Frustrating as this might be, CondoInternet is going building to building to provide gigabit Internet to apartment dwellers and even building neighborhood-scale fiber service to Eastlake, while CenturyLink is laying gigabit service to other neighborhoods, one by one. Even if we were on Google's shortlist, by the time they came to town they'd have competitors. Competitors who don't have a business model of monitoring people's web usage so they can target ads at them.
Says you. After it came out that Verizon is actually changing request headers in Internet traffic to inject tracking tokens, I wouldn't trust any company to not do/track anything. In fact, it's in their best interests to track your usage - they can sell that information to advertisers and make more money from you.
Not trusting Google but trusting some unknown competitor is strange to me.
CenturyLink is playing the FUD game. I live in Olympia, had door to door sales come by. "You may have heard about Google Fiber. We are coming around to let you know that we've been installing fiber..."
You're saying "they'd have competitors" as if it is some kind of a downside. It's good thing if Google had competitors, it is also a good thing if the competitors had Google. Honest competition keeps participants honest and agile. Of course, honest competition is hard to achieve in a place where the most important proficiency required to achieve success in a business is proficiency in navigating a byzantine network of regulations, permits and requirements, and that, instead of delivering stellar service, becomes a core competency of a successful business.
As for Google monitoring web usage, you're saying it like it's unique for Google. All advertisers to that, and ISP is not the best place to do it anyway (content-side is more efficient and not confused by things like HTTPS/SSL/VPN). Moreover, targeting ads is by far not the most evil thing one might do - in fact, if the ads were as well-targeted as it has been rumored for decades now, I'd not have to install adblocker first thing I do on the new computer. Right now I have to because the ads shown to me are so annoying and irrelevant. I'd like to discuss our all-knowing perfectly-targeting advertising overlords, but we'd have to get some first. So far they are nowhere to be found, and in the meantime our internet connection sucks and costs an arm and a leg. Is it worth having sucky internet access so Google couldn't nefariously target their ads for me? Not for me.
I find it odd how vocal and numerous the ad blocker users are on HN. You "have to" install it because the ad are so annoying? How have you coped with TV advertising, or magazine advertising?
Simple - I don't watch scheduled TV (I either record it or watch it online via Hulu/Netflix/etc.) and magazine ads don't bother me because I can simply leaf through them. And, also, I don't read magazines that have too many random ads. Those that I do read either have relevant ads or have them nicely segregated so they don't bother me. I never saw a magazine that has an ad with auto-play video, high-frequency animations, auto-play sound or is placed in a way that makes other content unaccessible until I spend several minutes on it.
I don't know what I would do if I didn't have the modern options. Switch to DVD/reading books probably - that's what I did before I had DVR and online streaming.
I know that many sites rely on ads for their income stream. I do not feel an obligation to sacrifice my psychological well-being in order to make that model succeed. Fortunately, they seem to be doing just fine without me.
CondoInternet (and CenturyLink) are only going to newer very large buildings though, it doesn't make economic sense to go to older/smaller buildings for them. So your only option is Comcast.
And digging is much more expensive to do initially (think two or three orders of magnitude), though it's often cheaper in the long run due to less maintenance and repairs.
The problem with digging is that in case of faults, it's far more difficult to service. Also, future upgrades (e.g. fibers with better optical properties, or more fibers) require re-digging.
When done properly, conduit is laid that fiber is then run through. You don't re-dig to lay new media, you simply drag it through the existing conduit. That's why "dig once" is such a big deal.
I wonder if they could at least bring it to the east side, where their Kirkland office and Microsoft in general is located. I bet there are lots of high tech workers who would be more than happy to dump Comcast for Google Fiber over there.
It would be pretty ironic, but maybe it would kick Microsoft to do something similar. If they already have fancy buses to shuttle all their workers around, why don't they lay a nice fiber network to give them all fast internet (and allow more reliable working from home).
When MS announced the Xbox One, I was actually on their camp. I bought into the whole idea of digital distribution as the future of gaming.
However, not once have MS done anything to actually improve the US internet speed or infrastructure since. Its like MS sold me on the vision of a future, but came back to tell me that they don't actually have a plan to make the vision possible.
The east side isn't seattle, and many of those small cities lack the poor neighborhoods that would make universal service so unecononimical. So why not? But man, living in Bellevue feels a bit depressing. The cooler but smaller Google office is in Fremont right?
