Google Fiber
fiber.google.com
fiber.google.com
There may be nothing wrong intrinsically with controlling content and infrastructure, but it seems to be bad for consumers generally, as exhibited by Comcast[0]. And while a high-speed competitor to local cable monopolies is exciting, I worry about trading one dictator for another just because there's some competition in the transition period from the old guard to the new.
Is there some safeguard in place Kansas City and other fiber recipients have arranged to prevent Google from having the power to exert cable-esque control? Not rhetorical, genuinely curious.
EDIT: I'd like to make it clear that I'm not anti-Google, I don't think they're evil, or abuse consumer data, or are actively trying to become the next Comcast. I am, however, expressing concern over the position of power they will find themselves in if Fiber takes off. So far I've seen a lot of comments suggesting Google is not evil, to which I agree, but I haven't seen any indicating that there are adequate checks in place to (relatively easily) prevent the abuse of power.
[0]http://scrawford.net/blog/comcastnbcu-will-raise-costs-for-c...
I don't know about you, but I'll take Google over Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, etc. any day of the week, regardless of their conflicts of interest. Google has a proven track record of doing things in my favor.
The current, publicly acknowledged level of intercourse between Google and the U.S. Federal Government is already worrisome. Perhaps your data has been a part of those exchanges, perhaps it hasn't. You and I don't know.
Now, imagine that Google begins relaying traffic unrelated to their services on behalf of internet users. It isn't hard to fathom that Google will come under the same pressures to give the U.S. government access to user traffic as have Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and others.
That could just be the tip of the iceberg though. How long before the company caves in and decides to start including user internet traffic analysis into the search engine's signaling and ranking? Would it still be doing you a favor?
Edit: typo
We've known for a fact that companies like AT&T have been working closely with the NSA for years. So it seems like Google is the better choice here.
Do I believe Google tells the whole truth? I'm not 100% convinced, but I can't know that. What I do know is that even if they tell 5% of the truth about government interaction with your data, this is several times more information than AT&T, Comcast, or Verizon tell you. Most of the time your data is simply handed over on a simple request. At least Google attempts/pretends to put up a fight.
Is it worrisome that I would accept 5% of the truth? Yes. But that goes to show how shady everyone else is. While immoral cooperation has no excuse, I would still point more blame to the government that makes the requests in the first place. Always assume your security is lost the minute the data touches a public pipe unless you take deliberate attempts to secure it.
I could be mistaken, but I think the PATRIOT act permits the US government to obtain your personal information without you being informed.
Thus far.
The point still stands, as a principle – that sort of combination of function/power and interests has, historically, not been one that has resulted in good things for consumers, in the long run.
Don't forget all the horror stories of trying to sort out customer support issues. Given the range of issues that supplying internet to houses can have, this would discourage me a lot.
etc.
When there is no competition then companies can afford to be lazy or ignore customer complaints. AdSense has no real competition, so Google just doesn't care if they have one less customer.
In the local access area, fiber from Google would increase competition, so would be a good thing.
(Or is this sarcasm fail somewhere?)
Not to be Pollyana; Google needs to be watched. So we all keep each other in check. The following disruptive moves benefit Google _and_ your average Joe:
1. Reduce bandwidth costs. Google pays to send data and we pay to receive it. This is just your classic elimination of the middleman, in this case the anti-competitive backbone and last-mile carriers. In theory the first to benefit from this are the startups with large bandwidth bills today.
2. Reduce delays associated with new tech. Google wants new tech like a larger TCP Initial Congestion Window [1], IPv6, SPDY / HTTP 2.0, or Strict Transport Security [2] to happen faster. As long as your average Joe has a fast enough pipe, these are a win-win. The lag in adoption comes from slow-moving risk-averse players, such as incumbent backbone providers.
3. Reduce mobile bandwidth costs. Google is already heavily invested in mobile broadband clients. In especially congested areas like New York, anything to reduce mobile broadband costs benefits Android first: the top tier of customers who don't feel the costs are probably using iOS.
There are more win-win situations but those are my top 3.
[1] http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tcpm-initcwnd-00 [2] http://dev.chromium.org/sts
There is absolutely no reason that any local government in the US worth its weight in salt couldn't start a fiber to the home initiative where they take a tax hike for a few years to pay off laying fiber to everyone in the district. They could contract with neighbor regions, or with private long line services like Level3 to provide internet access, and then nobody gets ripped off when they get a telecom monopoly in their area, because it is a publicly owned utility.
