Google seems to halfass a lot of their products. I really had expected it would at least be live in the Bay Area right now. It's not like Google doesn't have the money.
My understanding is that homeowners in the bay area have some next level NIMBY ism that even Google can't overcome. Those fiber huts have to go somewhere...
Well, when you spend several million dollars to buy a house I understand you're likely to be afraid of anything that threaten your investment and turning NIMBY.
Maybe this is an overreaction to being stuck with Australian internet for the past decade, but if anyone in my neighbourhood was to resist the installation of fibre it'd be fucking on for young and old.
Actually we finally got NBN on my street and I am syncing at 75mbit (paying for 100) and frankly I am over the moon. The fastest I have had previous, after living all over AU, was 14mbit down, and I was the envy of my friends for that roaring waterfall of data.
Everyone else I know is on around 8mbit even in 2018.
Hoping against hope that we get a similar result when NBN rolls around to my neighbourhood. It would be absolutely awful for them to "upgrade" our system, after waiting so long for this, to the exact same or worse speeds as the ADSL we've been stuck with all this time.
And yet companies like AT&T and Comcast have been able to improve their infrastructure and launch fiber in more and more areas in the Bay Area (it's more than just San Francisco, you know!)
The cause is not NIMBYism, or any other negative traits you might try to tag on to people from the Bay, but rather, the existing telecom companies and their attempts to protect their pseudo-monopoly.
It was more PR that delivery. In my area AT&T brought fiber and we were not in an area important enough for Google. Bemoan the big cable and phone companies all we want but they deliver a lot more and quietly. For me any time I read about one of the internet big tech companies rolling out service traditionally performed by older companies as nothing more than a PR grab.
People at work were all excited when the announcement for our major metropolitan area was announced until the areas were given and it was like, what is the point if your in such limited areas?
I know more outside of my metro Atlanta area with fiber than within. that to me is just backwards but I will take it. I like my hick neighborhood and with fiber I can work from home a lot more
That's what I am thinking when people talk about tax cuts. Apple or Google don't need more money. They already have more than they can invest productively.
That's an explanation -- another is that Apple and Google believe that future uses of the resources could yield greater aggregate return (or serve as a bulwark against a downturn).
Not really surprising, my own country is still profiting from the massive investment in cable done by the state owned telecom operators in the 80s. Infrastructure like this is something that can only be done with government support.
I don't think that's the case. Google certainly has more disposable cash available at less bureaucratic cost than many country's governments. They just lack the interest.
If there's a single company with a forever long track record of half-assing products and never finishing them, only to cancel them later with disregard to current customers, that's Google.
They make so much money that nothing really matters for them.
I’m not disagreeing (or agreeing) with you, but your comment did make me wonder if Google truly is less bureaucratic than (all / some) governments. For example back in NZ where I grew up sure there’s bureaucracy throughout the government - but it does seem like they deliver a _lot_ more than Google is capable of and across a far more diverse product range (e.g. from fibre to the home to universal healthcare etc...), interesting thing to think about and if nothing else it highlights to me just how poorly run most google products must be given their flop rate despite their enormous wealth, amount of data on people and their reach.
A government owned company has easier access to public land and can do that while doing their public infrastructure work. It can go as a more coordinated work and costs can be saved greatly, especially when the property is publicly owned. The work itself is then normally done by private companies in a bidding process.
The government own companies faces only problems, when it has to cross private property.
While a private company has to pay for the usage of the public property too. It has also to work on the allowance to use the public property at all. Also the construction costs are much higher, as they cannot share with other infrastructure costs. If private companies wants to share the costs of infrastructure work, it requires much more coordinating work. They also need to know way in advance when which infrastructure work by which private company is planned to be able to work together. That will become a bureaucratic mess.
And I suspect that getting into a business where you have mange the installation and physical plant and also provide real customer service isn't one where Google has or wants to get involved.
You clearly underestimate the cost of providing fibre to every house. This is why in the past electricity, water and phone lines were rolled out by the government.
I would say "only", but it is damned harder if one do not already have some fixed installation one can exploit.
In Norway the fastest growing deployments of fiber is done by regional power companies in cooperation with a services provider (data, VOIP, IPTV etc). This because the power companies already have poles and pipes that they can run the fiber along.
I remember the prevailing attitude at the time in message boards being that Google had no real intention of taking this serious and was instead just trying to bluff the entrenched interests to upgrade.
It worked in the markets Google rolled out in...and that was it. These companies stubbornly refused to preempt Googles expansion anywhere.
Maybe they called Googles bluff, maybe they were never nimble enough to even think about getting ahead of Google let alone execute it, and maybe Google was just never that serious in the first place.
This is true, I believe, and in my area of the country, we went from 10Mb to 125Mb in short order. And now, years later, even ATT now offers 1Gb fibre (though limited areas and still mostly slow 3Mb everywhere else) .
I think the time you are referring to was at least a few news cycles after the start of Google fiber.
I think it genuinely was received as the Cool New Thing for a while. Then the cities applied to be Google fiber cities. Then fiber rolled out to some cities. At some point competitors responded by upgrading their service. And then with some retrospection, we collectively looked back at that series of events and said "ah, this must have been Google's plan all along."
I honestly don't doubt that Google's initial plan was insanely ambitious. And that what transpired, while falling far short of the original vision, nevertheless did advance their interests. But my recollection of the events as they unfolded in real time wasn't that this was their plan from the start, or that people felt that way, until a few news cycles passed and it was clear that it spurred other internet providers to action.
But I do agree with you that it definitely did become the prevailing wisdom, eventually.
But is wireless seriously an alternative to fiber? I mean with 4k streaming spreading, what will happen on a super bowl night? There is only one shared bandwidth.
You have to keep in mind that with enough antennas (and enough VERY high bandwidth connections between the antennas - but only has to exist on the service provider side, plus the antennas can be pretty close together and still work) there is, in theory, 2^n interference patterns, each of which is localized. Each of which can transmit data.
If you use the interference patterns to transmit data instead of the signals directly, and you have enough antennas, you have essentially unlimited wireless bandwidth, at least at relatively short range (ie. cells). Granted, doing this for more than 4 or so antennas is currently beyond the capabilities of deployed equipment, but we'll get there.
I don't understand why people keep saying that we won't be able to satisfy bandwidth demand on wireless. We can, and it may be a lot cheaper (esp. outside of the cities).
I don't understand why people keep saying that we
won't be able to satisfy bandwidth demand on wireless.
Is it possible, from an engineering perspective, to build a wireless network with very high bandwidth and generous transfer limits? Absolutely! You just need to increase last mile bandwidth every time you get a new subscriber, so cells never get overloaded.
Is it possible, from a market incentive perspective, to build a wireless ISP business where it's more profitable to increase last mile bandwidth or turn away customers, rather than overload a cell? I'm not sure.
Am I right then that to get super fast wireless everywhere we need lots of fibre to back-haul it? That's my understanding. All the 4G super fast masts springing up are all piping that hot traffic down fibre to the next hop.
All wireless internet connections meet copper and fiber eventually.
Wireless is fairly useful to provide basic coverage to a huge area at relatively low cost. The quality is lacking though. Low Cost, Coverage and Quality, pick two.
> Is it possible, from a market incentive perspective, to build a wireless ISP business where it's more profitable to increase last mile bandwidth or turn away customers, rather than overload a cell? I'm not sure.
As someone who's now lived >5 years in 3 locations, I've always found that there are things that oppose last mile bandwidth buildouts and there are things that don't matter.
What doesn't prevent capacity buildouts:
large costs (but within an order of magnitude or so of reasonable, I'm not talking "FTTH to a fishing village on a remote island" large costs)
technological limitations (again within an order of magnitude of what's possible)
What prevents capacity buildouts:
monopolies
cartels
absurd (and required) levels of capital investment (like buried fiber/copper capacity)
And you know what I find another huge positive about wireless networks ? There's 15 in every place I've lived. 2 "really" independent ones, 1 "more or less"/partially independent one, and a dozen or so that piggyback on the others' networks, providing for more price differentiation. Physically, there's room for something like up to 5 truly independent ones, using different frequency ranges. If the military were to get off half the spectrum, we can easily make that 20, so if the situation gets bad, there is an actual reserve. This means that governments can always threaten the existing providers with allowing another one in, in a way that they can't with wired networks.
Wired providers, there was never more than 2. Mostly there was just 1. Even when there were 2, they were absolutely not comparable (I mean, I've done telecommunications consulting for huge companies, I know there are really 50 or so, with 49 having extremely limited reach, unusable for consumers). This lead to monopoly, which lead to all sorts of shit situations, including bandwidth limits and turning away of customers. Even then, in the one place were 2 were available, the key to good service was to switch wired provider every 2 years.
Wouldn't there be too many noise problems to reliably determine the right interference pattern?
I've heard this suggested before, but it seems to be slow in the making.
Does multicast do anything about last mile on wireless networks? My impression is that it's mainly about the backend, and you'd still have to duplicate the packets over each separate data connection from the cell tower?
Yeah, don't throw out that TV air antennae yet. If if you're networking is doing fine, major broadcasting stations still can't seem to get live streaming at scale right.
http://www.speedtest.net/result/7112084631 is my 4G home wireless "broadband" plan's speed in suburban Melbourne, Australia. Basically 10/1 Mb which is not great, but still much better than what I was getting with ADSL, and I'll have to wait another year or two until the NBN rollout reaches my house. But by 2020 the mobile networks will be rolling out 5G.
Apart from mailing out the modem to me, my wireless ISP has basically zero marginal installation cost for adding me as a customer, assuming their closest towers have sufficient capacity (they vetted my address first before selling me the wireless modem). And I know for a fact that they're capping my modem's speed in software as my 4G smartphone's connection is much faster. This is why the NBN's CEO said wireless networks are its biggest threat.
Is there any cap on that? Here I can get uncapped 100mbit/100mbit up/down fiber for a fraction of the cost of 100GB data over mobile/wireless broadband.
I'm pretty happy with the results. The local company here in Portland really stepped up the rollout of their gigabit service and while it's not quite a full gigabit by my tests, it's more than fast enough (~400mbps).
This is why I'm happy to live in a country like France where the government takes part in deploying those infrastructures (by investing money in the deployment). They planned to equip 50% of the territory by 2017 (which was achieved), and 100% by 2022.
Same goes for public service, profit-focused corporations can't provide the same quality of service.
Exactly. Fiber to the home is the only fiber than really matters. If there is fiber but my last mile is old copper, then that doesn’t do me a lot of good does it?
France claiming 100% fiber by 2022? They are dreaming, or perhaps even delusional. No way they can get FTTH by 2022. There are some places that don’t have any connectivity and you have to use Satelite.
> Exactly. Fiber to the home is the only fiber than really matters. If there is fiber but my last mile is old copper, then that doesn’t do me a lot of good does it?
I wouldn't go quite that far e.g. let's say you're my parents in a village of 300 (and as many cows) with the DSLAM >5km away, the best DSL you can get is 1024k on a good day (and on average closer to 512k with pings in the half-second range), my understanding is that for them the FTTN node would be roughly at the center of each village.
All of a sudden, unless the village is huge there's <2km between any home and the node and you can expect 15~20Mbps over the entire village.
But how would you carry a model like that over to a place as big as the USA? Montana, Wyoming, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and just about every state that isn't on the East/West coast would have an incredibly difficult time executing this kind of plan because of the distance between communities. I'm not saying that a similar model wouldn't be easy to implement in the boroughs of New York, Boston, SV, Austin, etc., but when you still have 20% of Americans living in not-urban environments. Indeed even the urban environments are far more sprawling and spaced out than anywhere in Europe/Asia (e.g. Dallas/FW, Houston, Phoenix, Austin, and even Atlanta).
