Google Fiber Is High-Speed Internet’s Most Successful Failure
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In the areas where it was deployed, Google Fiber was wildly successful. And yet, Google threw in the towel. Why?
It _isn’t_ because Google Fiber is was unprofitable. To the contrary, it was profitable _despite_ driving broadband prices way down in its service areas.
It’s because the incumbent ISPs simply have too much power. That power comes in many forms:
1. Excessive industry lobbying power;
2. Anti-competitive exclusivity agreements;
3. The ability to stall rollouts indefinitely in the absence of “one touch make ready” policies;
4. Required cooperation with and permission from governments who feel less pressured to move quickly once their residents have at least one incumbent provider;
If the incumbents are so well protected that one of the most powerful corporations in America found the barriers to entry too burdensome, then how can anyone argue that there is any semblance of a “free market”? What hope is there for startup ISPs?
The incumbents have received hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, so they already had a government-assisted head start. And, despite prices being so inflated that they halved overnight wherever Google Fiber rolled out, they are still able to effectively stave off meaningful competition.
Would that be possible in a healthy, competitive marketplace? No. So we need to stop treating it like one, when it clearly isn’t.
This is basically normal and what you expect. People are just blind to the massive amount of regulation that struggles and often basically predetermines the market and when you try to explain how 3 different regulation combine to make the improvement impossible peoples eyes gloss over.
If the regulation is not "THIS GUY HAS A MONOPOLY" its very hard to get anybody exited or even talking about these regulations.
as i understand it, the core motivation for libertarianism is that power is real and impossible to "distribute" evenly. relatively more powerful people will always be able to divert state resources to serve their own ends. the only way to limit this effect is to limit the power of the state itself.
so the argument is not so much that free markets are beautiful, perfect things; rather, the free market is usually preferable to the regulated markets that powerful actors will allow to occur.
Monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels can (and would) certainly occur even in the mythical Ancapistan, but accidental and deliberate abuses of state power make them both more common, more stable, and worse than they would be otherwise.
Walmart needs no help to kill off competition in a small town as a more local example.
This is also why a new competitor opening up seems to cause prices to decline significantly. Part of it is the competition, but part of it is that the same factors that allowed the competitor to justify opening a new store (e.g. a tax cut or population growth) also allow the existing store to reduce prices.
Retailing companies? Sure they can. If Walmart started selling products for $5 that retail for $1 elsewhere, anyone could sell the ten they already have in their kitchen to their neighbors for $4.50 each, then use the money they just made to drive to the next town and buy twice as many. Before they've even run out of vacation days at their real job they're doing half the business in the town and can afford to rent a storefront month to month and hire some college students to mind the store.
The second Walmart lowers their prices again, they sell their remaining inventory for the normal retail price instead of the inflated one and then shut down. Assuming they haven't built enough volume and loyalty in the local market by then to continue operating and keep half the town's business indefinitely.
Which is the real power of monopoly pricing, it's not obvious that spending 1.05$ is vastly worse than 1$ but it makes a huge difference to a companies bottom line.
The margins are only ~3% because the barrier to entry is low. Imagine what their margins would be if they had an actual monopoly on food.
> Which is the real power of monopoly pricing, it's not obvious that spending 1.05$ is vastly worse than 1$ but it makes a huge difference to a companies bottom line.
It's not obvious that spending $1.05 is vastly worse than $1 because it isn't. It's not even clear that the hypothetical five cents even exists -- if Walmart is charging $1.05 because their cost is $1, and they have no competitors because the next most efficient retailer has a cost of $1.07, Walmart is charging you less than the competitor(s) they put out of business, not more.
And that would still be true if they reduced their own cost to $.25 without lowering prices further, when no competitor could reduce costs in the same way, though that rarely actually happens. Squeezing 5% more out of a supplier is a lot more realistic than squeezing 75% more out of them.
2 years ago I had 300 Mbps cable service at home via Time Warner Cable, then they were bought by Spectrum. Now I have 150 Mbps service.
I still live in the same place and I'm still using the same cable modem (one I own, so as to avoid the ridiculous rental fees) I used back then, but 300 Mbps was simply killed as an option. I can't even pay more for it.
Google Fiber may have been a useful gambit to increase the pace of rollout of other telecom's high speed offerings, but I would bet good money that it will be a very short-term play with erosion of net neutrality and further consolidation of the telecom market quickly wiping out the benefits.