It is getting to the point where internet access is so ubiquitous and essential that we need to see the rise of public fiber and wifi to enable competition in an area where for the last 30 years there has only been collusion and monopoly abuse. I consider myself a social libertarian but we have proven time and time again in history you can not effectively privatize infrastructure and expect long term benefits to society from that.
Even when governments build infrastructure they typically contract that work out to private companies. I'll let you decide whether government contractors and bureaucracies are preferable to making the guy who built it have his skin in the game.
More importantly, if someone else wants to build it, as long as they follow rational rules (that can be imposed ex post facto) it is irrational for the taxpayer to clamour to pay for it.
We. Can. Not. Afford. It.
In case you haven't been paying attention:
Unemployment is high, so new taxes are tougher to sell than usual, and income tax revenue is declining.
Home values have just taken a big hit, so property tax revenue is declining.
The housing market is having a difficult time clearing in many areas; i.e. prices are still too high and there's a surplus of homes, which sit abandoned. This stretches local services (fires, copper theft, copper theft of e.g. gas lines which causes fires, homeless, drug activity, etc.).
Expensive pensions, healthcare, etc. cause costs for government employees to keep going up.
In short, state and local governments are overextended and are feeling a need to cut services, not expand them. The federal government is too, to some extent, but they can essentially print money.
Of course, these are generalizations; they obviously won't apply to every locality.
Laying fiber would create jobs all over the country, not only by employing companies to lay the fiber, but by creating work for the companies that manufacture the fiber. More people working means more tax revenue and it means they have money to spend elsewhere, which in turn creates additional jobs in local regions - once again increasing tax revenues.
What the US cannot afford is to continue to cut federal, state, and local jobs when there is already not enough demand in the private sector to provide anything close to full employment.
> What the US cannot afford is to continue to cut federal, state, and local jobs when there is already not enough demand in the private sector to provide anything close to full employment.
Whether creating jobs should be a goal of government, or merely a side effect of implementing policies, depends on your politics. (It's as much a question of "big-government" vs. "small-government" as "left" vs. "right".)
Which is why they should issue voted-upon bonds, instead of tax incentives to the corps.
Fiber is a benefit to businesses. When my city installed a fiber line with the assistance of a large regional credit union headquartered here, we also saw a couple data centers and co-location facilities move in. The lines paid for themselves in a more than reasonable time frame.
In reality, the big thing holding back municipal Internet access or the installation of high speed lines is not the lack of money in the government (the government doesn't need to pay a dime). It's that the government is willingly allowing the existing local telco to maintain their monopoly with bans on the installation of new cable. Make it cheap and easy to drop new lines in and the market will expand to fill the desire.
You can use bonds to pay for fiber, because fiber is infrastructure (like water, electricity, roads).
Here's how I would like to see it: the City provides fiber infrastructure, and charges a base fee for it. This gets your traffic to some termination point(s). If you want access to the Internet, you pay a third party to carry your traffic to/from the Internet past those termination points. It'd be an open market, so carriers would try to undercut each other.
Same thing with maglev trains along the east and west seaboards. They cost a ton, but in 50 years they would usher in new eras of mobility and an order of magnitude less cost to transport goods extremely quickly.
Of course it would be preferable to have true structural separation in service providers, having a competitor that has interests that are not aligned with most content publishers is a pretty good consolation prize.
While Google has products that overlap with legacy content publishers, that doesn't appear to have made Google enthusiastic about keeping bandwidth prices up, and content under tight control.
The whole market is becoming vertical. There is a war going on who gets to extort content providers, by controlling the access to consumers.
The hardware vendors can control access and demand a slice (apple, amazon). The operating system vendors can control access and demand a slice (microsoft, google). The connection providers can control access and demand a slice (phone/cable companies).
Here in Holland, we now have net neutrality. But maybe thats not enough. Maybe we need app/media store neutrality as well, by requiring OS vendors to allow side-loading. Maybe we need OS neutrality as well, by demanding HW vendors to offer their machienes "rooted".
For now, Google is pro net neutrality, and has not abused their position. Maybe this is just a defensive step. Neverthless, google, like any other ISP should be forced to treat packets neutrally. But that really should be a law, not a contract.
Maybe? There's no question. Manufacturers are already abusing these holes.
The disgraceful FRAND abuses, the privacy abuses, the anti-competitive expansion of Google Search. Hence why they are under multiple investigations by ITC, EU, US governments.
