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Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

I guess I fundamentally do not understand what makes a city a good or bad candidate for this kind of service. Why is SF or NY not an obvious candidate? Density means that there are lots of customers for a given physical length of infrastructure rollout, they're both wealthy cities with a large proportion of techies who could use faster internet...

I'm sure they're both nightmares to deal with permitting processes for. Is that it? Or is there something else that makes mid-tier, more spread-out cities more attractive?

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I suspect they mostly want a compliant political infrastructure and relatively easy construction. NYC and SF aren't really known for either. Also, NYC would probably be biting off more than Google Fiber has any interest in chewing at the moment. They're still scaling up, after all.

YUP.

The short answer is: it's much easier to build in a greenfield environment where there is a "helpful" local government, ready access to rights-of-way, and underserved population, easy construction costs, access to labor, favorable tax climate, and a host of other reasons that come before "lots of people who want gigabit speeds".

The economics of building (or overbuilding) a gigabit fiber network drive you towards areas where you can get a high degree of penetration for your investment. That's not going to happen in a place like NYC or SF. The construction costs (directional boring) and tax regime (network cables are "property" for property tax purposes) mean that SF and NYC are probably going to be the LAST places to get Google Fiber.

> (network cables are "property" for property tax purposes)

WUT.

Look it up. If you install $15M of fiber in/around town, you can bet your bottom dollar that the local taxing authority considers that real property and will tax you on it at appropriate rates.

In TX, colo providers have had to send business property tax bills to people who locate their servers in those centers. Sometimes those bills are quite shocking.

In CT, the local phone companies started putting DSLAMs on poles because it got them off the ground and saved them millions on property taxes because there was a rate differential between property that was pole attached and property that was on the ground.

Never underestimate the effect that taxes can have on the deployment, operation, and maintenance of business property. You can explain great deals of financial shenanigans to the real savings associated with avoiding taxes.

And who gets screwed? Anyone who doesn't have the scale or size to make avoiding that tax worthwhile. e.g. the small-business owner.

Good answer. I always post this: http://www.fiercetelecom.com/story/att-ordered-stop-u-verse-... when people ask why SF isn't at the top of the list. Existing telcos already can't easily roll out faster service!

ATT is now rolling out U-Verse in San Francisco:

http://www.noevalleyvoice.com/2013/May/Att.htm

The challenge to ATT's plans was manifold:

1) ATT refused to put their equipment underground. SF's sidewalks don't need more cabinets.

2) U-Verse is DSL service. Sonic.net already offers 40mbps DSL service in SF, so U-Verse is not that much faster. Why does SF need more cabinets to get pretty much the same data service from the incumbent telco?

3) ATT is putting cabinets on the sidewalks, and running fiber to those cabinets to serve ~45mbps connections to folks ~800 feet away. If ATT had planned to run fiber from those new cabinets into residences ~800 feet away and provide 100mbps or 1gbps service, folks would have welcomed their project.

4) Monkeybrains [0] and Sonic.net [1][2] have had (for several years) workable plans to eventually deliver 1gbps service to the whole city with (they say) far fewer aboveground boxes that ATT "requires" for U-Verse, and don't even need to dig up the street to lay the fiber. I'm not sure why they've been ignored by the Mayor's Office and the DPW.

[0] https://www.monkeybrains.net/DPW-MonkeyBrains-March-2011.pdf

[1] http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2010/07/14/micro-trenching-at-soni...

[2] http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/12/15/sonic-net-plans-gigabit...

Sonic.net leases the lines from AT&T. 40mbps as far as I remember is a bonded ADSL+ service requiring two phone lines. Even then 20mbps is a theoretical maximum which falls off the further you are from Sonic's DSLAM. The U-Verse boxes brings the DSLAM much closer. In my apartment's case, I can only get 5mbps from Sonic.net while AT&T is able to deliver over 20mbps.

Putting cabinets on sidewalks still seems like a very minor point and still part of the "People United Against Everything" syndrome affecting so much of America. Maybe U-Verse is not that much faster, but faster is still important!

If Sonic / Monkeybrains can deliver 1gbps, all the better.

The beautiful thing about this in the long-term is that if Google Fiber succeeds and becomes more widespread, people will start to say, "Why don't we have this?" If this succeeds — and I have little doubt it will — local governments across the country will be under increasing pressure from their constituents to move away from the monopolistic deals most cities have now with Comcast.

