, 28.3 fiber.
See e.g. https://www.fiber7.ch/ for a very attractive provider :).
I'm on a 100Mb/s cable service, even though there's fibre to my new-built apartment, since the cable company seemed much more competent when I moved in.
Given most consumers use wifi within the home, and at these speeds it becomes the gating factor, is there any advantage (excluding nerd edge-cases of the average HN reader!) of faster speeds than that?
Of course, we just get private industry setting up monopolies or duopolies instead, often with the help of local laws prohibiting competition. This is worse, but somehow more acceptable to the American electorate.
Everyone --($$$)--> Private enterprise --($)--> Taxes
.......................................--($)--> Actual service
vs.
Everyone --($)--> State --($)--> Actual service
or
Everyone --($$)--> State --($)--> Actual service
Not to mention: http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2013-01-14
No, that's not how GDP works. The GDP measurement is independent of whether the action is performed by the private or public sector.
> Problem with using GDP, in my limited understanding, is that taxing things, even your breathing air, increases the GDP
No, that's not how GDP works either.
It's true, if the gov't performs a service, it's included in GDP. And no, taxes don't increase GDP.
GDP is composed of four components. One of those components is government spending, which can be negative (ie, taxes) or positive (subsidies or direct purchasing).
However, government spending doesn't come from nowhere (no, even if the money is printed or issued as debt). A change in government spending is always matched by an equivalent change in consumption, investments, and/or net exports, which are the source of that money.
The secondary effects of tax policies may be to ultimately change the shape of aggregate supply or aggregate demand functions (at least, that's the argument for doing so), but taxation does not directly have any effect on GDP.
So no, taxing air would not increase the GDP.
That's an oversimplification that honestly provides a more confusing definition than the real one, which is that GDP is the sum of consumption, investment, government spending (which can be negative) and net exports.
> If it was taxable (privatized), it would increase the GDP, whereas if not (as if the government performed and didnt tax it), it would not increase the GDP.
No. Whether a service is performed by the private or public sector has no bearing on how much it counts towards GDP.
GDP can be measured in several ways. In a perfectly observable system, all the measurements would be exactly equal. They are not different models and they do not represent different underlying concepts. It is wrong to say that taxes are included in one measurement of GDP and not the other. In some methods, they are measured directly, and in others, they are measured indirectly. In both cases, taxes have the same effect.
> If a government decides to not tax air, no economic activity. If they do, and a company sells you taxable air, there is economic activity. In the former case, it no money is required. In the latter, it generates economic activity, activity that cannot be swept under the rug and must be measured.
Your usage of "economic activity" isn't really well-defined. But the difference between the two situations you're describing is that, in one, air is free, and in the other, air is being sold. The fact that it's being taxed on top of the sale is irrelevant.
This is also a really pointless example because air is mostly a non-excludable resource, so talking about either "selling" it or "taxing" doesn't reveal anything meaningful.
> It does matter, gov vs private industry.
No, it does not. Taxation doesn't come from nowhere. From a macroeconomics perspective, the government isn't "special".
Let me try one last time: Remember when I said that GDP = consumption + investment + government expenditures + net exports? Some economists would instead say that GDP is really "just" consumption + investment + net exports. And guess what? Regardless of which school of thought you subscribe to, the end result is exactly the same. It doesn't matter whether you break out government expenditures separately from consumption, investment, and net exports or whether you include government consumption in "consumption", government investment in "investment" and so on. The end result is exactly the same.
I don't know if the comparison should be valid. Over the past 100 years the US has done incredible things. From developing the first transistor to applied atomic power to the first man on the moon, and more relevantly to your point, it expanded the German Autobahn model and took it to a continental scale.
If America wanted to do it, it eventually could be done - and many people around the world still believe this idea to be true.
Edit: What I think is interesting to add is that defense and national pride or prestige were indeed significant factors in these developments through the decades.
First problem is the cost of the infrastructure for such a huge space. We did offer to subsidize it to a point and the companies took the money without delivering. As usual, no repercussions.
Second problem is very few politicians, in office or wishing to run, will listen to the citizens and prefer taking money from corporations to maintain the status quo.
It's a bigger issue than it seems on the outside.
Did you hear anyone talk about broadband during this year's presidential election?
While it's hard to hear much about policy plans over the personal, historical, and character attacks this cycle, yes, I've heard Clinton promoting her "broadband for all" plan, as well as seen some criticism of and debate about it in the press, etc.
Here's an article from earlier this month: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/hillary-clinton-v...
Except that Sweden is 20 times larger than New Jersey in area. The continental US is 18 times larger than Sweden, so it is actually a better (if terrible) comparison geographically.
Maybe in your argument you should compare Sweden with Michigan, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Nevada, or Minnesota instead of New Jersey, which each have at least half the area of Sweden with varying population density.
Take Denmark next to Sweden, while still better than the US, for the most part, the broadband roll out is much different. A single phone company (TDC/YouSee) owns the phone network, but they are force to lease their lines to competitors. TDC more or less dictate the price for renting, it just has to be "reasonable". The result is that a 20Mb DSL line cost the same from all providers. Cable companies have been force to open their networks this year, until then they had monopolies in individual areas. Fiber is being rolled out, but slowly and at great cost to the electric companies (that more or less own the fiber networks). This may sound great overall, but rural areas aren't getting nearly the level of connectivity that they would have gotten in Sweden. There are still plenty of place that are lucky to get 5Mbit, and Denmark is a very small country. I can't imagine the cost of rolling out just 10Mbit to 90% of the US customers.
Incidentally, I didn't get LTE service in the farmland between Munich and the airport. That would be quite unusual in the U.S.
...depending on your provider. try driving around in the sticks of Maryland just 20 minutes outside Baltimore, good luck getting EDGE on tmo!
This correlates well with the only network metric that matters, linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every inhabitant in the country.
Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.
Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.
But what if a place doesn't have service on a large portion of roads? I doubt that is particularly true for this comparison, but the metric probably shouldn't reward a place with more unserved areas.
If your aim is to provide broadband to all, you'll have to build there too. Sweden aims to do 100 Mbps to 90% of the population by 2020. Can't do that by just covering urban areas.
Try driving through Wyoming some time (on a highway!). You can easy drive for an hour or two and there is nothing but BLM (gov't) land all around you. No one lives there.
As an absurd example, you can serve 40% of the population of Alaska by establishing service in Anchorage, which is roughly 0.1% of Alaska by area.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=ratio+of+land+area+of+...
Silicon Valley covers a large number of municipalities, and without specifying which one you're in, all I can say sorry, 20 Mbit is slow these days.
The building next door to me is wired for fiber through one provider, Wave, and offers 1gig for $80/month: https://gowaveg.com. I'd love to switch and pay the extra $30 for much better internet but I can't get access to it as a single customer since it is decided building by building.
Don't get me wrong. I like the idea of cheap super high-speed internet, just like I like my streets to be repaved nicely every year.
