Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption We Were Promised (vice.com) 173
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Some eight years on and Google Fiber's ambitions are just a pale echo of the disruptive potential originally proclaimed by the company. While Google Fiber did make some impressive early headway in cities like Austin, the company ran into numerous deployment headaches. Fearing competition, incumbent ISPs like AT&T and Comcast began a concerted effort to block the company's access to essential utility poles, even going so far as to file lawsuits against cities like Nashville that tried to expedite the process. Even in launched markets, customer uptake wasn't quite what executives were expecting. Estimates peg Google Fiber TV subscribers at fewer than 100,000, thanks in large part to the cord cutting mindset embraced by early adopters. Broadband subscriber tallies (estimated as at least 500,000) were notably better, but still off from early company projections. Even without anti-competitive roadblocks, progress was slow. Digging up city streets and burying fiber was already a time-consuming and expensive process. And while Google has tried to accelerate these deployments via something called "microtrenching" (machines that bury fiber an inch below roadways), broadband deployment remains a rough business. It's a business made all the rougher by state and local regulators and lawmakers who've been in the pockets of entrenched providers like Comcast for the better part of a generation.
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Well, that's how we would like to see it...
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Yeah, we've not been that in years now.. Sadly.
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But I largely agree with it.
The alternative to government run infrastructure is strong legislation to keep these competing commercial entities in check by enforcing a level playing field.
Like net neutrality.
Dergulation? (Score:3)
But relaxing the existing rules to allow competition would be DE-REGULATION! Nobody wants that, right? It's not like regulatory capture is often used to stifle competition by existing markets or anything.
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The UK model (Score:2)
The wires in the ground are mostly owned by the former Telecoms monopoly, but it has to allow ISPs to have boxes in its exchanges, as well as having to allow access to the network. The result is many ISPs competing effectively on price and service.
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But relaxing the existing rules to allow competition would be DE-REGULATION! Nobody wants that, right? It's not like regulatory capture is often used to stifle competition by existing markets or anything.
Since de-regulation will never happen, I don't want to hear the US bitching anymore about their shitty broadband capability vs. the rest of the world.
When corrupt lawmakers support the Broadband Mafia at the highest levels, we get what we fucking deserve.
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Deregulation will allow others to compete with comcast and verizon and provide better, cheaper service.
Did you even glance at TFSummary?
Google, with giant piles of cash, could not roll out competitive service. They do this by doing things like delaying moving their equipment so that Google can't roll out new wires. "Oh...You need us to move our cables on the power company's poles so you can compete with us? Ok....We'll get right on that. Honest!!".
That's why TFSummary brings up Nashville. One touch make ready would have allowed competitors to actually roll out service because the incumbent ISPs couldn't
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This is a lie. It is not illegal.
Educate yourself [wired.com]. Local governments almost always grant exclusive monopolies to providers in exchange for fat paybacks - either increased tax revenues, big political donations, or often both. If you just bothered to RTFA, you would have learned that often Google was prevented from using PUBLIC poles via Government-granted monopolies to existing carriers.
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Almost all regional monopolies ended in the 1990s and 2000s. Most of them were originally granted with a time limit. Do you even live in the US?
Oh wait...you believe legal monopolies are the cause of there being no competition in broadband. Clearly you do live in the US and used our lovely education system.
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Here you go [consumerist.com]. Government (local, in most of these cases) granted monopolies. You get a choice of one provider. Remove the local monopoly grant and you'd find lower prices and more services. The problem in most of the US is the local Government granted monopoly.
Here in Ventura, CA you can have either Cox or Spectrum - depending upon where you live. Verizon is available in some neighborhoods, AT&T in the others. It's all sliced-and-diced up and maintained that way by the cable companies who work with
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Government (local, in most of these cases) granted monopolies
Wrong. They have a monopoly. It is not a government-granted monopoly. Just like Standard Oil had a monopoly without the government granting them their monopoly.
They currently have a monopoly because long ago they did have a government-granted monopoly. That government-granted monopoly expired, and now they use the power of incumbency to maintain their monopoly.
Anyone else can already roll out competing service. If the country was actually covered by government-granted monopolies, it would be illegal fo
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Check out cable franchise fees and agreements
Those are for cable TV. ISPs don't have to follow those.
They're used quite effectively to grant de-facto monopolies.