The upstream still has to be highly asymmetrical because they're allocating rf channels asymmetrically. The capacity of one segment of coax is still a great deal less than a GPON network, nevermind active Ethernet.
But leaving the facts aside, this is something you can logic through. Instead of speculating about what problems Google might have faced, look to its actual conduct to see what problems it tried to avoid. If "industry lobbying power" was the problem, you'd expect Google would try to deploy fiber somewhere it had the leg-up lobbying-wise, like Seattle or San Francisco or Mountain View. It never did that. Under your theory, you have to assume that Comcast (based in Philadelphia) has more lobbying muscle in Google's own back yard than Google.
What did Google do instead? It went to medium-sized cities in Red states with overhead utility lines. Atlanta, Austin, Provo, Kansas City, etc. Why? Because those cities waived regulatory requirements they applied to incumbents, including the crucial one of build-out requirements (the requirement to build out to the whole city). Google went places like Kansas City, which fast tracked permitting, gave free leases of public land for fiber huts, and waived the obligation to cover low income neighborhoods. Indeed, the willingness to waive build out requirements (which are routine in the industry), is one thing these disparate Fiber cities have in common.
All of this tells you that the basic problem with Fiber was profitability (not just making a profit, but enough profit compared to what else Google could be doing with that money). Build-out requirements kill profitability, because you’re forced to spend a lot of money building to neighborhoods where you can expect few customers. (The major cost of a fiber build is wiring the neighborhood, not hooking up each house.) That’s why a cornerstone of Fiber was the idea of “fiberhoods”—neighborhoods with demonstrated demand for fiber. (Of course, remember, the initial fiberhood selection exluded most low income neighborhoods in KC, as you’d expect. Google was forced to back peddle and add a bunch of low income neighborhoods in. But that misstep tells you a lot about the money math that was driving Fiber.)
I’m not sure we’re talking about the same kinds of agreements; I’m not referring to agreements between providers and municipalities, but between providers and developers, large residential management companies, and HOA-type entities. I do not know whether those are illegal, but in my experience they are prevalent enough that it doesn’t seem to matter. They still get signed, and presumably at least one party believes such covenants are enforceable (I have no idea whether they are or not).
> If "industry lobbying power" was the problem, you'd expect Google would try to deploy fiber somewhere it had the leg-up lobbying-wise, like Seattle or San Francisco. It never did that. Under your theory, you have to assume that Comcast (based in Philadelphia) has more lobbying muscle in Google's own back yard than Google.
I would expect cities where incumbent ISPs’ political influence is weakest to already be benefiting from increased competition, and indeed, that seems to be the case.
I wouldn’t expect Google to prioritize cities that are already well served by multiple providers.
You can also add a layer of conjecture, that there are cities that have more competition because lobbying power is weaker. What makes you think Kansas City or Provo or Austin or Atlanta fit into this category more so than Mountain View? And it’s not like most of Silicon Valley is “already well served by multiple providers”—why not build there? I think it’s obvious that the answer to that is not “lobbying” but “blue state cities make it an expensive pain in the ass to build anything including fiber.”
Are they? I lived in a large single-family home neighborhood in Florida for several years where the HOA has an exclusivity agreement with one of the big cable companies. Why wouldn't those be an issue as well?
My sister used to live in a HOA neighborhood and has some stories to tell about power grabs, corruption and lies almost on a Game of Thrones level involving the neighbors vying for control of their own little fiefdom.
Please share.
Yes. But ultimately isn't it the number of ppl being served, not the building count, that matters more?
Or have I somewhat forgotten what the OP + resulting thread was trying to unpack? Sorry?
In other words, wealthy people aren't really relevant. Density of middle class and upper middle class is what makes these build-outs successful.
Cynicism: the wheels require a lot more grease in Chicago than they do in Nashville.
Just a note to say that this is an awkward construction. The OMB defines Metropolitan Statistical Areas and Combined Statistical Areas, but nothing called Combined MSA, which seems to be a conflation of the two.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gvyyym/hundreds-o...
I've never had the option of more than cable from one company or DSL from another.
But notably, Provo is very red. They also had an existing fiber network infrastructure that they basically gave to Google in exchange for the promise of offering a free service tier to residents.
Not surprisingly, my 2 choices for fast Internet are the phone company and the cable company.