Here in Seattle there seems to be this fear that not getting Google to install Google Fiber™ means we'll just have the crappy offerings from Comcast and CenturyLink for the next 50 years.
In reality, I believe not selling ourselves to a provider immediately will allow a better market to develop where we get real competition and the possibility of a city run fiber network. It may take a few more years than having Google build out the whole thing at once, but I think the alternative will be better and other municipalities will have wished they had waited too.
This article has been floating around Seattle for a while and I think it's done a great job illustrating areas which can be improved to encourage broadband competition.
I've been living in the Seattle area for 10 years, and my only option for high speed internet has been Comcast. So where has the magic of the free marketplace been for that time?
Same. I also find it very strange that there's not DSL offering in either of the places I've lived. I'd rather have slow and steady DSL than erratic cable :(
Here in Portland, Frontier and CenturyLink are experimenting with gigabit internet and Comcast just doubled their speeds, all based on the threat of Google Fiber as an option.
It is a valid point, but we're in 2015 now, and I'm sitting in the SF bay area (which is not supposed to be the place where it's hard to get new technologies going) and see not much change in the quality of access or pricing for years now. So "wait a few years more" may not be working as well as it could. And as for the prospect of city run network - I see how they run public transportation, it is a disaster. Why would I want to have the same disaster in internet access?
To summarize, the article mentions four roadblocks:
1) Process: "Can you imagine the Seattle City Council keeping a secret like this and then acting on it in just one day? Of course not. We’d need to have endless community meetings and hearings and public floggings of Google Executives."
2) Pole Attachments: "At these rates, building a network on 100,000 poles to serve every home and business would cost Google up to $2.8 million just to rent the pole space."
3) Permits: "Attaching fiber cable to a pole in Seattle may require a pole attachment permit, a street use permit, and land use and environmental permits, among others."
4) Build-out requirements: "But the company has to agree to build out and serve every premise in that area. This is a lofty goal because it means all neighborhoods, rich and poor, get served, although it increases the overall cost because the company builds cable on streets with few customers."
None of these are unique to Google Fiber. These are hurdles ISPs, including incumbents like Comcast, face in nearly every large city. Google is just the 800-lb gorilla that refuses to play along. They'll only install fiber in cities desperate enough to sign a contract with Google without extensive public proceedings, who will allow bypassing permit requirements that apply to everyone else.
What the article really highlights is the real reasons for the lack of ISP competition. People imagine shadowy cabals conspiring to keep out competitors, but in most cities, it's the result of rules that aren't facially unreasonable. Rules like build-out requirements, which apply to incumbents and competitors alike, make deploying fiber economically unattractive, sometimes even for the incumbent.
Contrast the telecom industry with say the cell phone industry. It'd be illegal for an ISP to do what Apple did with its first iPhone: target rich buyers, then trickle down the technology to everyone else as it recouped capital costs. The rule is deploy to everyone, or don't deploy at all. Unsurprisingly, companies usually choose the latter. Except Google, which has the clout to demand exceptions to the rules, and the luxury of not actually being in the ISP business and only deploying in smaller municipalities willing to bend-over.
>deploying in smaller municipalities willing to bend-over for them.
I think you mean municipalities with the foresight to realize that their residents would never get fiber under any other circumstance? iPhones for rich people and for everyone else a few years later is much better than flip phones for everyone.
If things were regulated like last mile Internet like you want, the smartphone/mobile boom would never have happened. Requiring deployment to a big portion of the market that doesn't want something is idiotic.
> I think you mean municipalities with the foresight to realize that their residents would never get fiber under any other circumstance
That's one spin on it, but at the end of the day, it's a decision borne out of a lack of other options. Incidentally, it's also one reason countries like South Korea and places in eastern Europe lead the way in fiber deployment. They were/are underdogs, looking for ways to make themselves more economically competitive. Places like New York or San Francisco don't think the same way. They're prosperous enough to be able to fight over things like how ugly the fiber cabinets are.
> If things were regulated like last mile Internet like you want, the smartphone/mobile boom would never have happened.
I don't think we should regulate last mile internet, for precisely that reason.