A de-facto monopoly can't be fixed by removing a non-existent government-enforced monopoly.
There's a huge benefit to being the incumbent - you can run any competition out of business because you've already recouped your capital costs. That gets you a monopoly on that business. One that has nothing to do with the government.
As far as Google fiber, RTFS. Companies are using the power of monopoly and their connection with local Governments to keep Google fiber out, taking it to court even.
They are not using the "power of monopoly". They are using the power of incumbency to create a monopoly. And that monopoly is
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And there's no government-enforced monopoly on the last mile.
There is a major advantage to being the incumbent in the last mile, which existing ISPs use to maintain their monopoly. But it isn't a government-enforced monopoly.
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I think reality is a lot more complicated than your simplistic view allots for.
Actually, it's extremely simple. Is there a law, ordinance or regulation that forbids anyone else from being an ISP?
No.
Ta-da! No government-mandated monopoly.
The complexity comes from the ways the incumbent ISPs maintain their monopoly. But they do that without the aid of a law that says "Only Comcast can be an ISP".
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But relaxing the existing rules to allow competition would be DE-REGULATION! Nobody wants that, right?
The only truly stupid people are the proponents of regulation and the proponents of de-regulation. What regulation is or isn't applied needs to be assessed on very specific cases. But you're never going to get that kind of critical though applied to anything in the Un-united States of Red vs Blue
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But relaxing the existing rules to allow competition would be DE-REGULATION! Nobody wants that, right? It's not like regulatory capture is often used to stifle competition by existing markets or anything.
"deregulation" is a meaningless buzz word which can distract from both the real important public interests being pursued with regulation and the real downsides that bad regulation can bring to the free market without meeting those legitimate public interest goals.
I look at it as either good regulation that promotes competition and lowers barriers to entry while efficiently ensuring some public interest in health, safety or ensuring a level playing field in the free market.
Or bad regulations that unnecessari
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Counterpoint: The Airline Deregulation Act [wikipedia.org] of 1978. Air fares have fallen, there are dozens more options for consumers, and competition keeps things generally lower cost and more flexible. More people are flying for less money.
As far as Standard Oil - that wasn't "deregulation" that hurt, it was a monopoly acting like a monopoly. Deregulation has NOTHING to do with Standard Oil, it was a Government-ordered break of a monopoly [wikipedia.org], nothing else.
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In fact, Standard Oil was already losing market share to its competition when it was busted up. They peaked in 1879 when they were refining 90 per cent of US oil, after starting up in 1870 with just 4 per cent. During that time, the consumer price of kerosene dropped from 26 cents to 8 cents a gallon. Pretty good customer service for a supposedly evil monopolist.
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Well I screwed up the dates above (Standard had 90% market share in 1899. It dropped to 68% by 1907, four years before the breakup), but you're a complete idiot. Nobody ever complained that Standard's consumer prices were too high, part of the argument to break them up was that the price was too LOW (they were undercutting competition).
Prices didn't go down after the break-up, either.
Saying that is good service is like saying if only Motorola made cellphones ever, and a cellphone costs $8,000 today, that that is good service as when they were first invented they cost $25,000.
The only good phone is a land line and the phone should be made out of Bakelite.
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It's more of Shelbyville idea.
Google (Score:2)
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oh it's not that. google just underestimated, again, how hard it can be to break into an industry with players deeply entrenched in all levels of government. they just kind of gave up, but you can't really blame them. big as they are, they are just one company against the several giants.
Google gets bored too easily. (Score:2)
That’s what happens when you rely on a company that always half-asses things and due to its manic ADD it gets bored easily. They were never going to put in the full effort needed to take on Verizon, AT&T or Comcast.
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I believe this is true, and what happens when you allow a bunch of 20-somethings attempt to bring products to market. While it's possible they are reasonably intelligent, they lack vision, drive, wisdom, and long-term focus. Google isn't too bad at developing technologies, but they are utterly abysmal at delivering those technologies to consumers.
It's an ethos that appears to driven by the Silicon Valley mentality of constantly throwing things at the wall. I recently heard that no one in the valley takes yo
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Well, they had vision and drive! They should get something for their hard work. Stop complaining and start paying back your $150,000 of tuition, petunia.
Phew, I can't believe I just used up all my sarcasm and snark for one day in just 3 sentences. Everybody ok?
