The failure of Google Fiber paints a very bleak picture of the future of internet infrastructure, or even all communication in this country. If Google cannot compete with the status quo, who can?
Probably not, but common sense should be enough. It is 2 inches, on a road...
General overview of micro-trenching: https://www.ppc-online.com/blog/best-practice-for-installing...
It is a lot deeper than 2 inches.
Google tried to do the backfilling/slot filling with some sort of rubber compound or something that was not proper pavement grouting.
Google and their contractor fucked up the OSI layer 1.
The way it's done with the "teraspan" (company name) method in Vancouver BC is not economical to service individual residences, or small buildings, it's a set of networks built for several different companies' last mile fiber access networks to service major class A office towers in the downtown core. The diamond blade concrete saw + microduct + cable + slot filling setup is way too costly in dollars per meter of installed fiber to be used for something like Louisville.
I now work at a different fiber ISP. The industry is fine, it's just that Google sort of gave up. Even if they went full-on "we changed our mind" after I left, it's not the original team anymore. A lot of knowledge has disappeared into the void. You hear "invest in teams, not in products," around here a lot. That's not what Google did.
You simply can't promise gigabit class last mile service to every residence in a city, and actually build it with a reasonable dollar-per-house cost, and make a return on investment on it. Not unless you have an incredibly low cost to deploy it, basically a city and local electrical utility that has handed you ROW (right-of-way) on a silver platter. Or unless you are already the incumbent telecom operator, and have ROW literally everywhere, and can overbuild your POTS network with modern GPON stuff, as Centurylink is doing in parts of Seattle.
Or unless you bring the dollars-per-unit cost way down, by focusing on MDU (multiple dwelling unit) such as WaveG and Webpass have done.
It costs a lot less to light up an 85 suite condo building with 1000BaseT to each suite, than it does to build last mile GPON or active ethernet fiber to 85 individual houses.
I never saw the Google Fiber cancellation as a cost issue. It felt to me like more of a scale issue. You have to live in Kansas City to pay Google for fiber, but you can buy an Android device from anywhere in the world. Thus, one of those things is going to make more money than the other, and it makes sense to focus on that.
The economics of ISPs, the way I see it, depend on:
1) Cost of money. (Free if you're Google, 18% a year if you're some guy using your credit card.)
2) Expected lifetime of wireline Internet. Wireless internet isn't getting _worse_ every year. While a lot of us here won't be giving up our wired connections any time soon, many people already have. Their phone is their computer. They can't even plug an Ethernet cable into it if they want to.
If your fiber is going to be good for 50 years... after you've paid off the loan, it costs basically nothing to provide Internet service over. And yet, people will pay more than $0/month to have Internet service. So economically it works out... if fiber continues to be relevant. That is the if that scares people. (The other issue is that it's hard to find free money unless you are, say, Google.)
In developing nation environments where there is no pre-existing wireline infrastructure, and incomes are much more limited, it's now incredibly common for people to only have a phone with LTE radio in it, and no fixed internet at home. Examples would be in Rawalpindi, Pakistan or in small cities in Turkey.
But I don't see people downloading 90GB xbox one games on LTE last mile connections any time soon, even with carriers' advancements in fixed LTE and coming "5G" stuff. The capacity of last mile wired connections will always be much greater. And the typical residential consumer in the US or Canada has much more ability to pay a $75 monthly recurring bill for proper home broadband, on top of their cellphone costs.
This seems like Google has not yet learned how civil engineering works, which is a crucial component in internet infrastructure.
It's unfortunate that Louisville is getting bit hard here.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/17/google-builds-its-own-subs...
There's a reason rural Internet sucks: It's expensive to build and unprofitable to operate. That's why ISPs don't want to build them out.
Nobody actually cares about the rural poor. No transportation options, limited services in general. It's just laughable how people consider themselves so giving, unless those people live outside the city, then screw those people.
The Trump campaign advocated for it in their 5G-nationalization scheme that the Trump White House for some reason wasn't aware of ([0] ?) and likely wouldn't work because of the nature of 5G penetration.
The problem is "broadband for all" is it's an issue that doesn't register as much as the culture war.
[0] https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/03/trump-administrati...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-Fast_Broadband
Covering 87% of the population by the end of 2022. It is a public–private partnership of the government with four companies with total government investment of [USD 1 billion].
It was rolled out below budget. Then again, look at Australia trying to do the same thing, and failing (incumbent telco and govt), which might be more similar to what would happen in the US.
Size, geography, and population of NZ is somewhat similar to Oregon, if that helps. As written by someone from Oregon: "When it comes to Oregon and New Zealand, there are similarities galore. Both have a largish city in the north corner. Both have around 4 million in population. And the square mileage of their land masses differ by only 5000 (98000 and 103,000, respectively). The scenery is spectacular. Micro-breweries are aplenty. And Kiwis “get” coffee. They really do. In other words, I feel at home here."
This is indicative of nothing more than Google behaving consistently.
$ Due to a wacky series of misunderstandings, both of these ISPs service my building now that Webpass is gone. They periodically send out sales reps who bring snacks and wine.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your point but your experience may be on the rare side.
All the railroad right of ways are loaded with fiber, the freight tunnels are loaded with fiber, etc.
If you are downtown, you can add the half dozen or so fully competent local ISPs. These companies sell internet to condo associations; every unit gets a dedicated connection and the common areas get shared wifi. The cost gets added to the monthly assessment. Where I live it's $25 per month for 500 meg symmetrical.
I work in a 1920s skyscraper in the Loop. Cogent stops by at least once a year and puts coffee and (expensive) donuts in the lobby. They'll run fiber directly from their backbone to a server rack on whatever floor your office is on.
Railroad right of ways are largely immaterial to last mile home seevice.
Wireless is slower, has higher latency, is less reliable (interference/obstructions), etc. But you can put in one tower and service every customer for miles under those conditions, which is much cheaper than wiring every building.
It's possible to address those problems with wireless, but the way to do it makes the wireless network look like the wired one. Instead of one tower serving many people, you have very many towers each serving a small number of people. But then the cost benefit evaporates. You need a tower on every street corner which has to be wired with fiber.
At that point you might as well just hook the existing phone or cable wires already going into everyone's houses into that box on the end of the street in order to get the last few meters, and save yourself a few billion dollars in wireless spectrum.
This all varies based on the wireless tech used. My apartment in Seattle is serviced via point to point wireless with another building across the neighborhood. Currently I see under 2ms RTT to google.com, and can max out the 100mbit port on my router both up and down. (Gigabit is available, but requires an account with WaveG. 100mbit is free with my rent, and on the landlord's account).
Aside from a misconfiguration on my building's switch that allowed a neighbor to act as a rogue dhcp server, I've yet to see an outage in the two years of living here.
Wireless doesn't have to suck.
Moreover, the reliability you get has a lot to do with what happens in your neighborhood. Point to point wireless is great until somebody builds a new building in the path between you and the other wireless device.
That’s simply not true, and it becomes obvious why when you account for fan-out. There is a reason why independent ISPs often do MDU installs. Running fiber to one point where you can service 100 customers is vastly cheaper than running fiber to 100 houses.
You would only need to bring fiber into the home for the users that need the full performance of fiber. But then fiber is the only thing with that level of performance. You're not reasonably going to get better performance out of wireless than you can get out of coax.