So it is far better to assume NOBODY should be trusted.
When has Google, in and of itself, abused FRAND? The only actions I know of happening on FRAND patents are things grandfathered in from motorola - are you blaming those on Google? I think it's far too early to judge Google's behavior wrt to patents. We have to see what they do in their own right.
At this point the law suit is way past the phase of negotiating licensing fees and I doubt very much that it is possible to rewind it back to there even if Google wanted to (which I don't see why they would; they know that Apple is intent on banning their devices - Apple's goal is nothing less than the complete destruction of Android as a product, not negotiating reasonable licensing fees).
So to be clear you're talking about the inertia regarding the Motorola suit, not any specific action taken by Google executives. So they've been "evil" for two months. I call shenanigans here: you're spinning. No one sane would indict a giant corporate entity on this kind of evidence.
Thanks for your consistent concern trolling about Google anyway.
[1] http://mediacenter.motorola.com/Press-Releases/Google-Acquir...
I haven't used Chrome with AdBlock in maybe a year or two, so this might be out of date. But that's what it used to be like, and that's where the perception is coming from.
Chrome extension apis have to be explicitly designed and developed, and backcompat is taken care of, so your extensions don't all break every six weeks when Chrome updates.
In any case, yes Chrome supports extensions that block or modify network requests before they occur: http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/stable/webRequest.h... (and it's been out of experimental for eight months judging by this bug http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=60101)
In addition, Adblock for Chrome has been able to prevent requests from loading using a base webkit api for two years now: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/20/chrome_does_resource...
(Disclosure, I work for Google, but not on anything related to Chrome. I'm just huge fans of the project and its ideals.)
For what it's worth, the FAQ for AdBlock on Chrome claims that it does "actually prevent ads from downloading", and I assume the same is true for (the unrelated) AdBlock Plus on Chrome. http://code.google.com/p/adblockforchrome/wiki/FrequentlyAsk...?
Why not?
> while a high-speed competitor to local cable monopolies is exciting,
It's not just exciting, it's everything. Comcast, TW et al, can get away with being massively valuable enterprises even though they provide the absolute worst service on earth. Any kind of competition for them, can only be a good thing, even if its from another company that controls both content and infrastructure.
Because they will favor transmission of their own content over competing content. See Net Neutrality. This being said, Comcast is already doing this and I trust Google more than the big 3 internet providers.
I agree. I hope this spurs competition, more than anything else.
Consider a service competing with Youtube; will they have the same streaming performance when delivered over Google's fiber as Youtube? It might even just be accidental (say, Google colocates it's services with its fiber infrastructure) - but it could easily give competitors a big disadvantage if they can't get access to the same performance as Youtube has.
This is actually the defense Comcast is using with their IPTV services. They don't have to pay anything to move that data over public lines, so they don't "charge" extra for it (by "charge", I mean putting it against the caps they recently removed). On the other hand, Netflix et al does go across public lines that Comcast does have to pay for, and they do "charge" for that because they themselves are being charged for it.
Local CDNs are troublesome when it comes to the difference between WAN and last-mile prices for content providers/deliverers.
I want fast fiber. I also want to avoid another evil monopoly from taking over the computing landscape. I miss the old, trustworthy, don't-be-evil Google.
It'll be interesting to see if the announcement addresses your concerns.
It's pretty cool. My record so far is to consume 400Mbps, using 4 computers downloading from about 10 places, all wired through gigabit switches.
In practice, though, it doesn't make much difference compared to a 30Mbps cable modem for most consumers:
most streaming video is < 10 Mbps;
large file downloads are generally limited by a server (or somewhere else in the network?), so it's hard to exceed 30-40Mbps download speed;
web browsing feels about the same, because it's limited by round trips of DNS and http requests, not by bandwidth (spdy will help here?);
many consumer-grade NAT boxes (linksys and friends) are capable of only 100-200 Mbps
The one place it's made a big difference so far is uploads. For example, backup to a cloud backup service (backblaze) often goes 50Mbps or higher. But I did have to try several backup services because some were limited on the server side to a few Mbps.
Running services from home could be a use case too, but then you get into reliability of power/etc, and the fact that so far you can't get a static IP address through google fiber.
So for now google fiber is mostly a fast cable modem from a "don't be evil" provider. I think the real disruption will come with new services that don't really exist yet. What kind of new things can be built if there's enough audience?