I live on the east coast, and was irked to watch neighbors complain about bad cell service and about a new cell tower going up in the same breath.
We are not talking about a federally owned fiber network.
Sweden is not very dense, large parts are uninhabited forests.
Sweden 24 United States 35 New Jersey 467.2
You are basically saying, "I live in the most densely populated state in the US, and my Internet is almost as good as the internet of the Swedish country side, U.S.A! U.S.A!"
People from the German Telekom like to us this argument as well, "Germany has much more population, we can't do what they do". That argument has been debunk and shown for what it is many times, by multiple experts. It's simple lobbying by a monopoly provider of copper to defend its monopoly against the competition heavy fiber.
If they're actually uninhabited, then there is no need to build fiber out there, and you shouldn't count them in the density measure. What you're really interested in is the population-weighted density (i.e. the density of the places where people live).
Compare the list of U.S. urban areas to that of Sweden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_urban_areas_in_Sweden; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_urban_ar.... The vast majority of the population of Sweden lives in urban areas with between 2,000 to 3,500 people per square kilometer. No urban area in the U.S. is as dense as Stockholm's (3,500). NYC is at the low end of that range (2,000), and is less dense than a bunch of Swedish cities with just ~50-100k people.
Major U.S. urban areas like Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, and St. Louis are under 900 people per square kilometer. Major cities like Houston, Dallas, and Philly are just north of 1,000. That's 1/3 the density of Stockholm.
The only metric that matters when building a network is linear route miles of cable per subscriber needed to provide service.
There is a single metric you can use to approximate this for any country: people per mile of road. Every (on-grid) dwelling and business is on a street or a road, so if you put a fiber cable on every road or street, then you will pass every inhabitant in the country.
Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.
Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.
While this is probably true in an absolute sense, Sweden is also a much smaller, more homogeneous country than the U.S.; I don't think governments scale very well, so a small affluent country can likely be more nimble and innovative than a large affluent country (think startups vs enterprises).
Democracies aren't businesses. Getting some kind of consensus from a huge, diverse populace is hard. I think you end up with diseconomies of scale.
> If there are diseconomies of scale then you can organise it at the state level or municipal level
This requires the federal government to now maintain 50 distinct sets of policy, or delegate to regional bureaucrats. Both of these are diseconomies of scale.
These kinds of problems are hard to solve within a large enterprise with a hierarchical power structure; the United States is a much larger, more diverse entity with a distributed/consensus-driven power structure.
The argument that it is merely an option assumes that you are able to rationally choose the best option from the ones available. Not the case when we're talking about government. And the larger the government, the more political power is at stake, the less rational the decision making becomes.
Also, it looks like you're counting Sweden's vast unpaved road network, which makes up about 75% of its roads. I bet very few of the 60% of households with fiber live on an unpaved road. If you compare paved roads only, the U.S. and Sweden have the same linear density. And even then, it's much less expensive to connect two dense urban areas at either end of a 100 mile road than to serve sparse suburbs and exurbs along a 100 mile stretch of road.
Firstly, Sweden pretty much intends to do so. The official goal is to bring at least 100 Mbps service to at least 90% of the population by 2020. Many municipalities/states have programs to build out fiber to everybody.
Sweden also already has a cable running to almost every premise, so in practice every road and every street is already passed. In 2011 xDSL covered 98,5% of the population and only 1100 households or businesses had no service or less than 1 Mbps service.
Secondly, it's an estimate, but it's a far better estimate than population density or any other single metric presented so far. It correlates with the linear miles of cable needed to pass all premises, which is the deciding factor in determining costs. It is also readily available and it measures compratively how hard it would be wire up a nation.
By this measure Sweden does far better, even having a need for more infrastructure per inhabitant to reach the same end result, i.e. broadband service for everyone.
Is this just a guess or do you have anything to back this up with?
> You could probably cover 98.5% of the population without covering much of the road network.
Here's a map of xDSL coverage: http://www.europarl.europa.eu/document/activities/cont/20110...
Let's see how you propose to cover that land area without also covering much of the road network.
Looking at the map, the northernmost county has barely any HSPA coverage. Nevertheless that county has a population of a quarter of a million inhabitants. To get 99.6% coverage, you'd still have to cover over 200 000 of those and everybody else in the country. That's clearly impossible as 100 000 inhabitants in that county live outside the ten largest "metro" areas.
There's just no way of not covering a lot of roads if if you aim for coverage in the high nineties with such a dispersed population.
That's a fair point.
> And even then, it's much less expensive to connect two dense urban areas at either end of a 100 mile road than to serve sparse suburbs and exurbs along a 100 mile stretch of road.
Not necessarily. Build costs in dense urban areas are high, but there are more subscribers. Suburbs and exurbs are cheaper to build per mile, but have less customers. It averages out fairly well.
Sometimes you can get DSL, but since Verizon employees get fired for fixing outages now, that will be gone soon.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/verizo...
"The wireless home phone service, VoiceLink, is not a proper replacement for copper phone lines because it doesn’t work with security alarms, fax machines, medical devices such as pacemakers that require telephone monitoring, and other services, the union said."
Really? Verizon should be maintaining and repairing obsolete infrastructure so people can keep using fax machines? GMAFB.
Wat. NYC is over 10k/km^2. Manhattan is over 25k/km^2.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_m...
I mean some people talk about the Northeast megalopolis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, and some times Richmond. But, that does not mean Boston and DC are somehow the same city.
Not it does not, that is the "Tri-State" area. I have never heard anyone use the term "NYC Urban area." What you are saying makes it sounds as if those places are suburbs of New York City and none of them are. New York City is 5 boroughs.
Also I think you are confusing Manhattan and New York City. Half the daily population of Manhattan are commuters:
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/commuters-nearl...
You can use the same trick to come to the surprising conclusion that LA is denser than NYC. Population-weighed density is definitely a better way to measure density if you want numbers that reflect intuition about how dense a place "feels" rather than merely reflecting what arbitrary political boundaries were chosen
I think that's the difference - the costs are upfront, not paid by capital/loan with the subscriber having to pay for it eventually.
Rationally, most people wouldn't want to pay that much into a US cable/net provider, considering their historical experience with them.
There's probably a reasonable market doing this at $10-20k/house. There's clearly a market for multi-family dwellings like condos/apartment buildings (webpass, condointernet, etc. have shown), but maybe the next step will be neighborhoods pre-wired with fiber to some kind of switchbox with your choice of carrier coming in.
At that level of competition, it could easily drive the prices down into the $10-20 range for high bandwidth, which would probably break even with current cable internet prices now.
I pay nearly $100/mo for 300Mbps/20Mbps since I have about 9 active users in my home. I pay about $1.2k per year in internet, so $1-2k upfront for cheaper monthly pricing and more competitive features.
What you describe sounds like a great model. It'd be very difficult to do it in the U.S.
What do carriers in Sweden do with people who can't afford to pay the up front fee?