The kind of engineering to distribute such a large network seems to mirror the issues with the nationwide power grid that was proposed to allow for consistent solar energy. The USA is just a very, very big place with populations, even urban, that sprawl and are not condensed like in London, Paris, Munich or other countries in the fiber fight.
> But how would you carry a model like that over to a place as big as the USA? Montana, Wyoming, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and just about every state that isn't on the East/West coast would have an incredibly difficult time executing this kind of plan because of the distance between communities.
> I'm not saying that a similar model wouldn't be easy to implement in the boroughs of New York, Boston, SV, Austin, etc.
Oh please, the village I'm talking about is not a borough of a major metropolis, it's a small rural village, the closest thing which could be construed as a city has a population of under 50k and is 20km away.
Boston and Austin have metro populations in the millions, there's barely 6 cities in all of France which reach that.
> you still have 20% of Americans living in not-urban environments
Oh good point, let's check the percentage of rural population in france. Hey look, it's 20%. Wow, probably an outlier, let's check Germany. Oh, 24%. Maybe Spain? 20% again.
And these are highly urbanised countries mind, Ireland and Portugal are sitting at 36% rural population.
> The USA is just a very, very big place with populations, even urban, that sprawl and are not condensed like in London, Paris, Munich or other countries in the fiber fight.
None of London, Paris or Munich are countries, they're major/capital cities inside countries which have their own non-urban populations.
America as a whole does have a lot more remote areas. France only has one department with a population density of less than 10 per square kilometer according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_departments_by_...). Compare that to America and note all of the counties with a population density of less than 10 per square mile (https://www.census.gov/dmd/www/pdf/512popdn.pdf) -- and a square mile is a larger unit than a square km. Fiber absolutely might be cost prohibitive in certain areas.
I still agree with you, though, that America could do something if there was a strong enough will. Even if the cost of fiber is prohibitive, it seems like there are wireless technologies out there that would be better than the zilch broadband 23 million Americans currently have. (https://www.npr.org/2018/03/03/590546371/rural-communities-t...)
I don't want to pick a side here, but "rural" in the USA and "rural" in Europe are two different things. Once you get away from the coasts, things get very sparse and very big. In many places, if you were 20km from a center of 50,000 people, you would actually be considered to be living in that town of 50,000 people. I personally live about 30km from my city center, I am considered part of that city (including my mailing address), and I don't think anyone around here considers it rural. Rural in America means you might have to drive hours on the weekend just to go shopping. 100s of kms of nothing between you and the next town in some places. And since they are ranching areas on poor soil, there are houses all in between that need to be reached. We are talking about one family on around 400 square kilometers of land. I have family that live in a community like that, and it is not uncommon in many areas.
Consider this, the state of Texas alone is bigger than all of France, and while it has several huge cities in it, it still has less than half the population of France. Montana is more than half the land area of France, and only has 1 million people living in it.
It would be a lot easier to just give up on the 1% that are truly scattered to the winds with little homesteads in the middle of no-where. But hopefully we can get some really good low earth orbit satellite internet and not have to worry about all this.
This is something Australia tried to tackle with the NBN, and I would guess that Australia is far more rural and less densely populated than the US. In Australia the solution was a mixture of fibre (FTTP then FTTP), fixed wireless, and then satellite.
That's always a misconception about Australia, as someone who has lived in both.
The NBN failed largely because of a government ideology that neutered it from FTTH to FTTN, if that.
Australia is fairly equivalent to the US for many areas with the exception of the (relatively) uninhabited interior.
If you combined a list of US and Australian cities by population, the top five Australian cities would be in the top 10:
New York (8.5M), Sydney (5.0M), Melbourne (4.7M), LA (3.9M), Chicago (2.7M), Brisbane (2.3M), Houston (2.2M), Perth (2.0M), Philadelphia (1.6M), Adelaide (1.5M).
The notion of Australia as quaint rural villages is used as an excuse by defenders of the status quo. The US is just so unique, "Oh, it's bigger", "more dense", "cities are different here", etc., et al.
I think you are making the mistake of comparing Australia's "Greater Capital City Statistical Areas" [0] with United States cities, when the GCCSAs are better compared to US Metropolitan Statistical Areas [1]. The top US MSAs, labeled by key city) are
(1) New York - 20.2M
(2) Los Angeles - 13.3M
(3) Chicago - 9.5M
(4) Dallas - 7.2M
(5) Houston - 6.8M
(6) Washington, DC - 6.1M
(7) Philadelphia - 6.1M
(8) Miami - 6.1M
(9) Atlanta - 5.8M
(10) Boston - 4.8M
Only Sydney would make the top 10, coming in just above Boston.
Both the US and Australia have cities / metro areas that are significant in population as well as huge low-density areas, but the US metro areas are definitely larger. This makes sense given an overall population of 323M vs 24M.
You definitely make a good point, but on the flip side of that is also that the MSAs are probably more overarching than GCCSAs.
For example, the Seattle MSA extends as far north as Burlington, Mt Vernon, as far east as almost Lake Chelan, and as far south as Packwood near White Pass.
No one would credibly claim that White Pass was a part of Seattle, any more than Lake Chelan.
Whereas Melbourne absolutely would consider Boronia on the east a suburb, Campbellfield on the north, and Frankson in the south all suburbs.
I do get what you are saying, and of course with that population number it is so, but I don't think that there's really a great correlation (mainly as a result of Census in the US using a non-standard definition of the internation "metropolitan area" to basically... "anywhere else".
That being said, when you look at "as a percentage of the population", Sydney and Melbourne at ~20%, the others at ~10%, there's also not the argument of "hey, these US cities are far more dense and complex than Australia's", when the complexity is far more often a result of _artificial barriers and restrictions in the market_ than anything logistical.
It depends on what kind of copper. DSL suffers from the limits of twisted pairs over medium-long distances, with only about 1100 kHz available. DOCSIS, with its shielded coaxial cable, has much higher bandwidth available, up to 750 MHz.
In practical terms, this means that DSL has already reached its practical limit with speeds around 30-50 Mbps, whereas Cable Internet still has room to grow around 2-4 Gbps, depending on how many TV channels the operator is ready to sacrifice to Internet traffic.
Of course, this doesn't address congestion / oversubscription issues around cable, but assuming a competently managed network, FTTN with coax as the last mile is still a very good choice in 2018.
Funny though. No offense and I love France, and I love Europe (really do!), but FB's and GOOG's and BABA's of the world seem to be ... elsewhere? inverse correlation?
Facebook is really just money, and money doesn't have a location. In terms of offices and employments and locations and blah Facebooks is as big as a middling supermarket chain.
Which isn't to say that money is bad or irrelevant or anything. Just that it isn't local in a meaningful way. Facebook is local to wherever that ugly office building is in much the same way that half the world's aircraft are Irish.
There is probably a place in the world for both, but I would rather smaller, competitive companies, over encumbent monopolies and aggressive investment strategies (build a moat with money and watch everything else fail).
Puzzled why it came across as big vs small cos. Who's been the smaller competitive company out of Europe to take on incumbents? Skype? Dailymotion? Spotify? Blablacar? Seznam.cz? That's... it? Seems a bit underwhelming for 1/2 billion highly educated rich people with fast internet, no?
I just don't think it matters much that the rest of the world doesn't have massive, unicorn tech companies. I don't believe they are the unwavering innovators we make them out to be. They are amazing in their space, sure, but most tech companies aren't actually that big economically speaking.
Silicon Valley has been a playground for venture capitalists and their beneficiaries but I would wager that their influence, while wildly public and social, is only important inside it's bubble, and much of that influence has been frivolous, bought or self inflated. Does anyone really need Facebook or Twitter, or Hootsuite or Gmail? They have only existed for circa ten years each.
So I don't believe it's the beacon of social benefit or industrial power. It is certainly a beacon of wild capitalism, excitement and glamour. Whether that's a good thing or not is hotly debated, but a world without SV unicorns would move on just fine.
What does the existence of mentioned companies have to do with the quality of life in a country? For their employees, maybe, but I don't think FB/GOOG/MSFT employ most of the US population?
The GP said nothing about startups, though. They were only talking about access to a good Internet connection at a reasonable price. Not to mention, GOOG etc. is not a startup, is it?
Anyway, going on this tangent, Europe is different. We've had our share of global domination already (which was expensive and unsustainable in the long run), as well as our share of innovation-by-any-means-necessary (which resulted, among other things, in pollution and WWI). We've decided we don't really need either to live a good life. We can still easily buy whatever innovation you come up with if it proves to be safe and useful. We're happy to leave beta-testing to others.
France had Minitel before the Internet was a consumer-product.
It's true that Europe does "disruptive" startups less, because people don't like being disrupted as much, but it's not true that France is a land of tech-illiterate peasants. It's just that the tech is done in large, somewhat lumbering but nonetheless profitable, megacorps.
I live in Zurich, I have Fiber7 (https://init7.net) at home and couldn't be any happier. They don't cost more than the DSL packs of the big firms, I get 500 mb up and down on the router with wifi and they have superb support!
+1 I use them in Lausanne. 777 CHF/year is a great deal!
Interesting model: the price is the same for everyone, while bandwidth is the maximum they can offer in your location. Excellent support. I bought a TP-LINK MC220L + patch cables from them, and hooked up an edgerouter lite for PPPoE & VLAN tagging. Already had a wifi router (google wifi), which sadly can't do VLAN tagging. Haven't noticed any issues with the double NATing.
That model has a downside for the customer: the company has no incentive to invest to upgrade your speed, as you already pay them the one fixed amount.
Market pressures take care of that when they exist. Networking is a pure commodity business, you can squeeze a lot of cost out of it, but in the absence of competition the providers get fat, lazy and rich.
Once you deliver the fiber, the marginal cost of increasing port speed is a rounding error as you do routine infrastructure refresh.
Where I work, we’re increasing many wan links to 10Gb because the cost is marginal at scale. In some cases, it can save money versus an older slower tech!
More than the FFTH penetration, I'm impressed you can open a map and see which places currently have fiber Internet. I live in the "Capital of Silicon Valley" and I can't do anything similar.
A lot of states are the same size or smaller than France and none of them has achieved to get the same internet price/quality so far. Not to mention the the US has a more concentrated population than most of Europe so it's even easier.
It's probably unproductive to compare state vs federal budgets across different countries due to the drastically different funding modal different countries use.
To begin start in a metropolitan region and if it is profitable expand. The problem is something different: The incumbent providers are successful in preventing competition.
It is interesting that this argument is reflexively brought up every time someone mentions infrastructure.
It is not the absolute size that matters, it is density and clustering degrees. And there are some sparsely populated countries in Europe that manage to build infrastructure just fine.
That doesn't take population spread into consideration though; Norway has most people live in the south, like how most people in Canada live near the south / southeast and how there's huge empty / low population areas in the US compared to the more urbanized east and west coast.
The problem with arguments like that is that when you start involving the federal government in anything, the expectation is 100% coverage - not 62.7%.
I don't think it's our size. France does a lot for All its citizens.
In the good ole USA--well we cater to the rich boys, and preserving their wad.
And yes--I had a opportunity to move to France as a young buck, but refused. I was a dumb proud American. It's been my biggest mistake on so many levels.
France has approximately the same population as the Northeast megalopolis (the Boston–Washington Corridor) but the French population is spread out over three times the area.
The US is far ahead of France on broadband in general, with average speeds 70% to 80% faster. That has been true for a very long time now.
