Why Google Fiber will never come to Seattle
crosscut.com
crosscut.com
I don't necessarily want more government or less government--I want better government, and more transparency on when our government is working or failing is helpful for getting there.
Resources must be extracted where they exist. No such physical constraints bind the development of search engines, social networks, etc.
Not to mention Kshama Sawant grandstanding about completely irrelevant topics. I can't understand how she got elected.
She got more votes than Conlin.
As srj notes, Conlin barely had a campaign whereas Sawant had an amazing campaign, with 100s of volunteers and great messaging (key to motivating your base). Conlin couldn't even muster a ballot chasing effort during the recount. Pathetic.
The comparative effort (amazing vs no show) demonstrates just how hard it is to unseat an incumbent.
Sawant's campaign buoyed the public financing and district reform (switch from at large council seats to district & at large hybrid), as well as McGinn's vote count.
So while I like and voted for Conlin, I do acknowledge and appreciate what Sawant did for progressive issues.
I didn't vote for her but I enjoyed her being elected. I would love to see her ridiculous ideas implemented just for laughs.
But, alas, this article still hits on all the main points as to why this will never happen.
Condo Internet uses a combination of microwave and fiber to provide connectivity to the buildings that they service. They only target apartments/condos, since building the infrastructure to individual residences is not worth it.
However, it is a pity that it's restricted to condos and large apartment complexes right now. It would be great if services like this were ubiquitous. Gigabit availability was a large factor in my decision of where to live.
PING google.com (173.194.33.165) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from sea09s18-in-f5.1e100.net (173.194.33.165): icmp_req=1 ttl=59 time=0.857 ms
64 bytes from sea09s18-in-f5.1e100.net (173.194.33.165): icmp_req=2 ttl=59 time=0.779 ms
64 bytes from sea09s18-in-f5.1e100.net (173.194.33.165): icmp_req=3 ttl=59 time=0.831 ms
One obvious solution is to relax zoning rules in Seattle; a lot more condos and apartment complexes would be built if it were legal to do so, and the benefits would extend far beyond fiber connections (see, for example, Matt Yglesias's The Rent Is Too Damn High or Edward Glaeser's The Triumph of the City for more).
http://www.seattle.gov/dpd/Research/gis/webplots/smallzonema...
So the definite haves of the city will continue to have amazing access to this world-changing network that we call the Internet and the rest of the city can go screw itself. The vast majority of Seattle's housing stock is in single-family and small multi-family dwellings. Holding up a couple of providers that cherry-pick the easiest ones does not make for a broadband plan, especially when a lot of those SFH-style dwellings are rented by people, either wholly or by the room, who couldn't afford the prices of the very expensive buildings served by CondoInternet or Cascade. Sure, those folks (who aren't all flat broke and destitute, just don't make a quarter-million per year) can suck it up and deal with Comcast and caps and horrible customer service so long as the condo-dwellers get 1Gbps service in addition to their unobstructed views of the Space Needle.
1. That's primarily a political choice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7344438. One could argue that SFH residents are already telling everyone who wants to live in Seattle but can't afford to, to screw themselves.
2. It's much cheaper per unit to deploy fiber to apartments and condos than it is to single-family houses; it seems unlikely that most residents of such housing would want to pay the true cost of the rollout.
> it seems unlikely that most residents of such housing would want to pay the true cost of the rollout.
Great, I'd love to talk to a company that provides gigabit service in Seattle who will provide a gigabit link to my residence and charge me no more than $2,000 for the install. (Why $2,000? I dunno, out of thin air, I suppose.) "But that's not the true cost of the rollout?" Awesome, and the subscribers to CondoInternet didn't pay the massive up-front cost for their links, either.
Here's my main complaint: People hold up CondoInternet and say "look, look, Seattle has gigabit Internet, why are you still complaining?" That's not anywhere close to answering the underlying discussion. Even if everyone who wanted gigabit could afford to live in those places, they wouldn't physically hold all of the people. It's like the FCC saying that one person in a ZIP code has DSL so the entire area "has broadband."
The debate over SFH versus multifamily is a good one, and I'd love it to tilt in favor of multifamily. But ignoring 95% of a city's residents is not the way to go about getting better access. Hell, even Comcast manages to cover the majority of Seattle with 50Mbps speeds.
I call the power company up now and then and suggest they bury the wire in the section. Or sometimes I'll suggest to the linemen as I pass them putting in a new pole. They get rid of me with some excuse they made up on the spot, and nothing changes.
Most faults seen on overhead distribution systems are momentary (i.e. they clear without human invention, e.g. line-to-line squirrel contact). For this reason, automatic reclosers are typically used at the station breaker. Conversely, automatic reclose is not used on underground distribution systems because momentary contacts are rare and attempting to reclose on a permanent fault just causes further damage to your breaker and other distribution assets.
Additionally, the types of conductor used for underground and overhead applications are completely different. They'd have to be spliced going into and out of the duct (you don't just put wires in the ground, you have to pour a concrete-encased duct) which adds an additional point of failure.
I understand that have two outages per year is annoying, but the thing about power distribution is that making a perfect system is much, much more expensive than making one that works most of the time for most of the people. And that money comes from your electricity rates.
