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Comment by clauretano | Hacker News Reader

This is how it goes with most service roll outs. If the people in the suburbs are really miffed that they aren't one of the first areas picked for Google Fiber, perhaps they should consider the downsides of living in the sprawl.

Congrats to any Austin HNers on your freedom from [insert Austin cable monopoly here]

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>perhaps they should consider the downsides of living in the sprawl.

I'm sympathetic to this point of view, but in many places it's not possible for everyone to live in the city center because of development restrictions that drive up prices (see here: http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/05/face... one discussion that I've posted before, albeit about California).

That article you linked demonstrates the opposite of what you claimed. It's talking about building restrictions in the sprawl itself and, in the Lucas case, in the middle of a rural area.

Close to downtown is expensive because all the shit people are willing to pay a premium for. Distance to work, nightlife, parks, scarcity of family oriented suburbanites, and being where things like Google Fiber are first to roll out.

TX is not CA. There are high rises going up all over downtown Austin. People are building as fast as they can get permits.

I wonder if this timeline is slow enough for a given city's cable monopoly to respond with price/terms/bandwidth competition in time to head off google fiber.

Doesn't mean they will, but I would think that this is slow enough that they could theoretically ramp it up.

I guess this is my answer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5521343

I'm sure TWC will now prioritize Austin as one of their first DOCSIS 3.1 deployments so they will likely be doing 300-500Mbit/sec at minimum by then.

We actually have a bit of a cable duopoly in a lot of the city. Both Grande Communications and Time Warner run systems here, although Grande's build-out area is a bit smaller.

Grande is a small(ish) Texas ISP:

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

I do hope Time-Warner is severely disrupted, though.

I've been really happy with Grande, they provide the best cable internet I've ever had (65/5 mb/s) for $70. Great uptime, with very consistent service. That said google fiber at 1gb/s, yes plz.

Don't forget AT&T.

There's also AT&T with Uverse. I'm pretty sure Grande just leases lines but may have better service.

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