Eight Years On, Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption Promised

Proof: finance industry's wide use of microwave towers.

https://meanderful.blogspot.com/2017/05/lines-radios-and-cab...

There was another set of articles describing microwave towers in Europe, quite fascinating.

Not sure if this was the one: https://sniperinmahwah.wordpress.com/2014/09/22/hft-in-my-ba...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlink_(satellite_constellat...

Basically, authoritarianism rears its ugly head in the US once again, across corporate, national, state, and local levels. The same general kind of gaming of the system which resulted in interstates dividing white from non-white neighborhoods is now maintaining the media status quo. On one side, it's the corporatism and Crony Capitalism the left traditionally complains about, now wielded by the Far Left as a non-governmental form of censorship. On the other side, it's legal and regulatory blocking of progress to maintain the status quo for old media and to use as leverage against the tech giants.

This is potentially deadly for US society. Until we once again have a healthy 5th estate which can reach the whole of society, the Fox-Newsification and the Gawker-ization of our news media is basically destroying what little actual discourse we have left.

I won't comment on any possible changes in the last couple years or why they may have happened, except to say that to the best of my knowledge, at no point was the sentiment, "We've shifted the industry enough that we can stop pretending to want to succeed."

Google makes no money if they can't show ads to people, and at the time Comcast and friends controlled Google's access to a majority of US audiences that Google's customers (advertisers) wanted their ads in front of. Advertising in the US was more than half of Google's revenue then. Comcast had the only network nationally capable of reliably delivering video and video ads, which was prioritized for growth within Google around then.

I think there was a real fear within Google about the leverage Comcast and other national ISP's had over them. TLS wasn't common, and advertisers weren't nearly as interested in mobile audiences in 2010: wireless data use was a fraction of what it is now. A well-capitalized Comcast without the regulatory restrictions of AT&T or Verizon could create existential trouble for Google if they really wanted to. Google Fiber could have been Google's way of showing they'd be willing to play hardball if it came to that. Any positive PR that came from it was a great bonus, but they almost certainly never made money from Google Fiber.

I think it is though, but probably not in the automotive industry; ATM it still has a lead, just like Apple had for a while on the smartphone market, but I think it'll be passed left and right by the competition.

But by then, Tesla won't be (primarily) a car company anymore, but a battery company, a solar power company (= energy company), and a company with the largest recharge station network in the country. Selling energy and charge stations will be the next generation's oil industry, and Tesla's taking charge there.

I’ve been a happy Verizon FIOS customer for 12 years. For $140 per month I have TV with every pay channel, landline phone and gigabit Internet. The gigabit is relatively recent but I get full gigabit speeds for up and down and it is amazing. I think you’re right that I don’t believe Verizon would’ve offered this at this price without the threat of Google and other competitors.

What did Musk tell investors?

I wonder if a lot of that ended up being used for GCP datacenter connections?

This is just categorically false. Where I live our state owned telco is horrible and you have to jump through hoops to cancel your account with them. People have to keep paying them for literally months (sometimes more than 6) after they cancel their service with them to cancel as they just do not process cancellations and then sue you if you do not pay up.

Our fiber revolution was driven not by the state, but by private profit-focused corporations. In fact the state telco now also has fiber - but it costs about twice the price and then you still have to deal with a provider which is sub standard and makes it near impossible for you to cancel their service. I pay about $10 USD more a month for 100mbit/100mbit up/down FTTH than I payed for 4mbit/512k ADSL up/down from state telco.

With just about every other "utility" or "public service" the story is the same here. Police is shit so I have to pay for security if you don't want to get armed robbed raped or murdered, schools are shit so you have to pay for private schools if you want your child to be able to read and write. Electricity supply is shit - every year we have load shedding and prices keep going up while govt is lining their pockets and then looking for ways to further fuck rate payers while getting kickbacks from Russia. And now because the govt has made everything worse for years there is talk about nationalizing industries to fuel populism amongst the almost 30% (official) unemployed and many poor people as our economy has been shrinking for years (and of course this is capitalism's fault now - because private industry makes govt look bad in comparison).

It is theoretically possible to have decent services where there is no competition and govt monopoly - but it is not the norm and I would say in most cases it does not work out this way.

Does that explain why France is so dramatically far behind the US on Internet speeds, and has been for the last 20 years? Ideally the US goes out of its way to not follow France's path on telecom.

As of Q1 2017:

US average speeds: 18.7 mbps

France average speeds: 10.8 mbps

To put France's figure into perspective, they rank toward the bottom in Europe, behind Russia, Hungary, Lithuania and Poland. They're #27 out of 31 nations ranked in Europe.

France also ranks near the bottom in Europe in % above 10 mbps, at just 31%. The US is at 67%.

And again France ranks near the bottom in Europe in % above 15 mbps, at just 18%. The US is at 48%.

The US is #10 globally when it comes to % over 25 mbps, with 21%. That category saw a one year increase of 65%..

The US ranks in the top 15 globally for highest percentage at 10 mbps, 15 mbps and 25 mbps.

France should be copying the US based on their persistently atrocious broadband figures. And that's with the US approach being subpar.

https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t...

And keep in mind that in France currently "fiber" means "at least FFTN", much of rural france won't see FTTH for a long time.

Thanks French government, you suck. I pay confiscatory taxes — including incredibly high taxes on my internet and phone service and what do I get for it? Abysmal speeds. Given the geographic size of France — it should be covered in fiber already, but my area is projected at 3 years out.

