Google Fiber plans 5-state growth spurt, biggest since 2015
reuters.com
reuters.com
Yesterday, I had a 1.5Gbps fiber internet installed in my home- not by Google, of course, but by someone who copied their model.
I think that was the point all along. Move everyone forward on this. Force every other ISP to stop resting on their laurels and get to work pushing the boundaries.
Unrelated: the bottleneck on my bandwidth is, for the first time in my life, between my computer and the modem rather than between my modem and the internet. It's 30,000 times faster than my 56k dial-up was in the 90s. This is pretty neat.
What it proved is that if cable companies offer lower prices than google, and offer 'good enough' speeds. That people will not switch over. Fiber is fast but so is DOSICS4.0. What it showed was that fiber to the house was not a revenue or profit winning strategy, with instead the ISPs using the existing copper coupled with fiber close to the home.
ATT and others recently made a push for fiber to the home, but their DSL was falling behind coax/cable and they were forced to make the switch.
Personally, look at T-Mobile home internet & starlink's growth. We might see cellular internet to the home take over in the next 10 years. My 5G cellular speed is already nearing that of what an 802.11ac wifi network can deliver. Most people are currently fine with 50Mibps, which is well within 5G's capabilities.
The laws of physics have not changed and yet every new mobile iteration cycle someone wants to insist they have.
Starlink is more akin to fixed wifi, which is essentially a point to point link depending on line of sight. That's the one possible game changer here: it's low enough, and the other end is somewhere you're unlikely to be cut off from.
But I suspect even Starlink, at any reasonable satellite density, wouldn't be able to support a city's worth of internet connections - and any reasonable effort to do so would be plain better served by just installing terrestial cables.
What is the actual physical limit for the network bandwidth for the available frequency bands? Have we reached it in congested cities?
The problem on the low band is that you can eventually you get to a point where the cell is overloaded and you're at capacity but still you can throw in another cell and/or split the sectors up. Which, again, costs money.
The problem is essentially economic, not technical.
MIMO gets past Nyquist and directional antennas can be added in finer granularity as more users come online (they do this for home LTE, not offering until adding more directional transmitters).
We already have ubiquitous wireless internet: it's wifi. And it gets faster every year, provided we deploy a base station every 10m with fiver backhaul (aka your regular home internet connection).
That's the point: with enough effort you can make any sort of wireless link pretty arbitrarily large and more "wire-like". At an extremely disproportionate increase in cost of equipment and sensitivity of antennas to positioning.
But now you're competing with the installation costs of fixed cabling anyway - we're not talking about small portable devices any more which a consumer puts "wherever" in their house. We're talking large fixed installations which need to be aimed and calibrated correctly, and consume substantial power (the Starlink rectenna for example is not a low power device).
The moment you've got skilled labor having to come out to the property you've lost: it's just as easy for the skilled labor to install fixed line cabling, as well as less disruptive to the home owner and it is very likely a lot cheaper. Our cities are well setup to bring things into people's homes - we have water, gas, electricity lines that need to go everywhere. The cost is not in the device, it's in the labor.
Yes, high end cellphones already have 8x8 mu-MIMO. It can be in an array and isn't like putting 12 separate antennas in different places on your roof or anything. Starlink (phased array, different tech) has hundreds of antennas (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOmdQnIlnRo&t=36m30s).
You might be thinking of like TV antennas where they often were much bigger due to the longer wavelengths involved in VHF.
Even if it were big, many many rural homes used to have those crazy big 80s/early 90s c-band satellite dishes just to get more TV channels, and for someone with a poor internet connection I could see them even putting something like that big up if it were required.
That's a good point, tbh. We have a local provider that provides fiber to the home. Its high quality and the bandwidth is reasonable for the price. Its also fully symmetric and everything is out of sight (buried underground).
A national cable company came into the neighborhood offering copper and ran new copper with ugly boxes everywhere for a slightly lower price. Quite a few people switched.
I really don't think most consumers care.
If nothing else they have proved the competition was needed.
In my neighborhood, I was restricted to 100Mbps down for 10 years @ something like $100->150/month. The price was also constantly climbing. The only competitor for my neighborhood offered 40mbps down for $100/month.
The MOMENT a new fiber provider announced they were going to build out to my area, all the sudden 600 down cost them $60/month and the caps went away.