As for rates, the paper ran an article a few years back on how much of our rates were based on the constant repairing of the poles - it was a big chunk, though I don't recall the details. Having a 3 man crew out there for several hours with their heavy equipment costs a bundle.
The underground section needed a repair exactly once, and the power didn't even go out.
About 2/3 of the homeowners in the community have given up and bought generators. Generators run from $500 to $5000 - I'd rather pay higher rates and not need one of those things.
They do trim the branches now and then.
I just don't see why it's so impractical to break out the Ditch Witch and cut a trench, and lay the durned cable in it. It was done for my neighborhood, and the developer wasn't known for spending excess money :-)
Do you always feel compelled to argue with domain experts on the topic they're most familiar with?
In the link above, it seemed like the domain expert was quite enjoying the conversation, everything was polite and friendly and the resulting information was quite educational.
Every neighborhood within a 10 mile radius of my house is set up the same way. Poles on the main streets, underground into the cul-de-sacs.
About 2/3 of the homeowners in the community have given up and bought generators.
Eight years ago I bought a $250 gas "camping" generator. It has a peak of 4,000 watts. Running from the outdoor patio outside my walk-out basement, it's good enough to run a refrigerator, keep a computer and Internet going so I can work from home and keep cell phones charged. The recent ice storms we experienced on the East Cost left us without power for 3 days and reminded me how handy even a small generator can be.
For people living in Austin, I doubt we will see increased speeds or better price offerings from AT&T/TWC until the day Google Fiber is available to significant portions of the city's population.
I've always been on promo deals, but even the "regular" price is $70-80.
My only theoretical alternative is AT&T but last I checked they don't even know my address exists (my house was built in 2004).
Meanwhile Wilson, NC built out its own network after getting fed up with broadband providers not willing to service her citizens. Of course that won't be happening elsewhere in NC since TWC successfully lobbied the state legislature to prevent other towns from doing so. Anyway, here's the pricing in Wilson http://www.greenlightnc.com/about/internet/
20Mbps Internet-only $39.95
40Mbps Internet-only $59.95
60Mbps Internet-only $79.95
100Mbps Internet-only $104.95
1Gbps Internet-only $154.95
I can still picture the signs Comcast put in people's yards. They were bright red, had dice on them, and said "Don't gamble with our tax dollars." There were letters to the editor in the local papers on both sides, but it was clear from almost the beginning that too few people understood the value of municipal fiber, and the vote didn't pass.
Today, my parents have barely functioning UVerse.
Also, your internet option is super gross, that's really too bad. I recently moved for work to a more rural area, but thankfully the same package was available.
That sounds overpriced given any definition of basic cable I can think of.
If they push, tell them a neighbor just signed up at a lower rate or similar, you'll get a big decrease of your bill pretty quickly.
The FCC caved on this recently. [1]
This isn't just a hypothetical situation. Comcast in Oregon now encrypts the OTA network channels. [2]
[1] http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-57533637-38/fcc-allows-cab...
[2] http://customer.comcast.com/help-and-support/cable-tv/limite...
[1] http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140220006003/en/Time...
> We’ve considered spending the $700 million or more it would cost to build our own fiber network, which might provide a billion dollars in benefits each year.
Why do we want Google Fiber in cities so badly? What's the benefit over building your own network, or partnering with someone like Gigabit Squared?
"Mayor Ed Murray has declared the city’s deal with startup broadband company Gigabit Squared dead."
That worked out great for the residents of Seattle.
http://www.geekwire.com/2014/gigabit-squareds-legacy-seattle...
Many places can't due to lobbying by existing telcos at the state level. See, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7271044 .
[0] - http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/5/5070520/los-angeles-planni...
Why does Google's proposed fiber map [2] include not a single city in the northeast or the Rust Belt?
Chicago, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh are all major cities that are at least "on the map" as far as tech is concerned. I know for a fact that the local authorities in Detroit, Cincinnati and Cleveland would bend over backwards for any project that has even the slightest whiff of economic development.
I can understand NYC being a special case that they don't want to deal with, but there are plenty of other cities in the region.
First, they have the growing low-regulation cities of the south which have plenty of customers. Second, they have the high-tech centers of Portland and San Jose which have so many tech customers that Google wants to serve them even though it is not low-regulation.
Poorer regions, non-tech regions, and high-regulation regions are all less interesting. Detroit, for example, hits the trifecta of all three disadvantages.
It becomes especially obvious in the winter when you see only certain parts of the city getting cleared immediately after a snow storm, those parts are where the alderman of that neighborhood lives, or a friend of the mayor lives on that block (and they'll do that, just plow a single block). Th rest of the city is plowed as well but it takes a couple days as the plows first have to do their crazy routes to make sure that major donors are all taken care of. I didn't really notice this until our alderman changed (I guess I used to live fairly close to the old one). The new alderman lives nearly a mile away from me and thus my block is one of the last in the city to get cleared where as in previous years, it was done directly following major streets. (the streets nearest to her are all plowed and clear immediately, and they're of the same significance that my street is, so it's not like balance was suddenly restored, they just moved the favor elsewhere).
It's really the only reason I'm a republican: this city is all blue and completely corrupt, I don't at all understand how people look at Obama, or Durbin, or Pelosi and don't see someone who has no morals and is in it for I don't even know what (as Obama seems to not even care about the power his position offers).