I have the Asus RT-N66U, which is rated on that chart for 730+ Mbps (of course, QoS will bring that down). Even the AirPort Extreme is rated for 400+ Mbps, but not QoS to speak of.
Also, less than half of the list is above 200mbps, let alone "most" or "much more".
Array.prototype.map.call(document.querySelector('table.chart').querySelectorAll('td.number'), function(speed) { return parseFloat(speed.textContent) > 200 ? '>200' : '<=200'; }).reduce(function(previous, next) { previous[next] = (previous[next] || 0) + 1; return previous; }, {}) => { "<=200": 40, ">200": 37 }
But, recently, they must have made modifications to their system - because I routinely see backup in excess of 15 mbits/second. Highly recommended.
But all of that is missing the point. The internet is not just a better TV with cats - it has true full duplex communication!
It's hard to believe because the monopolies in control of the last mile will generally offer you tons of downstream with little to no upstream. In some cases, the upstream is merely enough to send TCP ACKs for when you use all of your downstream. Its a natural move for these big old companies because upstream traffic from customers is more expensive for them and they are still stuck in the mindset of the "media consumption machine".
Google, of course, realizes that 1Mb of upstream is bad news for Google Hangouts and terrible for uploading 1080p video to YouTube. And all kind of distributed systems benefit tremendously from matching upload and download bandwidth.
But, of course, the problem is that while all of us easily have enough bandwidth to pull down streams of high-quality HD video, the video streams we're trying to pull down are choked into low quality by the sender's lack of upstream bandwidth.
In the next week or so, my downstream will be increasing to 105Mbps at no additional charge[1]. In some markets (mine included) Comcast will be offering 305Mbps downstream service (granted at $300/mo), which is 90% of the bandwidth the DOCSIS 3.0 specification would allow over 8 channels.
Granted, on the opposite end we have Verizon now trying to slowly kill their DSL service and replace it with LTE. [2]
[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/comcas...
[2] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/op-ed-verizon-wil...
Or, if it's just internet then 150/75 is 99$ and 300/65 Mbps is 200$/month from FIOS which would make Comcast a little behind but still reasonable alternative. Which is a lot better than the last time I compared them.
Regarding Verizon, I'd love to have FiOS, but they won't deploy in Boston without major tax breaks, which Boston refuses to offer. FiOS is great if it's available, but it's not in most markets. There aren't many other options in the continental US where you can get 100Mbps service for ~$100/mo if FiOS is unavailable (and for most of the US, that's the case).
The main menu has links to "About", "How to get it", "Plans & Pricing", "Cities", "Help" and a button "Pre-Register"
Also, since that page doesn't seem to indicate the time, the Google fiber blog (http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com/) says it's at 11AM CDT. Also an impressive stat is that they've apparently laid down over a hundred miles of fiber.
What could it mean??!?
OK, I am kidding to some extent. Maybe not. I'd sure like to see them move in a direction that assures users that all services will not be cutoff without recourse for unknown algo violations.
Of course, I'm probably being stupid about that. My network data was probably sold a long time ago. And they have also probably already correlated it with my google account.
But the cure is found in faster service: With fast connections you can host your own services.
What we really need is multiple competitors in connections this fast.
I would love to see how this service compares to the roll out of fibre we are seeing in Australia at the moment. There is a lot of resistance from the opposition as the government is largely funding our new network.
In particular, many commentators claim that rolling out wireless technology is more financially viable then fibre to the home. In Australia we do have a sparse consumer distribution, so the context is a little different, however if google's model is viable (as you would assume) it might make a strong case study for our situation.
Looking forward to seeing how it all progresses.
EDIT: spelling
Nonsense, Australia is one of the most urbanised countries on Earth. We are less dispersed than the USA.
> There is a lot of resistance from the opposition as the government is largely funding our new network.
The government is right that FTTP is the most future-proof technology choice. But the way the project is being run is shameful -- they're carefully hiding the costs and debts behind "commercial-in-confidence" for a company wholly owned by the government.
And the dealing with Telstra, and creation of a new monopoly ... there's lots not to like.
> Nonsense, Australia is one of the most urbanised countries on Earth. We are less dispersed than the USA.
That is a good point. To be fair, I am not fully aware of what our distribution looks like.
Perhaps I should clarify the point I was trying to make.
