Google Fiber to Launch 5Gbps and 8Gbps Plans in 2023 (Utah, KC, Des Moines) | Hacker News Reader

Google Fiber to Launch 5Gbps and 8Gbps Plans in 2023 (Utah, KC, Des Moines)

fiber.google.com

34 pointsalphabetting28 comments

I have gigabit Google "fiber" (really webpass which uses point to point microwave links). It's very hard for to max out the bandwidth in practice. Really the main benefit is the extremely low latency (e.g. ping to my workstation on campus 7 miles away from my home workstation is 2-3 ms).

I think you mean ms.

Yes thank you, fixed.... Phone autocorrect being brilliant as usual.

I guess it depends what you do. I download 150Gb games on Steam on the regular, and can easily max out 1Gbps. Automated backups can easily max out the link in the other direction.

Will Steam actually download at more than 1 Gbps? (I mostly play games on an Xbox, and there the maximum download speed is less than 1 Gbps...). Of course I also don't have any devices with 2.5G or 10G ethernet :)

I live in Utah, we already have much better, widely available municipal fiber network (UTOPIA) that has has multiple 10Gbps offerings for years. Looks like Google is trying to catch up.

With Utopia, you lease or buy the dark fiber for ~$20 a month, and then choose from 10+ different ISPs. 1Gb runs about $50 and 10G will run about $200/mo, and the provider will let you use an SFP in your own (real) router.

Does anyone else get the feeling that Google Fiber is a "meme ISP"? They feel far short of their original ambitious goals. I stopped paying attention to them as their plans got more and more de-scoped over time.

Yes. However I have personally benefitted as other ISPs immediately announced competitive pricing and speed tiers when Google fiber was slated to come to my neighborhood. Google never delivered but we’ve benefitted from the other offerings anyway.

I think that is the point of Google Fiber. It is basically the biggest middle finger to ISP, if you dont do it. I will do it.

Given the progression of multiple transmission technologies (DOCSIS, 5G C-Band), I'm extremely skeptical of the claim that Google is responsible for the overall increase in bandwidth available to residential consumers. Additional bandwidth was coming either way you slice it.

I had high hopes for Google Fiber, and still am disappointed that they pretty much silently scaled back their plans and declared victory in a self-congratulatory manner. Yes they are still around, but they are absolutely in the category of "meme ISP" based on how many households they cover versus other residential ISPs.

Were they unsuccessful? When they first started, gigabyte connectivity was rare in most of the country. The presence of threat of implementation feels like it did a lot to spur the entrenched players into offering better service.

They were supposed to build out in my city and were stopped by legal hurdles from an incumbent. That's probably happened in a few places by now.

> They feel far short of their original ambitious goals.

Is that Google's fault or the city officials/other ISPs who made their job hard or the voters who dont really care about this issue.

I fault Google. They were not realistic about how much it costs to build out such a network. Once they got a real taste of the cost, they got cold feet about any further expansion.

With these high speeds, it makes taking advantage of them difficult when it comes to torrents over VPN providers. Most VPN providers do not offer this kind of throughput. I haven't given it much thought but I almost feel like setting up a bunch of docker containers, each with a wireguard connection to a different VPN provider then allocating one torrent per container to take better advantage of these high google fiber speeds could be a fun experiment.

As someone who went from 24Mbps to 1Gbps fiber this year, I simply can’t imagine how 5x my current bandwidth would help me achieve anything practical.

Is there some version of an Overton window for bandwidth that will induce a need for more bits over time?

I have been working at startup ISPs for the past several years. Your intuition is correct.

Nobody uses 1Gbps. Nobody. Not download, not upload.

I did work for an ISP that served a lot of video editing shops, and I could see them potentially using >1Gbps at night, when they upload all their video to the cloud. They are one of the few customers that I have seen saturate 1Gbps.

Most people don't realize: your bandwidth is fine. Your latency is bad. Latency has so much to do with the internet experience.