Once the buildout happens in my neighborhood I'm switching anyways out of pure spite.
Unsurprisingly the incumbents are back to their usual complacency and their prices have steadily been on the rise in the couple years since Google Fiber did such a terrible job. It's one thing to shut down Messenger App 2 of 6, it's another thing to just entirely cut and run from an infrastructure project leaving bills behind to the City's taxpayers to pay.
Also, they would fight tooth and nail to prevent Google from being able to actually build the infrastructure. One way was to make it needlessly onerous, slow, and expensive to access utility poles.
This is all straight from the Standard Oil playbook.
It's funny how Americas look down on "third world" countries as being hopelessly corrupt, when in reality America is just as corrupt as any of them. In highly developed nations with rule of law, they don't have these problems.
It also means 5G only makes economical sense in the densest of areas. 5G isn't coming to the 'burbs any time soon. When you get into the one radio per couple of houses you might as well just run fiber.
Universal wireless internet is a fantasy - there simply isn't enough capacity over the air - just look at the growing pains starlink is already experiencing in areas of just moderate density. Wireless has it's place, but it will never be sufficient for base load.
The laws of physics are a harsh mistress.
Nope, density is manageable in most frequency ranges. The advantage to the mmwave frequency bands is that they have larger channel sizes (up to 400MHz), which allows for faster speeds.
Who said fiber will inherently cost more? That assumption only makes sense if you think that ISPs charge people at a reasonable consistent margin, and arent't just jacking up the prices up to the maximum they can get away with.
From my personal experience, finer didn't end up costing more in most cases. I am paying about $60/mo for a symmetric 1Gbps fiber from Google Fiber in a high cost of living city in the US. No data caps, no random fees, easy billing, easy to work with customer service. I paused the service once because i was out of state for about a month, and then resumed it again. It was as easy as calling their customer service and spending less than a minute on it (not counting the little time at the start of the call where I had to verify my account information). Transferring service to a new address (within the same apt building) was extremely easy. No lock-ins, month by month, so I can easily cancel any time and then sign up later. No "installation" fees or any other bs. Just paying the agreed upon monthly cost, plain and simple.
Just before that, i used to live in another large city with a cheaper cost of living (Atlanta). I was paying about $20-30 more per month for a locked contract with Xfinity. It was a nightmare. Data caps, them adding "by mistake" equipment rental fee to my bill about half a year into it (despite me using my own modem + router, and me giving them their equipment back on day 1), as well as me wasting hours to get it resolved, only for the fee to get added back to the bill a few months later. And I got lucky that me and my roommate at the time spotted that fee getting added sneakily both times. And don't get me started spending over 4-5 hours on the phone trying to get the service canceled a couple years after living there (because i was moving across the country). I legitimately ended up having to lie to them that I am moving overseas, otherwise they kept insisting they could just transfer the service to my new address, no matter how many times I told them that I wasn't interesting.
An interesting development came shortly after. After I moved out of Atlanta, Google Fiber finally arrived into the city. In the areas of metro ATL where Google Fiber entered, Xfinity dropped prices significantly, but they barely matched Google in cost (but still had tons of random bs fees and costs that made the price higher), still was a locked contract, and the speeds/service was much worse, it was closer to 100Mbps (it wasn't fiber, it was DOCSIS). Guess what happened in the metro ATL areas that were just right outside of Google Fiber coverage? Instead of dropping the price, Xfinity jacked up prices there for the same old crappy service.
As soon as I initially heard that Google Fiber was coming into ATL area, I was excited for my mother finally getting a cheaper and more reliable internet provider that wouldn't sneakily add random fees or "deals" that force her to deal with it. At worst, I expected that Google Fiber won't expand to her house (just a 30 min drive up north from ATL midtown), but with Xfinity at least giving a cheaper rate, given the competition was encroaching. Except the exact opposite ended up happening.
Oh, and to make things better, that apartment building I lived in back then didn't get Google Fiber for years since it became available in the city, despite being squarely in the coverage area. Guess why? The apartment building management made a 5-year exclusivity contract with Xfinity (aka Xfinity paid them off) to be the sole ISP offered to the apartment building. So even if I wanted to switch, and Google Fiber was available in my area, then too bad.
