Google Fibre is totally awesome, but it's also completely unnecessary | Hacker News Reader

Google Fibre is totally awesome, but it's also completely unnecessary

smh.com.au

17 pointshiharryhere22 comments

This is high in the running for the dumbest article I've ever seen on HN. Send that U-Verse internet connection back to 1983 and you'd get the same response - "this speed is cool, but it doesn't really let me do anything NEW". We need technology that serves for the things we might do in the future, not merely for the things we want to do today. Because we never know what technology from today we'll be stuck with deep into the future.

Glad yours is the current top comment.

There are for real reasons already - I work in manufacturing and collaboration is really annoying with gigabyte-sized files going back and forth - not to mention the browser CAD / simulation tools that could be made if the pipes were far bigger.

Friends with a 3D scanning company are FedExing crates of 2TB drives across the US to get around this - it's actually cheaper...

I think you (and to be fair, a lot of others too) might have skipped most of the article; what you've said basically agrees with the latter half of it- from "The inability to anticipate the utility of Google Fibre is understandable" onwards.

Journalist fails to see the potential in new technology, film at 11.

Who needs to play five high def videos at once? Uh, a household of five people? Anyone who has shared a home with a gamer knows what it is like to have them come bounding into your room shouting "are you downloading something?!?!"

Or me yelling out to my wife at the other end of the house "Are you watching Survivor on YouTube?!" because my travel research tabs were all performing glacially. Then realised the TV was paused (and thus buffering) Food Safari on SBS OnDemand. Oops.

tl;dr

The author has a hard time coming up with ideas to max out Google fiber, therefore it is unnecessary.

Do yourself a favor and skip this one.

Your second sentence is a bit rude, and unnecessarily so. Lots of people think the status quo is perfect as it is quite an improvement over what they used 10 years ago.

Even for an idiot like me, after utilizing the bittorrent protocol for a few months, it is quite obvious to me what we could do if everyone had consistent 10Mbps up and down for $10/month.

That really is my opinion- I read the entire article, it is quite verbose, does go into some interesting aspects of Google fiber that I didn't know about (like the Google Fiber demo lounge), but reading it was a waste of time because the reasoning behind the whole article can be summarized by my tl;dr.

I almost feel like the author had compiled a bunch of random facts and interviews, needed some thesis to tie it all together, and instead of titling the article "Some interesting things about Google Fiber" it was given the contentious linkbait "awesome but unnecessary" headline.

Reminds me of when Wile E Coyote caught the Road Runner. http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=KJJW7EF5aVk#t=63s

What I want to know is what the backbone is. My guess is that the 1Gbps to the leaf nodes is good now because they don't have that many users and most of the users don't have a need that uses more than a small fraction of the 1Gbps (on average). What happens when they get 10s, 100s, or 1000s of homes / businesses signed up? When will they saturate their backbone? Once that happens, then what?

Hmmm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_Carrier_transmission_ra... says 40Gbps is top end and, based on the dates mentioned, there are probably quite a bit of connectivity at 2.5/10/40Gbps... but that is only 2/10/40 leaf nodes. This doesn't seem like it will scale very well :-/

Outdated info:

There are a fair number of maps of the internet backbones on Google, but they tend to be undated and, I'm pretty sure, are grossly out of date (10+ years out of date). http://www.nthelp.com/maps.htm

This looks more up-to-date: http://1stnt.com/uunet_backbone.htm and http://1stnt.com/connectivity2.htm Top speed backbone links on those maps are OC-48 (2.5Gbps).

Thanks for digging in on the data (and practicality), I'm curious what the cost-difference would be when considering what capacity fiber to put in the ground (where the real costs lay). I would guess 'sky is the limit' when considering what to bury underground, but what type of switch to place at the endpoints would vary as paying customers adopt.

It's underwhelming for what we have now, but Google isn't running Google Fiber to allow a bunch of teenagers to download 1080p movies in seconds, it's running a network that will serve as a testbed of things that currently require too much bandwidth and couldn't be done with your usual DSL connection. Youtube couldn't exist in 1993 not only because average computers couldn't cope with video, but because internet connections, where they existed, were too slow. Even Facebook, with pictures, video and quick jumping from pages to pages, couldn't exist. The big thing of 2023 hasn't been invented yet, but it will require more than 10 Mbps.

For instance, lately I've noticed that when I'm reading a Wikipedia entry, I search Youtube for things that are mentioned in the article. This has improved my experience greatly. Say I'm reading the article about a man called Billionaire McPennybags. In the past, I'd read this bit of trivia: "In 1993, Billionaire McPennybags made an appearance in a late night TV show, where he accused Veryrich O'Inheritance of stealing his idea for a egg toaster". Now, I can search YouTube for 'mcpennybags egg toaster veryrich' and I can watch video of the interview and of the ensuing controversy.