At one point the FCC was going to issue a rule opening these wires up. My building would be wired with a half-dozen competing ISPs about 5 seconds after that rule was issued.
What happens when xyz start up wants to dig up a whole neighborhood to put their data cables in. Then a month later a new startup that promises to give you a better experience comes in and rips up the road. What happens when xyz start up fails and the half finished project just sits there? Do the tax payers pay to fix it?
The level of complication for making the initial drop to the building will vary depending on the area and how wiring is done in general there, areas where there are pole hung wires making the drops are pretty quick to add areas where the wires are underground are typically a little more complicated.
I'm having an issue with second hand smoke from an apartment getting into my unit and I have to put up with this disgusting problem since moving involves other compromises I'm not willing to make at the moment.
Uh, I don't think that a random comment on HN (without credible sources) counts as being credible. Care to try again?
As you know, there's a big difference between "this is illegal" and "this doesn't happen, because the laws prohibiting it are enforced effectively". Unfortunately, exclusivity agreements do not belong to the latter category. The New York Times, for example, has provided fairly extensive coverage over the last five years of how exclusivity agreements (despite being illegal in New York) have eliminated the possibility of choice in broadband ISPs for many New Yorkers, despite the fact that they may live in buildings that are otherwise already wired for alternative ISPs.
Yes, that's the biggest problem and I'm tired of repeating it. If Google can't do it, then what hope do the other minnows and plebeians have? Its high time that the average lazy American should wake up and revolt against the establishment for this injustice now.
People need to 1) have a general interest in many areas and 2) Hold their politicions accountable.
Currently it almost feels as though corruption is becoming acceptable. I keep seeing people say:
"they're all corrupt so its political to arrest them for the less serious things."
This seems a sign of the system breaking.
Also without trying to kick of tribalism here, I think wealth inequality drives this corrupt and short term behaviour somewhat. People start relaxing ethics as their focus turns to getting ahead. I feel if everyone is more balanced economically other things become more important for your feelings of self importance such as being judged for the person you are rather than your net worth.
Is this why? I am not aware of any disclosed reasons. I was under the impression that they ended their experiment and realized being an ISP wasn't in line with their business model, profits weren't large enough, and the execs just didn't want to be in that market. Sure incumbency and lobbying happened (and won't change with net neutrality and happens in any entrenched market they'd enter), but is that why Google stopped rollouts? Do you have evidence of this? And if not, why is your speculation more accurate than mine? Also, if this is not for sure why they stopped, do you believe other efforts to promote net neutrality are harmed by frequently using examples like this that may be inaccurate to assist?
In a country with very few companies that are bigger than 1% of what Google or AOL or AT&T are.
In a country where an entrepreneur doesn't even dream of having access to the big investor money needed to start an optical fiber ISP.
What you're paying in US is 10x-100x more expensive than that. One can only imagine the margins your ISPs make and the profit opportunities other entrepreneurs have in this space.
If it's not about the incumbent's overwhelming power, what can it be? Lack of entrepreneurial spirit in US? Lack of technological knowledge?(you invented this whole internet thing ffs) Lack of desire for easy profits?
I doubt.
1GB is fairly new in Romania, but already by 2007 fiber had been rolled out in the major cities (wise use of EU funds?) and at least 300Mbps or 500Mbps connections for 10€/month have long been routine.
(Incidentally, even though gigabit is becoming common, not many people realize they have to upgrade their routers – wifi in cafes is almost never gigabit, even if the ISP’s link supports it, just because the cafe owners will simply grab a cheap router from the shop and that is unlikely to be gigabit.)
Even before wide availability of fiber, cable and DSL connections offered pretty high speeds for that medium. In Cluj your ISP would even give you the username and password for a private server where you could share films and music with other people in the same city, so of course download speeds would be extremely fast. Good times.
These kinds of different-environment correlation mistakes based on some misplaced common sense do not help. More specifically to the Google case, these assumption mistakes that are then used to buttress NN arguments reduce the strength of the argument, especially while there are many evidence based examples in favor of NN one could use instead.
You don’t have to imagine! It’s part of the audited financial reports: https://www.verizon.com/about/sites/default/files/2017Verizo.... Verizon’s wireline division (including fiber) had an operating profit margin of 1.2% last year (see page 24). Wall Street has consistently pressured the company to abandon its fiber network: http://stopthecap.com/2012/01/09/wall-street-encourages-veri...
