Google Fiber coming to Austin
kvue.com
kvue.com
TL;DR - This Austinite isn't convinced.
It's not unusual to be in legal gray zones when you're in the humble beginnings of a startup (in the parents' garage, say).
They have to say things like "no running servers" and "no commercial use" because of the lawyers, but I doubt Google's own employees would let the Fiber team live it down if they found out a legitimate startup had been disconnected for a frivolous violation of their ToS.
Google giveth, Google taketh when they want to. Don't be the sucker to base your start-up on the idea that a 1 GB pipe is going to be there and or at $80 /month.
Google is just trying to pressure TW, Verizon, Comcast etc to increase the speed (Youtube, G Play and all)
Submitting resumes last week was a surprisingly optimistic experience. In addition to several referrals from friends, I'm qualified for development work at diverse companies, from games to chemicals to media to nuptials.
I'm looking forward to ditching Time Warner Cable Internet once Google Fiber goes live in Austin :).
And you want to move to Austin? In the middle of Texas?
It may be a great town, but it isn't the only one and it certainly isn't the most exciting or engaging. There's too much else going on in the world to put one place on a pedestal.
Austin is consistently ranked at the top of various best of lists, a quick google search found this link. http://www.austinhomelistings.com/blog/is-austin-the-best-ci...
1. No beach 2. Snakes 3. Scorpions 4. Coyotes 5. Steel guitars and country music 6. Guns 7. Heat kills everything, you better love the color brown 8. Few sidewalks and biking is a misdemeanor downtown 9. Everyone is obsessed with football and 10. Stevie Ray Vaughan
What? I see people biking downtown all the time. Is it really?
Really I don't dislike Austin. I moved here about 10 years ago. You will hear some Texans complain about rude Californians moving here. But it makes sense why you're moving here. Lower taxes = more jobs. Just about everything is more expensive in California. I don't know what the situation is in California lately but from reading the headlines, sounds like the government is broke. Texas is more conservative. For example, "State legislators in Texas make $600 per month, or $7,200 per year" vs. "members of the California legislature are paid $95,291 per year" Wikipedia.
That said, Austin is great. Come out and visit, flights are pretty reasonable. I prefer Austin weather, Texans are very friendly and welcoming people, and the area is booming which creates a lot of opportunity. TX is much more business friendly. No income tax, a strong libertarian sentiment, similar social views to SF.
The tech scene is obviously smaller but vibrant. There are quite a few coworking spaces and a few incubators. There's at least one tech meetup / event every day of the week. SXSW.
Like any city it has its weaknesses. North south traffic during rush hour is terrible. Our public transportation isn't great. It's very much a car city. The pickup trucks take some getting used to (I still find their proliferation odd). Housing costs are going up but IMO are still very reasonable. Much, much less than the bay.
Austin's great. I just want to experience what it's like living in someplace different.
The cynical old man in me thinks maybe there's some kind of bribery going on to keep the Bay Area off the table for as long as possible. How much would Comcast have to pay you, Google, to keep you from destroying its market here? A billion? Ten? Fifty?
I've thought about relocating to Austin if I ever tire of the startup scene here, but now it looks like I'd have a very good reason to just go ahead and do that.
$34.95/month* - High Speed Advantage - up to 15 Mbps down & 3 Mbps up
$54.95/month* - High Speed Advantage Plus - up to 15 Mbps down & 10 Mbps up
$104.95 to $114.95/month - High Speed Extreme Advantage - up to 50 Mbps down & 25 Mbps up
(apparently contrasting crappy service in Silicon Valley to rural areas is downvote worthy)
If it were ever to be declared a CSA with San Antonio, they'd be of similar size to Seattle-Tacoma or Minneapolis-St Paul. Which seem 'semi-large' to me, especially on global scene.
Austin experiences relatively mild boom/bust cycles. The metro area is not that big and there is still a great deal of undeveloped land so developers are always ready to build more, thus holding prices stable. The biggest problem the area faces is water supply. High property taxes of 2-3% annually offset most any gain from not having a state tax. Racial diversity is about 50 years behind most major cities.
Given how much of a clusterfuck residential development and zoning restrictions are in SV, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Goolge would have to negotiate with many many governing bodies to roll out fiber in 'its back yard'. (Wasn't it San Mateo that blocked some Bart line extension back in the day? I remember a HN'er sharing that info with us a few months ago)
Maybe Austin is another city where one entity owns all the rights to the telecommunication poles and pipes. Even if that's not the case, Texas cities have proven to be more business friendly than California overall in the last decade. There's probably an incentive for State govt to coerce cities to work with Google to build infrastructure that will help business. Heck, it'll surely help Rackspace and other Datacenters to have a stronger backbone of internet bandwidth.
This is pretty much the status quo for major infrastructure projects. Look at what happens with new sports stadiums between New York and New Jersey -- they each bend over backwards to see who can provide the most subsidies.
Why do you think New York wouldn't be able to provide a competitive "bid" to be one of the next cities? I can see why they wouldn't want to provide e.g. free office space as a result of the difference in local real estate prices, but that doesn't mean they can't offer something else. Tax incentives are a popular staple for this sort of thing. And NYC has the huge advantage that Google can wire more customers for less money as a result of the high population density, which means New York wouldn't have to offer the most concessions in order to be the most attractive.
Permit pile-on has killed quite a few nascent populist telecom infrastructure projects in recent memory. Commercial projects generally have enough revenue involved to be worth working around the issues.
Is anyone here thinking any of their comments through past "X city would be great for fiber"?
