Google Fiber is coming to Las Vegas
fiber.googleblog.com
fiber.googleblog.com
The author of the press release is under the mistaken belief that unchanged broadband pricing is a good thing.
From the linked price page:
1gig: $70/mo
2gig: $100/mo
5gig: $125/mo
8 gig: $150/mo
There was a time I would have been insanely jealous of any fiber option at all here in the Bay Area, and I know how hard it is to find fiber anywhere in the US, even still here in many parts of the Bay.
But when the fiber actually arrives, it becomes clear how cheap it is to provide.
When AT&T finally rolled fiber to my house in ~2019 it was $80/mo for 1gig symmetrical.
And you know AT&T's shareholders are still making money hand over fist at that price, because today, I pay Sonic $50 per month for 10gig symmetrical.
I once paid that ridiculous $149/mo for the 1gig Comcast service until I got tired of the bill that I was really only paying for bragging rights, and went back to 250Mbps.
IIRC all their asymmetric internet packages are based on their coax deployments. It's not a dumb tradeoff in the coax space even though I don't like their choices of how much in each direction they usually do. There are only so many useful channels they can deploy in a given physical network. They could offer more upload bandwidth at the expense of download bandwidth but generally speaking most customers don't upload much and value download bandwidth over upload.
Video calls, sure, but still most platforms are still averaging a handful of megabits. Most people don't have high quality webcams at home, so really moving to 10Mbit+ uploads isn't really going to do much for them.
Meanwhile people will likely stream HD video for hours and hours on their TVs, averaging 15+Mbit. They'll stream music which is like a basic online game but only a single direction. They'll download 100GB game downloads, scroll social media, etc. Do you think the average user uploads more media or downloads more media to social media?
I'd agree something like 20Mbit is probably too low for even an average US household, but in the end I'd say most consumers are still going to care more about download speed than upload speed. Just look around here in the comments and notice lots of people talk about how a fast connection is great because of large game downloads and what not; few people are justifying fast connections to home users because of sending data.
I use a lot of my upload data, but I'm definitely not a normal household. I hop on my VPN and stream data from my SDRs remotely, which will use hundreds of megabits. I host media streaming servers. I do remote gaming from my gaming PC to my handheld sometimes. I have some other applications I connect to while out. But I'm definitely not normal. And yet I still on average have 5-10x down than up usage.
I mean if I was forced to sit and stare at a download screen then sure it’d be worth it to me. However even at 2+Gigabit I’m not going to sit and stare about the download screen so it’s kind of meaningless how long it takes. I’ve got plenty of other stuff to do for a while.
All these folks talking about >$100 for slower speeds is insane in 2025.
I could get ~1Gbs for £35.
I don't know what I would do if I was forced to go back to BT, so I can relate.
A 1Gb internet package would let you have a dozen 40Mbit streams (480Mb) and still have another several hundred megabits for gaming, http traffic, etc.
At the time, it was still cheaper than a T1 (1.544mbps).
Fortunately I was able to get accepted into the StarLink early access around that time and managed to cancel the DSL. Even though ATT clearly did not want my business anymore, they still made sure I had to jump through countless hoops to finally disconnect and terminate billing. I had to sit on the phone for a couple of hours, being transferred between phone reps and managers until I finally got one person with the authority to shut my account down.
My personal longest issue with ISP's was when the software config once went wrong in their side, took me a month and allmost daily phone calls until I got to 4th line support that was an actual techie who fixed it in 10 minutes.
Most top end packages are 1G and go for between $45-70 depending on the reseller. But you can get it pretty much anywhere that qualifies as a decent sized town.
(We do have close-to a monopoly on the backbone, which is good for coverage but bad for speeds, looks like they are finally starting to role out full 1G/1G this year https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/08/openreach-reve... )
Not totally sure why.
(And while all Anglo countries are NIMBY, Ireland is the most NIMBY, which is why its population is lower now than in the 1800s.)
Uh, are you sure that you haven't disregarded the Great Libertarian Sociological Experiment of 1847 in your reasoning?
“[The Famine] is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence.”