EDIT: Looking at Stokab, it looks like they don't require an up-front payment. But Stokab built its network over two decades, starting out in the core city and expanding based on market demand: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/sites/digital-age.... That model is illegal in almost every city in the U.S. Any carrier must agree to wire up a whole city on a very short timeline, even areas where there isn't sufficient market demand. Verizon was given less than 8 years to wire up all of New York City.
Stokab is a municipal and non-profit carrier and almost all cities have one of those, competing with the private carriers. The municipal often requires 70% + coverage, witch is very hard to get in a small non tech village with old people. Stokab is a bit different because they have about 1.5 million people living in their area witch is dense compared to the rest of Sweden.
The private carriers don't even bother if they can't get a few hundred subscribers in the area. So if you live in a small village, but not small enough to get a government grant it can be though.
When you start digging up the streets you must allow competitors to also join, so when one carrier has decided to start digging, you often get offers from other Carriers too, with a slightly lower price. So there's usually many carriers in the same area.
There isn't that much fiber in the forests, but anywhere there is a city there is. Sweden has a goal to give 90% of the population fiber before 2020 even if that is probably not going to happen.
You can't really treat an entire region like it has a uniform population density, either. Area is not the relevant unit of measure, but total linear distance of the edges of the spanning tree.
Maybe a more predictive measure for networking costs would be median distance to nearest neighbor?
Sweden has 10 people per mile of road. The US has 30 people per mile of road.
Sweden simply does better, despite having to deploy more infrastructure to provide service.
Sweden used to have a state telecom monopoly which then became the incumbent. You are right that regulatory capture has played a big part in the development of the telecommunications sector. Sweden had a strong incumbent, but that did not stop the municipalities and power companies from building out competing fiber networks, nor stop the regulator from acting in the best interest of the people.
So, the big difference was that the Swedes had both political support for building fiber networks and a more can do attitude towards getting things done, without excluding large parts of the community.
Compare this to a relatively small city like Pereslavl in Russia where I lived for a summer. It's about 120some km north of Moscow but the base options for most of the ISPs was 50/50; note the plural on ISPs. We had more choices and better service in a small Russian city than most states have across their major cities. And my girlfriend (Russian native) was annoyed that we had to pay an "outrageous 450 ruble" for the access.
It's not just a matter of size with the U.S., the planning in general is very poor and not built out compared to many countries. The priority on the last mile networks just seems to be lower or more poorly managed.
Very few people have no complaints when it comes to Comcast, one of the most hated companies in the country. And you have no alternative besides Comcast. If it were regulated like a utility that would be one thing, but you're at the mercy of a powerful monopoly which has been know to play all kinds of anti-consumer tricks. I'd recommend keeping a close eye on your bill.
I guess I'm one of the lucky ones? I've had them for years now and no real complaints. I'm certainly not blow away by their customer service, but they came and setup the internet when they said they would and I've had maybe one outage that lasted less than an hour (in 5 years).
So if you're in the northeastern corridor, you have 1 option for decent isp service, and it's totally reliant on Scrooge McDuck CEO not boning up a labor agreement. Otherwise you're screwed. USA USA USA indeed.
But "bury big tubes with fiber optic cables in them" is somehow too complicated of an engineering task?
The reality is we could get it done, there's just no political will cause the status quo benefits the entrenched players.
This is what's happening in Mountain View, home of Google. We don't have Google Fiber because of local obstructionism.
And by "entrenched players", I meant anyone that has a horse in the race, not just ISPs.
The scaling up of a system to the national level isn't the challenge -- it's the need to scale down to the municipal level that creates the monopoly problems.
The POTS network was regulated by FCC and State utility commissions, and were run very well. Cable is government by franchise agreements at the local level, which results in poor governance because local governments aren't equipped to negotiate these types of contracts.
I have heard that response before, but I don't think it holds.
The culture density in Europe is tremendous compared to the US. European countries are not like US states: in a few hours, I can go to a city where nobody speaks my language. Even within my country, many regions have tremendous accents and even completely different languages that are still in heavy use (Brittany's Breton language, for instance).
Even at a governmental level, passports are issued by countries; US citizens have the same passport, with common federal laws and a single military.
Culture variety drives the number of communities regardless of the size of geographic surfaces.
The US is one big community with fairly common concerns, such as ISP monopolies. In Europe, we have very different ISP markets from country to country — each has different companies and different struggles.
Sure, there are inequalities even within a common culture; you can have good phone coverage in Montpellier but no reception around Millau. Still, when you face the same competitors across the country, you are authorized to characterize their behavior towards the market.
The Australian government came up with a credible plan to provide high speed internet along the lines of the Swedish model being described. It has subsequently been modified to be less fast, but the concept of providing government-owned infrastructure to be leased by multiple providers on a competitive basis stays.
If it's possible in Australia, it's definitely technically feasible in the US too.
For reference, Sweden is around the same size as California, with 1/4th the population.
The problem with infrastructure in the US is simply one of money. We don't want to pay for nice things. It's the 50 year old self-fulfilling prophesy of cut budgets, then complain that nothing is maintained and so the budget needs to be cut more because clearly it must have been wasted. Repeat ad nauseum. (This of phenomenon also plays out on the micro scale when people claim poor people are poor because they bought a stick of gum, instead of I guess investing 22 cents in an index fund or something.)
"However, the project was completed only in December 2007 (instead of 1998), at a cost of over $14.6 billion ($8.08 billion in 1982 dollars, meaning a cost overrun of about 190%)[6] as of 2006"
Comparing a government transportation project to anything in the private sector is a canard. There's literally nothing comparable. That isn't the say that government contracting policies and processes are perfect and not abused. They clearly aren't perfect, and they clearly are abused. See the F-35, and well, pretty much every military purchase since the Cold War. See the vast majority of government infrastructure projects. Most importantly, these cost overruns aren't something that's fundamental about private-vs-public, but rather something about how American governments function.[0] Unfortunately, there's no single smoking gun, and instead everyone falls back to their favorite boogeymen. (My favorites are multiple environmental impact studies, public comment periods, fraud, and of course willful incompetence (i.e. "I don't believe the government should do this, so I"m going to do a really shitty job, and then use my poor performance as evidence that the government is intrinsically incompetent."))
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-04-08/why-u-s-i...
well that would be socialism. Sorry comrade, here in the US we have this thing called FREEDOM. It Trumps your smart/efficient/reasonable solutions any day.
Something something past, rose-tinted glasses.
Political climate is a function of the people in charge. People in charge, due the nature of power and its effects, are always the same. Therefore the political climate is always the same.
You're just inadvertently filtering out.
https://fiber.google.com/about/
By contrast, California municipalities have made building fiber difficult[1].
[1] http://www.bizjournals.com/sacramento/blog/morning-roundup/2...