It's a (very) dumb example, but in the next decade we'll find ways to use our spare megabits and something better will appear.

Perhaps. But if I could buy 5% of their stated capacity? (i.e. 50Mbps up and down) for $50, that would be a huge improvement.

My theory is that Google realized they could not penetrate last-mile infrastructure in any significant way. However, by demonstrating an extreme amount of bandwidth is possible at reasonable cost, they could influence bandwidth/ prices/ availability over a much greater geographical area.

I also find it odd when people exclaim how unnecessary certain technologies are until other folks step-up and show what can be enabled with these "unnecessary" technologies. On top of that, I also believe hyper-decentralized services would be easily possible as consumer connections approach/attain 1Gbps last-mile, So, it is weird (to me) for a major "cloud" provider to demonstrate and enble that potential.

The weird thing about end-user Internet is that at least at MIT, I had 10/100 Ethernet in my residence in the mid/late 1990s, as did thousands of other people. I assume other college students at the time did, too. (true, it wasn't like MIT had enough transit to really do WAN stuff at those speeds for everyone all the time, but there were ftp servers, p2p file sharing, etc. all on-LAN) And I assume a lot of colleges have continued to upgrade since then. So, there should be lots of people with high speed Internet experience.

Only someone with no idea of, or appreciation for the rapid rate of technological advancement would deem a 1GB connection unnecessary.

The sad thing is that this reflects the current thinking of politicians (Especially in Australia) I wouldn't actually be surprised if this was published in the SMH to help undermine public opinion of the national broadband network currently being rolled out here.

Pretty sure 1 Gbit was available in eastern europe before google fiber and it sure is cheaper than $70 now.

This would make the Google Pixel actually worthwhile. Most of the complaints about the pixel were that Internet speeds aren't good enough to use the Internet as "local" storage. Well, now you can. If you're in Kansas City.

i think its incredibly sad that the author and maybe many others fail to see the bigger implications of Google attempting to bypass the current isp monopoly and introduce real competition. As there are many accounts of current subscribers in the KC area getting amazing offers from the current batch of providers due to the threat of Google. If they can't compete by features then they have to compete by price.

Fast internet for all, except narrow-minded Farhad Manjoo!

I remember when 1mb internet was unnecessary.

The author should have answered questions like what are their policies on privacy (monitoring your internet use), availability (uptime), and sharing (free wifi for anyone nearby)?

I would hazard a guess, being that this is both a residential and an obviously subsidised service, less than stellar answers to all of the above.

No need to guess, read the terms yourself before spreading FUD. https://fiber.google.com/legal/terms.html

I am not spreading FUD, I am raising valid points. Rather than providing meaningful response your reply was rather unpleasant. Let me attempt an interpretation.

Privacy: To sign up for Fiber, users will be asked to provide an existing Google Account or to create a new one. You may be asked to provide additional personal information, such as billing address, service address or location, or bank account information when you sign up for Fiber.

We may also obtain and use information about our Fiber users from outside sources for marketing purposes (such as commercially available demographic, geographic, or interest information).

We may share non-personally identifiable information publicly and with our partners – like content providers, publishers, advertisers or connected sites.

So, that seems to mean, to a non-lawyer, they associate all your network use with your existing Google account and can release any information on your network use and derived information on your interests as long as they don't give out your name.

Availability: WE DON’T MAKE ANY COMMITMENTS ABOUT THE CONTENT WITHIN THE SERVICES, THE SPECIFIC FUNCTION OF THE EQUIPMENT OR SERVICES, OR THEIR RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, OR ABILITY TO MEET YOUR NEEDS (ie. zero)

Sharing: Disallowed (but intention-based, so fuzzy, and practically you could share with a bunch of neighbours). The Fiber Services are intended for the personal use of you and others with whom you share your residence (including, within reason, guests who are visiting you). You agree not to resell or repackage the Services for use by people other than those with whom you share your residence. If you wish to use the Google Fiber Services to provide Internet service to others, you must enter a separate agreement with Google Fiber that specifically authorizes you to do so.

All in all, less than stellar. Legally, you wouldn't be able to build a business on this without paying more to Google, and you wouldn't have any availability guarantees at all.

Reading between the lines I'd guess it's basically an experiment in high speed consumer profiling against existing Google databases, with potential interest to provide Google related ChromeOS (I guess) set top boxes with enhanced YouTube support, plus DRM protected content delivery from Netflix, etc.

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