Whilst it is true that a large proportion of our population reside in urban environments, one of the aims of the fibre roll out here is to reach almost all of the population with fibre to the home.
For those not in urban environments (which is still significant), the geographic spacing is quite large, and I would imagine in that context we are sparsely distributed. Is running fibre to the home in that context a viable option? Hard to say, and perhaps even the google roll out will not give us much more information or real world example then we currently have.
> ... the way the project is being run is shameful
The thing I hope most to see out of the google roll out is how they handle it. I don't know of many data points regarding nation-wide roll out of fibre technology, or any similar infrastructure, in recent times, so the potential to 'see it done right' is an exciting one.
Australia is a bit odd. It is among the lower ones in terms of average density but among the higher in median density. We're very clumped; 89% percent of the population is in urban areas. Compare with densely populated Netherlands, with only 61% percent in urban areas.
Sources: wikipedia, nationmaster.
I don't think anyone claims that wireless isn't cheaper than fibre-to-the-home (FTTH). Some commentators claim it offers similar performance to fibre
(They are wrong: at scale, with a large number of geographically concentrated users wireless doesn't offer anything near fibre performance. Comparing the best wireless case performance - where there is a single client on an uncongested network, against the cheapest available - bandwidth capped - fibre plans is clearly an invalid comparison)
I imagine that's because it says in big letters "Look out for an announcement at google.com/fiber on July 26" which is tomorrow.
The government is LOANING the money and are expecting to make a profit out of the effort.
The clarification is a useful one though.
However, the national broadband network is funded through government loans, but expects to make a profit on the returns from it.
So there is quite a difference in terms of the Government budget. The former are a cost to the budget, with ongoing expense and no expectation of any monetary returns. The latter is forecast to take nothing out of the government budget.
Edit:
Other interesting sprites:
* http://fiber.google.com/static/img/sprite-devices.png
* http://fiber.google.com/static/img/sprite-networks.png
also, tooltip:
http://fiber.google.com/static/img/cities/business_address_e...
Last edit : curl > grep > sed > jsfiddle:
Edit: This looks ominous:
.fooled-image{position:absolute;top:55px;right:-30px;width:160px;height:243px;background:url(/static/img/you_have_been_fooled.png) no-repeat;} http://fiber.google.com/static/css/rel/portal.css?v=18c3b45c08597bad573f68d9f62a28cbWhy does this matter? Well owning the pipe is always a good move especially in the face of net neutrality. But there are all sorts of other tie ins. For one, payments.
Our current payment infrastructure is based around private leased lines. If you really wanted to take on the payments industry you have to start with the infrastructure. Otherwise you are always at the mercy of a credit card processor just shutting you off. When you own the network where the transactions actually flow it is a different story.
Umm..
Credit card processors have other, more obvious ways of shutting you off that taking away a leased line.
The leased lines used for credit card processing are such a minor factor that you can pretty much ignore it. Yes, it is a weird way to do it, and no, if you were building a replacement you wouldn't use leased lines, but that isn't what is holding back payment technologies.
Today Google Wallet is at the mercy of credit cards, but in the future... people will pay their Google Fiber bill with credit cards. I don't see where you're going.
... so that Google can achieve further market domination in the search and search advertising space?
There is probably an upper limit on the number of networks any given city can support, so it's going to be natural for some combination of content sources to be partnered with fiber distribution networks to revenue share.
It's enormously costly to deliver "wireline" fiber to the home service. Most of this is labor cost, but you also can't discount the impact of property taxes and upkeep on infrastructure that is supposed to weather the elements and wildlife (including human) for upwards of 30 years.
Fiber is a great solution but wireless is still the most economical way to deliver access for the "last-mile". If we ever find a way to provide low-cost, high bandwidth wireless service within a one mile radius that doesn't make the NIMBY types have an aneurism, then fiber-to-the-home will seem as quaint as an individual copper pair to every residence.
disclaimer: In 1997-1998 I worked at a municipally owned city utility that was able to deliver 10mbps symmetric Internet access to a development of homes in FL. Bellsouth subsequently had laws passed to prohibit political subdivisions from engaging in the provisioning of telecommunication services.
If you could rig up visible-light laser communications, you wouldn't need the fiber. Fiber's just a convenient container.
Whilst the information carrier, photons, is identical in both cases, the medium is extremely different.
In the case of fibre we have a highly controlled, flexible medium with extremely good quality of service and very little attenuation. This comes at the price of requiring relatively expensive infrastructure between network nodes.