Google's switching to wireless is in part an acknowledgment that competing in the wired space is costly and fraught with hurdles including lawsuits from incumbents. Could we wire the nation tomorrow with gigabit everywhere? Well not literally, but if there was a "moonshot" program that captured the public's imagination yeah I'd imagine we could get it done in a few years. We've done it before when we really wanted to - the Rural Electrification and Highway programs are two examples from the last century. But it would represent an incredible change from how business is done today and the resulting lawsuits would drag on for decades after the work was done.
Sure it's $2/month if you ignore any fixed costs. Net margin after interest and taxes is high single digits.[1]
There are plenty of companies that own and are continually rolling out new fiber in Sweden, especially when you start looking outside the large cities. I would guess that IP-Only (Bynet) and Telia alone are currently putting more fiber in the ground than the state run networks combined.
For rural areas a lot (most?) of the new fiber is built by local organisations and payed for by the members, EU-subsidies and partnerships with companies that take over the operations of the networks once they have been built.
That said, both IP-Only and Telias fiber networks are Open networks that allow the customers to choose from a number of different ISP for their internet connectivity.
Basically what we did for long-distance phone service. The recent FCC ruling stopped short of doing just that, but it isn't a stretch of the imagination for the FCC to apply full teleco rules to cable providers in the US.
Of course, every ISP is going to lobby extremely hard against that. But one can only hope...
How is that ensured? At least in the US, munis and federal govt are notoriously slow on upgrading tech. Often requiring legislative (slow) approval and tax increases to get it done.
It took 20 years or so, but they started with the most lucrative routes in the inner city, serving companies and universities, and then slowly expanded their network over the years until they're now at a point where I think they've covered almost every home in the city.
No tax money used beyond the initial funding, since it's a profitable company, and no legislation required, since it's just a company. And the competition can't whine either, because this company isn't doing anything they couldn't do.
This isn't "free" - your taxes pay for it.
The owner of the building has probably signed a deal to get a good rate for everyone. Fine if you like it, but a waste of money if you'd prefer a different provider.
> The municipalities own (most of) the networks
The municipalities use his tax money.
Please read the original comment in its entirety, beyond the first half of the two sentences you misleadingly quote.
> municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee.
> For example, I have 250/100 mbit/s for free. My rent pays for this.
He pays rent to the landlord, the landlord pays the broadband company for service to all the apartments, the broadband company pays the municipality to use the fibre network.
The fibre network might have used tax money initially, or it might have been laid with income from usage fees from other areas. There's no ongoing use of tax money for the network.
As we speak, private ISPs are rolling out their own fibre-to-the-home in order to break loose of Hellkom. Hellkom is responding by launching their own FTTH packages that are 3x the cost and have caps that can be depleted in a day.
What works for the Swedish will not work for everyone.
That's no surprise. The Scandinavian countries are superior nations to every other country on Earth, except maybe Switzerland. Every quality-of-life study ranks them at the very top.
Alternatively, one can look at this not as a failure, but as a success. The point of Google fiber was to force carriers to get faster internet to everyone. It appears that it has been working. This benefits google directly as their properties such as Youtube can deliver more and better content.
For Google, this is a win/win proposition.
class Internet implement Musk.Tesla.Model {}
I was really looking forward to giving Google $70/mo for 1 Gbps or whatever they were offering, and not having a data cap. It's not that I expect to hit the cap, but the fact that I don't want to think about it.
I moved recently and was forced to sign up with them as the only competitor option was 7mbps. After provisioning my service online successfully, I received a call from them stating that I would not be able to receive the the service I had requested at the price they quoted. I could either cut the speed in half, or increase my bill by $70/month. I was furious, since there is absolutely no reason the website should have given me incorrect information...I put in my service address, after all. I refused to drop my speed or pay more. There was a brief pause, then they told me this was fine and activated my service. I provided my own modem, and am still charged the monthly modem rental fee despite attempting to notify them several times.
Worst fucking company I have ever dealt with. I would happily pay more money to anybody else just to take business away from them.
This is a big reason why I don't trust quotes until I get some sort of confirmed pricing from the seller.
Shouldn't have to, of course, but we kind of demand instant gratification and I feel this has led to poor service in many.
I've often thought well Century Link handles cost predicting well but maybe that is more due to the quality of the service and the fact they are over-charging for a lower quality service so it's easier to guarantee those prices. That doesn't reflect in the price comparison but it does show when you have the service and your comparing to your neighbor whom has the other.
FWIW, I recently switched from Sonic to Comcast and I'm relatively happy now. But that had something to do with Sonic being unable to provide a good connection in my old apartment building.
I pay $75/month for 150Mbps via Comcast... and most days a speed test will say around half of that, and there's infrequent outages (averaging roughly one every month).
The only other service where I live is AT&T: 18Mbps for $50/month. And whatever you may think of Comcast, my experience with AT&T's service and customer service has been far, far worse.
This loss of competition hurts consumers
That being said, the other wildcard (that another user did mention) is whenever SpaceX gets all of the spectrum / permits for their internet microsat constellation, it will happen. That will most likely be a few years out at best, but when it happens, no doubt it will be a good option (LEO Sats have a lot better ping times than existing Satellite based internets).
Edited to mention that it is SpaceX working on a Satellite internet constellation not Tesla (thanks: nickjarboe for the cluebat).
Musk Industries's satellite internet constellation. Original post updated with credit to you.
:)
So fed up, and needing to start working from home soon, that I'm moving in a few months..
If you can document that DSL was once available at your house or that your neighbors still have it, you might be able to get somewhere.
So, I don't agree that it's nice for Austin. This removes the incentive for the other providers to continue expanding coverage, and the core of the city will likely be stuck on the old cable lines for much, much longer.
Then they could have invested another 1-2B (given how little it has cost TWC to roll out faster speeds in cities that google came into) to spit some nodes and install faster backends links. That would have provided 1GB speeds to a much larger swath of people than they are managing to do with their fiber rollout. Then in a few years when they decide they don't want to be in the infrastructure business they could sell it to someone else. But, in the process they would have proven to everyone that the existing cable/telephone monopolies are doing a huge disservice to their customers and the country.
I live in the Bay Area (Berkeley). My only choice above 20mbits is Comcast. AT&T's lines near me are old, I can get a max of 18mbits with them; Sonic says I can get about 12. I own my own home, so I can't get Webpass. LMI and the other local ISPs offer things like 3mbps for $90.
I have literally zero reasonable choice other than Comcast.
I'd happily pay double what Google charges for Fiber for a quarter of the speed they offer. I just want off Comcast. Google shuttering Fiber is the last hope I have. I don't think I'll have any other choice for at least a decade.
It took 5 weeks to get Comcast wired at my house in Berkeley. Terrifying that the next best options available to me were Unwired 10Mbps (burst & shared) wireless for $90/month or 1.5Mbps DSL (gah).
For example in Nashville, they have been trying to roll out fiber in Nashville for over a year now but have only been able to install on less than a dozen utility poles so far.