OP resident here. Probably not, as Sprint does not sell local ISP services. Could have been Time Warner though. That article is dated though, as Google is now building in OP. It actually worked out for the better as both Google and AT&T are laying fiber in OP; competing 1000/1000 services. My ISP (CCI) just bumped me from 30/5 to 100/5 for free. I can't wait to dump them though. Some areas of OP will have three competing 1000/1000 services; Google, AT&T, and CCI. My area was wired 10 years ago by CCI so it's just hybrid fiber-coax.
The real fuck-up is Leawood, KS though; just next door. Google pulled out recently when they were told no "new" ISP lines could be run on existing poles. It had to be 100% buried, despite existing cable ISP on poles:
It's been interesting to watch. I remember someone sending me a map of which areas of Kansas City agreed to Google's conditions to try and get Google fiber, and the city of Overland Park was a big obvious missing block.
I don't really have a problem with engaging the democratic process. Bringing fiber to Seattle is a long term infrastructure project that will last for many decades. In the grand scheme of things, expediting the permit process hardly makes a difference.
The author seems to really hate citizen participation. I'm sure people don't understand fiber very well and there are a lot of opinions and concerns out there which aren't necessarily valid, but that's going to be true of anything new.
Cutting the public out of the debate about innovations doesn't seem like a good path to take. The solution is to provide a more effective forum for this debate to happen, not to put a stop to it.
> When Google announced its launch city for Google Fiber – Kansas City – it was a sensation. And the very next day the Kansas City Council authorized a contract with Google for the service.
Kansas City is desperate. If Google comes calling, they will sign a contract, whether or not it's actually good for the city, they'll figure "Hey, Google's coming and asking, it's Google, we won't say no!"
This is not really a good thing. This particular contract may be great for KC, but it's not because you can just always trust Google and sign whatever they put in front of you. But many desparate cities will.
There are two Kansas Cities, and they compete tooth and nail.
Kansas City, Kansas agreed to Google fiber (possibly to due its benefits possibly due to lack of competition) and put up with Google's requirements.
Kansas City, Missouri refused. Once the announcement was made it was a big ruckus and looked like a black eye for the city and they rushed to do anything they could to get in on it because every citizen was interested. The last thing they want is to be seen as falling behind the Kansas side and losing more jobs and businesses.
Exactly. "The last thing they want is to be seen as....", it's got very little to do with the terms of the contract of whether it's good contract for the city or the citizens. It might be in this case, but it doesn't even matter.
My thoughts on this come from my experience with an analagous case on a smaller level -- I have worked with a university that signed a contract with a vendor (not Google in this case) for digitization of some library content, because "the last thing they want[ed] is to be seen as falling behind" other universities that signed such contracts with that or other vendors (including Google). That any vendor was even interested was seen as an honor. In fact, the contract was terrible for the university, they got little benefit from it and had to expend university resources basically for the vendor's benefit. But for a year or two, it seemed exciting and made them appear not to be "falling behind".
Verizon's FIOS fiber hasn't been profitable, and they've stopped building it out. Google would run into the same problem if they actually built enough that it had to make money, instead of only doing cherry-picked demo projects.
Technically, you don't need fiber to the home to get gigabit rates. Coax from the end user to the DOCSIS node at the pole is more than enough. Within 100 meters, such as in apartment buildings, CAT 5 is enough. The fiber connection to the DOCSIS node at the pole, the DOCSIS node, and the back end have to have more bandwidth.
The cable industry has a plan for slow migration to gigabit services:
"an you imagine the Seattle City Council keeping a secret like this and then acting on it in just one day? Of course not. We’d need to have endless community meetings and hearings and public floggings of Google Executives. Every citizen in a tinfoil hat who thinks fiber is just another cereal ingredient would have their three minutes in front of the Council. "
Ah, I see - democracy is a bug, according to the author.
Actually, reading further, it appears that anything short of kneeling and begging at the feet of corporations is somehow supposed to be terrible...
Seriously - here's the conclusion:
"Could we simply agree to pay for all the pole replacements and permitting as a city, and hire a few extra employees to expedite the process? Couldn’t we just hand over title to a few strands of the 500 mile fiber cable network we’ve built to Google Fiber?"
Translation: "Couldn't we just spend taxpayer dollars to subsidize profits for one of the world's largest corporations?"
Not really, the real question is at the end of article: "There's just one question: Do we love our Seattle process too much?" There is a choice - you can have process, permits, etc or you can have fast connections. The problem is that we pretend that you can have both, or that there is no cost to the Seattle process.