“The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson. That calamity must not be too much mitigated. The greater evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the Irish people.”
I'm not sure that that's correct; modern planning permission as a concept was only really introduced around 1970, at which point the population was 3 million. The population is now 5.2 million. Ireland's depopulation was down to, initially, the famine, followed by almost constant economic crisis from the 19th century to the 1990s. We tend to emigrate very enthusiastically (this is particularly visible in the 1980s, when population actually _dropped_ for much of the decade).
(I do think that clearly with more sensible planning the population would now be somewhat higher, but you're probably talking an extra couple of hundred thousand.)
Interestingly, though, expectations about population did contribute to our current housing and infrastructure crisis. Around 2010, a lot of long-range planning was done on the basis that the population would reach something like 4.8 million by 2040; of course, this turned out to be wildly incorrect.
The estimate seems to have been based on the theory that, after the financial crisis, Ireland would go back to our historical pattern of decades-long recessions and mass emigration, now that that has failed to happen, well, all that planning is dramatically wrong. Ireland now completes more housing units per capita per year than any other OECD country, and it's still not enough. There's a massive housing deficit, the railways are over capacity with no relief until at least 2026, electricity and water infrastructure are under tremendous pressure, and so on. All of this is essentially a consequence of assumptions made 15 years ago that we'd just go back to mass emigration, and thus it was reasonable to have a decade where ~nothing got built.
On top of that, Virgin Media is upgrading their existing 18m home DOCSIS network to FTTH plus their nexfibre build will take them to probably 25m+ homes.
So by the end of the decade the average UK household is going to have access to at least 3 separate FTTH networks.
Only OR FTTH is not symmetrical btw. Everyone else offers symmetrical and YouFibre offers 8/8gig.
Am surprised to see Gb coverage that low!
Edit: that link is super interesting but I think they need to break it down a bit more. E.g. CityFibre, YouFibre and LightSpeed all seem to be counted under Altnets but all are very different setups.
10 Gbps is available in increasingly smaller cities (e.g. it was recently made available in a city of 100,000 near me).
Both priced at about $30/mo
Also as an SF resident with no realistic alternative to Comcast cable, I'd appreciate a provider who didn't try to sneak price increases onto my bill a couple of times a year.
In a healthy market I wouldn't expect big margins for sellers, but honestly if someone's making insane profits by selling me a product or service that's excellent and better than my non-empty set of alternatives I'm not going to complain.
Caveat: I work from home so I keep my comcast subscription as a backup and have a router with automatic failover. I would say this is not worth it for most people and just Monkeybrains is sufficent.
Any opinions on this from a user experience point of view?
In practice, I think I've seen only a handful of people use them directly. It is soo conspicuous using one of these in broad daylight. Lots of people use the ports for charging, though. Also how NYC is this:
> Each Link has cameras and over 30 vibration sensors to sense if the kiosk has been hit by an object
I don’t think the idea is going to sell in this day and age.
For a laptop I could just occupy a coffee shop WiFi, and get coffee.
(Oh, also if you request a /48 IPv6 prefix, you'll get it. Never had that work on AT&T's $90.75-after-fees plan.)
The real advantage in having Google Fiber move into Vegas (or anywhere else) is they they're creating competition. It's silly how fast broadband prices plummeted here with the 1-2 punch of 2 fiber providers coming in in relatively short order. All of a sudden, whoops, the major providers can profitably provide service at a fraction of the price! Who knew?
My 1G/1G CenturyLink plan is $65/mo, which beats Google's $70 plan for the same thing in the same market, but I've had this plan for 5 years and it is no longer available.
The assigned IPs are dynamic, and hosting from a residence is probably against the ToS. I've never checked to see if any ports are blocked, but I know that UDP 51820 (Wireguard) is open.
At least the Vegas place has IPv6 provided by the same ISP. I've got another place in greater Los Angeles with Frontier fiber. It costs more money for half the bandwidth, and they have NO IPv6 support, or any plans for IPv6 support. For that location, I use an HE IPv6 (RFC4312) tunnel, which generally works fine, except many websites such as YouTube require authentication before they provide content. They're probably countering the AI training bots, and have flagged the HE IPv6 blocks.