This is because of the rules that prevented anyone other than the owner of the existing lines to move anything. This meant that if Google wanted to add lines to a pole with existing AT&T and Comcast lines, it would require both companies to move their own lines independently of each other in coordination. This means roads would have to be closed 3 separate times for each vendor. Nashville recently passed the One Touch Make Ready ordinance that allows approved vendors to do all of the work at the same time.
Now both AT&T and Comcast are suing the city: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/comcast-sues-nash...
I hope that google stills continues to deploy to cities that are already in progress. It took community effort to get the ordinance passed and subjects them a lawsuit. It would be a real letdown.
Google also seems to just give up on a lot of its products: Google+ Hangouts Project Ara Google Buzz Google video Orkut Talk Meebo etc.
http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/visuel/2015/03/06/google-memori...
And Google discovered that you CAN'T just make money deploying Gigabit fiber for $60 a month. Getting even a 50 Mbps fiber circuit around here is hundreds of dollars a month.
Yes remember when the mantra was "don't be evil"? They also just let products linger w/o any or many improvements. Google voice is an example. Text to speech is in many cases totally worthless, even with clear speaking speakers.
"Hi Davy, thank you so much" becomes "Hey baby, I think so much". Brightens my day.
In this concrete example, I don’t think “Google cancelled a product” can be equated with “Google is evil”.
Southwestern Bell - became AT&T inc by buying Ameritech, AT&T Corp. Pacific Telesis, BellSouth (all Baby Bells)
Bell Atlantic/NYNEX - merged to become Verizon buying GTE, MCI Worldcom along the way
US West - merged with Qwest, acquired and became CenturyLink
"the original AT&T" is those Baby Bells not just the empty shell that became AT&T Corp. (aka ATT Long Distance)
The takeaway is that the ORIGINAL AT&T split into 3 companies and swallowed GTE, MCI, Worldcom, and Qwest in the process. It ended up being a consolidation. 4 of the 7 baby bells are back together operating under the AT&T name, that's over half the old company.
Consolidation started with Cingular buying AT&T Wireless. Then SBC bought AT&T and simply kept the AT&T brand. Eventually the Cingular brand went away and they went back to AT&T and AT&T Wireless.
Wheeeee! The AT&T of today is basically SBC with all the old assets rolled in. SBC bought AT&T, not the other way around.
Source: worked there through it all
They do point-to-point wireless transmission. This is perfect for cities, where you can place these on rooftops instead of laying underground fiber.
I've dwelt on this quite a bit and have come to the conclusion that while Google is amazing at a lot of things it is not necessarily great for leveraging network effects - a domain handled much better by Facebook.
Google's core product is search, an awesome web utility. The next product often named is gmail - again, a utility. Then you have their Drive-oriented applications - Docs, Sheets, etc. which are all amazing... as standalone products that don't need other people to enhance its value.
The problem with G+, Hangouts (and other chat apps), and a variety of other products they have tried to develop is that they're trying to break into the social space - but the company isn't about social at it's core. While I appreciate that the company is trying to bring competition to the social space I think it should focus harder on areas where it has traditionally excelled - utilities that are convenient for individuals and made better by collaboration. If it wants to get into the social space it should break out a new company under Alphabet that can focus on that objective - but there's no reason to tie it directly to Google.
EDIT: I think Fiber can and will still play out strong, mind you.
I don't think it has anything to do with "core competency". Google was just the last (copycat) dog in the social game trying too hard to figure out what the cool kids want.
It's silly to describe what happened to Google Video as "just giving up". They abandoned that specific product because it was getting no traction. Instead, they won the entire category for at least a generation by buying YouTube, working out all of its licensing issues, and integrating the best elements of Google Video's features and design. You'd be hard-pressed to argue they made was the wrong choice for anybody.
Meebo was practically an acqui-hire, never really a Google product.
From the big G's standpoint, it makes good biz sense to exit this market. I sure hope the subtext in the article comes to fruition ie that Google / Alphabet has figured out a better way to get high speed internet to homes in the US sans fiber.
In an ideal world, this fast fiber internet ought to be a municipally managed utility, with my tax dollars paying for the fiber in the ground. Then, my take home dollars paying for whatever competing service(s) I choose to light up said fiber to bring me access to the net.
Disclaimer: I'm a Project Fi subscriber for the last half year or so.
I agree that Fiber isn't Google business, which is why Alphabet was created. It allows for the company to try expanding into areas that aren't just software. Also, Google does a LOT of infrastructure work with datacenters and the fiber they own across the country/world. (though that is more business focused than consumer/residential)
It's a 0-5% margin business for the foreseeable future; and best-case scaled scenarios it's a 10% margin business with huge capex. Google shouldn't be interested in anything with less than a 20% margin at scale. So from a portfolio standpoint, it was a stupid bet.
My guess is that Google entered the business without knowing all the nuance of the access world. They made an assumption that there was some magic bullet of architecture and comp sci that could lead to game-changing economies of scale. But it turns out the telecoms are pretty solid on the engineering / design side, and customer service and network maintenance are the big cost centers. Neither of those can be automated with algorithms or AI (well, network maintenance sort of can be, but the telecoms are already on top of it), so there's not a ton of opportunity for Google to leverage its strengths.
Running a datacenter is a very different business from running access networks. Operations that are cheap in a datacenter are expensive in the field (cable runs, equipment swaps, etc.) Likewise, there are different considerations around who does the work -- it makes sense to hire full-time people in a datacenter; less so when your equipment is scattered over a few million square miles. All of that leads to a very different operating model, so it's no wonder that Google couldn't figure it out.
I know that's standard financial thinking, because a business is assumed to be able to absorb pretty much any amount of capital and invest it at a rate of it's core rate, which for Google is indeed 20%. However, obviously, Google cannot do that. It can invest maybe 10-15 billion, but no more (presumably unless you want to make Google a low-margin business). So that doesn't appear to be true.
Is it better for Google to "invest" their 80 billion or so at 3% in liquid assets versus investing it in a 10% margin business ? Here's the thing: they'll make more profit with the money in Fiber than they'll make with the money in bonds and stocks. Definitely. If fiber provides a 10% return on investment, definitely.
Sadly I know: for the GOOG and GOOGL stock prices, yes it is a better idea to keep cash on the sidelines, as then you get the benefit of investors assuming Google can deploy cash at 20%, despite it being obviously wrong. But it offends my sense of efficiency.
Telecoms return about 10% at scale. Startup stage of a telco is incredibly expensive; and you typically won't see positive cash flow until a decade or so later (which is why it's usually financed by debt offerings; not equity or cash). Risk is also high; because if you enter the wrong market as an overbuilder, you can ensure nobody in the market (including yourself) will ever turn a profit.
All in all, overbuilding a telecom is a high-risk, low-reward investment with a very long payoff period. There's a good reason there aren't more companies lining up to do it.
The fact is, they have a national rollout of Project Fi because they were able to operate in a way that allowed them to resell existing carriers' products as an MVNO. And they were able to offer something unique over existing MVNOs by combining Sprint and T-Mobile's networks, which required a special radio/SIM card combination since the networks are quite different. It had the practical upshot where I live of providing superior service to even the best available networks (which are AT&T and Verizon in my area) and giving me excellent coverage in an area served poorly by each of the networks independently[0].
