Ultra high-speed broadband is coming to Kansas City, Kansas | Hacker News Reader

Ultra high-speed broadband is coming to Kansas City, Kansas

googleblog.blogspot.com

125 pointsyanw60 comments

As soon as I saw the release, I immediately considered what might be like moving to Kansas City, Kansas (aka KCK).

Given that a large percentage of the city will soon have access to Gigabit Broadband, I wonder if we could simply consider the entire City to be one large LAN.

If you're considering moving just for gigabit broadband, you might consider Chattanooga, TN. We already have it.

Don't tempt me, my brother in law lives in Murfreesboro and it's absolutely gorgeous down there. Beautiful brick homes all over the place, and very mild weather. Throw in gigabit broadband and you've just about got me convinced.

I read that as convicted!

It's a beautiful part of the country. I love it down here.

Hey, how much does it cost thougth? 200$ 300$

https://epbfi.com/you-pick/#/fi-tv-essential&fi-speed-in...

Thanks for the link.

For those unwilling to follow the link, gigabit is $350 a month.

I'm perfectly satisfied with their 30 up / 30 down plan. That one costs $58 a month.

TN also has no state income tax, and has the FedEx global hub in Memphis, and is a fairly short flight to Washington, DC. I could easily see it being the Seattle, WA of the Mid-Atlantic.

I am guessing that this could do some great things for helping to grow the tech community in Kansas City. Should be very interesting to see what the response will be from other cities if this helps to drive growth.

I lived in KCK for a year in the mid 1990's. Yes, there was crime. Yes, there was poverty. Yes, there was a lot of blight. However, there were a whole lot of good, hard-working people there.

In particular, Kansas City Kansas Community College is a bright spot. Here's hoping that their CIS program can work with Google to place some interns!

I lived in KCK much more recently -- ~2007ish. The new developments out by the race track and Legends (where I lived) are really nice, and I'm sure that's the main area Google is considering. The suburbs out there (one of which, Olathe, is my hometown) are also really nice, and a great place for this kind of effort. I'm sure that played a part in the decision.

Pre-emptive edit: When I mention the suburbs, I understand that they won't be included initially, but with the network nearby it should be eas(y|ier) to expand into those areas. ;)

From what I understand, no I have not watched the video yet, this is for Kansas City, KS and Wyandotte County. Olathe is in Johnson County and about a 20-25 minute drive from downtown KCK.

Did I mention I spent that year commuting from KCK to Olathe? Glad that is over. Don't let me get started about the commute from Lawrence to Lee's Summit. I have no idea what I was thinking.

Unlike another commenter pointed out, I am really hoping that Google did pick KCK because of its relative low status in the KC Metro area. I am hoping the benefit of greater connectivity will be more clearly seen in a city like KCK.

And starting in 2012 the Royals could be on the rise. Their wave of prospects is just starting to arrive. Fast internet and competitive baseball.

Gigabit fiber to my house, my beloved Royals having a winning season, I suppose that's why the world ends in 2012... too many "when pigs fly" events occurring.

Very good point. The Chiefs made it to the playoffs last year, maybe next year we'll make it to the final rounds of the playoffs. Too good to be true.

Kansas City, Kansas makes up only a small part of the large Kansas City metro area. And, frankly, KCK is the least desirable area to live in (even with this new development).

I know what you mean. I would rather invest in a few of repeaters than actually live in KCK.

Thougth the same here. It would be wonderful to use such speed once before i die.

I'd love to hear what some of the business implications of this are from fellow HN'rs. (Good and bad, is there a downside?) What sort of local community problems can you solve with an internet that's 100 times faster?

I'm in Kansas City, Missouri. My office is about 1 mile East of the state line. I'm pretty excited about the community impact of this and I only live and work nearby.

One quick thing I could think of is to connect crime watch cameras all over the city and hook them up.

As well as ubiqitous WiFi access points?

Ideally, you would do both. Cameras to help justify the cost of infrastructure, and Wifi APs to enable additional sources of revenue like captive portal advertising. Not to mention the general economic benefit of offering such Wifi to smart phone users (aka shoppers in the local business districts).

I live just down the road in Lawrence. We have AT&T, Knology, and a small, scrappy (disclaimer: that used to work for) community wireless startup in Lawrence Freenet.

