Google Fiber Is Coming to Salt Lake City
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On a side note, my current ISP just started rolling out 10Gb/s here. The geek in me really wants to get it, but I'm having a real hard time even making up excuses for the added cost, around $700, compared to $40 for gigabit.
Isn't that usually caused by TCP and bandwith-delay product and not the connection itself?
The biggest issue with a really fast connection is that your wireless becomes the bottleneck, even if you buy really expensive gear.
I have a Grande 1Gbps connection here in Austin (Google has not yet built out my neighborhood), and it's around 3.5ms RTT to work over the IPsec VPN (pfSense on both ends). 9 hops in-between, and yes, I leave one ISP and enter another.
Physics is a bitch.
I'm on Time Warner, and I just happened to move apartments, and I got the price reset without really asking for it. Some sort of "new service" treatment even though I only moved to a new address in roughly the same city.
Usually it's noticeable when this is going on (especially the blocking), so you only need to go to some other solution when you notice this.
[For reference's sake, 8MByte/s is 64Mbit/s and 9MByte/s is 72Mbit/s
Being a third-world country is not a handicap to have high internet speed. Fiber is not heavy infrastructure. I live in a messy third-world and we have 100mbs fiber at around $80/month.
The HDI is 0.72, ranked globally in the "high human development" tier. It is just above China, and slightly below Thailand.
I'm also not sure what network they could even buy in SLC, since as far as I know there is no iProvo-like network there (most fiber is owned by telephone/cable companies who aren't leaving).
What they should do is buy Utopia from Layton city (north of SLC). It is essentially iProvo all over again, and they're even looking to sell it (an Australian company is interested).
So if Google stepped in and purchased Utopia, and built out their SLC network, they would already own a massive swath of northern Utah.
Very unlikely, as Pete Ashdown (founder/owner) was recently discussing XMission investigating rolling their own fiber until wind of Google Fiber came up:
http://www.reddit.com/r/SaltLakeCity/comments/2yl51u/does_xm...
1. https://xmission.com/blog/2015/03/24/google-fiber-in-salt-la...
> Every mile of this super-fast network has to be planned – we can’t just put it anywhere. We use the data shared with us to create a map of where we can build (based on existing utility poles and water, gas, and electricity lines).
> With our plan in place, we start the hard work of stringing and laying thousands of miles of brand new, state-of-the-art fiber optic cable. We will lay enough new fiber in the area to reach from here to Canada and back, and you will see our engineers and crews in the streets for a long time.
So this is definitely a new construction/infrastructure laying project, unlike Provo where it was mostly a purchase of the existing fiber network.
Google Fiber not only brings Gbps broadband they are encouraging it elsewhere in those cities and surrounding areas. I just wish Chandler was in the announcement as we were one of the first 4 cities to get cable broadband in the 90's largely due to Intel. The cities that Google Fiber picks are getting better internet just by being announced from Google and competitors alike.
Broadband cable during inception in the 90's was such a big leap it was almost magic from 56k to up to 6mb down when you were new on a node. It was unreal and the cable companies were heroes. They could have kept going, there are still only a small percentage of channels used for data/broadband. They can compete now but haven't, all that wasted on channels noone watches.
Now it feels like cities are winning the Google Fiber bandwidth lottery because broadband providers have been throttling in their extract phase for so long with no competition. Google Fiber is spreading competition and better internet almost as magically as the cable companies did with broadband in the 90s.
I think with SLC, Provo, and at least one of the small towns in the area all having fiber available, the rest of the front will follow suit... but it will not happen overnight.
Secondly, Salt Lake City proper, where I live and where this announcement is declaring the buildout initiative, is very much not-mormon. The number of people logging on to their site to stream videos is minuscule compared to the number of people in the surrounding suburban sprawl. Google Fiber isn't coming to Salt Lake Valley, it's coming to the City. This won't help them.
I was in college when iProvo was building out, but it didn't live up to the hype. Over 10 years later and the dream of fiber in the front range is finally coming to fruition.
This is good news in that, at the very least, it'll light a fire under Comcast's business. Qwest/Century link were never a serious competitor anyway.
[1]: https://xmission.com/blog/2014/02/19/google-fiber-in-salt-la...
https://xmission.com/blog/2015/03/24/google-fiber-in-salt-la...
What I'm getting at is, have we had any related push to wire up more homes with cat6a (or something of that nature)? It isn't quite as future proof as fiber, but it's cheap and 10Gb/s should keep up for a long time.
802.11ac can currently do a maximum of 1300Mbit.
WiFi has evolved, yes. But my 900Mbps router paired with a 450Mbps wireless adapter still underperformed my 10Mbps powerline network for network drives & filesharing, and interference frequently drops WiFi speeds to a tenth of their intended speed.
It has a valuable place, but so do hard lines.
Sonic.net is bringing gigabit fiber to San Francisco.[2] Construction is underway in the Sunset District. Next, Bernal Heights and the Castro. Also, Berkeley. Already operational in Sebastopol, Brentwood, and Santa Rosa. Sonic may have more actual users than Google does.
[1] http://anewdomain.net/2013/04/07/how-does-google-fiber-work-...
All of them in California. Those of us outside Silicon Valley would like fiber too, thanks.
> This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2013-2014 election cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.
And that makes a difference how exactly? ISPs are owned and controlled by various family clans and key people there.
In the end, the result is that politicians are paid to push the agenda of existing monopolists.
I think this restraint has merit, but not when applied to interference with monopolies and utilities.
But in this case this logic isn't even correct. Since they support laws which ban competition, and that is clearly interfering with the economy. I.e. it's interfering for the benefit of monopolists, and against the benefit of their competitors and the public. I get an impression that this abstract idea of "don't interfere with the economy" is simply inconsistent. More consistently that position looks like "against competition", which equals against free market.
1) Franchising, especially if you want to offer TV service (which is the money-maker). The city has to approve your overall deployment plan. As part of that deployment plan, you will usually need to agree to:
A) Build-out requirements. Cross-subsidies for poor neighborhoods are baked-into the process in almost every city. You have to build out to every neighborhood in the city above a minimum density.
B) Franchising fee. Usually a % of revenues.
C) Contributions for public services. The municipality will usually require you to spend (a few to tens of millions) per year on things like providing free fiber to government buildings, or contributing to local public TV programming, etc.
2) Permitting. You need a wide variety of permits for: A) laying cable; B) stringing cable on utility poles; C) tapping into the grid to power fiber cabinets; etc.
3) Negotiating rights of way.
4) Miscellaneous regulations: environmental permits, etc.
There are also the broader political dynamics. In NYC, de Blasio has turned FiOS deployment into a social justice issue: http://www.speedmatters.org/blog/archive/new-york-mayor-bill... ("If you can’t afford to feed your family by the end of the month, you can't afford $75 a month for the broadband service. And that's what we have to fix.")
Google's MO is to say "fuck you" to all that. They only agree to build Fiber on the condition that the municipality gets rid of build-out requirements, fast-tracks permitting, etc. Second and third-tier southern and western cities are willing to play along, because they see fiber as a competitive advantage. Cities like San Francisco and New York are not, because demand to live and work in those cities is so high to begin with.