Ensuring that people have fast, reliable, non-discriminatory access to the internet is within Google's best interest. Assuming the next administration undoes network neutrality, Google could find itself and its products penalized if carriers offer alternatives that don't include surcharges (unlikely, yes, but possible considering many don't have more than one choice for broadband service).
And, speaking personally, working with Project Fi has been wonderful. I've interacted with customer service on three occasions (most recently a month ago due to a software update killing my wife's phone) and they're incredible -- going well over and above what the other carriers have done for me when I've run into trouble. It's particularly nice for me since I have data usage requirements that occasionally balloon in a given month but are often very low -- it's saved me about $80/month as a result[1]. And from what I read, it's a lean business. Since they don't manage the network, all of the phones offered are in-house brands (Nexus and Pixel), there's a lot of overlap everywhere except for customer service[2].
[0] I'm about a year out of date with data since I've had Fi since then, but the thumb area of Michigan had parts that were covered well by T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon and AT&T, but those places were interspersed with a lot of dead areas. Sprint and T-Mobile appear to almost exist in places where the other isn't so as a result of combining the two, I get 4G through every part of the thumb that I spend a lot of time in the summer.
[1] My data usage is almost always under a gig, but I occasionally run into a situation where I need a lot of data for a few days. As a result, I always kept a data plan that was five times what I required "just in case" because the overage charges were extreme on Verizon when I was a customer and it was "just easier". I probably could have managed to keep a lower plan and only called in when I went over, upgrading temporarily (they used to let you upgrade and backdate that upgrade to the previous month a few times), but I didn't like the risk or the hassle.
[2] When I had this problem with my Nexus phone, I was transferred from Fi support to a much more general hardware support group that sounded like it was specific to the Nexus phones. Despite the transfer, this call was the shortest I've dealt with to get to resolution and I was pleased that the CSRs all had a great command of the English language (the hardware guys had accents but they weren't so thick that I had a difficult time understanding them). Getting a replacement sent over night with Saturday delivery at no charge was really great.
My understanding from this article amongst others is that they are simply rethinking their approach to, rather than laying down fiber throughout all target cities, beam high speed internet from local way points to the roofs of high rises (like WebPass does in SF, which they acquired).
It is pretty reasonable to, if this seems a viable approach, halt expensive infrastructure operations to lay down hard wired fiber and cut the jobs associated with these logistics and operations.
Their title: "Advancing our amazing bet"
Point being that our ISPs right now need some disruption and I think a lot of people were hoping this Google Fiber would catch on. A lot of folks assumed Google would eat whatever losses to make this a hit. Apperatnly not, apperantly some short term profits trump anything else.
Local communities could use municipal bonds to pay for a 10G-EPON build outs where multiple providers can provide transit, VoIP and IPTV over the same cables using PPPoE and VLANs. Then a per subscriber fee could be assessed to make pay back the bonds. This would be an ILEC/CLEC model, except with local government ownership much like they own the roads.
The situation where incumbents drop prices could be handled by having a default CLEC that offers free ITU broadband service at 256Kbps. People would switch for that and then switching to a better CLEC could just be a phone call. The incumbents could not compete with free service over a 30 year period and the municipal government owned ILEC + private CLEC model would win.
Local governments ought to focus on building roads while businesses focus on building the services that are provided through them. Having each business build its own network of private roads is infeasible. It sounds absurd when stated in this way, but that is what is happening. We need the local government to do the one thing it is good at doing, which is enabling transportation for private industry. Private industry can do the rest. That includes IP transit in such a way that tier 1 ISPs like Hurricane Electric would have a very low barrier to becoming CLECs. If each subscriber pays a fee dedicated to repaying the municipal bonds over a 30 year period, this would pay for itself.
If people operating it mess up, they can be replaced. The CLECs are interchangeable from the customer's standpoint. The contractors running the infrastructure are interchangeable from the community advisory board's standpoint. The members of the community advisory board overseeing are replaceable from the local politicians' standpoint. The local politicians are replaceable by the public. It is very different than what we have now where if people are unhappy, they cannot replace the incumbents and have little ability to voice grievances. This is the sort of system that I want in my community. I am abroad right now, but when I get back to the US, I intend to start gathering people to discuss how this could become a reality in my area.
This seems like a page out of Verizon's FIOS rollout.
Is Google working on their own cellular network (non-MVNO)?
Is this due to the FCC reclassification of internet as a common carrier?
There's tons of red tape laying actual fiber, and that probably makes it harder to provide high quality internet to as many customers as they'd like to.
I wondered a little bit about this, myself, when Fiber was launched. They have a lot more motivation without network neutrality as a matter of regulation because it'd open up the ability of ISPs to penalize their products[0].
I'm generally of the opinion that government over-regulates, but I was in support of the whole "Network Neutrality" situation because broadband services availability for many/most in the US is limited to one provider and that one company is also usually either AT&T or Comcast, known more for how much they suck than for the services they provide. It's not too hard to believe that if common carrier status were removed, AT&T or Comcast would lower their caps and start offering services that are exempt from those caps (especially Comcast - suddenly Hulu or anything NBCUniversal is all-you-can-consume, but Netflix/Amazon Video/YouTube are not).
In a world like that, Google does have more motivation to roll out an ISP that does the opposite with their own services (or more likely just doesn't discriminate with anyone's traffic). Fiber resulted in a sudden expansion by many other ISPs to service with higher performance (and in many areas that are not even on the future Fiber cities list), so they've kind of accomplished the goal that has the greatest benefit to them -- more eyes on their products at a speed that makes them more useful.
At the end of the day, though, I'm not so sure that the FCC reclassification is much more than a tiny bullet point in favor of not spending the money required to do a fiber roll out. They are certainly aware that Republicans are itching to dismantle this reclassification and their nominee has promised to do so IIRC. And though the Democrat's nominee has indicated that she'll keep that reclassification, I'm not willing to take her at her word on that. If that were their main reason for allowing fiber to "transition" to whatever new option they're looking at that (hopefully) costs a lot less to roll out but still doesn't exist in the places they want to roll out to, I'd be pretty surprised.
[0] I'm not advocating that network neutrality be dismantled to give Google more motivation.
The market changed. When they launched Fiber, they're announcement was reminiscent of GMail when it launched. Back then, getting a 15-30MB free web mailbox was normal and Google announced a start at 2GB. Memory may not serve me perfectly, but I believe when they launched Fiber, there wasn't a single ISP offering residential service at 1Gbps and very few at even 100Mbps. I live in a city that is neither Fiber available or even on the list of future Fiber cities, but I can get multi-gig service for the price that I think the 100Mbps service was offered when Fiber launched. Most of this happened because of Google Fiber -- these companies were not terribly interested in increasing their capacity and service before, but knowing that a huge company like Google, who realistically had the funds to do a roll out, was potentially going to invade their monopoly territories was enough to get the market to move. This also, unfortunately, reduced the need for them to do it. Market-wise, they'd have to fight harder for customers since their service may not be so much faster/better/cheaper to get people to endure the hassle of switching.