They won’t have 100% fiber by 2022. It’s impossible given the French propensity to make the simple complex, and the inexpensive, expensive. If Orange is a representation of the power of French innovation, then I fear for the future. That’s a company that has separate sign in systems based on the type of account you have and a system that takes 2 weeks to update when payments are made by credit card. Orange represents the single worst experience I have ever had as a customer — that includes my time living in the US and dealing with companies such as Time Warner. The French electric service, EDF, is a close second.

You want to talk about government and successful internet infrastructure initiatives — have a look at South Korea.

But France? Innovative? It’s all for show. It still is a pain in the ass to accomplish anything in that country. Europe uses IBANs almost universally, for example, yet French utilities still insist on the RIB. The insurance company I have can’t do prelevements with my German IBAN. It’s ridiculous.

Just because a government spends money on something doesn’t mean that government is any good at what they’re spending money on.

https://map.geo.admin.ch/?layers=ch.bakom.anschlussart-glasf...

Thanks to this map it was easy to select the right place to move to, and we are currently in the process of moving... to an home equipped with FFTH!

There's just no way you can draw a conclusion like this. I would be equally right in say that public corporations never have an incentive to improve services due to lack of a market or competition (see mass transit).

The rollout of a nationalised national broadband/fibre network in Australia has been an interesting one for a number of reasons. We've actually seen private companies roll out their own networks to compete with both the public provider AND other private companies.

Ultimately, the quality of these services is going to depend on a whole lot more than "public vs private"

Before he disrupted those two markets, it was just as bad as the US. Remember the "Forfait RSA" the government crowed about having negotiated for the poorest citizens? 40mn and 40SMS for 10 euros per month...

I think it genuinely was received as the Cool New Thing for a while. Then the cities applied to be Google fiber cities. Then fiber rolled out to some cities. At some point competitors responded by upgrading their service. And then with some retrospection, we collectively looked back at that series of events and said "ah, this must have been Google's plan all along."

I honestly don't doubt that Google's initial plan was insanely ambitious. And that what transpired, while falling far short of the original vision, nevertheless did advance their interests. But my recollection of the events as they unfolded in real time wasn't that this was their plan from the start, or that people felt that way, until a few news cycles passed and it was clear that it spurred other internet providers to action.

But I do agree with you that it definitely did become the prevailing wisdom, eventually.

People at work were all excited when the announcement for our major metropolitan area was announced until the areas were given and it was like, what is the point if your in such limited areas?

I know more outside of my metro Atlanta area with fiber than within. that to me is just backwards but I will take it. I like my hick neighborhood and with fiber I can work from home a lot more

When Comcast offered 1000Mbps* service for $70/mo with a three year contract, I gave up. Interestingly, this offer only seems to have been available in likely GF service areas and was a pretty transparent attempt to tie up potential GF customers with a nice early termination fee.

* download. Upload is 40Mbps.

Even my GPRS connection is faster than 400 millibits per second.

If you use the interference patterns to transmit data instead of the signals directly, and you have enough antennas, you have essentially unlimited wireless bandwidth, at least at relatively short range (ie. cells). Granted, doing this for more than 4 or so antennas is currently beyond the capabilities of deployed equipment, but we'll get there.

I don't understand why people keep saying that we won't be able to satisfy bandwidth demand on wireless. We can, and it may be a lot cheaper (esp. outside of the cities).

Wireless multicast means that the superbowl will be sent out once to many subscribers.

I don't think most people care when their typical WiFi setup will only get them in the 100-150 real-world range.

As much as I'd love to sign up for Spectrum's 940 downloads, I can't even hit the 200 I'm limited to with any of my internet devices.

Downloading of small files will change from being a fraction of a second to nigh-imperceptible, and as long as the remote side supports it, this will apply to all images on a website at once. And no longer will downloading a game on steam mess with your youtube/netflix/whatever.

Plus very few servers seem to be able to reliably send at fast speeds, and TCP slow start means small files (<100MB) see 0 benefit at all.

The biggest problem I have is that a lot of portable storage I have (SD cards + USB hard drives) is way slower than my internet. I have one SD card which struggles at random file writes at more than 50mbit/sec.

Without Google trying to enter the scene, most internet consumers would not have realized they could get better. Also, these ISPs are overcharging for their service. Google's pricing allowed people to peer into the fact that they were being cheated. I'm not a Google lackey by any means, but they did a huge service to internet consumers, who are now much more aware of the quality of service they should be getting from ISPs like Comcast and AT&T.

What is the best use case for fiber? I feel like I'm missing it.

We don't see the broad adoption of tech that can utilize 1gbps because too few people have it. If everyone had 1gbps Netflix could increase the bandwidth of their streaming, everyone could do live backups of every file they have in realtime anywhere, hell there are more esoteric use cases like WLAN terminals with centralized compute resources. You could run a normal OS perfectly fine over a gbps connection from anywhere that can maintain that link at low latency. You could use remote GPUs and CPUs to accelerate compute on demand.

None of that is possible as long as most Internet users are stuck on two magnitudes less bandwidth. How incredibly shortsighted to think dramatic improvements to performance in any metric are pointless just because we haven't seen the fruits of such improvements already happen yet.

An ideal solution would be nationalization of the infrastructure, but that's never happening in the US. A possible solution is for the US government to scare the telecom monopolies with antitrust lawsuits so much that they come up with a solution themselves (which might be simply splitting the monopoly like you suggested).

BTW, is your name an ss13 reference?

If there's a single company with a forever long track record of half-assing products and never finishing them, only to cancel them later with disregard to current customers, that's Google.

They make so much money that nothing really matters for them.

In Norway the fastest growing deployments of fiber is done by regional power companies in cooperation with a services provider (data, VOIP, IPTV etc). This because the power companies already have poles and pipes that they can run the fiber along.

Bullshit.