There's a choice - spend taxpayers dollars to prevent Google from laying fiber or spend taxpayer dollars to enable Google to lay fiber (and yes, make the profit in the process). I think the latter is preferable. I'd prefer no taxpayer dollars participation at all, but in the current environment it's not really an option, right? There's an option of having fast internet or having slow internet and unperturbed bureaucracy. Seattle chose the latter. I hope they enjoy their bureaucracy.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadNot trusting Google but trusting some unknown competitor is strange to me.
We know for a fact that Google and Verizon track your Web usage. I would take an unknown company over the certainty of being tracked any day.
Stick with Verizon and Verizon recognise that they can do/track anything without consequence.
On the other hand, leave Verizon for a competitor who is not currently doing/tracking anything and this becomes a selling point for the competition.
Err, yeah. Fifty five miles away. So what?
As for Google monitoring web usage, you're saying it like it's unique for Google. All advertisers to that, and ISP is not the best place to do it anyway (content-side is more efficient and not confused by things like HTTPS/SSL/VPN). Moreover, targeting ads is by far not the most evil thing one might do - in fact, if the ads were as well-targeted as it has been rumored for decades now, I'd not have to install adblocker first thing I do on the new computer. Right now I have to because the ads shown to me are so annoying and irrelevant. I'd like to discuss our all-knowing perfectly-targeting advertising overlords, but we'd have to get some first. So far they are nowhere to be found, and in the meantime our internet connection sucks and costs an arm and a leg. Is it worth having sucky internet access so Google couldn't nefariously target their ads for me? Not for me.
Well, it is to Google.
> Is it worth having sucky internet access so Google couldn't nefariously target their ads for me?
No, but in Seattle you have other options: live somewhere where you can get good internet access from someone who isn't Google. That's what I do.
I don't know what I would do if I didn't have the modern options. Switch to DVD/reading books probably - that's what I did before I had DVR and online streaming.
I know that many sites rely on ads for their income stream. I do not feel an obligation to sacrifice my psychological well-being in order to make that model succeed. Fortunately, they seem to be doing just fine without me.
> CondoInternet is...building neighborhood-scale fiber service to Eastlake
http://www.condointernet.net/fiber/
http://www.muninetworks.org/tags/tags/dig-once
http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/san-francisco-seeks-t...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/06/14/execut...
However, not once have MS done anything to actually improve the US internet speed or infrastructure since. Its like MS sold me on the vision of a future, but came back to tell me that they don't actually have a plan to make the vision possible.
In reality, I believe not selling ourselves to a provider immediately will allow a better market to develop where we get real competition and the possibility of a city run fiber network. It may take a few more years than having Google build out the whole thing at once, but I think the alternative will be better and other municipalities will have wished they had waited too.
For example, one recent change: http://www.geekwire.com/2014/seattle-approves-bill-allows-fi...
1) Process: "Can you imagine the Seattle City Council keeping a secret like this and then acting on it in just one day? Of course not. We’d need to have endless community meetings and hearings and public floggings of Google Executives."
2) Pole Attachments: "At these rates, building a network on 100,000 poles to serve every home and business would cost Google up to $2.8 million just to rent the pole space."
3) Permits: "Attaching fiber cable to a pole in Seattle may require a pole attachment permit, a street use permit, and land use and environmental permits, among others."
4) Build-out requirements: "But the company has to agree to build out and serve every premise in that area. This is a lofty goal because it means all neighborhoods, rich and poor, get served, although it increases the overall cost because the company builds cable on streets with few customers."
None of these are unique to Google Fiber. These are hurdles ISPs, including incumbents like Comcast, face in nearly every large city. Google is just the 800-lb gorilla that refuses to play along. They'll only install fiber in cities desperate enough to sign a contract with Google without extensive public proceedings, who will allow bypassing permit requirements that apply to everyone else.
What the article really highlights is the real reasons for the lack of ISP competition. People imagine shadowy cabals conspiring to keep out competitors, but in most cities, it's the result of rules that aren't facially unreasonable. Rules like build-out requirements, which apply to incumbents and competitors alike, make deploying fiber economically unattractive, sometimes even for the incumbent.