> If it's not about the incumbent's overwhelming power, what can it be?
Building fiber is really expensive in developed countries. Look at it this way. According to Google, a round-trip ticket on the Bucharest Metro is about $1.25. On the DC Metro, it’s $4-12 depending on time of day/distance. ($5 each way during commuting hours from the suburbs is typical). The DC Metro must be hugely profitable, right? Well no, actually it loses a lot of money!
From my time making telecom comparables - you want to be America. American ARPU numbers aresignificantly higher that the world average. America had something like $40 in 2006, to $35 in 2016.
IN contrast, Germany has 14$ today, and Asia something around a $1 - $3.
https://www.strategyand.pwc.com/media/file/An-industry-at-ri...
Dont have access to any industry finance/research papers.
America telecom is moribund, To argue otherwise is to mislead. Google failed to change the market. Despite dumping huge amounts of money into it, something no other firm can afford to do.
Where it entered, incumbents magically were able to offer better services which they had avoided providing.
THis HBR report reads like MBA speak, more a lesson on spin than actual fact.
Remember when these firms hid zip code information in auctions so that they wouldnt cross bid?
I read the history of American telecom with bemusement, the lessons highlighting the necessity to build good regulatory frameworks so that the economy can work efficiently.
Finally - Building fibre is difficult, even in developing countries. The fact that you have regulation stopping people from tearing up the road, or just having wires crossing over houses willy nilly is the happy cost of being a civilized nation.
OP’s assertion was that because fiber service is much more expensive in the US than in Romania, American telecoms must be making huge profits on it. ARPU—which ignores costs—is useless for analyzing that assertion.
EBITDA margin is also useless for looking at telecom profitability because it’s exclusive of depreciation and interest. Telcos spent tens of billions of dollars on fiber that’s sitting in the ground depreciating. EBITDA ignores that. If anything, looking at EBITDA shows you how dismal the economics of wireline really are. People have this idea that wireline networks are free money after paying for the initial build. In reality, 2/3 of every dollar you pay in service charges goes to ongoing expenses, even before you start accounting for the cost of building the network in thr first place.
https://www.strategyand.pwc.com/media/file/An-industry-at-ri...
This is the first OK free report I found. Someone in finance or with access will have a wealth of better reports.
Google fiber is, in the end, compared to the same companies because they had to make the same capex. The subsidy will be accounted for in the financial calculus.
I don't want to argue whenever NN is good or not so much (I'm not sure myself), but my point is the effort seems massively misdirected. Everyone's raving about not policing traffic; states are passing regulations, but (across the ocean, I admit) I don't see anything happening so you guys can get closer to having lots of new ISPs and actual competition.
In fact when Google Fiber first launched they were decidedly not net-neutral; they banned server-hosting.
Google has long cultivated a substantial lobbying effort in Washington. In fact it outspent any other single private company in it's lobbying in 2017. [1]
>"2. Anti-competitive exclusivity agreements;"
There's no such thing at either the municipal level, state level or otherwise. Exclusivity agreements for carriers don't exist.
>"3. The ability to stall rollouts indefinitely in the absence of “one touch make ready” policies;"
Telephone poles which were an issue in the Austin rollout are not an issue in many(most?) US cities where there are no telephone poles and cable vaults and ducting are underground and not owned by the incumbents.
>"4. Required cooperation with and permission from governments who feel less pressured to move quickly once their residents have at least one incumbent provider;"
Is there any evidence of this? Politician love to take credit for innovations and improvements that they had very little to do with.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/23...
Which ISP would have more power than Google? :-)
They built wherever they pleased, whenever they pleased, at minimal regulatory cost and with minimal additional costs. Because of course nobody would buy a house with no dialtone phone and/or no cable TV.
Now in a modern era if a FTTH ISP wants to come along and overbuild the same routes as the phone company, it's a lot more difficult, time consuming and expensive.
The reasons this is getting off the ground at all is because our city government spent the past 5 years dotting every i and crossing every t to be able to drop the hammer on AT&T and WOW! without retaliation. Also, we own our own electric utility, and on top of their ROW they're also bankrolling most of this operation with a sweetheart loan deal (overpaying for electricity worked out in the end, who knew).
Then ISPs can reach end user customers by paying the PUD for L2 transport across their networks.
This new PUD fiber infrastructure exists separately from whatever the local Telco and cable TV operators have built.