France ranks near the very bottom in Europe in percentages above 10mbps, 15mbps, and 25mbps. In the developed world, France is behind - typically far behind - nearly every nation, including Russia (a far poorer country). France's broadband situation is an embarrassment, nothing has fundamentally changed in that picture for the past decade.
France is laughing stock also due to their ugly captive portal pay for every MAC address WiFis, oh and without an OpenVPN over WebSocket you are pretty much limited to TCP 80 and 443.
> Same goes for public service, profit-focused corporations can't provide the same quality of service.
This is just categorically false. Where I live our state owned telco is horrible and you have to jump through hoops to cancel your account with them. People have to keep paying them for literally months (sometimes more than 6) after they cancel their service with them to cancel as they just do not process cancellations and then sue you if you do not pay up.
Our fiber revolution was driven not by the state, but by private profit-focused corporations. In fact the state telco now also has fiber - but it costs about twice the price and then you still have to deal with a provider which is sub standard and makes it near impossible for you to cancel their service. I pay about $10 USD more a month for 100mbit/100mbit up/down FTTH than I payed for 4mbit/512k ADSL up/down from state telco.
With just about every other "utility" or "public service" the story is the same here. Police is shit so I have to pay for security if you don't want to get armed robbed raped or murdered, schools are shit so you have to pay for private schools if you want your child to be able to read and write. Electricity supply is shit - every year we have load shedding and prices keep going up while govt is lining their pockets and then looking for ways to further fuck rate payers while getting kickbacks from Russia. And now because the govt has made everything worse for years there is talk about nationalizing industries to fuel populism amongst the almost 30% (official) unemployed and many poor people as our economy has been shrinking for years (and of course this is capitalism's fault now - because private industry makes govt look bad in comparison).
It is theoretically possible to have decent services where there is no competition and govt monopoly - but it is not the norm and I would say in most cases it does not work out this way.
And where are you living? This sounds a lot like being due a high level of corruption. I think that's one challenge to overcome, you're right that public services are not automatically better
Where I live is irrelevant as this speaks to the point that "profit-focused corporations can't provide the same quality of service.". They can and do all the time. Maybe not in France and maybe not in USA - but the for profit model works just fine here. Why it works so well some places and not at all in others is the real kicker.
And yes the problem is exceptionally high levels of corruption - but if the Govt does not have a self granted monopoly on providing services this provides some measure of containment for corruption and also means that you don't have to pay for everything twice as I have to do now.
And sure - I would like to have a non corrupt govt - but that won't happen ever. So people who make this blatantly false statement that Govt services will always be superior from private services is just giving fuel to the cash grab perpetrated by the Govt of my country.
So yeah, thanks, I guess - thanks for giving the govt of my country excuses for looting even more money - like they needed any to begin with.
> Where I live is irrelevant as this speaks to the point that "profit-focused corporations can't provide the same quality of service."
Um..not sure how validating your evidence is irrelevant. Or even wanting to know more about it.
And to the other poster's point, personal experience impacts interpretations a lot (in both directions). I myself consider the govt inefficient but reliable when compared to private companies. I'm not a libertarian because I trust the govt, but because I trust companies less. I've spoken with people from countries with lots of govt corruption and they find the idea of a reliable govt to be a joke. We each have a lifetime of experience to support our positions.
Corruption is less of a problem than incompetence and general “not giving a fuck.” Municipal infrastructure makes the most sense in relatively dense cities. But in America, cities are disproportionately where poor people live. (Contrast say Paris, where poor people live in the suburbs and rich people in the city). These are disadvantaged voting blocs that won’t (or can’t) complain that loudly when their public services suck. I saw this starkly when I lived in Wilmington and Philadelphia. The busses in Wilmington might as well not keep any schedule. But nobody cares because the DuPont executives don’t rise the bus, they live in the very nice surrounding suburbs and drive in.
Are you actually serious? I live in the Luberon, not far from Avignon and Apt and our internet speeds are 0.8 mbs up and 8 mbs down. So 800 KILObytes up. And that’s for a “business” connection! That’s thanks to Orange’s practical monopoly out where I live. I get to pay over €100 per month for such innovation. My total monthly bill with two cell phones and internet is €360. Which is insane — that is approaching $450 a month.
Thanks French government, you suck. I pay confiscatory taxes — including incredibly high taxes on my internet and phone service and what do I get for it? Abysmal speeds. Given the geographic size of France — it should be covered in fiber already, but my area is projected at 3 years out.
They won’t have 100% fiber by 2022. It’s impossible given the French propensity to make the simple complex, and the inexpensive, expensive. If Orange is a representation of the power of French innovation, then I fear for the future. That’s a company that has separate sign in systems based on the type of account you have and a system that takes 2 weeks to update when payments are made by credit card. Orange represents the single worst experience I have ever had as a customer — that includes my time living in the US and dealing with companies such as Time Warner. The French electric service, EDF, is a close second.
You want to talk about government and successful internet infrastructure initiatives — have a look at South Korea.
But France? Innovative? It’s all for show. It still is a pain in the ass to accomplish anything in that country. Europe uses IBANs almost universally, for example, yet French utilities still insist on the RIB. The insurance company I have can’t do prelevements with my German IBAN. It’s ridiculous.
Just because a government spends money on something doesn’t mean that government is any good at what they’re spending money on.
> our internet speeds are 0.8 mbs up and 8 mbs down. So 800 KILObytes up.
Your conversions might be mistaken.
For example, at my place of work, on ADSL2:
Down Stream : 6696Kbps / Up Stream : 736Kbps
So slightly worse than you. Converting directly to kilobytes, we've got 837 KB/sec down and 92 KB/sec up. Shave off around 20% to get real-world speed, because those are sync rates, not actual throughput.
Unless you actually have 8/0.8 MBytes down/up, equivalent to 64/6.4 Mbps down/up, which is quite decent! (Still maybe not quite €100 good).
Well, to be fair to the private sector... it's only thanks to Xavier Niel that the French have such affordable internet (and now mobile too).
Before he disrupted those two markets, it was just as bad as the US. Remember the "Forfait RSA" the government crowed about having negotiated for the poorest citizens? 40mn and 40SMS for 10 euros per month...
> Same goes for public service, profit-focused corporations can't provide the same quality of service.
There's just no way you can draw a conclusion like this. I would be equally right in say that public corporations never have an incentive to improve services due to lack of a market or competition (see mass transit).
The rollout of a nationalised national broadband/fibre network in Australia has been an interesting one for a number of reasons. We've actually seen private companies roll out their own networks to compete with both the public provider AND other private companies.
Ultimately, the quality of these services is going to depend on a whole lot more than "public vs private"
> This is why I'm happy to live in a country like France where the government takes part in deploying those infrastructures
Does that explain why France is so dramatically far behind the US on Internet speeds, and has been for the last 20 years? Ideally the US goes out of its way to not follow France's path on telecom.
As of Q1 2017:
US average speeds: 18.7 mbps
France average speeds: 10.8 mbps
To put France's figure into perspective, they rank toward the bottom in Europe, behind Russia, Hungary, Lithuania and Poland. They're #27 out of 31 nations ranked in Europe.
France also ranks near the bottom in Europe in % above 10 mbps, at just 31%. The US is at 67%.
And again France ranks near the bottom in Europe in % above 15 mbps, at just 18%. The US is at 48%.
The US is #10 globally when it comes to % over 25 mbps, with 21%. That category saw a one year increase of 65%..
The US ranks in the top 15 globally for highest percentage at 10 mbps, 15 mbps and 25 mbps.
France should be copying the US based on their persistently atrocious broadband figures. And that's with the US approach being subpar.
If even Google cannot penetrate this market then it's for all intents and purposes 100% impenetrable. Unless somebody comes up with a radically different strategy, the ISP market in USA should be considered monopolized and should be broken down by the government (fat chance). In any case, it's game over for consumers - abandon all hope.
If Google's survival depended on solving this, they would have solved it 10 times over. Since it's not, they're approaching this problem with a cost/benefit mindset and they seem to think it's not worth it.
An ideal solution would be nationalization of the infrastructure, but that's never happening in the US. A possible solution is for the US government to scare the telecom monopolies with antitrust lawsuits so much that they come up with a solution themselves (which might be simply splitting the monopoly like you suggested).
> If Google's survival depended on solving this, they would have solved it 10 times over
assuming that's true, can we safely conclude that Google is unworried by the loss of net neutrality? i mean, the broadband providers are still in position and still have their potential anti-neutral leverage.
or does google have some other strategy to fight the loss of net neutrality?
I wonder, was Google Fibre ever intended to succeed in the traditional sense?
Instead, perhaps it was an attempt by Google to change the industry by 1) scaring the incumbents into improving, and 2) expanding consumers' Overton windows[1] regarding what they could/should expect.
Google presumably wants to ensure its services can be delivered to consumers, so this would seem towards that end. As another commenter notes, Google also has deep pockets. Creating & operating a whole company as a PR 'stunt' doesn't seem beyond the realms of reasonable probability.
PS: I think a similar argument can be made for Tesla. I don't think it is a given that Musk intends for Tesla's success to be an economic one.
People spend good money on cars, electricity, and rocket launches.
I think the last one is a particularly good business because even though the US military has understood that cost reduction is job #1 for the use of space, the conventional cost plus model of developing rockets and then building and launch them can put stuff in orbit but cannot do cost reduction.
I have observed a wide range of attitudes towards deception. Both deception of one's self, and of others.
For example: For some people being 'a liar' is one of the worst things imaginable, but to others it is perfectly fine. The former judge the latter as being immoral monsters, the latter think the former are rather sweet (and are perhaps also glad the former exist?).
Regarding deception of one's self: some people feel there is an absolute truth that can be known, whereas others may choose their reality and belief systems to fit their needs in any given moment.
I'm describing opposite ends of two spectrums here, rather than categories.
I think people make assumptions about where Musk is on those spectrums.
My sense, from the press and from personal acquaintances, is that a lot of early investors, and at least some later investors, were impact investors[1]. DBL Investors is a notable example of an early Tesla impact investor. The successor, DBL Partners, is long on all three Musk companies.[2]
This doesn't mean that Tesla didn't need to be an economic success. It does mean that economic success wasn't the only criterion, or as highly ranked as it is for a non-impact company with non-impact investors.
Instead, perhaps it was an attempt by Google to change the industry
I’ve been a happy Verizon FIOS customer for 12 years. For $140 per month I have TV with every pay channel, landline phone and gigabit Internet. The gigabit is relatively recent but I get full gigabit speeds for up and down and it is amazing. I think you’re right that I don’t believe Verizon would’ve offered this at this price without the threat of Google and other competitors.
Google might have made the $70 price point happen. But I’m not sure I’d overstate it. AT&T and Verizon are deploying gigabit in places where Google will never go. Verizon's gigabit upgrade happened after Google had already paused Fiber expansion. Comcast started offering $150/month multi-gig in my town long after that too.
I strongly suspect 5G is instead causing renewed interest in fiber deployment. Comcast wants to get in on a cellular/wifi hybrid service, and for that it needs backhaul.
Fwiw, $140 is quite a lot. We shared what everyone was paying for Fios here at work. I'm on the upper end of $65 for 50/50 (no TV). The lowest we found was 1G for $40.
the trick seems to be to cancel and sign up again for the new user deals.
The $140 includes the $49 “Ultimate Entertainment Pack”. It’s literally every single pay channel. Without that I paid $91 per month for gigabit Internet, TV with Prime channels and Phone.
Comcast had data caps on their broadband packages in Nashville until Google Fiber showed up. GF has shown very little expansion here, but the other guys definitely felt it.
> PS: I think a similar argument can be made for Tesla. I don't think it is a given that Musk intends for Tesla's success to be an economic one.
