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Comment by JoeCortopassi | Hacker News Reader

Is anybody really surprised by this? I mean, Google has some of the best and brightest engineers working for them, a substantial budget, a purpose other than profitable retail of their service, and a tiny town outside of major populations to work with. I would be hard pressed to find a reason why they wouldn't be faster than anyone else out there. Shoot, I bet you could find similarly sized cities were Verizon/Comcast/Charter handily beat Google Fiber. Don't get me wrong, I love that they are doing this, but everything breaks at scale

EDIT: Misread the part about it being Kansas City vs. a city in Kansas. I feel my point about scale still stands, as Kansas City in total (Missouri and Kansas) is in the 6-700,000 person range, and is still a fraction of total user base of the other ISPs mentioned

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>Tiny Town!?

There's 2 million people in the Kansas City metro area. (I'm from Kansas City. Grumble.. grumble...)

For many people who spend most of their time in SF, anything other than SF, LA, and NYC is "flyover country".

It's absolutely hilarious to put SF in the same category as LA and NYC.

That's why I had the qualifier that it only applied to people in SF. Their view that SF is in the same category as LA and NYC shows how myopic and inward-looking many of the people in SF are.

I was wondering what the population breakdown looked like and I found this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_United_States_Metropol...

Edit: This list is also interesting - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city

As a Houstonian this amuses me greatly.

And me as well.

not chicago?

Chicago is technically flyover country. It's the capital of flyover country, but it's flyover country.

well... it looks like the population of KS and central Kansas City MO (where google actually is) is way less than a million people. Comcast, on the other hand, covers about 100 million people. That includes those 1.5 million google skipped.

> a purpose other than profitable retail of their service

To be clear, Google Fiber aims to be profitable:

http://gigaom.com/2012/07/26/the-economics-of-google-fiber-a...

I'm not sure I believe it. Whether they aim to be profitable or not, I think they have to say they that publicly or they'd be immediately accused of being anti-competitive.

I would kickstart it coming to my city. I think a lot of people would.

The costs probably exceed by a wide factor the sums that are typically raised through kickstarter.

I have FIOS and it's by far the best option in my area, but only really fast in comparison to the crappy 5.3 Mbps average connection speed in the US vs say 17.5 Mbps in South Korea.

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