This was sometimes due to a legal requirement, similar to requirements to maintain water and sewer connections: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Did anyone think anything else WAS the strategy? Google has a history of such "spurring" efforts. Glass, Fiber, Nexus, heck, even a ton of Android support itself.
The same is true with Android, as they were under threat of locked out of a smartphone boom by Apple. They have stuck with it because it has become more popular than they could have ever imagined. I also think this is their reason behind making Kubernetes. I think they want to commoditize the cloud more to avoid dominance from Amazon.
Nice theory, except that Google bought Android Inc. in 2005, years before the iPhone was announced.
Yet at the launch I wasn't impressed ("doesn't solve a problem I have"; clearly I lack vision as it took until iPhone 4 for me to see the light).
1. https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2974676/this-was-the-orig... 2. https://www.pcworld.com/article/254539/original_android_prot... 3. https://www.theverge.com/2012/4/25/2974843/google-in-2007-a-...
It’s the most successful consumer electronics product in history, but some still are in denial.
People still think Google Glass was a failed product. Many just have no idea how businesses, particularly non-traditional ones like Google with an appetite for change and a pocketbook to buy what it wants, are run.
Not that todays' options are GOOD on those points, but they've definitely improved, at least with Android version updates.
If Google went through all the investment to build an ISP, bid on spectrum, etc., it'd be silly for Google to at least not cautiously/optimistically aim for the main prize of the market.
It seems more likely that competition was too costly, and it was fine falling back on the modest goal of prodding the market forward.
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-gig-o...
even your linked blog post seems to support this point. they conservatively couch the product as an "experiment".
> We don't think we have all the answers – but through our trial, we hope to make a meaningful contribution to the shared goal of delivering faster and better Internet for everyone.
does that sound like the PR blurb of a company that seriously intends to offer hi-speed internet to every person in america?
That’s not true (and the article doesn’t cite to any support for that idea or any other). In 2009 ATT and Verizon were in the middle of deploying Uverse and FiOS, which were planned since 2005. By that time, Qwest (later acquired by CenturyLink) had already passed a million households and had service in a dozen cities.
The article credits Google with these deployments, but makes no effort to show that the pace of these projects, which were already in the pipeline, somehow accelerated after Fiber. This would be an easy assertion to prove: show there was a discontinuity in FTTx deployment after 2010. The article states that there is 30% urban FTTx penetration today, but doesn’t say whether that’s on or off the pre-2010 trend. (The article also gets the cable trajectory wrong. In 2009, everyone was in the middle of deploying DOCSIS 3.0. The pace of DOCSIS upgrades didn’t speed up after Fiber. DOCSIS 3.1, and gigabit cable, came when you’d expect.)
What Google does deserve credit for, I think, is making gigabit happen. ISPs likely would’ve held that as a premium tier for market segmention purposes. After Fiber set the gigabit at $70 price point, everyone had to match (or come close). That was something that wasn’t in the road maps before Fiber.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/telecom/2010...
They still do. I don't think much has changed regarding actual fiber. Comcast, for example, will sell you passable gigabit over cable in the < $150 category (not cheap), but that has some abysmal upload (probably 20 Mbps), and lots of bufferbloat. If you want real fiber from comcast, be prepared to pay $500 in installation, $300 a month, and a 2 year contract. This is in ATL, which is a google fiber market, just that google fiber never really rolled out beyond the google fiber shop.
Seattle, BTW. Where CenturyLink is theoretically rolling out gigabit, but not actually.
Do you live in an area that was targeted for a Google Fiber rollout? I do. Weeks after Google announced our area was getting fiber — BAM! AT&T and TWC dropped prices and raised speeds dramatically . Not long after that AT&T had run FTTH to a significant number of households. Previously that had been unheard of in this area. Google most certainly lit a fire under their asses.
Though Google appears to have paused future deployments, the broadband business
has permanently changed. Fiber investments by former telephone companies have
accelerated or restarted.
All in all Google's Fiber is super limited (very few blocks can get Fiber to their home) but just like a "grimreaper waiting on your doorstep" ISPs competing with Google had to start offering really good deals to everyone.
In October 2017 a Google employee walked door to door in the neighborhood signing people up. We signed up, gave a $15 (?) deposit, and then never heard from him or google again.
On the other hand, in that span of time my Spectrum speed got bumped repeated from 15/5 Mbps to 200/12 Mbps, without changing my price. So, thanks Google for bluffing so well.
