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Comment by nlh | Hacker News Reader

Speed is not even the biggest thing here. Heck Verizon FiOS offers fiber to the home in NYC and has speeds of 300Mbit/s. I'm sure if they wanted to go to 1Gbit they could. As can AT&T in Austin.

The thing that's exciting about Google Fiber is what it represents -- reasonable cost, no bandwidth caps, net neutrality, etc. Google WANTS its customers to use the Internet as much as possible. The more HD videos people watch on YouTube and the more people surf the web the more ads they show and the more money they make. The opposite is true with AT&T -- they'll start metering and charging the second they can.

I'd take 100Mbit Google service over 1Gbit AT&T service any day of the week.

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> Heck Verizon FiOS offers fiber to the home in NYC and has speeds of 300Mbit/s

Where? The entire time I've lived in NYC, in neighborhoods with population density between 30k to 70k people per square mile, I've never, ever, ever had FIOS available to me.

Sure, I've heard about the rare building that has it, but as far as I can tell, it's marketing with just enough actual deployment that we can't call it vaporware.

I suppose I'm one of the lucky ones. I'm on the UWS and my building got FiOS a few years ago. Started at 100Mbit, then upped it to 150 at half the price. They offer a 300Mbit service but it's $300 a month and even bandwidth-hungry I can't justify that. Some friends who live in Silver Towers (42nd St) also have it.

http://www22.verizon.com/local/new-york-fios/ Google search term: verizon fios nyc. Put Manhattan in the search box on the map. Looks like a few hundred buildings in a 1 mile radius from the center of Manhattan.

FiOS in NY is expanding very slowly (not just in Manhattan but in all 5 boroughs). Staten Island got more coverage than most, because it's less urban. Constructing in the middle of the city is always way more expensive, and Verizon is not rushing to do it.

When you look at that map, the majority of manhattan doesn't have fios available, let alone the other boroughs.

What? http://i.imgur.com/r6ZJny0.png Looking at that map, it's not clear at all that Manhattan doesn't have coverage. And this is only what's within a two mile radius of the center.

It only looks like a lot when you're not zoomed in. The density here is very, very, very high. The vast majority of buildings aren't covered.

> Where? The entire time I've lived in NYC, in neighborhoods with population density between 30k to 70k people per square mile, I've never, ever, ever had FIOS available to me.

You likely lived in an MDU (multiple dwelling unit), i.e. an apartment. FiOS requires the building owner to enter into an agreement with Verizon. It doesn't cost the owner anything, but they have to let Verizon in the door, since Verizon deploys new equipment. Typically it's an MDU ONT (Optical Network Terminal) capable of delivering voice, data, and video over existing infrastructure in the building. In an older building, this typically means that the last 100-1000 feet of your data service is VDSL (over legacy two pair copper) or MoCA (effectively a capable modem over coax).

> You likely lived in an MDU (multiple dwelling unit), i.e. an apartment.

Which is, like, nobody in new york city. Quit complaining everyone!

Verizon has to do construction work to wire a building. You call them up if you want them to do a survey, board approves and they do construction at no cost.

For that the fiber has to be at least at some distance from the building street already. It's not the case in the vast majority of places in NY.

Yeah, agreed -- I've been waiting for about 5 years for it at my place in park slope and it only became available a couple months ago.

A while back they told me the fiber had been in the avenues for a long time, but the hinderance was running the fiber from the avenues to the back yard utility poles. Specifically, they needed to get permission and backyard access from every owner on the block to pull cable. Knowing how notoriously difficult it is to get a landlord to do anything in NYC, I imagine this was no easy scheduling task.

Ditto, I wish I could sign up for fios

>Heck Verizon FiOS offers fiber to the home in NYC and has speeds of 300Mbit/s.

Which is great if you're in NYC. There are huge portions of the country -- I'm familiar with the former Bellsouth territories personally -- where you can't get FiOS or U-Verse at all.

I'm in a metro area with ~250k people, and you might be able to get 6Mbs DSL from AT&T; many areas of the city top out at 3Mbs.

Even here in Northern Virginia, it's spotty. Alexandria is still a FiOS-free zone, for example. Verizon was planning on it for a couple of years, but then changed their mind. Their statement said, essentially, that they already had enough FiOS customers and didn't need any more, thanks but no thanks.

What I want is competition. I have U-verse, but why can't I have FIOS. Here in Frisco, TX it seems there are agreements between the providers to focus on certain neighborhoods have one or the other, but never both.

I want to choose who I connect to the internet through, just like I choose grocery stores, cell phone providers and just about anything else.

What's funny is, depending on which side of Frisco you are on, you do have that choice. In general, if you are west of the Tollway, you can get both services. Several other cities in north Texas are like that (Watauga, for instance, as well as Keller, north Fort Worth, far North Dallas).

What you are seeing, at least in Texas, is the historical division between what used to be GTE and Southwestern Bell. Back when those companies were regulated utilities, you are exactly right: the markets were divvied up between the two. Generally, Southwestern Bell got the big cities and GTE got the suburbs and rural areas. Inertia and a general unwillingness to rock the boat means that situation persists, though you can see some areas where it has melded.

Not to mention the latency. Apparently gFiber has much better ping times.

I think it's too small to make any kind of judgement on that, first ATT networks were probably very good. That said, I'm sure they will keep up the quality

times to what is always the question. The big G has some limited backbone but growing, but what is their transit for that service?

As someone else pointed out, when you have an entire OS built on being connected to the cloud, connection speeds becomes an important issue.

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