I see this as a huge step in the right direction and cannot wait to see how it turns out.

To be fair, San Jose has a pretty awful political climate as well. I mean look at VTA.

I'm in San Jose, what's wrong with VTA?

Doing any kind of utility work in NYC is a nightmare. There's lots of stuff underground (power, telecom, water, steam, sewer) that has been built up over the years and is in various states of obsolescence and disrepair, and in many cases isn't really marked on any utility maps. It's not a trivial matter to just dig a new trench for fiber.

Here's a interesting story of what happened when an electrician found a 250VDC feed that was supposed to be abandoned decades ago: http://www.electriciantalk.com/f5/fixture-tails-44009/#post8...

And here is a cool cross section of what lies underneath New York City:

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/97/nyunderground/

... dangit, I wish I knew more about electrical work. Why was that so dangerous? I mean, besides 250 volts and rotted-out insulation. The writer makes it sound like he just discovered an unexploded bomb.

Good question! AC voltage is relatively safer because it crosses the zero point 120 times a second. If it passes through your body, your muscles will spasm but you will have an opportunity to pull away. Also, AC voltage will probably not sustain an arc at such a low voltage, again, because it is constantly switching polarity.

On the other hand DC voltage, once a connection has been made, will continue to flow through that path to complete the circuit. You can think of it as the electrons on the hot wire want very badly to get back to the place where they were generated (the source transformer under that covered up manhole). If they find a path through your body, it will continue to flow through your blood vessels until either you or the wire burns up, or the upstream transform faults. You basically become a fuse. If you are part of the circuit, you'd better hope there is somebody nearby to hit you you with a pole, because otherwise you are pretty much stuck that way. Also, DC voltage is much better at sustaining an arc, even below 100 volts, so it can set off an explosion that can ignite whatever dust is lying around the equipment. Google "arc flash" to see what this looks like.

> Also, DC voltage is much better at sustaining an arc, even below 100 volts, so it can set off an explosion that can ignite whatever dust is lying around the equipment

Ahh, that's what I was missing. I assume the "painted black" part was to insulate the box and mitigate this risk when the box was closed?

AC is lethal at lower RMS voltages. Two reasons: (1) peak-to-peak voltage is higher (2) It is not synced to heart, so can cause more damage

Yes absolutely. I never said AC wasn't dangerous.

The steam pipes that blow up every couple years are the unexploded bombs.

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

"At least 12 steam pipe explosions have occurred in New York City since 1987."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_City_steam_explos...

Just ask any NYC folks. How many of us are still waiting for that FIOS? I am waiting and waiting. And they promised to complete by 2014. We are almost three months into 2014 and I still have no FiOS access here. A bit above my area has already gotten FiOS two-three years ago and my area still hasn't gotten any!

I am angry. We need to break this franchises.

> The company also appears to be blaming landlords for any hold ups in deployments

Yeah. Excuse. I haven't heard any landlord in my neighborhood ever complain about this. A lot of my neighbor landlords (they don't actually live there, just for rent), when they come by we would have conversation about these things (because they know I do some computer stuff and they would come and ask for advice when TW goes down), they say they'd make more rent if FiOS was here.

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Verizon-Accused-of-Laggin...

Yes. This. Having had FiOS before is the worst part, knowing first-hand just how subpar my TWC service is (there's no going back after getting 35mbps upload speeds). It seems completely ridiculous to me that in 2014 Brooklyn we're still choosing block-by-block where to live based on the internet service.

VZW stopped rolling out FIOS across the board I believe.

Yeah I've heard/seen this as well, they've done it in favor of expanding LTE coverage [0]

I'm astounded at how anyone at VZ thinks this could be a good idea.

[0] http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Verizon-Again-Confirms-Fi...

There are a lot of folks on forums like this who think networks like FiOS should be regulated into being essentially dumb pipes. Verizon and their investors see some chance of this happening, and even if it didn't, it turns out there aren't a lot of "value added" services you can sell to consumers over a proprietary network; they just want the internet.

You can't make the margins as a "dumb pipe" that Verizon needs to justify the capital investment in FiOS. That's the long and the short of it. They had dreams of selling pay-per-view movies, video chat, and a dozen other applications over their network for big $$$. Instead they're fighting with Comcast over the same $120 in cable and internet bills, while Netflix, Google, and Apple build their high-margin businesses on VZ's fiber.