Contrast the telecom industry with say the cell phone industry. It'd be illegal for an ISP to do what Apple did with its first iPhone: target rich buyers, then trickle down the technology to everyone else as it recouped capital costs. The rule is deploy to everyone, or don't deploy at all. Unsurprisingly, companies usually choose the latter. Except Google, which has the clout to demand exceptions to the rules, and the luxury of not actually being in the ISP business and only deploying in smaller municipalities willing to bend-over.
I think you mean municipalities with the foresight to realize that their residents would never get fiber under any other circumstance? iPhones for rich people and for everyone else a few years later is much better than flip phones for everyone.
If things were regulated like last mile Internet like you want, the smartphone/mobile boom would never have happened. Requiring deployment to a big portion of the market that doesn't want something is idiotic.
That's one spin on it, but at the end of the day, it's a decision borne out of a lack of other options. Incidentally, it's also one reason countries like South Korea and places in eastern Europe lead the way in fiber deployment. They were/are underdogs, looking for ways to make themselves more economically competitive. Places like New York or San Francisco don't think the same way. They're prosperous enough to be able to fight over things like how ugly the fiber cabinets are.
> If things were regulated like last mile Internet like you want, the smartphone/mobile boom would never have happened.
I don't think we should regulate last mile internet, for precisely that reason.
Overland Park's haggling likely had more to do with the fact that Sprint is headquartered there.
The real fuck-up is Leawood, KS though; just next door. Google pulled out recently when they were told no "new" ISP lines could be run on existing poles. It had to be 100% buried, despite existing cable ISP on poles:
http://www.govexec.com/state-local/2014/11/google-fiber-leaw...
The author seems to really hate citizen participation. I'm sure people don't understand fiber very well and there are a lot of opinions and concerns out there which aren't necessarily valid, but that's going to be true of anything new.
Cutting the public out of the debate about innovations doesn't seem like a good path to take. The solution is to provide a more effective forum for this debate to happen, not to put a stop to it.
Kansas City is desperate. If Google comes calling, they will sign a contract, whether or not it's actually good for the city, they'll figure "Hey, Google's coming and asking, it's Google, we won't say no!"
This is not really a good thing. This particular contract may be great for KC, but it's not because you can just always trust Google and sign whatever they put in front of you. But many desparate cities will.
Kansas City, Kansas agreed to Google fiber (possibly to due its benefits possibly due to lack of competition) and put up with Google's requirements.
Kansas City, Missouri refused. Once the announcement was made it was a big ruckus and looked like a black eye for the city and they rushed to do anything they could to get in on it because every citizen was interested. The last thing they want is to be seen as falling behind the Kansas side and losing more jobs and businesses.
My thoughts on this come from my experience with an analagous case on a smaller level -- I have worked with a university that signed a contract with a vendor (not Google in this case) for digitization of some library content, because "the last thing they want[ed] is to be seen as falling behind" other universities that signed such contracts with that or other vendors (including Google). That any vendor was even interested was seen as an honor. In fact, the contract was terrible for the university, they got little benefit from it and had to expend university resources basically for the vendor's benefit. But for a year or two, it seemed exciting and made them appear not to be "falling behind".
Technically, you don't need fiber to the home to get gigabit rates. Coax from the end user to the DOCSIS node at the pole is more than enough. Within 100 meters, such as in apartment buildings, CAT 5 is enough. The fiber connection to the DOCSIS node at the pole, the DOCSIS node, and the back end have to have more bandwidth.
The cable industry has a plan for slow migration to gigabit services:
http://www.cedmagazine.com/articles/2012/07/an-evolutionary-...
One unit at a time, in the chain from head end to end user, equipment can be swapped out for faster, but backwards-compatible, units.
Of course, in the end it's still Comcast.
Sure, it only serves a few neighborhoods, but it's progress, and more importantly, not Comcast.
Ah, I see - democracy is a bug, according to the author.
Actually, reading further, it appears that anything short of kneeling and begging at the feet of corporations is somehow supposed to be terrible...
Seriously - here's the conclusion:
"Could we simply agree to pay for all the pole replacements and permitting as a city, and hire a few extra employees to expedite the process? Couldn’t we just hand over title to a few strands of the 500 mile fiber cable network we’ve built to Google Fiber?"
Translation: "Couldn't we just spend taxpayer dollars to subsidize profits for one of the world's largest corporations?"