I think it is though, but probably not in the automotive industry; ATM it still has a lead, just like Apple had for a while on the smartphone market, but I think it'll be passed left and right by the competition.
But by then, Tesla won't be (primarily) a car company anymore, but a battery company, a solar power company (= energy company), and a company with the largest recharge station network in the country. Selling energy and charge stations will be the next generation's oil industry, and Tesla's taking charge there.
People always say Tesla is a battery company, but as far as I know their batteries are made by Panasonic and while I'm sure they're doing research on their own batteries, I don't know why you'd expect them to be more successful than a company that already makes batteries and employs researchers to improve them.
You could say that Google Fiber was a response to Comcast's announcement of its intent to acquire NBC in December 2009.
Google makes no money if they can't show ads to people, and at the time Comcast and friends controlled Google's access to a majority of US audiences that Google's customers (advertisers) wanted their ads in front of. Advertising in the US was more than half of Google's revenue then. Comcast had the only network nationally capable of reliably delivering video and video ads, which was prioritized for growth within Google around then.
I think there was a real fear within Google about the leverage Comcast and other national ISP's had over them. TLS wasn't common, and advertisers weren't nearly as interested in mobile audiences in 2010: wireless data use was a fraction of what it is now. A well-capitalized Comcast without the regulatory restrictions of AT&T or Verizon could create existential trouble for Google if they really wanted to. Google Fiber could have been Google's way of showing they'd be willing to play hardball if it came to that. Any positive PR that came from it was a great bonus, but they almost certainly never made money from Google Fiber.
> Google makes no money if they can't show ads to people
I'm really, really hoping that changes drastically in the next decade. It would be really nice if Google started making the majority of their money from compute cloud offerings (a little out there, but that sector is growing much faster than their general business). I think it's essential if Google's ever going to gain some independence from the perverse incentives they've set themselves up for, and I think that's essential for Google (and society in general) as we move forward.
I'm not sure what to do with Facebook. I don't see people paying for that. Then again, with the amount of time people spend glued to Facebook, they could probably make a tidy business offloading general computing tasks to their users through JS. The concept has been brought up before, generally in the discussion of blockchain mining through websites, but at Facebook's scale and usage it's an entirely different story. I imagine Facebook could have the largest weather supercomputer in the world (by many factors) next week if they really wanted to.
I wonder if Facebook has a department whose job it is to look into developing more parallelizable algorithms for common workloads...
Fundamentally, both Google and Facebook live by questionable morals: Google is a surveillance company trying to branch out, while Facebook is a surveillance and behavioral manipulation company doubling down. Google has some smart engineers, who could maybe make a viable version of the 60s mainframe business when the ad bubble pops. Facebook... I'd pay a couple bucks a month to keep up with acquaintances in a way that's easier than an email list or private Usenet group. But I see them taking the dark path and e.g. selling "consumer profiles" that aren't "credit reports," because "credit reports" are governed by laws.
I worked for Fiber for two years. It was both (wanting to succeed as a business and wanting to shift the industry), with a primary focus on succeeding as a business, or at least that was what the internal messaging was.
I won't comment on any possible changes in the last couple years or why they may have happened, except to say that to the best of my knowledge, at no point was the sentiment, "We've shifted the industry enough that we can stop pretending to want to succeed."
Google Fiber hit a lot of roadblocks along the way that slowed things down. You have the lawsuit from AT&T against local government in Louisville[0]. There was also a lot of arguments[1][2] around the country for Google trying to access utility poles to hang their wires.
Incumbents tried their hardest to prevent Google from hanging new wires. Many of the laws in-place today make it difficult for new companies to hang wires, which I believe was a reaction from the telegraph days[3].
Your analysis is backwards. There aren't special laws that "make it difficult for new companies to hang wires." The issue was not Google hanging its own wires, but Google contractors moving AT&T's wires in order to make space on the poles. Louisville passed special laws to enable one company to relocate another company's property on utility poles. I think those laws are a good idea, but its hard to blame AT&T for not wanting Google contractors to touch its infrastructure.
Also, pointing to a couple of lawsuits ignores the fact that Google got huge concessions everywhere else. It got waivers from build-out requirements (obligations to cover whole cities, instead of "fiberhoods" with sufficient demand), fast-track permitting, free use of municipal land for fiber huts, etc: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-kansas-city-....
I think Google rightfully gets the benefit of goodwill that say AT&T does not. But it's a real triumph of narrative over facts to suggest that Google Fiber didn't have the red carpet rolled out for it in nearly every Fiber city.
(Incidentally, a team of four guys with heavy equipment have spent the last three hours trenching fiber 50 feet through my tiny yard. That's the second visit, and there will be one more, and that's not counting running the fiber down the main road which required months of permitting and surveying. I strongly suspect that's why Google pulled out of Fiber.)
While I absolutely agree with you, that setup would have been untenable. I had an ATT line hanging about 6 feet off the ground(in Louisville, pole neighborhood). Took ATT multiple calls and visits, a total process of about a month, to adjust that one line on one pole. Now imagine a citywide rollout.
I think the FCC should impose a nationwide “one touch make ready” regulation. Federal law already requires non discriminatory access to utility pole, and the FCC already has limits on how long utility line owners can take to do pole adjustments. The FCC has been considering taking that further.
That would be a massive grab of both state and private rights, mostly for the sake of a single company that has asked for it, which is already a monopoly in several other markets and does not need special government favors to help it achieve more.
Is that because of legitimate difficulty in the work being done, or because ATT is completely bureaucratically incompetent?
I'm all for having a set of processes and procedures in place, especially for an entity as large as ATT, but even by the standards of telecos their internal workings are a Franz Kafka nightmare.
the latter. I had trouble even reaching them because I'm not an ATT customer. I tried emailing random contacts I could find, to no avail. Finally they sent a guy out, who was an installer but couldn't touch the pole. Said a different team handled that. About 2 weeks later, they took care of it at last. Not hard work - it was literally rebinding a 20 ft section of wire to the taught steel wire that already existed, which they appear to do with heavy wire ties.
"We" (the government) didn't build it or pay for it. Even back in the AT&T monopoly era it was always private infrastructure.[1] AT&T got certain rights (e.g. easements) but that also came with a lot of strings attached (they had to build in a bunch of rural places they never would've built otherwise). Public ownership of the wires was never part of the bargain.
[1] The same is true for power lines. They're mostly privately owned. The power utilities are subject to various regulations (rate regulation, etc.) but the wires were built with private money and are private property. In contrast, most water/sewer lines are owned by the municipality, and paid for by the public through taxes and hook-up fees for new construction.
I would wonder if the subsidies and tax breaks that have been given over to these companies by the government over the years would count towards the idea us having paid for it. There's always that scandal from decades ago that comes up from time-to-time.
Companies were not given subsidies or tax breaks to pay for telephone or power lines. They were allowed to have local monopolies, in exchange for the requirement they provide utility services to all customers in the area, without regard to the cost of building out service to those customers.
It would also then, have to pay AT&T for it. ...Again. Because AT&T presently owns their property, and regardless of any handouts they've been given, they'd need to be compensated for it's fair market value in order for the government to relieve them of it.
Also, it's likely eminent domain attempts for Google's benefit would run afoul of the law. I don't think the government can eminent domain something for the benefit of another corporation.
> We" (the government) didn't build it or pay for it.
This is not and has not ever been true.
Here [1] is an open auction with ~$2 billion in federal aid attached - "a total of $1.98 billion for 10 years." This was last updated just over a week ago. I would dig further back for other subsidies, but it is not necessary. Through tax breaks and subsidies we (the government, tax payers, etc) have certainly aided infrastructure build out for telecom cos.
The Connect America Fund is funded through a special tax on telcos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund#Connect.... It's likes taxing cell phone companies to provide free phones for low-income people. Yes, some cell phone companies will end up getting "subsidies" but companies like AT&T (or Apple) would be net payors. And whether or not you call that a "subsidy" in rural areas, everywhere outside of rural areas it's the opposite of "subsidized." The taxes that pay for CAF make service in urban areas more expensive, thus decreasing demand and revenue. Municipalities also treat telecom service as a revenue source (a tax of 5% of gross revenue is typical). And there's all the extra obligations, like build-out requirements.
There was some tax dollar funded subsidies in the ARRA, but it's a vanishingly small fraction of the trillion+ dollars invested in telecom infrastructure in the last few decades.
One, companies can’t just pass on taxes like that. If they add a surcharge, that increases the price of the product, which reduces demand. You can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps: you can’t increase your revenue by having the government add a tax to your product and kick it back to you, maybe unless you sell heroin or something. (But then you could just raise the price without the pretense and people would pay it.)
Two, AT&T is paying the tax, but the government is mostly kicking the subsidies back to small rural telcos and coops. Telcos with more urban footprints, like AT&T, subsidize telcos in high cost rural areas.
So calling CAF a subsidy to AT&T really makes no sense. It’s like saying Apple would love the government to slap a 5% tax on iPhones and kick the money to providers of low cost phones. Even if Apple could increase prices to compensate, and get some of those subsidies for the iPhone SE, it’d still be worse off than without the “subsidy.”
Oh please. Incumbents love USF, just like they love all other goofy surcharges. That's whey they invented them in the first place. Sure, their customers pay more than those of their competitors, but through their complete domination of PUCs and FCC they get to decide exactly how the programs are administered. As if they actually needed more barriers to entry for any potential competition, the rules of these programs are continually adjusted to fit exactly what incumbents are doing anyway, while imposing ruinous costs on competitors.
The FCC doesn’t disclose USF contributions by company, but you can guess: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-303886A3.p.... Total reported telecom revenue is about $300 billion per year during that period. AT&T averaged $120 billion per year in revenue during that period (about 40% of the industry). (This is probably an overestimate because AT&T’s revenue includes non-telecom revenue.)
During that period, USF revenues were $7-8 billion per year. 40% of that is like $3 billion. Even if I’m wrong about AT&T’s revenue share by a factor of 4 AT&T still pays in much more than it gets out.
The government has precedent to intervene to make sure new competition is allowed in the market. IANAL but I think they should be exercising this right here, otherwise the incentives are for AT&T to move their wires over for a competitor approximately never.
"(Incidentally, a team of four guys with heavy equipment have spent the last three hours trenching fiber 50 feet through my tiny yard. That's the second visit, and there will be one more, and that's not counting running the fiber down the main road which required months of permitting and surveying...)"
Do you live northwest of Austin, where 18 inches below the surface there is about two feet of solid limestone?
Rocky outcropping. I thought it was going to be a surgical incision, not a ditch. I think they partly went under my neighbor's yard--but they put all the dirt and dead leaves back over so hopefully he doesn't notice!
> a team of four guys with heavy equipment have spent the last three hours trenching fiber 50 feet through my tiny yard. That's the second visit, and there will be one more, and that's not counting running the fiber down the main road which required months of permitting and surveying. I strongly suspect that's why Google pulled out of Fiber.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a huge factor. Everyone likes to blame regulation for fibre failures, but the "last mile" of fiber to the premise, like many wired broadband technologies before it, is often a nightmare.
GF suffers the same fate of every other Google initiative: new exec decides it can't advance his career so it's starved to death in favor of something shinier.
Google won't save us any more than Musk will. It's billionaires launching cars into space and fighting for personal wealth at the detriment of the rest of the society.
Sometimes it feels like some folks will only be happy when life is completely hive-like, when there is nothing to differentiate anything from anything else, everything is grey, nothing is whimsical, and nobody can put their mark on the world.
I don't completely agree with this argument, but...