You can have 20-50Mbps in a household with two parents and two kids, and your internet experience will be great if your latency is great.

There are three factors that determine the quality of your internet experience: 1) bandwidth, 2) latency, 3) packet loss. In practice, #3 is not usually an issue. But every ISP only advertises #1.

When you get introduced to fiber, the biggest upgrade you get is in latency.

So you are completely correct: you will never use 5Gbps. You won't even use 1Gbps. But the upgrade to fiber will probably make your internet experience feel a lot faster, due to lower latency.

> There are three factors that determine the quality of your internet experience: 1) bandwidth, 2) latency, 3) packet loss. In practice, #3 is not usually an issue. But every ISP only advertises #1.

Fully in agreement. I've always hated that (outside of enterprise use) latency is never discussed - sure assuming a similar latency 1Mbps and 100Mbps is significantly different but 100Mbps and 10Gbps (except if you're shuttling files every so often) is already at the point of diminishing returns. Maybe there's a consumer use case that changes this in a few years, but everyone should focus on latency first. Unfortunately, there isn't much of a focus here - whether due to technical reasons or due to... ISP politics reasons (peering and transit fights are "fun" to watch, and is something that an average person is unaware of, even if they knew about corporate lobbying politics).

I think the reason it's not discussed by consumer ISPs is because the big guys are using a wide range of technologies, from DSL (yes, still) to cable to fiber. They don't want to talk about how their 200Mbps cable customers have significantly worse internet than their 200Mbps fiber customers. If they did that, they'd have to go deploying fiber into all the places that use other technologies.

I'm in an area where Google Fiber offers 2 Gbps service.

Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the 2 Gbps service doesn't allow for (or didn't, when I looked into it) the use of your own routing equipment -- you have to use the wireless router that they provide.

The 5+ Gbps blog explicitly mentions being able to use your own routing equipment, so that's a promising sign. I'm not in the regions that Google Fiber explicitly listed, but I'll be keeping an eye on future announcements.

You may already know this, but while not 'officially supported' Google will not block you from bringing your own equipment on their 2Gbe service.

The ONT on a stick (aka SFP) plugged into the Technicolor manufacturered router Google provides can me moved to other routers. The difficulty is that instead of negotiating at the usual 1 or 10Gbe, the SFP negotiates at 2.5Gbe (commonly known as Multigig). There's next to no hardware on the market that supports Multigig, this makes it seems like no other equipment works with Google's service.

I wish they just went straight to SFP+ but I'm sure there are good reasons why they did not.

There's a lot of 2.5G copper stuff on the market now - lots being driven by 6E access points.

I assume there's no reason that you can't use a 2.5G copper SFP module to connect to this also?

I would assume all those modules would be 2.5G to SFP+? I've never seen a standard SFP module do more than one 1G. If what the OP is saying is correct, the way Google is doing it is very odd.

> If what the OP is saying is correct, the way Google is doing it is very odd.

2.5Gbps SFP is technically a standard, but since it came out after SFP+ has been standardised no-one really bothered to use it.

Despite loathing Google, I did use Google Fiber for a short time because I hate Comcast more, and those were my only options at my old apartment. These days, I use a 5G home connection. It’s perfectly “fine”. I actually have lower latency than my last cable connection.

Chattanooga's EPB has had 10Gbps to the home since 2015. Come on, Google! You can do better.

This is sort off Topic. Getting 5Gbps / 8Gbps or even 10 / 25Gbps Internet to home isn't that difficult once you have the fibre laid out.

But having reasonable price for 2.5G / 5G / 10G Ethernet? 10G is still very much Prosumer category pricing. But even 2.5/5G aren't exactly consumer friendly either. And I never had enough time to look into this. Is this because of SerDes pricing? Volume of 2.5G / 5G? Or Controller complexity that needs to order of magnitude higher cost?

Holy balls do I hope they roll this out in Austin soon!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com