I still wish Google would continue the buildout in Austin, as Grande doesn't have a clue about IPv6.
First gripe....why oh why could they not make that goal for a symmetrical 100Mbps and not just focused on the DL speed.
If the push is to 5G, I'd welcome it, if the mobile carriers opened ports on consumer plans. I've cherished my coveted unlimited iPad data plan with att used in my mifi with a yagi that points right at the service tower. It regularly sees over 250Gigs a month (check my twitter for that pic).
Remember they've done this before. Usenet.
And for a successful success story, how about gmail? Just like no one remembers alta vista, lycos, etc (or myspace in more recent history), no one remembers that when gmail launched and offered 1GB of mail, that was absurd. The previous free tier was more like 5MB -- 3 orders of magnitude lower! Then when Yahoo finally came around (had to stop the bleeding) and also offered 1GB, gmail went unlimited!
They are going to write this exact same story in 10 years if electric cars take off (I don't think they will, but leave that aside) and Tesla is dead. Tesla's failure will be the industry's success.
Are you implying that Google started usenet? (hint: they didn't.)
In which alternate universe is this happening? Certainly not in the United States. How many residential locations have a choice of more than two data providers? Yes, there's wireless, with "Unlimited", "Premium Unlimited", and "Extra Premium Unlimited."
The day I read an article announcing they'd hired the former CFO of Morgan Stanley, and she would be focusing on "cost containment", I knew Google Fiber was dead.
Now they have a fifty dollar 100 Mbps plan. But students don't pay for that, either, because they don't know about it.
It was not a well-thought-out business plan.
Their seven-year contract will be expiring soon. Will be interesting to see what happens then.
I don't think it's a what if. If you can think back to the state of broadband (e.g., Verizon, Comcast, and mobile speeds) when Fiber was announced, and the following the subsequent increases, there's definitely a strong correlation to Fiber's influence.
Goggle got what they wanted by pretending to do something it had no interest in doing. That's not a failure. It's damn clever.
Quorvo (or maybe HRL) presented a 33 dBm GaN MMIC a couple years ago, but it was ~90 nm GaN process which isn’t out yet. Once that’s out, I’d expect >1W at 80 GHz to allow some cool stuff.
It's also possible FB's tests are using channels even wider than 5GHz with STA from the FCC.
There is a cost to doing fiber build outs before there is a real demand for it. If people don’t need more right now than what cable and wireless can offer, you might wait a very long time to recover your investment.
I could use symmetrical 10G right now for software defined radio experimentation. I presently have 100/5, and it’s the 5 that is the issue. Without fiber, we’ll be stuck with horrible asymmetry.
Electricity and telephones brought immediate, game changing benefits, and there was no alternative that was almost as good. Fiber still doesn’t offer “must have” benefits over existing alternatives for typical consumers. Maybe in the future with VR and whatnot, but not yet.
The demand for faster wired connections has stalled even on the LAN. Apple added GigE to the PowerMac in 2000, a year after the standard for 1000base-t was ratified. It’s been more then a decade since 10Gbase-t was ratified, and Apple just added it to a workstation this year. There has been almost no uptake outside the server room.
Lack of demand means that it’s hard to draw consumers away from existing options. FTTH uptake rates are below 50% (meaning less than half of homes who can get it actually subscribe, or put another way you have to build fiber past two or three homes to get one paying subscriber).
On the supply side, anything involving human labor is relatively more expensive compared to other inputs than it was then. Minimum enlisted military pay at the time of the rural electrification act was $9,000 per year (adjusted for CPI inflation). It’s double that today.
I don't see how that can be viewed as a Prisoner's Dilemma.
If I have the timing correct, Google led a large financing round of Spacex around the same time as they stopped expanding their Fiber service
$34.95 CAD a month. (Around $27 USD).
Who knew fiber could be this cheap?
No activation fee or any other initial fees.
AT&T has been deploying fiber where Google was, but that seems halted too.
Spectrum is just garbage. While they offer 300 Mbps downstream, the upstream is 20.
I at least have 100/5 from CCI, but their infrastructure is going to shit with reliability problems.
Fiber is really the only way, with true symmetrical 1000/1000. DOCSIS is shit, as well as DSL variants.
I can tell you mmWave is going to be shit too. It’s only useful for line-of-sight, which rules out mostly everywhere here due to trees.