All of that money came from somewhere. Do you wonder why most of your local retailers went out of business, and you can't visit a local bookstore or camera shop anymore? It's related to why Jeff Bezos has so much money that he has nothing better to do than shoot stuff into space. Preferably, he will shoot bigger stuff farther than Elon Musk, Richard Branson, or Paul Allen.
It could also be used somewhere else. Is shooting suicidal volunteers at Mars really the best use of billions of dollars?
Please see "I don't completely agree with this argument..."
Printing money and setting it on fire would employ printers and firefighters. I'm not sure Billionaire Space Wars are a net harm to society, but they're pretty silly.
> It's billionaires launching cars into space and fighting for personal wealth at the detriment of the rest of the society.
I would entertain an argument that Google Fiber hasn't actually helped society very much but I have a hard time buying that it's been harmful... At worst, it's driven the other players in the regions it's in to offer more bandwidth for less money. At best, it headed off rising a trend of ISPs deceiving the public about what was possible in an effort to suppress speeds and tightly meter bandwidth...
Can you help me understand the ire over that launch?
It's standard that new rockets are tested with a dummy payload to avoid destroying something valuable. Typically that's steel plates, but the Falcon Heavy was going to go up with a useless payload regardless. Saturn I-IV did the same, and V only had a payload because it was a module test and a launch test rolled into one.
I suppose the Tesla took up some extra man-hours fitting the car for launch, and the rocket wasn't aimed somewhere it would be destroyed (though I can't tell whether they usually are).
But seeing this spun as "SpaceX won't save us, they're just shooting cars into space!" is baffling to me; it was some personal wealth spent on adding spectacle to a totally normal rocket launch.
"NASA is a waste" is, broadly, a conservative/Republican stance. Almost everyone I've seen outraged about the Tesla launch was noticeably left of the average Democrat. I don't think a narrative of "they hated the public version, now they hate the private version" holds up for the people I've seen.
Granted, there's a second group on the left who hated NASA before and SpaceX now. But that narrative is usually "space exploration is a waste when people are going hungry", with not much concern about public/private status.
"NASA is a waste" is, broadly, a conservative/Republican stance..."space exploration is a waste when people are going hungry"
It's definitely now also a Far Left talking point. Larry Wilmore basically went back to the old 60's, "Why is there poverty, and we're putting men on the moon?" There's a scene somewhere where he's telling Bill Nye to STFU about his Science. This brings to mind Phillip DeFranco's t-shirt about substituting feelings for facts.
This is incorrect. Access is an Alphabet subsidiary separate from Google and its CEO reports to the Alphabet executive team. The people working on it are incentivized for it to succeed, and the next person up is Larry Page.
Actually, you prompted me to check, and Dinni isn't listed as having a manager, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. But I certainly wouldn't deny Ruth's ability to influence Access's direction. :)
GF suffers the same fate of every other Google initiative: new exec decides it can't advance his career so it's starved to death in favor of something shinier.
Apparently, "Don't be Evil" doesn't cover internal company politics.
I remember at a previous job, there was this hefty trans-atlantic data link the company was leasing. All the VPs coveted it, so the political machinations basically resulted in no-one using it, ever, all the while we were paying not-insignificant funds for it.
This would be an insightful comment if it provided evidence rather than conjecture. As it stands, it contributes nothing to my understanding of Google Fiber.
> ... at no point was the sentiment, "We've shifted the industry enough that we can stop pretending to want to succeed."
I don't doubt you, but I would definitely expect that sort of messaging even if the true primary goal for GF was to be disruptive, as opposed to profitable.
Right, it's possible the executives weren't straightforward with us simple SWEs. But I don't have any particular reason/evidence for believing that in this case. My general priors for such things are somewhere between 0 and 1, exclusive. :)
FWIW, if I were aware of other plausible explanations for the way Fiber has progressed, Occam's Razor would compel me to believe those explanations versus defaulting to cynicism.
There was so much news about all of the dark fiber that Google was buying up. Every time it popped up in the news, it seemed like people assumed it was for the Google Fiber project.
I wonder if a lot of that ended up being used for GCP datacenter connections?
Comcast still charges too much, but since Google Fiber they stopped sending out techs who barely know more than the troubleshooting checklist they use when you call.
It certainly had that result for me here in Austin. While they slowed/stopped the Google Fiber rollout, I am now able to get fiber from AT&T. And, extremely surprisingly, the customer service has been great.
Honestly I'm sure they just realized how time consuming and expensive it is. And fiber isn't their main gig so they decided to duck out.
AT+T rolled out fiber to my neighborhood over the last 6 months. They've been digging up yards and shared areas for months and I was the first person in my area to sign up. It took multiple visits for the techs to fix the line noise and clean the lines after the first rollout, and the techs are still here almost every day fixing other noise/line issues the last few weeks.
I think some people still don't realize quite how expensive it is to truly build out a national Telecom network. I remember when Clearwire raised ~$7 billion [1] and still wasn't in many markets and rural areas, ultimately selling to Sprint for pennies on the dollar. The infrastructure costs are staggering, and even a rich company like Google can't just dip their toes in hoping to succeed.
Yes, I agree this is the key here. Google realized FTTH is too expensive in most places, and still are looking at wireless IIUC. Except for new buildings in dense areas or similar, it's likely that bringing fiber close and going over the remaining distance with either 3.5 GHz radio or millimeter waves (former better for range, later for available BW) makes more sense. We'll see soon how well it works in practice, 5G NR deployments will start with fixed wireless like this.
I have fiber internet at home (US) and while I'm generally happy with it, the thing I'm most happy about it is I'm no longer giving Time Warner Cable / Spectrum any of my money. In terms of speed, yes it's fast (1gb up/down) but let's be honest, there are very few things that can make use of that bandwidth. As a test I just downloaded an Ubuntu ISO at 40 megabytes/sec (320 megabits/sec.) While it's nice, if I had to wait 4 minutes instead of 1.5 minutes with my old service, it's not really changing my world/life.
Agreed entirely, I also have 1gig up/down, even 802.11ac struggles past 300mbit/sec through a couple of walls.
Plus very few servers seem to be able to reliably send at fast speeds, and TCP slow start means small files (<100MB) see 0 benefit at all.
The biggest problem I have is that a lot of portable storage I have (SD cards + USB hard drives) is way slower than my internet. I have one SD card which struggles at random file writes at more than 50mbit/sec.
There's a simple solution to this really - force ISPs to charge the same price to everyone. The fact that there are different prices in different areas is really weird and I don't think it happens in any other country.
Also, they didn't really seek to keep expenses down where they could. Both the jack and the router are proprietary, for instance. Also, in very high density areas like high rise apartments, normal cat6a would more than suffice at half the price of single-mode fiber, and that's not even taking into the account the price of switch equipment.
GF potential customer here in Atlanta, I will say 5 years in it has been nothing but a series of disappointments. I was in one of the first neighborhoods to get GF actually laid down. I have been promised "any day now" for 2 years. But what it looks like is if your house is not on a direct fiber line, it will never be coming. GF had promised it would get ATT to complete the 1 block connection between their fiber and my house for 2 years.
However I did get fiber from ATT for 100 meg symmetrical for 50 bucks a month. And unlike comcast it really delivers 100 megabits per second. I could have gotten the full gig fiber for 70 a month. But it did not seem worth it.
Similar situation. Got on the waiting list as soon as they put it up. Got my "Google Fiber" T-shirt. And then nothing, for several years.
When Comcast offered 1000Mbps* service for $70/mo with a three year contract, I gave up. Interestingly, this offer only seems to have been available in likely GF service areas and was a pretty transparent attempt to tie up potential GF customers with a nice early termination fee.
Interesting, implies that it is still a cable based backbone.
I still remember the PITA back in the days where I needed to do 800 meg updates to my game, it took two hours to post it! I would have loved 40, and 100 was unimaginable.
Recall the CEO's departure and scale-back announcement[0]. There was going to be a shift of direction towards other kinds of last-mile (or even, last 100 yards) technology. Its a shame we haven't heard any more since then.
I'm still on the cheapest plan I could find, which is 60 Mbps for $40/month. Even if fiber were $70/month, I'm not sure I would buy it, as 60 Mbps seems to be doing the job fine. What kind of things would 1 Gbps allow me to do that I currently cannot, that would justify an extra $30/month?
You're looking at it from the wrong perspective. The difference between 60 and 1000mbit is not in allowing you previously impossible things. It is the same difference as between spinning rust and SSDs. It affects every single interaction you have with the networks to reduce friction as much as possible on your end, and also improves parallelization capabilities.
Downloading of small files will change from being a fraction of a second to nigh-imperceptible, and as long as the remote side supports it, this will apply to all images on a website at once. And no longer will downloading a game on steam mess with your youtube/netflix/whatever.
Everything you do now, but faster? I have GF and I don't know how I will ever be able to go back to <100Mb if I ever move. I haven't had to wait for _anything_ since I got the gigabit; even multi-gig 4k movies finish downloading before I can finish making my popcorn.
It bugged me a lot too that there are a lot of sloppy editorial errors that were somehow not picked up by the journalist, nor the copy editors, and the editor(s) in chief before publishing a headline story like this. It reminded me of how far we've slipped in journalism quality :/
Tech companies are incredibly profitable. Fixed costs are really low. Employees are probably the biggest cost. This is in stark contrast to the likes of, say, Comcast, Spectrum or Verizon that have massive capex budgets.
Building a broadband network is an interesting business. I like to describe it as a hyper-local national business. I saw this because every municipality has different rules (eg compare getting pole access in Louisville vs Nashville vs Austin), the ground is different (one area might have a lot of limestone in the ground and make trenching slow, difficult and expensive) and so on. Getting something resolved might be a case of whoever is the construction manager in a given area knowing the right person to call that might otherwise have 11 people standing around for 2 days.
This is something that national ISPs are exceedingly good at because they've spent decades doing it. I mean they go further than that by trying to keep competitors out through regulatory blocks and so forth but this doesn't change the fact that this is a core competency.
It is not nor was it ever Google's core competency. Google is at its heart a technical company that solves technical problems. Making search or Maps or GMail worth with petabytes or even exabytes of data is something Google is exceedingly good at. This is an entirely different business model and core competency.
I don't know this for a fact but I SUSPECT that Google's executives went into Fiber with the naive belief that (a lot of hand-waving here) they were Google and could do anything and somehow they could reduce the cost per household connected from a more normal $1000-3000 to <$500. This might be true if it was a software problem. Digging up trenches and stringing cables to poles is not a software problem.
What's more Google has never really had to control costs in the same sense that a large capital project would have to. Worse, Google's culture that it'll ship when it ships (which is great from a software engineering POV) doesn't work when you need to plan for lighting up networks and areas and there are a lot of moving parts to make that happen. It's really a case of what gets measured gets done.
Add to this that there is uncertainty over what the future of fixed broadband is going to be. Will it be wireless or wired? That's the ultimate question. If it's wireless and you've just spent $50B building a national wired network then... woops. If it's wired and you've just invested $25B in building wireless infrastructure then... woops.
I suspect it's one of these cases where doing nothing is worse than doing something but I suspect Google's board was scared off by the large capital costs involved in doing anything and were too risk-averse to be wrong.
The crazy thing is that Google invested in wireless technology, acquired companies and filed patents even before the Fiber announcement. Yet, here we are.
It's a management failure. They should have pushed further, despite monopolists' resistance. But they gave up. Didn't they know it was a long term investment? Alphabet could afford it.
> And in markets that Google Fiber has been deployed, it has resulted in a dramatic reduction in prices among regional incumbents.
Yeah, that's the main outcome. Gigabit for $70 is a norm today, and if someone charges a lot more, it's viewed as a rip off. And not only in markets where they deployed.