The reality of what the market is was discovered. They had hoped they'd be able to do the roll out cheaper, with the involvement of local regulatory bodies itching to have their cities added to the program and paving over regulations that historically made doing a roll out like this very expensive, time consuming and difficult. The incumbents, who already had networks and had to deal with and work through those same regulations cried foul, started suing and made this all more costly and difficult. Back to point #1, with other ISPs offering service at a similar speed and at a far reduced price from when Fiber launched, this took some of the motivation to pave over those regulations away from the regulatory bodies. And this is all without the reality that many of those elected officials who make the laws that caused these problems have their re-election paid for by the AT&Ts, Comcasts and Verizons to a far greater extent than they do Google, so they're even less motivated to help them out.
Google Fiber was never offered in my area nor was it even hinted at being a future Fiber city, but Comcast currently offers multi-gig service. I'm not sure about AT&T because my past experience with them has had me swear them off. They could offer next-to-free service and I'd turn it down, so I don't pay attention to their offerings in my area, but I am able to get top-tier U-Verse TV/Internet in my home so I'd imagine gig will be around the corner at some point. Google Fiber wouldn't cause this expansion over here, though it may have been responsible for the initial expansion (or even the idea of delivering speeds like that to consumers). The "cat is out of the bag" so to say. The (limited) competition exists and isn't going to go away with Fiber out of the picture. I think Google saw this and realized it was a somewhat safe time to shed the expense/headaches they're having getting Fiber rolled out nationwide.
And then there's the start-up factor. In the City of Detroit, I'm aware of one small company that's offering (building-to-building) gigabit service on par with Google Fiber. These micro-ISPs probably won't get a footprint the size of Fiber, but if enough of them pop up, the combined numbers might reach that point, further forcing the incumbent's hands. It's not a terrible business to get into the way some of these start-ups are funding their efforts. The fact stands that practically nobody who has worked with the customer service arms of their "big company" ISPs anything positive to say about them. I pay 2.5 times the price of residential broadband for the same speed to get better customer service out of Comcast[0], and I wouldn't dream of leaving Comcast Business for AT&T Business or Comcast or AT&T consumer. I work at home, I need reliable service without caps and nonsense, and I need to know I can get a service call handled quickly when problems arise. If a start-up came to my area offering faster speeds at the same or better price, despite my relative happiness with Comcast, I'd switch just because I know at some point they're going to discover the expense they're paying for Comcast Business's service isn't necessary because "We're a utility company. We don't have to care."
[0] The service paid for itself a while back when I took the bait for U-Verse TV service (offered at a huge discount for 6-months and no cancellation penalty -- yes, I cancelled), and the contractor from AT&T -- who's eyes were bloodshot and speech was slurred -- came to bury my U-Verse wire and managed to cleanly slice my Comcast Business Internet cable. I called at 5:00 PM and they had a guy out at 6:30 PM same day who ran a completely new cable, hooked it all back up, and did so apologising for the service disruption that was their competitor's inept contractor's fault. He was done by 7:00 PM and despite this not being Comcast's fault, I was not charged for the service call (which I would have been fine with paying for). I have not had a single outage lasting more than 15 minutes in three years (which was one time, though, luck may be a factor here), and their Business help line gets me to a proper English speaking representative who doesn't just recite "did you turn it on and then off again" from a script. It's actually a bit distressing knowing that this same company, which deserves its terrible service reputation on the residential side is perfectly capable of providing service bordering on fantastic, but just doesn't (unless you opt into a substantially higher bill).
Perhaps Sonic, which provides gigabit Internet service to parts of San Francisco at a lower price than Google [1], will take over Google's operation there.
They walked around and put up door tags -- really really big ones saying, "Google Fiber is coming!" and immediately after that the 0 crime neighborhood I live in had a slew of break ins. Anyone who didn't remove this massive door tag was an easy target, the crooks knew who was home and who wasn't.
Then like a week later... they put the exact same door tag up on all the doors. And we all laughed... but we were like, "WTF, Google..." Then the next day they put the exact same door tag up again... even doubling it up on homes that already had a door tag. They door tags were just promos to sign up; they didn't tell us to mark our sprinkler systems, or who to call in case the construction crew accidentally cut our water lines...
The actual cable laying came about a month later... and it's been going on for 7 weeks at this point. Some days the guys work, most they don't. Doesn't appear to be any pattern to it. There are a bunch of expensive drilling and trenching machines parked at the end of my cul-de-sac and along the street in the spots where residents used to park. 7 weeks and counting...
In all likelihood, if they do completely abandon Fiber, rather than finding another way to provide the service that doesn't require digging, they'll sell it off to another ISP (I think TFA mentioned CenturyLink). Their DVR was (is?) based on SageTV's product, which I ran at home and found to be excellent (the extent to which it differs from their original product may change my mind on that assertion, though).
[0] I had a problem with my DSL service at my family's home up north that required sending out a tech on 13 different occasions, which required me to drive two hours up north to meet him. I went through four different DSL modems (none of which were broken, but they were basically throwing darts at a wall with a blindfold on). They'd show up, find nothing wrong (on one occasion they offered to replace my interior wiring and decided against it when they discovered I ripped it all out and replaced it with one proper cable run using better cable than they'd install ... and the readings from their test equipment indicated the wire was very clean). They never actually fixed the problem as a result of a service call, it just went away at some point last year.
There's a tiny ISP (US Internet) in Minneapolis that's already wired half of the city with fiber with some loans as capital, they're not a public company and they don't have billions in CoH and they still figured it out. They've already started offering 10Gbps to home users. Yes, ten gigabits, that's not a typo. And they're profitable.
Laying fiber is impossible for a megacorp with billions of CoH and access to the overflowing "talent" of Silicon Valley like Google perhaps, but not for a small business like US Internet. Let's hope Portland gets a US Internet of it's own. We're all better off if the future of the web is built by smaller decentralized companies anyways.
That's not entirely correct they have about a quarter of the city wired with plans to finish in 6 or 7 years[1]. The linked image is pretty small but it's all I can find. Note the linked map only shows 40% or so of Minneapolis. Also they have been providing Business services like dark fiber for the last 20 years, so it's not like they are completely dependent on home fiber income or new to the business.
I just recently got US Internet fiber, we have the 100 Mbps plan for $39.95 a month and it's great! I noticed that when I ping 8.8.8.8 latency went down from 33ms to 22ms. Also we have more bandwidth and cheaper internet than when we had Comcast. Of course the best part of US Internet is not having to deal with Comcast anymore!
Finally US Internet forced Century Link and Comcast to launch their own fiber services[2].
[1] https://fiber.usinternet.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Scre...