Wireless technology on the other hand travels through air as a medium. You remove the end-to-end infrastructure requirement, but the trade off is much higher attenuation and lower quality of service. Additionally, you require some amount of 'direct line of sight' depending on frequency. Lower (and hence slower) frequencies are able to refract around mountains and even off the outer atmosphere, providing quite good coverage, but visible light has no such capability. Repeater satellites or LOS base stations would be required to effectively use such a frequency.
This is why HAM radios are great for talking to people kilometres away, but can't be used for effective wireless internet, and why hotspots don't cover more than a few hundred metres at most.
That said, your understanding is a bit "off."
Amateur Radio (HAM) has microwave frequencies available for use that would be VERY effective for point-to-point wireless internet. We even have frequencies that are very close to the existing bands and there would be no problem running LTE over those frequencies. The problems with amateur radio are regulatory, not technical.
Generally speaking, the higher the frequency, the higher the attenuation. Of course, the higher frequencies are better suited for the kinds of modulation rates necessary for high bitrate communications. So there's that.
But all of this is besides the point. No technology exists in a vacuum and must compete against others for particular applications and for particular cost models. That's why telecommunications engineers have no hair and bad tempers. This stuff is hard.
For "lower" bitrate communications, wireless is the hands-down winner. The cost to deploy a network for a given level of service to a range of end-stations is just so much easier and cheaper that lots of other nations skipped over building a wireline network and just went straight to wireless. Mobility of the stations is almost a secondary concern.
Once you get to the point where your communications are less intermittent and higher bitrate, it's really a question of how far you need to go and how much/how often you need to communicate.
Lots of LTE stations are connected to a central office (router) via fiber (gigabit ethernet mostly). Lots more are connected via point to point microwave. Backhaul of bandwidth is something you dont hear talked about a lot but it's a big part of why it can be hard to get LTE/4G/WiMax into a particular location. Economics are a big part of that equation.
SO, I wish the Google Fiber guys well and I hope they succeed, but the telecommunications market is so broad and complicated that it would be foolish to look at one company's efforts to shake up a single market and equate that with a sea-change in how the broadband market works.
edit: I met Milo Medin (who is now running Google Fiber) and he offered me a chance to work at @Home way back when. In retrospect, I probably should have pursued it.
I agree that telecommunications is a hard subject, and even more so that different technologies are useful for different purposes. That is why I think the original comment was off:
> If you could rig up visible-light laser communications, you wouldn't need the fiber. Fiber's just a convenient container.
Something we haven't really talked about, and I'm not sure how relevant it is, is the saturation of the wireless spectrum. Point to Point wireless is obviously a different beast, but for broadcast wireless is there a saturation point where we can't safely send more data over the airwaves?
I like that fibre is by construction point to point, not restricted by line of sight, capable of very high bit-rates with relatively low energy (correct me here if this is wrong), and excellent quality of service.
Wireless has a lot less infrastructure, particularly when used for the last mile, and is definitely extremely convenient in many situations. I don't think it is the solution for general purpose network infrastructure, though that may change in the future (and is clearly the choice for some countries already).
I wonder what the replacement for fibre will be in 20-30 years time - is wireless the only frontier at the moment?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_frequency#Propagation_of_L...
Fiber is a waveguide and not much different in that respect from coaxial cable (or for that matter twister pair). What matters is what kinds of frequencies the waveguide will accomodate and what kind of attenuation those frequencies will experience. This matters for lots of important reasons.
As an example, take RG-6 coaxial cable (the kind you probably have in your home):
At 100Mhz (VHF) the attenuation is about 2.0 dB/100ft.
At 700Mhz (UHF) the attenuation is about 6.0 dB/100ft.
Now, take a look at Corning SMF-28 singlemode fiber:
At 1310nm (229.644 THz) the attenuation is 0.35dB/kilometer.
At 1550nm (192.4 THz) the attenuation is 0.22dB/kilometer.
So, fiber is an exceptional waveguide at very high frequencies, which makes it uniquely suitable for high-bandwidth communications. Compared to all of the other waveguides, it's the most durable, most compact, and most future-proof solution.
Except when you can't use it.
SO, what's left? Wireless probably. Well, there is free-space optical which uses the same 1550nm frequency but has the problem of aligning the transmitter and receiver to have a completely free line-of-sight. Then there is the fact that attenuation through free space isn't the same as within a fiber. Attenuation at 1550nm ranges from 0.2dB/km (clear) to 100dB/KM (foggy). So, the atmosphere is a shitty waveguide for optical frequencies.