So why do I stick with a $70/mo service that I can barely utilize over "good enough" speeds that I wouldn't notice the difference of for $10-20 less per month? Reliability, and a good business model. I had my internet go out overnight when I wasn't using it and didn't even know I had an outage for 5 hours. My bill is how I found out I lost service. Google Fiber will automatically stop charging you and discount your bill if an outage is caused by their end. No other ISP does that that I know of. You're paying for "speeds up to XXmbps", including speeds less than, and no service at all. I have never once had to call or contact their support. I don't even know what number to call, or off the top of my head where to find that number, and I don't have to, I can actually drive to a Google Fiber physical store and talk to someone in person, not some level 1 tech support agent in India reading verbatim off a script in an internal wiki. Granted, I can also call or email them, but I've never once in over six years of service, had a need to do that. Another thing is, you can cancel and reactivate your service on the go. Going on vacation for a few weeks? Disable your service before you go, turn it on when you get back home, save money, and they don't care. You can shut it off every night before bed and turn it back on when you get home. They allow you to do this. You'll only pay for the service you are actively being provided.
They created a business model that is so polar opposite of what other ISPs are, to push other ISPs to fix their craptastic infrastructure or get left in the dust by competition.
I personally will always choose a fiber connection over cable because I don't know of a single Cable ISP that people don't regard as "a horrible company with equally horrible service and customer service".
And they gave up.
It's nice that they're getting back at it now, but come on, where have you been all these years?
That wasn't incumbents fighting them. They did that to themselves.
Over wifi, I can get around 600mbit to the router at best.
Running generic speedtest websites, I'm seeing myself top out at around 900mbit or so. Which should be enough for all my needs for long time.
Good old cat5e can actually do 2.5 gbps these days with newer network cards (Intel Z590 and Z690 mobos) and switches (kinda pricey though).
Plus, the connection is dug in through the ground instead of run from a telephone pole like AT&T's was, so it's less prone to interference by trees and squirrels
I'm honestly surprised that our city is so well wired up that I have the choice of two gigabit providers. We aren't a tech hub or anything like that. I wonder why this location seems to be such a competitive market for ISPs. We have other big ones like Spectrum, but there's even a local provider (although, I guess they were acquired recently, so not quite local anymore): https://www.astound.com/texas/
Its basically the same as any other city unless you live in a few specific spots.
Texas makes it easy and cheap to build. Places like NYC and SF make it hard to build. There’s other reasons, but that’s #1.
*I bought a new build in 2016 in South Austin and had to wait some time before Google Fiber became available
(Disc: Googler in Global Networking, not Fiber)
The day before my installation appointment, Google Fiber called me to let me know there was a problem with the fiber on my street. They said they'd have to reschedule my installation. I was really disappointed about the delay, expecting I'd have to wait until they fixed the problem on the street to even pick a new date, and that it might be several weeks away. But right there on the call they said it should only take a day to fix, and they could do the installation the day after the original date. I was impressed that they would commit to such a quick fix and reschedule right then.
The installation went smoothly. The equipment installer arrived exactly on time, and finished in the one hour that was scheduled. With Spectrum, I was often given a 3-4 hour window for service, and sometimes they were later than that. Makes you block off a half a day just in case.
The speed and latency are always great. The reliability beats Spectrum, which would go down for minutes to hours when power flickered during storms. I don't think my Google Fiber service has been down for a single second.
They do have to support https://ndcac.fbi.gov/calea/lawful-intercept-standards
As soon as Google announced, CenturyLink and Cox both put the gas on their fiber rollout here in the PHX metro area. When Google finally cancelled the rollout about two years later, CenturyLink/Cox noticeably decelerated their fiber plans.
But they do want push ISP to increase speeds since that does benefit Google (e.g. Youtube, etc).
So from their perspective, they succeeded in PHX.
Century Link fiber has been incredibly stable, the only outage we had was ironically when ATT was running the connection into the building they cut the Century Link connection...
I worry that Google really missed an opportunity to roll out an expansive network that consumers were eager to adopt. ATT has been adding in fiber everywhere in Central Florida. Every new development has ATT FttH. If Google rolled in now nobody would really care unless the price was dramatically cheaper.
So... color me skeptical about the significance of this.