[2] http://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/comcast-fires-back-at-c...
- Copper telco lines
- Coax cable lines
- Google fiber
There's zero reason for anything other than fiber in an area being updated to it. States/municipalities should solicit bids for a company that wants to maintain the fiber infrastructure, and other companies wishing to provide phone/tv/internet over the fiber can all compete on their service over the one fiber line.
We only have one telco and one cable line because states blessed monopolies for this, they should do the same for fiber, and open access to it for competition from service/content providers. It'll never happen, but I can dream...
Hasn't Google said before that one of their reasons for starting Google Fiber was to push other companies to expand high-speed Internet access in the US? Has this happened or has Google Fiber just run out of steam? I know Sonic is rolling out fiber in the Bay Area. I'm sure Google Fiber has put some pressure on them to up their game.
1) Google Fiber is dead. Long Live Google ISP.
Google cannot afford to lay fiber in the ground because it's a long game and Google doesn't really want to play the long game (they just want to put pressure on competitors so they can move more bits along the wires, generating more searches and more streams with which to shove ads in your face). Fiber never was the most efficient way to do this, but there's something sexy about "Google Fiber" as opposed to "Google Point to Point Radio Towers". The reality is that wireless delivery of bits is way cheaper than fiber because you don't have to tear the ground up (over the last mile obviously since the arteries must be fiber links).
Clarification: "long" refers to 30-year payback periods for physical asset investment. There are a lot of things with higher returns on that timeline than fiber that google can invest in. I don't actually think it's profitable for anyone to build unsubsidized networks. This is why networks should be public and operators should be private, but that's a topic for another day!
2) Fiber is cheap, construction is expensive.
When I helped Comcast build out the fiber network in SF, what struck me was the relative cheapness of the assets we were putting in the ground compared to the cost of tearing up the street. The conduit and the glass inside the conduit cost almost nothing, but tearing up the street in SF is $300/sq ft. Crossing cable car tracks was like $50,000. Then there's the actual cost of construction: people. Getting contractors to arrive on time, finish on time, and avoid overtime is fraught with peril. It's actually really hard to move physical atoms around in a manner similar to programmatic systems, and so many models that have real world elements stumble against the harshness of actuality. I suspect Google's cost modeling for building a fiber network was optimistic.
3) Wireless is fast, but does it scale to city size?
It's not hard or particularly expensive to deliver gigabit over wireless. You basically need a tall building to rain down radio waves onto the masses. What I wonder about, given that we have no cities running on majority wireless point to points, is what happens when you hit scale? That is to say, point to points have a limited wireless footprint (because using beamforming we don't need to splay the signal everywhere, we just send it in one direction), but one can easily imagine a saturated wireless environment as generating a significant amount of noise. Wireless networks are easy when there's only a few objects on the network but get significantly harder as the physical area reaches device saturation. That is to say, WebPass might be super easy to operate when only a handful of buildings are on WebPass, but it might be much harder if a whole section of the city is online.
4) Google bought WebPass a while back.
The writing has been on the wall for a while that the fiber game was killing uncle Google. I can only hope that they don't bow out completely. I think that wireless makes Google significantly less of an existential threat to their carrier partners as well.
Overall, I remain cautiously optimistic about Google's future as an ISP.
On a final note: Google Fi is not an answer to Google fiber disappearing. The two are tangential, disjointed offerings that cannot, for a bunch of reasons, compete with one another (most notably the wireless data caps).
There are pieces of conduit that we run fiber through into your building. Inside your building there's a fiber termination point that hands off to ethernet. On the other end is a repeater/node that boosts the signal from the other termination point back in the DC.
Check out this horizontal drill: http://www.ballantineinc.com/sites/default/files/img/Copy%20...
See this diagram for how they're used: http://www.ajvac.ca/images/directional%20drill%20diag2.jpg
Even in the area I live in, ripping up the streets is how it's done. I've only seen horizontal boring machines deployed a few times around here. Maybe they're used a lot and I don't notice them because I don't have to drive around them, but I do keep a eye open for them in the wild. I considered renting or buying one for a project and was impressed how cheap they are, but the benefit of burying things versus the price - no contest.
What I learned, though, is there are eBay-like markets for TBMs and it seems most people buy one with so many hours on it, use it for a project, and sell it +so many hours. I didn't find the thriving rental market I expected.
Of course one of the early slowdowns was AT&T throwing a fit about google sharing poles owned by AT&T.
2) many cities do not have above-ground power and fewer still have above-ground telco without power. I have not researched this extensively so I am not sure if google picked places with poles specifically, but that would be a smart move. That being said, imagining att would let them use the poles was not really reasonable.
As long as there is line of sight, the tower has fiber, the hardware upgraded as the network grows and beamforming technology continues to improve it shouldn't be an issue.
Things break in exciting ways at scale :).
Give it 5 years before the infrastructure and service is sold to ATT/Time Warner/Spectrum/WTF
However, it may also be that Google is going to be more careful where it spends its money. Hoarding cash may be protection against interesting changes in the economy.
If Google wanted to create a market they shouldn't have priced it so low. Even if you could do nationwide gigabit for 70 bucks, there wouldnt be any profit.
Isps aren't going to do a massive capital expenditure to make the same money.
My analysis: They're realizing big cities are not profitable and installation costs a ton of $. My guess is they'll try to go for smaller towns with better utility pole infrastructure.
All the sheep on Reddit who got behind FCC mandated "net neutrality" are directly responsible for this. Urbanites get a warped view of this country and vastly underestimate the amount of places where satellite internet is their only option. Yet they have the nerve to bitch and moan about what a tragedy it is that they can't stream 4k video without buffering. The government must fix this! To hell with the rural schoolchildren and their lack of access to wikipedia, I want to watch high-def cartoons!
There was so much innovation taking place behind the scenes to provide a decent web-browsing experience via satellite internet and WISPs. And it's all for naught.
I'm still excited for this next year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViaSat-2
> "net neutrality" and the implicit claim behind it, which is that all ISPs are just dumb pipes that are moving bits, and that consumers are agnostic about who does it
This is consistent with wanting a dumb ISP that moves more bits for less money and with fewer outages. Nobody wants Goog Fibre because it comes with #"google prime video library" or whatever tie-in. They want it because it moves more bits more reliably as a big dumb pipe ought to.
* 1TB of Google drive
* A Google-made 802.11AC WAP that doesn't suck.
* Cable box has built-in chromecast and is built on top of SageTV.
* Bill management through a Google website.
Maybe I'm just a pessimist but I don't believe that Google put ~$100MM into Fiber simply because they wanted to be a dumb pipe and put pressure on other telecoms to compete. How do you rationalize that to shareholders?
Maybe they have some people in the public convinced that they entered this market out of the goodness of their heart. But it's pretty clear to me from Fiber and from Project Fi and OnHub and NEST that they believed that they could succeed as an ISP because of the frameworks they would put around their internet services, not simply by outperforming in performance.