By contrast, in Tucson (where I used to live), I got 12mb down and 1 or 2 mb up for about $70.
RCN's speeds aren't equivalent to Google Fiber, but they're not terrible either.
This is Google's answer to the cold war declared on the Internet by Comcast and Time-Warner Cable.
Do any of you remember when Comcast was complaining that Google was making billions of dollars selling ads on Comcast's cable modem service? Do you remember them saying that they wanted a part of that revenue? That this was UNFAIR?
Make no mistake: this is Google making the cable companies watch their step. If push comes to shove and the cable companies start to try and constrain the open Internet in an effort to extract rents, you can bet your bottom dollar that Google will expand this service QUICKLY and get into the wireless broadband business post-haste.
This is about ACCESS. Google isn't Google if they can't ensure that they get the visits to their web properties. Right now, the cable companies are the only game in town in way too many cities. This is wrong. We should have competing wireline providers. I'm no Google apologist but I can't say that I disagree with their strategy.
With what? A city here and a city there is a great experiment hoping to push telcos into action. Trying to expand nationally can get hairy and extremely expensive.
I have a feeling that Google is losing on this project and the "real price" would be much higher than the current one.
Google makes a lot of money on ads. This is the broadcast television model applied to Internet service. They can subsidize their service with ad revenue (cablecos do this too) and still make money.
But you don't have to cover the whole nation to have an effect. You just find out the cities where the CableCos are extracting the highest rents and target those. You take away their gravy with the fattest OPEX margins and repeat until they cry uncle.
“Google received stunning regulatory concessions and incentives from local governments, including free access to virtually everything the city owns or controls: rights of way, central office space, power, interconnections with anchor institutions, marketing and direct mail, and office space for Google employees.” http://bgr.com/2012/09/10/google-fiber-criticism-crony-capit...
maybe they're profitable but that's not going to last or others (Comcast, AT&T etc) will sue the government for favoring Google over them.
Even if they said it's profitable, it all depends. Maybe some of the costs are shifted from division to division within Google. Either way, just because they said so, doesn't mean there isn't some wiggle room. They cannot lie about total sales and revenues, but many companies do not even break down division sales.
The give property tax abatements to WalMart or sales tax abatements for equipment deployed in a data center within their borders. This is nothing new.
And like someone else mentioned, TWC and Comcast have had de-facto monopolies for the past 20-30 years. Cable companies are bound by a franchise agreement with the city. One of the things they agree to in that agreement is that they have non-exclusive access to the market via the public right-of-way.
Also consider that one of the things cities will do is try to get ANYTHING that will bring jobs and industry/investment to their community. Growing the tax base is a prime directive of any city.
I think the main impediment is popular support. When people realize, by way of comparison with cities that have Google fiber, that they are getting gouged government will be under pressure to improve broadband everywhere.
Check out the average times, etc.
Try to imagine for a second how much easier and less expensive it is to deal with Austin than SF.
http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2013/04/03/navigating_the_trea... is a wonderful explanation
Realize it is so bad they have a many-page colored guide on replacing a fucking window:
http://www.sf-planning.org/ftp/files/publications_reports/St...
The first Google Fiber campaign seemed to me like it was more or less "Which city government will bend over backwards the most for us?", and I'll bet KC ranked first with Austin close behind. It wouldn't surprise me at all if there were well entrenched interests, especially in SF, that would prevent Google from making an easy entrance there.
I'm not in the bay area, but would love to see it in my city. I was so dissatisfied with the webpage and user experience of signing up for Comcast [1] that I eventually just gave my neighbor some cash for his wifi password.
[1] Off topic: They'll tell you that you can get pretty decent internet for $10 a month. Then it turns out you're not eligible. And it turns out you're not eligible for the $20/month either. So after a lot of back and forth, it ends up being $40/month. Which is fine, unless you though you were getting the same deal for $10 just a few hours before. I don't understand how this scheme could work. Maybe by annoying users enough that in the end they just click Sign Up to get it all over with? Somehow it must work, though, since they keep doing it.
It'll probably be somewhere without decent options right now, which rules out anywhere Verizon operates FiOS. I would guess that it will show up in a low-regulation stat, which rules out most of the West Coast and Northeast. Somewhere like Seattle is plausible, but the city is teaming up with a company to offer Gigabit Seattle.
Some of the more plausible options might be Phoenix, AZ, Denver or Boulder, CO, a city in one of the Carolinas (Raleigh / Durham?), Oklahoma City, Minneapolis / St. Paul, or Madison, Wisconsin (some may already have FiOS).
http://sfcitizen.com/blog/2011/11/15/no-att-lightspeed-inter...
"Sorry, we'll bring fiber to your area just as soon as we get through the 46 meetings necessary to remove this heritage tree blocking the way"
Imagine the red tape involved in doing anything in MTV or SF or the bay area.
The cynical old man in you consider just how over-regulated the area really is. California requires lighting and wattage density calculations to place lighting in a building. This part is actually not so uncommon, since IECC has some requirements.
However, compare:
http://www.lightingcontrols.com/support/statecodes/excerpts/...
with
http://www.lightingcontrols.com/support/statecodes/excerpts/...
Note: Texas just follows IECC (so for example, you will find it the same for NJ, MD, VA, TX, etc), while california has gone off on their own.
I'm actually all for permitting and code inspection, but a lot of the crap you deal with in SF and MTV is truly crazy.
Why not? I'm all for fiber but really what I want is a fast symmetric connection. If someone can provide that over coax, that's fine with me.