My neighborhood was one of the first in Wake county that AT&T lit up, probably because it's one of the neighborhoods that re-used Bellsouth fiber[1]. It's been reliable service. No trouble with IPv6. I could've done without the AT&T privacy breach though.
Meanwhile Google didn't finally have fiber to my address till last year, many years after I got the free T-shirt[2] from them.
[1]: https://hack-gpon.org/ont-nokia-g-010g-a/
[2]: https://www.itbinsider.com/fall-fashion-fiber-shirts-are-her...
As with all rural infrastructure, low population density means high costs, especially if not everyone is a customer but you still have to run a cable past their house.
My rate is a little better than that- I think $120 for 150 or 200 symmetric- but it's still simultaneously more expensive than what I'd pay in the city and a far better deal than what we had before. Eventually they'll maybe make some money back on what I'm sure was a not inexpensive outlay just getting it to my house in the first place.
Once they actually get the service in place the final price-per-gbps is more a factor of physics than of corporate greed.
In France, the price for a symetrical 8 Gbit/s optical fiber is 50€/month (about $52) at the two fastest and most expensive companies! It's also 50€/month for professionals.
Amazing what an administration with a goal can achieve…
You’re buying into the narrative if you truly think race has anything to do with it. Race is a tool, and it was made a tool, which sucks.
Works out pretty well.
You say that like it (edit to clarify: "it" = "unchanged broadband pricing") is a bad thing, though. Sure, it'd be nice if we had 1 Gb internet for <$30 like Denmark or wherever. But I will gladly sing praises to GFiber's speeds and stable prices given the hellhole of Comcast and CenturyLink I was previously living with.
Existing national ISPs just have inbuilt advantages that a newcomer cannot replicate or can't replicate cheaply. This is the result of decades of lobbying state and local governments.
Take something as simple as where you run cables in the streets. You basically have two choices: you dig trenches or you string up cables on a pole. There is no best answer here as it depends on a lot of factors like weather and climate, local soil conditions, natural disaster risks (eg wildfires, earthquakes), distances involved and existing infrastructure and legislation.
So imagine in a given area trenching is uneconomical. This could be just because there's a lot of limestone rock in the soil so it's difficult, slow and expensive to actually dig the trenches and this may be complicated by local noise ordinances, permitting, surveying, existing trenches and so on. So you end up stringing up cables on poles.
Who owns those poles? Is it the city? Is it AT&T? You may have rights to string up cables on those poles but the devil really is in the details. You might have to apply for a permit for each and every pole separately. They might be approved by the city but then how does the work happen? Can you do it? Maybe. But you might need AT&T (or whoever) to do something first like move their own cables. Maybe several other companies have to move cables first. Maybe each company has 90 days to do that work and this can add up so it can take over a year just to be able to put a cable up on a pole. And you can't really do any work until all the poles are available. That's just how fiber works.
And where do you run the fiber too? Do you run it back possibly several miles to a POP? There are advantages in that but obvious disadvantages like cost and just overall cable size and weight. Or do you use local substations? If so, what kind of building is that? Is it a large building that residents find "ugly" and object to on aesthetic grounds or maybe even environmental grounds that means more delays? How much does that cost? Is AT&T grandfathered in with their substations and nodes?
And then after you've done all that and you have your last mile fiber, how many customers do you get? Roughly 30-40% of houses get fiber by how many companies are you splitting that pool with? You have to amortize your entire network build over your projected customer base and it makes a massive difference if it's 10% of dwellings or 15% or 30% or 40%.
In industry parlance this is called an "overbuild" and is inherently economically inefficient. It'll actually raise the cost of every ISP because each will get a lower overall take up rate.
That's why the best solution is municipal broadband that either provides service or acts as a wholesaler to virtual ISPs.
The cost of running a fiber cable from a POP to a house has only gone up over th eyears and it's the majority of your cost. That's really why Internet costs haven't come down. And also why the best Internet in the US is municipal broadband and it isn't even close.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
Heck, anywhere above a few gigs, I feel like you'd start getting bottlenecked by whatever's on the other end of the connection.