It's amazing to me how many people here on HN complain on one hand about companies not wanting to make massive capital investments to build out faster internet service while simultaneously espousing regulating such services into low-margin dumb pipes.

I think there's a simple solution - municipal fiber everywhere with companies allowed to lease access. Internet access looks like a utility and quacks like a utility, so it should be treated like one. The timeline for breaking even on the investment has been pretty reasonably short in the examples I've seen.

The municipalities have no money to build, and more importantly, to maintain and continually upgrade, such networks. Heck, they can barely maintain utility systems that evolve far slower than internet connectivity: power and water. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/us/18water.html?_r=0. People outside of HN won't be anywhere near sufficiently eager to earmark sufficient public dollars to properly maintain such networks, not when pensions systems are underfunded and schools are putting teachers on furlough.

I don't know enough about fiber to have a very intelligent discussion about it, but from what I've heard, one of the nice things about fiber is that you can run increasing amounts of bandwidth through the same fiber once it's laid as the endpoints improve.

I would expect that the buildout could be funded by a municipal bond issue, with the repayment being handled via the revenue from the customer-facing companies that lease access to the infrastructure. I've heard of municipal networks like this being run profitably and being repaid in a reasonable timeframe (on the order of a decade or two), but unfortunately I don't know more than that.

I think the point is: local governments can barely pay for essential services (water, power) that most everyone in their district needs. High speed fibre that a small subset of their constituents would use is way down on the list.

I think you're right that that was his point. It wouldn't necessarily come out of their budgets, though, it could be done with debt financing on the project itself, repaid purely from the revenues from leasing access to the network to the customer facing ISPs.

I also don't think it would necessarily be used by a small subset of the constituents - it seems as though it could potentially be much cheaper than alternative high-speed arrangements, since the customer facing companies would actually have some competition. Once the initial construction debt was paid down, the govt. could likely reduce the access lease cost, which would be passed on by the competitive ISPs, further enabling access by poorer residents.

I think it would be great for the long-term economic prospects of those areas as it broadens access and makes heavy uses like remote work more viable.

Plus, a good internet connection is a much cheaper form of entertainment than many of the alternatives, including cable, so it could actually save many people money.

Large capital expenditures undertaken by municipalities are usually funded by bonds.

A municipality would issue bonds to fund the replacement of their water mains, which are breaking and pouring water into the streets every winter. It would issue bonds to renovate their elementary school, which has a leaking roof, asbestos insulation everywhere, and drinking fountains that dispense leaded water.

Municipalities have limited borrowing power, so muni fiber does have to compete against all those other priorities. And it's been a tough market for muni bonds lately.

What's more, muni fiber would be considered a non-essential revenue bond. These types of bonds carry higher interest rates than essential services bonds, or general obligation bonds.

Ah great, thanks for the concrete info!

I imagine that a fiber rollout would create entirely new revenue, though, where upgrading water mains and other existing infrastructure wouldn't, so it might be viewed by the govt as offsetting any difference in interest rates?

Well, it's pretty common for municipal power companies to return a profit to the city, which is then used to offset property taxes. In fact, a number of successful muni fiber projects have been managed by the municipal power company, or the municipal cable provider.

The problem is that a lot of municipalities aren't run all that well. Local politics can sometimes be very ugly. Muni fiber only really works when the municipal government works. Sadly, that's not as common as it ought to be.

Hm, that is a shame. I wonder if there's a way for technology to help change that. Maybe by offering a graphical budget breakdown of spending that the public can browse? I remember seeing something like that for the federal government, and it was pretty eye opening. I guess there's no incentive for a terribly run government to roll that out, though.

Yep, it'll never happen.

Except where it did before the State stepped in to ensure Comcast/TWC didn't have competition.

But other than that it'll never happen.

Many other countries have built high speed consumer fiber networks, some of them heavily regulated. Something isn't working in the United States.

The U.S. is ranked #8 in average broadband connection speed in Akamai's most recent State of the Internet. That puts it ahead of most of Europe: http://www.akamai.com/dl/documents/akamai_soti_q213.pdf?WT.m... (page 13). If you look at more densely populated coastal states, the U.S. looks even better. Yeah, South Korea has widespread fiber internet. More than half the country lives in the Seoul metro area. You can't compare.