332 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadActually we finally got NBN on my street and I am syncing at 75mbit (paying for 100) and frankly I am over the moon. The fastest I have had previous, after living all over AU, was 14mbit down, and I was the envy of my friends for that roaring waterfall of data.
Everyone else I know is on around 8mbit even in 2018.
The cause is not NIMBYism, or any other negative traits you might try to tag on to people from the Bay, but rather, the existing telecom companies and their attempts to protect their pseudo-monopoly.
https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/03/10/google-fights-att-com...
People at work were all excited when the announcement for our major metropolitan area was announced until the areas were given and it was like, what is the point if your in such limited areas?
I know more outside of my metro Atlanta area with fiber than within. that to me is just backwards but I will take it. I like my hick neighborhood and with fiber I can work from home a lot more
"Cash is a call option with no expiration date" https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042613/cash-...
If there's a single company with a forever long track record of half-assing products and never finishing them, only to cancel them later with disregard to current customers, that's Google.
They make so much money that nothing really matters for them.
While a private company has to pay for the usage of the public property too. It has also to work on the allowance to use the public property at all. Also the construction costs are much higher, as they cannot share with other infrastructure costs. If private companies wants to share the costs of infrastructure work, it requires much more coordinating work. They also need to know way in advance when which infrastructure work by which private company is planned to be able to work together. That will become a bureaucratic mess.
In Norway the fastest growing deployments of fiber is done by regional power companies in cooperation with a services provider (data, VOIP, IPTV etc). This because the power companies already have poles and pipes that they can run the fiber along.
Bullshit.
It worked in the markets Google rolled out in...and that was it. These companies stubbornly refused to preempt Googles expansion anywhere.
Maybe they called Googles bluff, maybe they were never nimble enough to even think about getting ahead of Google let alone execute it, and maybe Google was just never that serious in the first place.
I think it genuinely was received as the Cool New Thing for a while. Then the cities applied to be Google fiber cities. Then fiber rolled out to some cities. At some point competitors responded by upgrading their service. And then with some retrospection, we collectively looked back at that series of events and said "ah, this must have been Google's plan all along."
I honestly don't doubt that Google's initial plan was insanely ambitious. And that what transpired, while falling far short of the original vision, nevertheless did advance their interests. But my recollection of the events as they unfolded in real time wasn't that this was their plan from the start, or that people felt that way, until a few news cycles passed and it was clear that it spurred other internet providers to action.
But I do agree with you that it definitely did become the prevailing wisdom, eventually.
If you use the interference patterns to transmit data instead of the signals directly, and you have enough antennas, you have essentially unlimited wireless bandwidth, at least at relatively short range (ie. cells). Granted, doing this for more than 4 or so antennas is currently beyond the capabilities of deployed equipment, but we'll get there.
I don't understand why people keep saying that we won't be able to satisfy bandwidth demand on wireless. We can, and it may be a lot cheaper (esp. outside of the cities).
Is it possible, from a market incentive perspective, to build a wireless ISP business where it's more profitable to increase last mile bandwidth or turn away customers, rather than overload a cell? I'm not sure.
Wireless is fairly useful to provide basic coverage to a huge area at relatively low cost. The quality is lacking though. Low Cost, Coverage and Quality, pick two.
As someone who's now lived >5 years in 3 locations, I've always found that there are things that oppose last mile bandwidth buildouts and there are things that don't matter.
What doesn't prevent capacity buildouts:
large costs (but within an order of magnitude or so of reasonable, I'm not talking "FTTH to a fishing village on a remote island" large costs)
technological limitations (again within an order of magnitude of what's possible)
What prevents capacity buildouts:
monopolies
cartels
absurd (and required) levels of capital investment (like buried fiber/copper capacity)
And you know what I find another huge positive about wireless networks ? There's 15 in every place I've lived. 2 "really" independent ones, 1 "more or less"/partially independent one, and a dozen or so that piggyback on the others' networks, providing for more price differentiation. Physically, there's room for something like up to 5 truly independent ones, using different frequency ranges. If the military were to get off half the spectrum, we can easily make that 20, so if the situation gets bad, there is an actual reserve. This means that governments can always threaten the existing providers with allowing another one in, in a way that they can't with wired networks.
Wired providers, there was never more than 2. Mostly there was just 1. Even when there were 2, they were absolutely not comparable (I mean, I've done telecommunications consulting for huge companies, I know there are really 50 or so, with 49 having extremely limited reach, unusable for consumers). This lead to monopoly, which lead to all sorts of shit situations, including bandwidth limits and turning away of customers. Even then, in the one place were 2 were available, the key to good service was to switch wired provider every 2 years.
Wireless multicast means that the superbowl will be sent out once to many subscribers.
Wait, what? How did IPv6 become a multicast dependency? PIM/IGMP is difficult, but is quite possible without MLD/IPv6. Don't forget class D space.
Apart from mailing out the modem to me, my wireless ISP has basically zero marginal installation cost for adding me as a customer, assuming their closest towers have sufficient capacity (they vetted my address first before selling me the wireless modem). And I know for a fact that they're capping my modem's speed in software as my 4G smartphone's connection is much faster. This is why the NBN's CEO said wireless networks are its biggest threat.
Even my GPRS connection is faster than 400 millibits per second.
Same goes for public service, profit-focused corporations can't provide the same quality of service.
And keep in mind that in France currently "fiber" means "at least FFTN", much of rural france won't see FTTH for a long time.
France claiming 100% fiber by 2022? They are dreaming, or perhaps even delusional. No way they can get FTTH by 2022. There are some places that don’t have any connectivity and you have to use Satelite.
They’re going to fix that in 4 years?
I wouldn't go quite that far e.g. let's say you're my parents in a village of 300 (and as many cows) with the DSLAM >5km away, the best DSL you can get is 1024k on a good day (and on average closer to 512k with pings in the half-second range), my understanding is that for them the FTTN node would be roughly at the center of each village.
All of a sudden, unless the village is huge there's <2km between any home and the node and you can expect 15~20Mbps over the entire village.
The kind of engineering to distribute such a large network seems to mirror the issues with the nationwide power grid that was proposed to allow for consistent solar energy. The USA is just a very, very big place with populations, even urban, that sprawl and are not condensed like in London, Paris, Munich or other countries in the fiber fight.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
> I'm not saying that a similar model wouldn't be easy to implement in the boroughs of New York, Boston, SV, Austin, etc.
Oh please, the village I'm talking about is not a borough of a major metropolis, it's a small rural village, the closest thing which could be construed as a city has a population of under 50k and is 20km away.
Boston and Austin have metro populations in the millions, there's barely 6 cities in all of France which reach that.
> you still have 20% of Americans living in not-urban environments
Oh good point, let's check the percentage of rural population in france. Hey look, it's 20%. Wow, probably an outlier, let's check Germany. Oh, 24%. Maybe Spain? 20% again.
And these are highly urbanised countries mind, Ireland and Portugal are sitting at 36% rural population.
> The USA is just a very, very big place with populations, even urban, that sprawl and are not condensed like in London, Paris, Munich or other countries in the fiber fight.
None of London, Paris or Munich are countries, they're major/capital cities inside countries which have their own non-urban populations.
I still agree with you, though, that America could do something if there was a strong enough will. Even if the cost of fiber is prohibitive, it seems like there are wireless technologies out there that would be better than the zilch broadband 23 million Americans currently have. (https://www.npr.org/2018/03/03/590546371/rural-communities-t...)
Consider this, the state of Texas alone is bigger than all of France, and while it has several huge cities in it, it still has less than half the population of France. Montana is more than half the land area of France, and only has 1 million people living in it.
It would be a lot easier to just give up on the 1% that are truly scattered to the winds with little homesteads in the middle of no-where. But hopefully we can get some really good low earth orbit satellite internet and not have to worry about all this.
The NBN failed largely because of a government ideology that neutered it from FTTH to FTTN, if that.
Australia is fairly equivalent to the US for many areas with the exception of the (relatively) uninhabited interior.
If you combined a list of US and Australian cities by population, the top five Australian cities would be in the top 10:
New York (8.5M), Sydney (5.0M), Melbourne (4.7M), LA (3.9M), Chicago (2.7M), Brisbane (2.3M), Houston (2.2M), Perth (2.0M), Philadelphia (1.6M), Adelaide (1.5M).
The notion of Australia as quaint rural villages is used as an excuse by defenders of the status quo. The US is just so unique, "Oh, it's bigger", "more dense", "cities are different here", etc., et al.
(1) New York - 20.2M (2) Los Angeles - 13.3M (3) Chicago - 9.5M (4) Dallas - 7.2M (5) Houston - 6.8M (6) Washington, DC - 6.1M (7) Philadelphia - 6.1M (8) Miami - 6.1M (9) Atlanta - 5.8M (10) Boston - 4.8M
Only Sydney would make the top 10, coming in just above Boston.
Both the US and Australia have cities / metro areas that are significant in population as well as huge low-density areas, but the US metro areas are definitely larger. This makes sense given an overall population of 323M vs 24M.
See
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Australia_by...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metropolitan_statistic...
For example, the Seattle MSA extends as far north as Burlington, Mt Vernon, as far east as almost Lake Chelan, and as far south as Packwood near White Pass.
No one would credibly claim that White Pass was a part of Seattle, any more than Lake Chelan.
Whereas Melbourne absolutely would consider Boronia on the east a suburb, Campbellfield on the north, and Frankson in the south all suburbs.
I do get what you are saying, and of course with that population number it is so, but I don't think that there's really a great correlation (mainly as a result of Census in the US using a non-standard definition of the internation "metropolitan area" to basically... "anywhere else".
That being said, when you look at "as a percentage of the population", Sydney and Melbourne at ~20%, the others at ~10%, there's also not the argument of "hey, these US cities are far more dense and complex than Australia's", when the complexity is far more often a result of _artificial barriers and restrictions in the market_ than anything logistical.
In practical terms, this means that DSL has already reached its practical limit with speeds around 30-50 Mbps, whereas Cable Internet still has room to grow around 2-4 Gbps, depending on how many TV channels the operator is ready to sacrifice to Internet traffic.
Of course, this doesn't address congestion / oversubscription issues around cable, but assuming a competently managed network, FTTN with coax as the last mile is still a very good choice in 2018.
The successor, G.fast, will nominally do a gig, but about 500 Mbps over short loops.
Europe, if one can even process such a mix of cultures as a single entity, seems to abhor spectacle.
Facebook is really just money, and money doesn't have a location. In terms of offices and employments and locations and blah Facebooks is as big as a middling supermarket chain.
Which isn't to say that money is bad or irrelevant or anything. Just that it isn't local in a meaningful way. Facebook is local to wherever that ugly office building is in much the same way that half the world's aircraft are Irish.
Silicon Valley has been a playground for venture capitalists and their beneficiaries but I would wager that their influence, while wildly public and social, is only important inside it's bubble, and much of that influence has been frivolous, bought or self inflated. Does anyone really need Facebook or Twitter, or Hootsuite or Gmail? They have only existed for circa ten years each.
So I don't believe it's the beacon of social benefit or industrial power. It is certainly a beacon of wild capitalism, excitement and glamour. Whether that's a good thing or not is hotly debated, but a world without SV unicorns would move on just fine.
Anyway, going on this tangent, Europe is different. We've had our share of global domination already (which was expensive and unsustainable in the long run), as well as our share of innovation-by-any-means-necessary (which resulted, among other things, in pollution and WWI). We've decided we don't really need either to live a good life. We can still easily buy whatever innovation you come up with if it proves to be safe and useful. We're happy to leave beta-testing to others.
