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Comment by zzz157 | Hacker News Reader

Google seems to halfass a lot of their products. I really had expected it would at least be live in the Bay Area right now. It's not like Google doesn't have the money.

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My understanding is that homeowners in the bay area have some next level NIMBY ism that even Google can't overcome. Those fiber huts have to go somewhere...

Well, when you spend several million dollars to buy a house I understand you're likely to be afraid of anything that threaten your investment and turning NIMBY.

With the state of the Australian housing market, having Fiber-optic internet would likely add to the property value

Maybe this is an overreaction to being stuck with Australian internet for the past decade, but if anyone in my neighbourhood was to resist the installation of fibre it'd be fucking on for young and old.

I have my pitchfork ready, Jono.

Actually we finally got NBN on my street and I am syncing at 75mbit (paying for 100) and frankly I am over the moon. The fastest I have had previous, after living all over AU, was 14mbit down, and I was the envy of my friends for that roaring waterfall of data.

Everyone else I know is on around 8mbit even in 2018.

Hoping against hope that we get a similar result when NBN rolls around to my neighbourhood. It would be absolutely awful for them to "upgrade" our system, after waiting so long for this, to the exact same or worse speeds as the ADSL we've been stuck with all this time.

That sounds like a dream. I'm sharing a 6/1 connection with 3 housemates and 2 partners. I honestly feel like I'm back in the days of dial-up.

And yet companies like AT&T and Comcast have been able to improve their infrastructure and launch fiber in more and more areas in the Bay Area (it's more than just San Francisco, you know!)

The cause is not NIMBYism, or any other negative traits you might try to tag on to people from the Bay, but rather, the existing telecom companies and their attempts to protect their pseudo-monopoly.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/03/10/google-fights-att-com...

To be fair, AT&T and Comcast have existing infrastructure (mostly poles) they can leverage.

It was more PR that delivery. In my area AT&T brought fiber and we were not in an area important enough for Google. Bemoan the big cable and phone companies all we want but they deliver a lot more and quietly. For me any time I read about one of the internet big tech companies rolling out service traditionally performed by older companies as nothing more than a PR grab.

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

I think Google has too.much money. They can try a lot of stuff but there isn't much pressure to succeed.

Or moreover it shows that money isn't necessarily the limiting factor in success that many perceive it to be.

That's what I am thinking when people talk about tax cuts. Apple or Google don't need more money. They already have more than they can invest productively.

That's an explanation -- another is that Apple and Google believe that future uses of the resources could yield greater aggregate return (or serve as a bulwark against a downturn).

"Cash is a call option with no expiration date" https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042613/cash-...

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