Nation-wide averages tell a story that no one is interested in. Do you have data on densely populated coastal states? I want to compare speed and speed/Mbps to areas like Warsaw and Stockholm with high density cities in the US.

The problem with drilling deeper is that America is organized quite differently than European countries. It is typical for a European city like Stockholm or London for 40-60% of the people in a metro area to live in the denser, core city. In the U.S., that number is more typically 10-20%. Moreover, because of historical reasons, the dense inner cities in the U.S. that are most geographically amenable to building out fiber have huge proportions of poor people who couldn't afford it. Middle class people who might buy fiber are disproportionately more likely to live out in suburban areas less suitable for building such infrastructure.

Very concrete example: Delaware is one of the fastest states in the U.S., with average connection speeds in Akamai's study comparable to the top 5 countries in the global list. I live in the largest city in the state, a major rail hub, in the heart of downtown, and can't get fast internet because the area is so poor. But the suburbs right around us have fiber.

Per-city breakouts aren't in Akamai's most recent report, but here's one for Q4 '11: http://tumblr.thefjp.org/post/22270191498/the-worlds-fastest.... The fastest city in Sweden at 11.3 mbps wasn't that dramatically faster than the fastest in the U.S. at 8.4 mbps. Asia of course dominates, but that's because Japan and Korea have tons of very densely-built cities.

Hey thanks for the link.

I would love to test all your hypotheses, I'm skeptical. My impression is that, even if you compare dense high-income areas (Manhattan, SFBay), many other countries are still coming out on top. For instance, Warsaw (!) metro area: 631.4/km2, Manhattan: 27,227.1/km2. I don't have the numbers but income is much higher in Manhattan.

Wikipedia tells me I can get 60mbit/s down for under 25 USD in Warsaw and I think that is uncapped. I don't believe any comparable deal exists for Manhattan. SFBay is similar.

Its a shame, regulated pipes is starting to look like the most reasonable solution when providers are doing exactly what you said, eyeing up higher margin models and drooling.

Regardless of opinions on free market, political leanings, etc, the fact that this is standing in the way of progress is bad news for everyone.

I wonder how many people honestly care about what internet provider they have? Do most people want FIOS? Or would more people prefer to have a much better connection on the phone/iPad?

On top of that, as was mentioned above, it's probably cheaper to update to LTE than it is to run fiber everywhere, and on top of that, it's probably worth more money to them on the $x/mo for LTE service since to add another customer in the area is trivial compared to FIOS.

It isn't about the provider, it's the speed we care.

Are they going to let my router able to get stable internet from LTE technology? I have desktop and laptops and I don't want to add wireless card to my desktop in particular. I rather serve things over my own router. How are they going to market to home users? FIOS has been said to be high speed, reliable, fiber-optic. Great. I am willing to add $20 to my monthly bill to get one.

And how can they drop the agreement like this?

I believe the FIOS demand wasn't high enough to justify the costs of expanding it any further.

fios penetration rate is 35% which is not bad. http://www.lightreading.com/fios-slows-but-still-grows/d/d-i...

What's funny is that the rent premium for fiber is higher than the prices people complain about for Cable.

> Why is SF or NY not an obvious candidate?

At least in NYC most of the buildings are older buildings that have already been wired for copper and are very tough to rewire. It's a much bigger task to rewire a building than to run a drop to a house. So then you end up having no idea whether fiber is available in any specific building. Plus many buildings have signed exclusivity agreements. FiOS has the exact same problems and so is generally just available in newer buildings.

That sounds strange to me. I live in Sweden and went apartment-hunting last year. Not one of the apartments I looked at was without fiber (technically, ethernet in the apartments, fiber to the building). Including buildings that pre-date WW1. They all had pre-existing cable and DSL as well. If there's a will, there's a way. I guess in the US there just isn't much of a will yet.

Vacancies in NYC are incredibly low, so a landlord doesn't gain much by being able to advertise fiber internet. This, added to the expense of wiring the old buildings, means that its not a worthwhile investment.

In sweden this sort of thing is done by the city/state not 'the market' which makes for a different set of arguments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises_by_count...

What about the actual building wiring? It doesn't matter whether there's fiber to the building if cable has enough bandwidth to fill the copper between the cable box and the apartments.