It's true that Europe does "disruptive" startups less, because people don't like being disrupted as much, but it's not true that France is a land of tech-illiterate peasants. It's just that the tech is done in large, somewhat lumbering but nonetheless profitable, megacorps.
Orange, Vivendi, Airbus, Bull, ST, and so on.
https://map.geo.admin.ch/?layers=ch.bakom.anschlussart-glasf...
Thanks to this map it was easy to select the right place to move to, and we are currently in the process of moving... to an home equipped with FFTH!
Interesting model: the price is the same for everyone, while bandwidth is the maximum they can offer in your location. Excellent support. I bought a TP-LINK MC220L + patch cables from them, and hooked up an edgerouter lite for PPPoE & VLAN tagging. Already had a wifi router (google wifi), which sadly can't do VLAN tagging. Haven't noticed any issues with the double NATing.
Once you deliver the fiber, the marginal cost of increasing port speed is a rounding error as you do routine infrastructure refresh.
Where I work, we’re increasing many wan links to 10Gb because the cost is marginal at scale. In some cases, it can save money versus an older slower tech!
It is not the absolute size that matters, it is density and clustering degrees. And there are some sparsely populated countries in Europe that manage to build infrastructure just fine.
Population density:
In the good ole USA--well we cater to the rich boys, and preserving their wad.
And yes--I had a opportunity to move to France as a young buck, but refused. I was a dumb proud American. It's been my biggest mistake on so many levels.
France ranks near the very bottom in Europe in percentages above 10mbps, 15mbps, and 25mbps. In the developed world, France is behind - typically far behind - nearly every nation, including Russia (a far poorer country). France's broadband situation is an embarrassment, nothing has fundamentally changed in that picture for the past decade.
And they are slooow as shit too.
Now that's interesting. Do you have some stats on CPU efficiency and overhead?
And I recommend mosh ( https://github.com/rinne/mosh - the SSH Agent forwarding fork/branch ) to hide the latency as much as possible.
This is just categorically false. Where I live our state owned telco is horrible and you have to jump through hoops to cancel your account with them. People have to keep paying them for literally months (sometimes more than 6) after they cancel their service with them to cancel as they just do not process cancellations and then sue you if you do not pay up.
Our fiber revolution was driven not by the state, but by private profit-focused corporations. In fact the state telco now also has fiber - but it costs about twice the price and then you still have to deal with a provider which is sub standard and makes it near impossible for you to cancel their service. I pay about $10 USD more a month for 100mbit/100mbit up/down FTTH than I payed for 4mbit/512k ADSL up/down from state telco.
With just about every other "utility" or "public service" the story is the same here. Police is shit so I have to pay for security if you don't want to get armed robbed raped or murdered, schools are shit so you have to pay for private schools if you want your child to be able to read and write. Electricity supply is shit - every year we have load shedding and prices keep going up while govt is lining their pockets and then looking for ways to further fuck rate payers while getting kickbacks from Russia. And now because the govt has made everything worse for years there is talk about nationalizing industries to fuel populism amongst the almost 30% (official) unemployed and many poor people as our economy has been shrinking for years (and of course this is capitalism's fault now - because private industry makes govt look bad in comparison).
It is theoretically possible to have decent services where there is no competition and govt monopoly - but it is not the norm and I would say in most cases it does not work out this way.
And yes the problem is exceptionally high levels of corruption - but if the Govt does not have a self granted monopoly on providing services this provides some measure of containment for corruption and also means that you don't have to pay for everything twice as I have to do now.
And sure - I would like to have a non corrupt govt - but that won't happen ever. So people who make this blatantly false statement that Govt services will always be superior from private services is just giving fuel to the cash grab perpetrated by the Govt of my country.
So yeah, thanks, I guess - thanks for giving the govt of my country excuses for looting even more money - like they needed any to begin with.
Um..not sure how validating your evidence is irrelevant. Or even wanting to know more about it.
And to the other poster's point, personal experience impacts interpretations a lot (in both directions). I myself consider the govt inefficient but reliable when compared to private companies. I'm not a libertarian because I trust the govt, but because I trust companies less. I've spoken with people from countries with lots of govt corruption and they find the idea of a reliable govt to be a joke. We each have a lifetime of experience to support our positions.
Thanks French government, you suck. I pay confiscatory taxes — including incredibly high taxes on my internet and phone service and what do I get for it? Abysmal speeds. Given the geographic size of France — it should be covered in fiber already, but my area is projected at 3 years out.
They won’t have 100% fiber by 2022. It’s impossible given the French propensity to make the simple complex, and the inexpensive, expensive. If Orange is a representation of the power of French innovation, then I fear for the future. That’s a company that has separate sign in systems based on the type of account you have and a system that takes 2 weeks to update when payments are made by credit card. Orange represents the single worst experience I have ever had as a customer — that includes my time living in the US and dealing with companies such as Time Warner. The French electric service, EDF, is a close second.
You want to talk about government and successful internet infrastructure initiatives — have a look at South Korea.
But France? Innovative? It’s all for show. It still is a pain in the ass to accomplish anything in that country. Europe uses IBANs almost universally, for example, yet French utilities still insist on the RIB. The insurance company I have can’t do prelevements with my German IBAN. It’s ridiculous.
Just because a government spends money on something doesn’t mean that government is any good at what they’re spending money on.
Your conversions might be mistaken.
For example, at my place of work, on ADSL2:
Down Stream : 6696Kbps / Up Stream : 736Kbps
So slightly worse than you. Converting directly to kilobytes, we've got 837 KB/sec down and 92 KB/sec up. Shave off around 20% to get real-world speed, because those are sync rates, not actual throughput.
Unless you actually have 8/0.8 MBytes down/up, equivalent to 64/6.4 Mbps down/up, which is quite decent! (Still maybe not quite €100 good).
Before he disrupted those two markets, it was just as bad as the US. Remember the "Forfait RSA" the government crowed about having negotiated for the poorest citizens? 40mn and 40SMS for 10 euros per month...
There's just no way you can draw a conclusion like this. I would be equally right in say that public corporations never have an incentive to improve services due to lack of a market or competition (see mass transit).
The rollout of a nationalised national broadband/fibre network in Australia has been an interesting one for a number of reasons. We've actually seen private companies roll out their own networks to compete with both the public provider AND other private companies.
Ultimately, the quality of these services is going to depend on a whole lot more than "public vs private"
Does that explain why France is so dramatically far behind the US on Internet speeds, and has been for the last 20 years? Ideally the US goes out of its way to not follow France's path on telecom.
As of Q1 2017:
US average speeds: 18.7 mbps
France average speeds: 10.8 mbps
To put France's figure into perspective, they rank toward the bottom in Europe, behind Russia, Hungary, Lithuania and Poland. They're #27 out of 31 nations ranked in Europe.
France also ranks near the bottom in Europe in % above 10 mbps, at just 31%. The US is at 67%.
And again France ranks near the bottom in Europe in % above 15 mbps, at just 18%. The US is at 48%.
The US is #10 globally when it comes to % over 25 mbps, with 21%. That category saw a one year increase of 65%..
The US ranks in the top 15 globally for highest percentage at 10 mbps, 15 mbps and 25 mbps.
France should be copying the US based on their persistently atrocious broadband figures. And that's with the US approach being subpar.
https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t...
An ideal solution would be nationalization of the infrastructure, but that's never happening in the US. A possible solution is for the US government to scare the telecom monopolies with antitrust lawsuits so much that they come up with a solution themselves (which might be simply splitting the monopoly like you suggested).
BTW, is your name an ss13 reference?
assuming that's true, can we safely conclude that Google is unworried by the loss of net neutrality? i mean, the broadband providers are still in position and still have their potential anti-neutral leverage.
or does google have some other strategy to fight the loss of net neutrality?
Instead, perhaps it was an attempt by Google to change the industry by 1) scaring the incumbents into improving, and 2) expanding consumers' Overton windows[1] regarding what they could/should expect.
Google presumably wants to ensure its services can be delivered to consumers, so this would seem towards that end. As another commenter notes, Google also has deep pockets. Creating & operating a whole company as a PR 'stunt' doesn't seem beyond the realms of reasonable probability.
PS: I think a similar argument can be made for Tesla. I don't think it is a given that Musk intends for Tesla's success to be an economic one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Edit: made last sentence less strong.
What did Musk tell investors?
I think the last one is a particularly good business because even though the US military has understood that cost reduction is job #1 for the use of space, the conventional cost plus model of developing rockets and then building and launch them can put stuff in orbit but cannot do cost reduction.
For example: For some people being 'a liar' is one of the worst things imaginable, but to others it is perfectly fine. The former judge the latter as being immoral monsters, the latter think the former are rather sweet (and are perhaps also glad the former exist?).
Regarding deception of one's self: some people feel there is an absolute truth that can be known, whereas others may choose their reality and belief systems to fit their needs in any given moment.
I'm describing opposite ends of two spectrums here, rather than categories.
I think people make assumptions about where Musk is on those spectrums.
New nit: two spectra.
This doesn't mean that Tesla didn't need to be an economic success. It does mean that economic success wasn't the only criterion, or as highly ranked as it is for a non-impact company with non-impact investors.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_investing
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DBL_Partners
I’ve been a happy Verizon FIOS customer for 12 years. For $140 per month I have TV with every pay channel, landline phone and gigabit Internet. The gigabit is relatively recent but I get full gigabit speeds for up and down and it is amazing. I think you’re right that I don’t believe Verizon would’ve offered this at this price without the threat of Google and other competitors.
I strongly suspect 5G is instead causing renewed interest in fiber deployment. Comcast wants to get in on a cellular/wifi hybrid service, and for that it needs backhaul.
the trick seems to be to cancel and sign up again for the new user deals.
I believe gigabit is $70 a month stand alone from Verizon.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/25/15423998/verizon-70-gigab...
I think it is though, but probably not in the automotive industry; ATM it still has a lead, just like Apple had for a while on the smartphone market, but I think it'll be passed left and right by the competition.
But by then, Tesla won't be (primarily) a car company anymore, but a battery company, a solar power company (= energy company), and a company with the largest recharge station network in the country. Selling energy and charge stations will be the next generation's oil industry, and Tesla's taking charge there.
Google makes no money if they can't show ads to people, and at the time Comcast and friends controlled Google's access to a majority of US audiences that Google's customers (advertisers) wanted their ads in front of. Advertising in the US was more than half of Google's revenue then. Comcast had the only network nationally capable of reliably delivering video and video ads, which was prioritized for growth within Google around then.
I think there was a real fear within Google about the leverage Comcast and other national ISP's had over them. TLS wasn't common, and advertisers weren't nearly as interested in mobile audiences in 2010: wireless data use was a fraction of what it is now. A well-capitalized Comcast without the regulatory restrictions of AT&T or Verizon could create existential trouble for Google if they really wanted to. Google Fiber could have been Google's way of showing they'd be willing to play hardball if it came to that. Any positive PR that came from it was a great bonus, but they almost certainly never made money from Google Fiber.
I'm really, really hoping that changes drastically in the next decade. It would be really nice if Google started making the majority of their money from compute cloud offerings (a little out there, but that sector is growing much faster than their general business). I think it's essential if Google's ever going to gain some independence from the perverse incentives they've set themselves up for, and I think that's essential for Google (and society in general) as we move forward.
I'm not sure what to do with Facebook. I don't see people paying for that. Then again, with the amount of time people spend glued to Facebook, they could probably make a tidy business offloading general computing tasks to their users through JS. The concept has been brought up before, generally in the discussion of blockchain mining through websites, but at Facebook's scale and usage it's an entirely different story. I imagine Facebook could have the largest weather supercomputer in the world (by many factors) next week if they really wanted to.