Freenet has been pushing hard to work with the City of Lawrence on a fiber project that would be very similar to what Google would like to do. Having this happen in KC, KS will, I think, only help the Lawrence project.

If I am not mistaken, KC,KS is also getting 2000 Cerner jobs sometime in the next year(s). I can imagine the presence of Google Fiber will help draw a lot more area tech companies. At least I hope so.

I work on mesh wifi, so I'm familiar with Freenet. You can see their (admittedly quite awesome) footprint here:

https://cloudtrax.com/overview2.php?id=freenet_production

Of particular interest is that the mesh admin tool / firmware they're using, which is based on OpenWRT, actually underreports the number of clients and traffic because of its size. The operators say the real figures are order(s) of magnitude larger.

Yep, it is a pretty impressive network. I had a lot of fun, particularly given the range of day to day work activities. One day I am coding web apps, the next talking with fiber contractors, the next cleaning up after a big storm.

I only work on web apps these days, so I miss the days of feeling completely overwhelmed by weather, a power outage, a fiber being cut, or, especially, climbing water towers.

A 16dB+ panel antenna and Ubiquiti Networks Bullet2HP radio, and a suitably high location, would shorten that distance for you very nicely. ;)

From my own experience working on a community wireless project in St. Louis, the benefit of a 1Gbit/s fiber uplink (or several) would be that you could use newer 5GHz radios with MIMO features to build out >=50Mbit/s distribution for that uplink over a few square miles. So, 1Gbit/s could be parted out to 20 end users getting 50mbit/s each, and with an infrastructure cheaper than running fiber or some other wired medium directly to those 20 users.

Upvoted twice for UBNT. Downvoted once for math:

50mbps x 200 users = 10,000mbps

Arithimetic aside, Ubiquiti is quickly changing the Wisp world. At Freenet, we switched from Canopy and upgraded our backhauls to Ubiquiti Airmax and saved money in the process. I am typing this now from a mesh node connected via a NanoStationM5!

Given my experience with city-wide wireless in Lawrence, ubiquitous WiFi in KCK really needs to happen, IMHO.

Oops, caffeine + haste = poor math. Fixed.

Sadly, plenty of ISP's use that math. (Users * Bandwidth / 10) = uplink.

I can't disagree too much, upload speeds are really disappointing. As one other poster pointed out, this can have a negative effect on entrepreneurs trying to bootstrap businesses from home.

As for why upload speeds are awful, my experience has been that it is a trade-off that has been calculated by the ISP. But not in the way I suspected. Any link level device that uses a single (simplex) medium (wifi, fixed wireless, mobile wireless, cable modems, DSL modems, etc. as opposed to Ethernet, which is generally duplex) only has so much bandwidth available.

At the WISP I worked for, we used to use Canopy 900mhz radios to provide fixed wireless service as well as backhaul for our city-wide mesh network. Since these radios only had ~3.3mbps aggregate bandwidth, we had to decide how to allocate it. In our case, we chose something like 5:1 download to upload ratio. This was a conscious choice about how best to use the available spectrum/bandwidth. I believe the same is true for cable/DSL media. Please feel free to correct me.

Living nearby in Overland Park, this is pretty exciting stuff. It will certainly be nice to see someone big give Time Warner and AT&T a little competition.

It's a little surprising that they would pick Kansas City, Kansas over the much-bigger Kansas City, Missouri, but then again, there's probably a lot less politics and red tape to cut through when dealing with a smaller community.

Sprints headquarters are in Overland Park -- does anyone know if they have their hand in this?

I'd say the Kauffman Foundation had a big hand in it. A smaller community may have been more attractive for a project like this because of logistics.

But doesn't UPS serve just about everywhere?

OP resident here too.

Given the recent Google Voice integration with Sprint, and investment in Clearwire, I'm sure the proximity of Sprint doesn't hurt.

My understanding is that Google was specifically looking for smaller communities to try out its fiber service first (unwitting beta testers @ Standford U. notwithstanding). A larger urban area like KC, MO may have been considered unappealing because its population density meant more competition with incumbent providers. KC, KS is smaller, but it adjoins the larger urban core, where Google could expand when it's ready.