But there is still a chance with wireless, since we aren't restricted to the propagation characteristics of optical frequencies or the directionality. With advanced modulation techniques (CDMA/OFDM), it's actually pretty easy to fit many more bits/hertz than you could with fiber transmission systems. It's just that that sort of heroics is not needed for fiber systems since it's easy to get extra bandwidth with another fiber.
Now, when you are talking about "last-mile" types of solutions, it really depends on what the alternatives are and what the "load-factor" is for that method. There is a big difference between phone calls and streaming audio for example when it comes to wireless systems. All of those things need to be taken into account.
IMHO, the end-game is probably going to be coax to a smaller set of homes using whatever flavor of DOCSIS is available at that moment. Most CableCo networks are mostly fiber anyhow. Once you get to a certain "cluster size" the choice of fiber to the home versus fiber to the local node and then coax to the house becomes an engineering question. For lower bandwidth or other services, you'll see wireless broadband displace some take-up of coax-base services. The only reason I think this will happen is because the coax is already deployed (and so it will be used). If we didn't have almost universal penetration of coax into the average home, there would be no question that most broadband would be wireless to the home.
The FTTH systems now being deployed have lots more in common with cable systems than is commonly understood. Your fiber doesn't actually go ALL the way to the central office. Your fiber is split at some point in the neighborhood (from 4-64 homes) and then is carried to the central office.
(As the old gag goes, this is why you should carry a short piece with you, in case you are stranded on a desert island. Bury it and when the backhoe shows up, get a ride back to land with the driver).
For something like this I sincerely hope they find and partner with a great customer support provider.
Actually wait.... Google has been "making [and selling] content] for a while. Their main business might still be search advertising, but that doesn't mean that rerouting the pipes won't benefit them and absolutely destroy others.
The day there's a google studios, or google game production, or google music labels, they'll be creating content.
What about YouTube or Maps or Apps? YouTube produces it's own content, as does Google Maps.
Again, Google today is not Google c. 2002. They produce massive amounts of content and goods, and being able to control the full distribution pipeline for said content and goods could end up being a significant anti-trust issue.
But, see, that only gets you from your house to the CO. I think that going from the CO to the internet could be an active and healthy free market.
Paul Vixie has advocated something similar...
This is a huge problem, yes.
It can be mitigated in general by having very clear lines between responsibility, and easy tests. Set the system up so you have one fiber strand from the house to the CO; at that point, well, if the light meters say it's okay, it's the fault of the ISP. (or the end user, in any case, it's not the fault of the owner of the fiber.)
But yeah, every time you have a service that involves more than one person, you have that problem. Even when one company owns the whole thing, you often have people trying to point the finger at other departments; but yeah, this is worse when it's two different companies.
>. Also, it's possible that all the competing ISPs could end up offering the same prices and evil TOSes.
Possible, but unlikely. The capital to start an ISP at that level (e.g. selling connectivity within a datacenter) is way smaller than the capital required to, say, buy a house. (I mean, marketing that sort of thing is damn difficult, but re-selling bandwidth within a datacenter/co is not a capital intensive thing.)
That's why I think that from the CO to the internet should be a free market; the barriers to entry are so low (except, maybe, marketing, but hell, I'll go knock on doors.) that if the existing players are doing something that irritates customers, there is a lot of incentive for new people to enter the market.
>The easier it is to switch ISPs the easier it is to get adverse selection problems, like if you offer policies that are friendly to heavy users then soon you will have all heavy users which may invalidate your business model.
I fail to see how that is a problem.
They want to enable entirely new applications.
For example, online video was an application enabled by the widespread availability of broadband Internet. Before broadband, downloading videos was possible, but streaming was not. Simply put, the (average) rate at which you download frames of video has to be greater than the rate at which frames are displayed for streaming to work.
The most interesting changes were not quantitative, but qualitative.
Google -- and most HN readers -- probably believe that higher broadband speeds are an inevitability, although the process has been going much slower in the US than most of us would like. And new ways of using the Internet will be enabled as speeds get faster. And, if it offers fiber, Google will be at the forefront of that wave, which will help Google by:
(1) Accelerating the change, pushing those new markets to be created sooner than they would have been created without Google Fiber (2) Putting it in a good position to capture the new markets -- i.e. if Application X is eating a lot of bandwidth on Google Fiber, that might be an early signal that the Application X space is a growth market and Google should find a way to get involved.