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Yeah, it's not that Google failed... it's that they didn't really try all that hard to begin with. They basically rolled out 4 or 5 test markets, realized that "Gee, this broadband stuff is hard!", and then took their ball and went home.
We really need municipalities to try harder at rolling out faster broadband, since they are more vested in it's overall success.
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We really need municipalities to try harder at rolling out faster broadband, since they are more vested in it's overall success.
There are plenty of municipalities that would love to. That's why the incumbent ISPs have gone to state legislatures to ban municipal broadband.
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Yeah, it's not that Google failed... it's that they didn't really try all that hard to begin with. They basically rolled out 4 or 5 test markets, realized that "Gee, this broadband stuff is hard!", and then took their ball and went home.
Or they realized that given the current legal, what they were trying to do was actually not possible. Not "boy, this will be a tough fight!" Just not possible. There's no point in throwing tons of cash trying to spread into the fiber market when the government system is hostile to them. Regulations, agreements, and the general way in which we handle communications lines has to change first. Far too few people consider broadband important enough that it would affect their vote for a representative -- not tha
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It's not just that Google is manic. Google isn't big enough to be a national telecom.
I've been saying it since they announced this shit, and I'll say it again: You need TRillions to be a national telecom, not billions. The existing infrastructure, the rights to it, the bribed officials at every level, and the existing laws that grant actual monopolies to existing ISPs are way more than Google has the ability to take on.
If you try to put up an actual fight, the existing telecoms will lower price just enou
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You can’t “breed in some competition” when your effort is half-assed like Google’s. The big players knew they could just ride things out until Google got bored.
Here's a good rule to follow, (Score:2)
If it's google, and too good to be true, it probably is.
Don't ever trust them to do anything but try to monetize you and your data/
If you buy hardware, expect it to die, with little or no updates, and no extended support.
If you allow them to become your Internet provider, prepare to be disappointed.
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I suppose the rule to follow is that Google's primary business is advertising, everything else is just about enabling advertising somehow and may not be persistent.
I'm not exactly what Google's actual motivation was for fiber. Did they have some plan to sniff traffic to feed to their advertising platform somehow?
I think there's a lot of projection on the part of people who think they were only in it to compete with traditional broadband providers because you know, more bandwidth for end users helps Google,
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I'm not exactly what Google's actual motivation was for fiber. Did they have some plan to sniff traffic to feed to their advertising platform somehow?
I think it was just to migrate customers from local applications, local storage and broadcast media to web services, cloud services and streaming services. I doubt they really wanted to take the market, just shake it up so there'd be more potential Google customers. No Google fiber here in Norway, but damn it's accelerating fast.
Latest stats:
4% under 4 Mbps
10% under 8 Mbps
25% under 16 Mbps
Median: 43.2 Mbps
Average: 80.9 Mbps
Gigabit: 0.5%
Heck, even my parents who barely do anything online can't get under 10 M
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That's a broad internet-wide benefit, though, and not a terribly Google-specific benefit. They're a smaller player in high-bandwidth products and their core products like search are pretty network efficient. It seems like a big initiative that helps competitors as much if not more than Google.
Maybe it really was a crazy, pro-internet concept and not a Google specific benefit.
The Broadband Mafia (Score:1)
"broadband deployment remains a rough business. It's a business made all the rougher by state and local regulators and lawmakers who've been in the pockets of entrenched providers like Comcast for the better part of a generation.
Well, the last part of that statement almost summed up the real issue; "been in the pockets of entrenched providers" is the PC-friendly way of saying that fucking greed and corruption have destroyed competition.
If Google can't succeed, don't think for a fucking second ANY lesser company stands a chance. Not until the Broadband Mafia is deregulated.
Re: The Broadband Mafia (Score:2)
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In the majority of the US, the entrenched telecoms have been given government mandated regional monopolies by buying off politicians.
This is actually false.
Monopolies were originally granted in order to get someone to offer service. Most of those those monopolies were granted with a time limit. That time limit has expired in the vast majority of the US.
Competition is not being stifled by legal monopolies. It is being stifled by the incumbent ISPs legally and physically getting in the way of competitors. That's why Nashville is in TFSummary - one touch make ready was an attempt to get the incumbents to stop physically blocking competi
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In the majority of the US, the entrenched telecoms have been given government mandated regional monopolies by buying off politicians.
This is actually false.