Still, pretty cool to hear that the option exists!
- Download games from Steam
- Download or upload AI models and datasets from Huggingface and similar
- Any kind of remote work where you are regularly working with multi GB files
Where symmetric broadband is a pipe dream. And the lived reality in the city is 100Mps down and something like 17Mbps up. I mean it still works for everything. But in comparison other people are living in some kind of techno utopia.
At least our banking system is modern so we can pay for our shitty internet without having to fax cheques /s
It's certainly convenient my games, AI models, cloud backups, and large file downloads tend to go many times faster than when I had gigabit but I'd by no means be crying on the sides of the road about how long things take to upload/download if I had to go back.
The biggest thing you'll run into is algorithms designed to increase performance for limited connections don't scale infinitely. E.g. updating games on the Epic Games Store tends to be core limited (even on an overclocked 9800X3D) rather than bandwidth limited because it puts so much effort into the encryption and differential updating with the assumption "it'll be fast enough to not worry about". Even in those cases... it's nice to max them out without even having contention on everything else you're doing.
for the last year I've been downloading Large Language Models through LM Studio's Huggingface browser, and I'm glad I can do that quickly
and pirating movies and tv shows again
other things that rely on some data don't get disrupted either
I'd like to run some service from my place, but I probably won't.
For one person with one computer it’s probably delightful overkill. For a modern family unit it can make everyone happy.
High speed internet opens up new use cases open up , for example, if I had a 10 gig symmetrical connection I could run my own self hosted CI runner for free* with my old hardware lying about and recoup my investment.
Any sort of spatial computing will need lot more speed and/or local assets to be useful - with today’s speed all we can reliably get is what Facebook is doing with metaverse .
It is not a necessity but a nicety.
Nothing, really! It's cheaper than 1gig, and my ISP doesn't even give me the option of paying for less. I could save about $10 a month to downgrade to AT&T 300Mbps fiber though (which would have data caps, bad privacy policy).
I'd be happy down to say 250/250. Gigabit feels like "all I could ever need" (for now), and 10gig is fantasyland.
It kind of is.
In a reasonably competitive ISP market, I'd expect the plans to slowly increase in price over time and significantly increase in speed over time. Keeping the basic tier at $70 is a good thing, even without a speed change. Gigabit is fast enough to still be solid in another 13 years.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20131218122258/https://fiber.goo...
I could go dig up my old bills
Edit : yeah just found my bill from october 2019 and I was charged 50 dollars. They quietly raised the price ghen claimed it was always 70 dollars. Obnoxious.
> And you know AT&T's shareholders are still making money hand over fist at that price
I'm familiar with Gbps and GB/s, one is 8x of another. But what is "gig"?
- Regular dynamic IPv4 + static IPv6 /48, 1G/1G, 10G/10G or 25G/25G (speed is your choice): $71.56/month - CG-NAT IPv4 + static IPv6 /56, 500M/100M if you don't have fiber available or 1G/1G if you do: $48.63/month
The higher speeds have higher setup and equipment costs but the monthly costs are all the same.
I have the 25Gbps service and can actually get those speeds outside my ISP's network: https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/84db310f-2caa-4564-b5ff-b...
Also fun: they can offer you a BGP session so you can use your own IP space with your home internet connection: https://lists.init7.net/hyperkitty/list/swinog@lists.swinog....
For anyone wondering how this is possible/economical when the US is so expensive:
- The last-mile connectivity is treated as a monopoly and providers who install the infrastructure are obligated to offer fair (not free) access to their competitors - this ensures price competition.
- Init7 successfully argued in federal court that P2MP topologies are anti-competitive, so can't be the sole implementation in new infrastructure deployments - this enabled them to install their own hardware on the other end of a customer's fiber, so they can simply swap a 1G SFP for a 10G SFP or a 25G SFP and offer higher speeds.
In 2017, basically all the Google Fiber software teams went on hiatus (mine included). I can't speak to the timing or rationale but my theory is that the Google leadership couldn't decide if the future of Internet was wired or wireless and a huge investment in wired may be invalidated if the future Internet was wired so rather than guessing wrong, the leadership simply decided to definitely lose by mothballing the whole thing.