I wonder if Facebook has a department whose job it is to look into developing more parallelizable algorithms for common workloads...
I won't comment on any possible changes in the last couple years or why they may have happened, except to say that to the best of my knowledge, at no point was the sentiment, "We've shifted the industry enough that we can stop pretending to want to succeed."
Incumbents tried their hardest to prevent Google from hanging new wires. Many of the laws in-place today make it difficult for new companies to hang wires, which I believe was a reaction from the telegraph days[3].
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/att-admits-defea...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/why-att-says-it-...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/01/cable...
[3] https://io9.gizmodo.com/photos-from-the-days-when-thousands-...
Also, pointing to a couple of lawsuits ignores the fact that Google got huge concessions everywhere else. It got waivers from build-out requirements (obligations to cover whole cities, instead of "fiberhoods" with sufficient demand), fast-track permitting, free use of municipal land for fiber huts, etc: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-kansas-city-....
I think Google rightfully gets the benefit of goodwill that say AT&T does not. But it's a real triumph of narrative over facts to suggest that Google Fiber didn't have the red carpet rolled out for it in nearly every Fiber city.
(Incidentally, a team of four guys with heavy equipment have spent the last three hours trenching fiber 50 feet through my tiny yard. That's the second visit, and there will be one more, and that's not counting running the fiber down the main road which required months of permitting and surveying. I strongly suspect that's why Google pulled out of Fiber.)
I'm all for having a set of processes and procedures in place, especially for an entity as large as ATT, but even by the standards of telecos their internal workings are a Franz Kafka nightmare.
Exactly -- AT&T thinks it's their infrastructure, but it's not. It's ours.
[1] The same is true for power lines. They're mostly privately owned. The power utilities are subject to various regulations (rate regulation, etc.) but the wires were built with private money and are private property. In contrast, most water/sewer lines are owned by the municipality, and paid for by the public through taxes and hook-up fees for new construction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eminent_domain_in_the_United_S...
Also, it's likely eminent domain attempts for Google's benefit would run afoul of the law. I don't think the government can eminent domain something for the benefit of another corporation.
This is not and has not ever been true.
Here [1] is an open auction with ~$2 billion in federal aid attached - "a total of $1.98 billion for 10 years." This was last updated just over a week ago. I would dig further back for other subsidies, but it is not necessary. Through tax breaks and subsidies we (the government, tax payers, etc) have certainly aided infrastructure build out for telecom cos.
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/caf2-auction
There was some tax dollar funded subsidies in the ARRA, but it's a vanishingly small fraction of the trillion+ dollars invested in telecom infrastructure in the last few decades.
Is this one of the taxes that they just throw straight onto my monthly bill?
Two, AT&T is paying the tax, but the government is mostly kicking the subsidies back to small rural telcos and coops. Telcos with more urban footprints, like AT&T, subsidize telcos in high cost rural areas.
So calling CAF a subsidy to AT&T really makes no sense. It’s like saying Apple would love the government to slap a 5% tax on iPhones and kick the money to providers of low cost phones. Even if Apple could increase prices to compensate, and get some of those subsidies for the iPhone SE, it’d still be worse off than without the “subsidy.”
The FCC doesn’t disclose USF contributions by company, but you can guess: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-303886A3.p.... Total reported telecom revenue is about $300 billion per year during that period. AT&T averaged $120 billion per year in revenue during that period (about 40% of the industry). (This is probably an overestimate because AT&T’s revenue includes non-telecom revenue.)
During that period, USF revenues were $7-8 billion per year. 40% of that is like $3 billion. Even if I’m wrong about AT&T’s revenue share by a factor of 4 AT&T still pays in much more than it gets out.
Do you live northwest of Austin, where 18 inches below the surface there is about two feet of solid limestone?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7720jUW_aIk
I wouldn't be surprised if this was a huge factor. Everyone likes to blame regulation for fibre failures, but the "last mile" of fiber to the premise, like many wired broadband technologies before it, is often a nightmare.
Reminds me of this story, where one Norwegian ISP started asking customers to dig their own trench: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/05/norwegian-isp-di...
^ entirely predictable
Google won't save us any more than Musk will. It's billionaires launching cars into space and fighting for personal wealth at the detriment of the rest of the society.
What?
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/6/16983744/spacex-tesla-falc...
All of that money came from somewhere. Do you wonder why most of your local retailers went out of business, and you can't visit a local bookstore or camera shop anymore? It's related to why Jeff Bezos has so much money that he has nothing better to do than shoot stuff into space. Preferably, he will shoot bigger stuff farther than Elon Musk, Richard Branson, or Paul Allen.
It could also be used somewhere else. Is shooting suicidal volunteers at Mars really the best use of billions of dollars?
Solving difficult engineering problems is usually good for the world.
Adam Smith directly says vanity is what took down feudalism. We surely dont want our billionaires to not even spend the money they have!
Printing money and setting it on fire would employ printers and firefighters. I'm not sure Billionaire Space Wars are a net harm to society, but they're pretty silly.
I would entertain an argument that Google Fiber hasn't actually helped society very much but I have a hard time buying that it's been harmful... At worst, it's driven the other players in the regions it's in to offer more bandwidth for less money. At best, it headed off rising a trend of ISPs deceiving the public about what was possible in an effort to suppress speeds and tightly meter bandwidth...
Can you help me understand the ire over that launch?
It's standard that new rockets are tested with a dummy payload to avoid destroying something valuable. Typically that's steel plates, but the Falcon Heavy was going to go up with a useless payload regardless. Saturn I-IV did the same, and V only had a payload because it was a module test and a launch test rolled into one.
I suppose the Tesla took up some extra man-hours fitting the car for launch, and the rocket wasn't aimed somewhere it would be destroyed (though I can't tell whether they usually are).
But seeing this spun as "SpaceX won't save us, they're just shooting cars into space!" is baffling to me; it was some personal wealth spent on adding spectacle to a totally normal rocket launch.
Now who would not want a new private American company to succeed in revitalizing the industry and increasing competition. Hmm, I can think of a few.
It used to be "NASA is a bloated waste of tax payer money let private Enterprise in."
And now the same people who said that, have been convinced that private industry is stealing.
This part doesn't match my experience?
"NASA is a waste" is, broadly, a conservative/Republican stance. Almost everyone I've seen outraged about the Tesla launch was noticeably left of the average Democrat. I don't think a narrative of "they hated the public version, now they hate the private version" holds up for the people I've seen.
Granted, there's a second group on the left who hated NASA before and SpaceX now. But that narrative is usually "space exploration is a waste when people are going hungry", with not much concern about public/private status.
It's definitely now also a Far Left talking point. Larry Wilmore basically went back to the old 60's, "Why is there poverty, and we're putting men on the moon?" There's a scene somewhere where he's telling Bill Nye to STFU about his Science. This brings to mind Phillip DeFranco's t-shirt about substituting feelings for facts.
Apparently, "Don't be Evil" doesn't cover internal company politics.
I remember at a previous job, there was this hefty trans-atlantic data link the company was leasing. All the VPs coveted it, so the political machinations basically resulted in no-one using it, ever, all the while we were paying not-insignificant funds for it.
You conveniently ignored Musk almost went bankrupt after 3 failures initially at space x.
I don't doubt you, but I would definitely expect that sort of messaging even if the true primary goal for GF was to be disruptive, as opposed to profitable.
FWIW, if I were aware of other plausible explanations for the way Fiber has progressed, Occam's Razor would compel me to believe those explanations versus defaulting to cynicism.
I wonder if a lot of that ended up being used for GCP datacenter connections?
AT+T rolled out fiber to my neighborhood over the last 6 months. They've been digging up yards and shared areas for months and I was the first person in my area to sign up. It took multiple visits for the techs to fix the line noise and clean the lines after the first rollout, and the techs are still here almost every day fixing other noise/line issues the last few weeks.
Laying new cable is expensive and time consuming.
The company at its core is a child of the web, and thus it struggles to manage anything that can't have a change/fix/AB-test pushed out on a whim.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/clearwire#section-fu...
Plus very few servers seem to be able to reliably send at fast speeds, and TCP slow start means small files (<100MB) see 0 benefit at all.
The biggest problem I have is that a lot of portable storage I have (SD cards + USB hard drives) is way slower than my internet. I have one SD card which struggles at random file writes at more than 50mbit/sec.
Many people don't understand the difference between 1gpbs and "up to 300mbps".
I don't think most people care when their typical WiFi setup will only get them in the 100-150 real-world range.
As much as I'd love to sign up for Spectrum's 940 downloads, I can't even hit the 200 I'm limited to with any of my internet devices.
However I did get fiber from ATT for 100 meg symmetrical for 50 bucks a month. And unlike comcast it really delivers 100 megabits per second. I could have gotten the full gig fiber for 70 a month. But it did not seem worth it.
When Comcast offered 1000Mbps* service for $70/mo with a three year contract, I gave up. Interestingly, this offer only seems to have been available in likely GF service areas and was a pretty transparent attempt to tie up potential GF customers with a nice early termination fee.
* download. Upload is 40Mbps.
[0]: https://fiber.googleblog.com/2016/10/advancing-our-amazing-b...
I have gigabit through Centurylink at a reasonable price. Thx Google!
Downloading of small files will change from being a fraction of a second to nigh-imperceptible, and as long as the remote side supports it, this will apply to all images on a website at once. And no longer will downloading a game on steam mess with your youtube/netflix/whatever.
I assume they mean "disenchanted" -- this sentence makes no sense as written.
Building a broadband network is an interesting business. I like to describe it as a hyper-local national business. I saw this because every municipality has different rules (eg compare getting pole access in Louisville vs Nashville vs Austin), the ground is different (one area might have a lot of limestone in the ground and make trenching slow, difficult and expensive) and so on. Getting something resolved might be a case of whoever is the construction manager in a given area knowing the right person to call that might otherwise have 11 people standing around for 2 days.
This is something that national ISPs are exceedingly good at because they've spent decades doing it. I mean they go further than that by trying to keep competitors out through regulatory blocks and so forth but this doesn't change the fact that this is a core competency.
It is not nor was it ever Google's core competency. Google is at its heart a technical company that solves technical problems. Making search or Maps or GMail worth with petabytes or even exabytes of data is something Google is exceedingly good at. This is an entirely different business model and core competency.
I don't know this for a fact but I SUSPECT that Google's executives went into Fiber with the naive belief that (a lot of hand-waving here) they were Google and could do anything and somehow they could reduce the cost per household connected from a more normal $1000-3000 to <$500. This might be true if it was a software problem. Digging up trenches and stringing cables to poles is not a software problem.
What's more Google has never really had to control costs in the same sense that a large capital project would have to. Worse, Google's culture that it'll ship when it ships (which is great from a software engineering POV) doesn't work when you need to plan for lighting up networks and areas and there are a lot of moving parts to make that happen. It's really a case of what gets measured gets done.
Add to this that there is uncertainty over what the future of fixed broadband is going to be. Will it be wireless or wired? That's the ultimate question. If it's wireless and you've just spent $50B building a national wired network then... woops. If it's wired and you've just invested $25B in building wireless infrastructure then... woops.
I suspect it's one of these cases where doing nothing is worse than doing something but I suspect Google's board was scared off by the large capital costs involved in doing anything and were too risk-averse to be wrong.
Disclaimer: Ex-Fiber Xoogler.
> And in markets that Google Fiber has been deployed, it has resulted in a dramatic reduction in prices among regional incumbents.
Yeah, that's the main outcome. Gigabit for $70 is a norm today, and if someone charges a lot more, it's viewed as a rip off. And not only in markets where they deployed.