It might work, assuming the building can support multiple cable providers (e.g. it's not all just 1 trunk from CableCo), but it would cost more in equipment. You would need to convert the fiber to coax (maybe with an intermediate step of ethernet), and then the customer would need a modem to convert from coax to ethernet. It'd be a pricey installation and continual maintenance of hardware.

> Vacancies in NYC are incredibly low

Same in Sweden. Often you need to be on a waiting list for 2+ years to get an rental contract in a large city in Sweden (longer in Stockholm[0]). The impatient among us flit around on 6-month second hand rentals. Or you buy an apartment with an untenable loan and hope the bubble keeps inflating...

[0]The wait is currently on average 7 years in Stockholm municipality. 15 years if you want a centrally-located apartment. http://www.svd.se/nyheter/stockholm/lagenheten-ar-din-om-att...

Is there some sort of regulation going on there? In a normal market I would expect rent to rise until the wait time was down to something reasonable. You can always find an apartment within a week or so in NYC - its just going to be really expensive. COL here is about double the national average, largely driven by housing costs.

Yeah, there's some quite heavy rent control http://www.thelocal.se/20131113/rent-control-blamed-for-hous... http://www.thelocal.se/20130723/49206

Actually, I and many others I know would pay a significant rent premium for a building that had fiber access, so I think a case could be made for it financially.

Same for me. My apartment building in Stockholm is from 1943. It has copper for phone (DSL) and cable, plus fibre right into my hallway.

When major Telco players decide how much to invest in opposing Google, the first place they look for a measuring stick is the potential lost revenue numbers.

The huge customers in cities on the coasts would give them every reason to fight tooth and nail. Going for small potatoes first represents a larger financial risk for Google, but it gives them a better chance to work out the kinks in their product in relative peace.

I wish Google Fiber could be deployed in NY.

However if you consider the cost of deployment, it's much cheaper to do it in a rural area than in the middle of the dense city. I.e. cost per meter of deployed cable can differ a lot.

None of the cities listed on that page are "rural" by any stretch of the imagination.

Then it's not an issue and Google is not scared of digging the earth. On the other hand they write they want to reuse existing conduits, rather than perform new construction.

I don't understand your point. Just because Atlanta isn't as densely developed as New York City doesn't make it "rural".

In every metro area they've chosen, the vast majority of dwellings are single-family, owner occupied. So they can run cables above ground next to the existing telco equipment, and approach homeowners directly when it comes to installing the drop.

In Chicago, about 60 percent of the city is NOT owner-occupied. I'm sure New York is significantly higher. MDU runs are much more expensive, even with cooperative landlords.

As I said, if Google is not scared to dig - good for them. But they seem to want to avoid it. See their FAQ.

I wonder if the existance of "dark fiber" is a factor. In the late 1990s a half dozen fiber companies tore up our industrial park street laying new fiber. I doubt if much of it is used. One new fiber was laid last year since then.

I looked at the map and was curious - are these cities each in somewhat close proximity to existing google data centers? It would make sense if fiber, much like app engine is just productizing existing google infrastructure

When Google came to Provo, UT, it wasn't because of the friendly government. It was simply that it already had plenty of fiber and a bankrupt ISP that Google could buy out. There's plenty of fiber that's been buried in the ground since the 80's. Some is in use, some is not. Some has more potential. Here in Utah, we have another fiber company called Utopia... I wouldn't be surprised if Google isn't just going around buying these companies and using the existing fiber. I'm probably way off base.

I had the same thought when I heard this. With Utopia already laying down the fiber (and keeping track of where it is compared to Provo) it would be smart move for Google to buy up Utopia.

I think their strategy is to get it out to as many people as possible in the most efficient way possible. I imagine doing construction in SF and NY is a nightmare so it would be a fight to get it done. If you do it in the easy places first, show all the benefits, and get the big cities jealous, you can drum up more demand than if you go through a painstaking multi year process just to get it in one city.

Their rollout to Kansas City was impressively fast. Had it taken years it would have done terrible things for their campaign.

Why couldn't they lay fiber to core areas, then setup some sort of wireless redistribution - there'd be some lack of speed due to more users using same connection, but it would mean less construction required. As they could just setup more and more access points throughout the city, and some sort of wireless login for specific users... --Might be a possible solution.

That sounds like LTE, which you can already get.

Probably because they are larger so it would take more time than a lot of the other cities here.

This is answered in their FAQ. The summary is: a wide range of variables.

Utah: large NSA datacencer -> Good. See how this works?

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