At that time, several proposed cities were put on hiatus, some of which had already hired local people. In 2019, Google Fiber exited Louisville, KY, paying penalties for doing so [1]. That really seemed like the end.
I also speculated that Google had tried or was trying to sell the whole thing. I do wonder if the resurrection it seems to have undergone is simply a result of the inability to find a buyer. I have no information to suggest that one way or the other.
There were missteps along the way. A big example was the TV software that was originally an acquisition, SageTV [2]. Somebody decided it would be a good idea to completely rewrite this Java app into Web technologies on an embedded Chrome instance on a memory-limited embedded CPU in a set-top box. Originally planned to take 6 months, it took (IIRC) 3.5+ years.
But that didn't actually matter at all in the grand scheme of things because the biggest problem and the biggest cost was physical network infrastructure. It is incredibly expensive and most of the issues are hyperlocal (eg soil conditions, city ordinances) as well as decades of lobbying by ISPs of state and local governments to create barriers against competition.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/googl...
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/googl...
What does a hiatus entail in this case? Did these teams all just stop working on Fiber stuff and sit around all day hoping they would be given something to do?
and still that box was better than what most fiber folk have delivered to date.
At least some good science was done about how ISPs really work... and published.
https://netdevconf.org/1.1/talk-measuring-wifi-performance-a...
I think you mean "they advanced their amazing bet".
https://fiber.google.com/blog/2016/10/advancing-our-amazing-...
I worked on the "misstep" with a small team, and it’s wild to see Fiber still around and even expanding to new cities. As far as I can tell, the set-top box software had nothing to do with why Fiber was scaled down. Also, usability surveys showed people really liked the GUI!
The client supported on-demand streaming, live TV, and DVR on hardware with... let’s call them challenging specs. Still, it turned out to be a pretty slick app. We worked hard to keep the UI snappy (min 30 FPS), often ditching DOM for canvas or WebGL to squeeze out the needed performance. A migration to Cobalt [1], a much lighter browser than embedded Chromium, was on the table, but the project ended before that could happen.
Personally, it was a great experience working with the Web Platform (always a solid bet) on less-traditional hardware.
--
Those mistakes in Louisville were huge. Literally street destroying mistakes that city Civil Engineers predicted and fought from happening in the first place, but Google Fiber did them anyway. Left a huge bill to the city taxpayers. It wasn't bigger news and a bigger upset because of NDAs and other contract protection things involved, but as an outsider to those NDAs/contracts, I can say it was an incredibly bad job on too many fronts, and should have left Google Fiber with a much more tarnished reputation than it did.
We lived on the edge of the city, and it was insanely hard to find a provider.
I knew internet was super cheap in Ukraine and was going to leave Ukraine in the following years, so getting a 1Gbps fiber as an all-time-at-home person was a great idea.
I ended up finding 2 providers that had fiber, and 1 of them had 1Gbps.
I was super happy to have symmetrical 1Gbps for $15 a month for the time I could spend there.
Here, in Vancouver, I am happy to have 250Mbps/15Mbps for $40 per month.
I have it - signed up the day it was available at my house. One of the few Google things I'm pretty sure will continue to exist.
(I can't repeat it because I forgot most of it.)
This seems to be Google Fiber's purpose. Spurring the telcos into investing to maintain share.
It's clear now that high speed fiber is the future. Cable companies aren't upgrading their networks anymore. It's unclear if the wireless companies will be able to support 10gig service. And the single mode fiber laid into the ground a decade or more ago has only increased in value.
But even then, it's not something most people are constantly doing. Maybe a couple of times a month.
I'd still probably go with more than 200Mbit for a family, but knowing how many of the families I know use their home internet they're rarely coming even close to routinely maxing out a 500Mbit connection even with several kids.
Well, because that's all they had access to.
These days a 200Mbit connection would handle five or so users doom scrolling social media with videos and images while a few TVs play 4K streaming media while smart home devices chirp home all the secrets in the house and the door bell cam uploads a few clips every hour and the Sonos is playing a few different songs in a few different zones throughout the house for ambiance.