Just got a fibre plan 20mbps for $30 US per month, no contract, they also give the router and modem. Although had to pay $70 or so upfront for the no contract option.
They also have a 1000mbps plan. First world countries really dragging there feet on fibre networks.
It isn't necessary to have separate bandwidth for TV. And any kind of bundling with Google Play would make the product a lot less attractive.
If it was, the USA would already have 10Gbps for bargain-basement prices.
I live in a city of 60,000 residents 20 km from Silicon Valley.
I'm using Cruzio. The spend bump was because they partnered with Sonic and also use ADSL 2+ instead of only the old crusty ADSL. Cruzio also will not pull any of the stunts Comcast et al do ("traffic shaping" to favour their own products, quotas etc).
I sure hope this announcement is, "Fiber is coming, and Austin's in the first wave!"
Go up to Dallas and you can get 50/25, 75/35, 150/65, and now they're rolling out 300/65. It gets expensive on the extreme end of that, but I would sure love even 50/25. Major, major difference in upstream bandwidth.
Now incidentally, a firmware update bricked my cable box and I haven't had the desire to talk to anyone at Time Warner about it, but $170 is a fine price for 50Mbps Internet. (I don't use the phone either. Again, not wanting to talk to anyone in a call center, this is the best I could do.)
Their DNS does lie about NXDOMAIN responses, however. If you try to resolve a nonexistent domain name, it returns NOERROR and an A record pointing to their servers. I run my own DNS server fed from the root servers, so I don't really care, but I thought I'd mention it. The technician that did the install was also not happy that I didn't have a Windows or Mac computer for him to insert a shady-looking CD in. "What kind of router do you have." "It's an OpenBSD box." "..."
(I had Speakeasy before and kind of miss them. 24 hour phone support, and they were always extremely knowledgeable. Someone I talked to once also used OpenBSD at home.)
Not that you want to host an IPv6 only website just yet...
But given the other competitors in this market, I'm glad google is making their move, US is falling behind other countries when it comes to broadband access and this will only open up so many new business opportunities in US. However, as others said I'll be curious about neutrality of Google when it comes to content. Will they block vimeo in favor of youtube?
And those who were granted a monopoly in order to build the infrastructure should not control the content.
(This speed isn't going to be ubiquitous for a long time, at least in North America. Too many rural and cell phone users.)
Come to think of it, I would be more than happy for all of my data to be held securely in the cloud so that I would never need to worry about backups or syncing my data between multiple machines. Assuming reasonable privacy and security practices, of course.
How about an in-kernel or FUSE Tarsnap driver? Are you reading this, cpercival?
Twitter .js app will be like 400mb.
Good software support is another hurdle; I believe AeroFS is one of the companies working on this, though since I'm fully comfortable with sftp et. al. I never signed up for their beta to find out.
You say that like it is a bad thing!
This is a cycle that has repeated for decades with every type of computing resource, and the end result is usually, for a 10x improvement in hardware capacity, you get a correlated but much smaller improvement in performance.
This is true, but is only a problem if everything else is equal - which they aren't.
I'm not defending badly performing graphics heavy websites which have no reason for existence except to display 24bit versions of things that could be done in CSS.
BUT I am looking forward to the ability to transmit multiple streams of 1080p (and higher) video while my children play games with rich, 3D video assets and my electricity supply optimization company monitors the temperature of every cubic centimetre of air to determine if the air conditioner's fans need to be turned up.
Yes, that will chew up a lot of bandwidth - and I'll love every single bit travelling over that beautiful, beautiful, fibre...
But complaining that fiber is getting rolled out too quickly.. that's a problem I'd love to be able to complain about it my area.
Realistically, it's a 3-5+ year project before it is seeing significant penetration.
The domain of bandwidth restricted problems may shift, but it will almost certainly still be an issue. Historically we seem to be really good at using whatever bandwidth is available.
The main thing that might prove this sentiment wrong is the other choke points in the system: it's no use pumping data down the line if our hard drives can't store it quickly enough, or we can't render it as fast as we get it.
Or have the resolution to display it.
Displays have been lagging capture technology for a while, and I don't think it's entirely delivery constrained.
Incidentally, once you have a fiber optic connection between two points, you can do a lot better than 1Gbps.