I love Overland Park, but it is just like the rest of Kansas; Red. Missouri is a bit too Blue for Google to make enough money quickly enough to feel comfortable putting it there. Plus KCMO is a lot poorer than KCK.

One of the best things, from my perspective is that it will give Kansas something that is positive for a change. There is lots of good tech here in Eastern Kansas, but all anyone knows is about our issues around teaching evolution and Fred Phelps. Sometimes makes it hard to convince a client on the coast that we really do know what we're talking about and aren't running a consultancy next to a barn.

Yes! All of my family and friends give me crap about choosing to live in KS. I would be hard pressed trade Lawrence/KC for another location. Unless, you know, there was no snow.

Probably largely because the Kauffman Foundation is there.

And nearby Sprint HQ, as mentioned in the other HN post about this.

There are quite a few interesting possibilities with Google coming in. The 3rd largest stock exchange, BATS, is based in Lenexa, KS. As others mentioned, Sprint is located in a suburb. Cerner, the largest healthcare IT company, is rapidly expanding into KCK. Garmin is in Olathe. KCMO has has a lot of biomedical firms and research firms including Stowers Institute, TEVA, etc. Kauffman Foundation has been pushing local startups more and more.

A lot of this though is beyond 2012 and would only be connected with an expansion of the fiber network. KCK has a NASCAR track, an MLS Stadium, Minor League Baseball Stadium, an outdoor mall and some factories...

I can't really say I'm that impressed. They'll be charging $350/month for the gigabit plan. That's about 10 times what the same service costs in Hong Kong or 5 times what it does in Tokyo. And that service was available in 2009.

I guess for people used to paying way to much for really slow connections it might be worth the $350, but it's certainly not a deal I'd be bragging about.

Where have you heard that price?

It's on their site: https://epbfi.com/you-pick/#/fi-tv-essential&fi-speed-in...

Wow, so close, and yet so far. I'm just a few miles away, but I'm not moving to KCK ;-). I wonder if they will eventually spread out from there within the metro, that would be awesome! We need more options than AT&T and Comcast, that's for sure.

KCK Mayor and Google Kevin Lo on KCUR right now, speaking about Google Fiber in KCK. http://www.kcur.org/uptodate.html#Thursday

From the musical/stageshow Oklahoma:

"Everything's up to date in Kansas City They gone about as fer as they can go"

Once I've ultra high-speed broadband, the first thing I'll probably get is an iPad2 :).

woooo can't wait to switch out of time warner in a few years

-hopeful socal

Really exciting for a KC native like myself, even though I'm far away now. We've been considering a move back in that direction and this only makes it that much more likely. :D

Facts about 3G/4G networks http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=251336,00.asp?h...

This pisses me off. There was a stronger response from Austin, and our govt. petitioned Google to do it here. What a letdown.

Given the number of times people mentioned BBQ and smell in the announcement a few minutes ago, I think you had two strikes against you.

buuuurrnnnnn

According to Wikipedia, Austin is 10x larger than Kansas City, KS. Google is planning on jumping into this with a test group of over 100,000 people, which is ambitious. It's likely that Google is taking a pragmatic engineering approach to this, like they are so famous for doing with all their products.

If Google is taking a pragmatic engineering approach with this, then why did they even bother asking communities if they wanted this? According to http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/public/list#KS Kansas City didn't even bother responding.

Yes they did, it just shows up as Wyandotte County. Kansas City and Wyandotte County share a unified government.

Austin also sprawls very far and there's no reason they would have had to cover the entire city.

I work on a community wireless net in St. Louis, MO (http://gowasabi.net) that was founded with an intention, among others, of attracting Google Fiber here, and I submitted a proposal to Google about it. Likewise, the city gov't sent in its own proposal to get fiber downtown, along with countless other local groups. http://stlcin.missouri.org/googlefiber/ I'm guessing many many other cities did the same.

While Google is indeed the 800lb gorilla here, it's not the only provider out there. If you're successful in getting Google to lend you really fast Net, that's awesome. If you're successful in getting similar service on your own, i.e. by micro-trenching your own fiber or negotiating a deal with a local bandwidth broker, that's actually much better.

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