It is sad that silicon valley has been so slow to adopt google fiber
These are political problems and they have political solutions. It's not "sad" that Silicon Valley can't get faster Internet access; it's the nature of the way California's politics as a whole have developed. The number of veto players (http://www.amazon.com/Launching-Innovation-Renaissance-Bring...) and NIMBYs ensure the problems California is currently experiencing.
This is more of a problem in medium density residential areas. In high density areas, big buildings often lease basement space to utilities. In low density areas, there's lots of room for infrastructure. It's the suburban areas where people obsess on lawn care where this is a problem.
These contracts aren't these evil things as much as they are there to recoup investment on the work AT&T put into that building. The neat part is that due to the cost of competitors walking in, the contracts don't even need to exist anymore. Its going to be a hard sell to get Comcast in there when AT&T already has the home field advantage.
If you're in our building, you're in luck, though: the HOA is amenable to laying CAT5, so if things go well, we may have Webpass by the end of 2015.
http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/san-francisco-seeks-t...
Sweden is spending a lot of money digging down fiber for everyone in Sweden right now.
There's more than just population density to take into account. It makes a big difference when you don't need nearly as much long haul backbone capacity because almost all of the destinations for the traffic are close to the subscribers.
The ISP model is hard because it just requires fucking shit tons of money to solve, and there's no getting around the tragedy of the commons problem. With telecom infrastructure, you can either use wired (expensive and with a heavily fragmented regulatory environment) or wireless (expensive with extremely limited spectrum - see the $12+ billion spectrum auction happening now).
Disruption is well and good, but it requires new technology that delivers similar services for a fraction of the cost. Until someone figures out a way to bring the economics of delivering content to end users down by a factor of several hundred, we're stuck with the current ISP situation.
I know someone who has this service in San Francisco - they only have it because it's literally their only option besides ADSL.
The meme that dealing with problems of physics and mathematics is somehow harder or more noble than dealing with problems of people should probably be considered harmful.
Just take a look at Aaron Swartz, Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden.
But I agree with your premise, that hard problems with large rewards require a different sort of VC pitch and may take longer to see a payoff. And are completely worth pursuing!
1: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/gigabit-wireless-to-the-h...
They also sell service in a Carrier Hotel. I read an article a long while back where they mentioned that:
1) The $250 installation fee, plus the $35/month monthly fee more than covers the costs for each residential customer.
2) The revenue from the stuff in the Hotel would also cover the cost for the residential customers, if the residential customers stopped paying their bills or something.
It's neat to hear how your new revenue sources have changed over the years. Hope you guys keep growing the business and -one day- push Comcast and ATT out of The City!
[0] https://www.monkeybrains.net/wireless.html [1]
[1] Or, a direct link to the current-at-the-time-that-I-wrote-these-words coverage map: https://www.monkeybrains.net/2011/islands-of-san-francisco.p...
Beamforming and directional antennas works really quite interestingly on the higher frequencies. I think their stuff could work. It's not obviously doomed to failure, like most 2.4GHz-based WiFi setups are, in my opinion anyway :)
Check out Siklu, SAF, AthenaWave, AirFiber, etc to see some of the antennas that talk outside of (normally) consumer grade frequencies.
And yes, we do have an FCC filing in place to deploy 80GHz gear.
[0]: http://crosscut.com/2014/03/04/business/118993/google-fiber-...
"We’ve been impressed by how enthusiastic the City of Mountain View has been as we’ve worked with them over the past few months — so let’s take a moment to thank them for everything they’ve done so far."
The City is also working on the physical infrastructure Google needs:
http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2014/09/26/google-fiber-gets-go...
I can't speak for other cities in the area, but for Mountain View, the belief that Google Fiber expansion is being held up by government inaction or unwillingness, is unwarranted.
(The one exception is San Francisco, which is a mess whenever anyone wants to build anything anywhere in the City, but SF's an outlier in that regard)
"Sign-ups are beginning today in South and Southeast Austin. We’re starting with these neighborhoods, and will be opening new areas on an on-going basis."
Also, I'm pretty sure that TWC is available pretty much everywhere in Austin.
If you look at other cities (Kansas City) only a fraction of the city (the denser, wealthy area) actually has the service 2 years later. Other large areas have been carved out entirely. Construction is "ongoing" in a number of areas but service remains unavailable. Half of the city hasn't even opened sign-ups yet - nearly 4 years after the initial announcement. A large part of KC that does have service was because Google purchased an existing fiber to the home network that already served that area.
By and large, Google Fiber is a big promise that's proving pretty tough to deliver quickly. Just google for the myriad of delays the project is facing in the cities it's "launching" in. By the time they're done launching in most of these cities by the end of the decade, the cable/telco companies will have gigabit service available in most of their markets.
Edit: Google-washed version of what they demand from cities: https://fiber.storage.googleapis.com/legal/googlefibercitych...
Better yet, cities should eliminate them entirely to encourage even more competition. All those rules do is create barriers to entry that prop up the existing players.