Is that because all you can do is doom scroll on an internet connection, or are there higher bandwidth possibilities waiting for 10gig home internet service to arrive?
To some extent making that argument is like Bill Gates saying "All anyone will ever need is 640k."
According to the FCC, in December 2023 something like 79% of all households had at least 100Mbit fixed internet, ~24% had 940Mbit or better. The NCTA claims 91% have access to gigabit or better. I do agree they're probably overselling that number (cable companies maps are often trash), but it wouldn't surprise me if it was really something more like 80% or more have some kind of access to gigabit but might just be cost prohibitive for what they care to spend.
https://www.fcc.gov/internet-access-services-reports
https://www.ncta.com/industry-data/91-of-us-homes-have-acces...
If these households aren't even really utilizing their gigabit connections very much today, what makes you think they're just waiting for 10 gigabit connectivity? What applications would they even really do with 10gig connectivity with hardware they'll have in the next five years, something normies would really care to do?
By and large people don't even care that much about 4K or ultra-high-quality video streaming. The two most popular Netflix plans are Standard and Standard with Ads. Blu-Rays are dead. VR acceptance is still pretty slow.
Even something like cloud gaming is really only using like 40-60Mbit of throughput for even a 4K gaming stream. Quadruple it, we're at 240Mbit. And even if we did ship 10gig home internet, it's not like we're just going to stop compressing the stream; a 4K 120Hz HDR stream is going to be ~32Gbit. Average household size in the US is about 3.23, so all three and a third people could be using 240Mbit and still have another 280Mbit of throughput.
Don't get me wrong, some percentage of home users would use a multi-gig home internet connection. But even though I can subscribe to a 5gig internet package and I'm more on the enthusiast end of things with a family with multiple kids and several 6E AP's with wired backhaul, hosting multiple applications and SDRs from my home, it's just not worth it to me to bother paying for it over the gigabit plan. Even if it was only $10/mo more I probably wouldn't jump to the higher plan. It wouldn't change my access or usage at all while costing another $120/yr.
Sell me on a 10gig home internet plan over a 1gig home internet plan. How is it going to radically change my usage with the kind of hardware most consumers actually buy and use? For that matter, sell me on a 1gig plan over a 500Mbit plan for a typical US household, let's say two adults and two teenage-ish kids. Would they really even see much of a difference in their day to day lives?
Back in the 90s it was pretty obvious what could be unlocked by having an always on multi-megabit internet connection over a single dial up connection for a household. It was just very prohibitively expensive for most people. I wouldn't say its anywhere near as obvious what benefits are to be had for a household today to jump from 500Mbit to 1gig or especially 1gig to 10gig.
It also is another branch of Alphabet so not directly in the Google mgmt chain.
Though it looks like Alphabet is looking to sell it off, according to a reuters article Feb 5th, 2024.
Hopefully good internet service comes as a result of this?
In contrast, for almost all other venues, providing networking is the responsibility of their owner, and they plan their networking gear not for the "one conference to rule them all" but for your everyday trade show.
Convention wireless is a pain in the ass as a whole, and I've seen it both from venue-hosted networks and privately-operated-on-site networks being deployed as an overlay.
It might or might not be connected to the show floor issues, but it's relevant information for a bunch of the in-room internet experience to get significantly worse over time. It suggests that they are not even trying, so the fact that convention wireless is hard is not an excuse.
So if they had, for example, a 10 Gbps link for the building - that's only 2.5 Mbps per room if everyone wants to use it. Fine when 98% of guests don't want to use it, totally inadequate if all your guests want to use it.
And as I understand things, if someone's offering you a 10 gigabit link for $150 they're relying on you only using it a tiny % of the time. So if you put your 4000 room hotel on a Google Fiber link you'll probably run into the secret download limits after a day or two. And the price for a non-oversold 10-gigabit link seems to be "call our enterprise sales team for pricing"
It's a skill issue from the hotel owners. They can't be bothered to fix their stuff.
For a casino, they probably already have spare conduit or dark fiber to a close by POP so they don't even need LoS microwave links.
Efficiently distributing all of that bandwidth across the many, many, many different wireless access points efficiently is an art and science all on its own and that's probably the aspect most people are complaining about.
How much does it cost to get a 100+ gigabit link set up for a 4 day long event?
I haven't been involved in the last decade, but I'm kind of known as "the guy that makes PyCon networking work", and it can easily be $5K to $10K (from memory) for the hotel, even if you are providing all your own connectivity and gear. I haven't had to do it in recent years because venue Internet has gotten much, much better.
(benign) peak-to-average problem - I'll go ahead and just assume that defcon attendees use a lot more internet bandwidth than the average Vegas-goer, so during defcon the network is overwhelmed, but the rest of the year the capacity is adequate. Upgrading the links to satisfy the peak (defcon) traffic load costs the casinos significant money, but gives minuscule benefit since the rest of the year they only need to support the much lower average load.
(malign) the casinos don't actually want you to have good internet because they don't want you staying in your room internetting - they want you down on the floor gambling. Other non-gambling amenities (shows, restaurants, etc.) are mostly time limited - you only spend so much time eating, and shows are only a couple hours each - and can be a differentiator that draws people to a specific casino (because of specific food/entertainment preferences). Those people then spend the rest of the day gambling at that casino.
"Better" internet it's actually a negative differentiator - people who want to spend all their time infinite-scrolling will gamble less, so casinos don't want to attract them in the first place.
Event venues AND anyplace that might EVER have expense account holding business travelers just want to charge for it. Even if fiber literally rolled right up to the side of the building, it'd be resold by either the hotel or a 3rd party vendor with a focus on profit rather than just being good.
Admittedly the only hotel I stayed in that was considered high end was the Conrad in Los Angeles.
Non anecdotally, I did a search and I couldn’t find a hotel that still charged separately for WiFi, just a “resort fee” that everyone pays.
Some hotels do charge for “premium” WiFi.
I also had an issue 6 or so years ago where Google Fiber would block sites that did not have both an IPv6 and IPv4 address.
Nonetheless, service has been fine otherwise. I'd say Google Fiber has probably been the second best ISP I have used despite my ever slowly growing hatred of all things Google.
We used to have Spectrum, but switched to Frontier Fiber as soon as it was available, a couple years ago now. Apart from a few hiccups during the first few weeks of service, it's been very reliable.
Cox and CenturyLink are monopolistic criminals and should receive corporate death penalties for their misconduct.
What does seem to matter is variability: latency and jitter, and the stability of the network inside the house (eg wifi contention). The pipe is the least of one's worries, it would seem.
Mesa AZ signed a deal with Google in 2022 and I got fiber installed last summer. It was all new fiber in the streets in my neighborhood too. And I still see lots of constructions signs for it around. Definitely seem to still be growing. Two other new competitors are also in the area.
I would not have accepted the router if there were any strings attached, and they're welcome to take it back if they want to start charging me for it.
I still have the deal.
Edit: I just checked, and Quantum Fiber now offers 2G/1G (two down, one up) fiber in my Vegas neighborhood for $95/mo. They are claiming it's a "lifetime" price guarantee.
I'll keep waiting for Google's 10G fiber.
It seemed really trivial to install, I don't think there's an excuse to not have it everywhere than can have a telephone line.
All the relevant information on one sign.
Google has already actively started soliciting outside investors to spin off Google Fiber. Don't hold your breath. Nothing escapes the Google Graveyard, its gravitational mass is simply too large.
"GFiber has already hired an investment bank to start the process of selling equity in the company, according to a source close to Alphabet's efforts. The future goal is for GFiber to be independent from Alphabet, the source said on condition of anonymity."
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/alphabet-is-s...
Especially because, who would invest in that?
Eventually, one of them did figure out how to get me connected.
This played out over several months
Download speed: 10Gbps
Upload speed: 10Mbps
They offer 1 Gbps download in my area with 20 Mbps upload. And it comes with a 1.2 TB limit.
EDIT: I'm wrong. The Xfinity in my area is on cable.
Thanks for the correction.