Monopolies were originally granted in order to get someone to offer service. Most of those those monopolies were granted with a time limit. That time limit has expired in the vast majority of the US.
Competition is not being stifled by legal monopolies. It is being stifled by the incumbent ISPs legally and physically getting in the way of competitors. That's why Nashville is in TFSummary - one touch make ready was an attempt to get the incumbents to stop physically blocking competitors. Also, incumbent ISPs have gotten several state legislatures to ban municipal broadband.
Oh, it's actually false, but then it's actually completely true? You do realize you're agreeing that existing telecoms have government-enforced monopolies, right? You're saying they're "legally and physically getting in the way of competitors", and that they "have gotten several state legislatures to ban municipal broadband".
They've bribed officials at every level and essentially own the wires, the right to run them, the right to access poles, the right to be an ISP, etc.
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You do realize you're agreeing that existing telecoms have government-enforced monopolies, right?
Does "expired" mean something different in your version of English?
Cable companies and telecoms were given a legal monopoly with a time limit so that they would fork out the capital expense to install service. That time limit expired, so there is no longer a legal monopoly. Anyone can roll out their own fiber and compete. Such as Google.
If there still was a legal monopoly, then Google Fiber could not exist. It would be illegal for them to install their fiber. Since Google Fiber exists, that's a pretty
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You do realize you're agreeing that existing telecoms have government-enforced monopolies, right?
Does "expired" mean something different in your version of English?...being the incumbent in any utility (Internet, telephone, water, power, etc) is a huge advantage. You've already paid off your capital costs, so you can slash your prices to kill off anyone who tries to install new wires to compete with you.
If anyone could afford to invest in the infrastructure in order to get their product out there and at least start competing, it would be a mega-corp like Google.
Like I said before, if Google is struggling to deploy, no one else stands a fucking chance. Bottom line is it ain't as simple as you make it out to be, no matter how you want to define "expired".
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Bottom line is it ain't as simple as you make it out to be, no matter how you want to define "expired".
When the subject is "Is there a government-mandated monopoly", it is extremely simple: No.
How do you tackle it? By having a competitor that doesn't have to quickly turn a profit for its shareholders: Municipal broadband.
That's why the incumbent ISPs fight like hell to stop municipal broadband. It's the only thing they really fear.
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So while not an explicit monopoly it is effectively a government granted monopoly since no one else can legally provide service in the area...
Anyone else can legally provide service in the area. Anti-competitive behavior by the incumbent ISPs make it impractical to provide service in the area.
Nothing says a new ISP has to use the existing power polls to run their cables. It'll just cost 1000x more to roll out.
Fixed it for you (Score:2)
There! now you got it more correctly. You are welcome.
Trying to compete in what should be a monopoly (Score:1)
Cool T-shirt (Score:2)
Actually, it's done a heck of a lot (Score:2)
I'm A Google Fiber Customer And... (Score:1)
People still don't get... (Score:5, Informative)
...how much of the US was pretty much given on a silver plate to the current ISP monopolies, and how much ISPs are still paying politicians for things to remain that way... it's just sad.
For anyone thinking this is Google's fault, you really need to search around and read articles that explains it from the company's side.
To put it very simply, it was taxpayer money that paid the entire infrastructure to handle the Internet, rights to it was haphazardly given up to ISPs, now everytime Google needs to pass fiber through existing infrastructure (which sometimes is the only way), it needs to gently ask permission to the likes of AT&T and Comcast to do so, which of course will do everything not to let them, including suing Google when the local government tries to expedite the whole thing.
Google Fiber failed because the government gave US infrastructure on a silver platter to existing ISP monopolies. That's why. It's the same reason why the FCC is working the way it is right now. You guys have an effective telecommunications mafia up there and it's gonna stay that way.
It's why Google caved in and started working on the next high speed transmission technology instead of wasting time and money in something that won't work out. Don't take it from me though, just search around for the information.
One inch?! (Score:2)
I don't know how roads are in the U.S.A. but if you try to bury anything only one inch below roadways in Canada, you can kiss whatever you buried goodbye, it will only last a few months.
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The cable company told the city that they had buried all their wires 12" deep. I cut their cable at 4" deep with my shovel in my backyard.
Looking at it another way..... (Score:2)
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I think they obviously have. I live in a city with google fiber depending where you are in the city. And the other ISPs have been trying to cut down prices in the areas served by google fiber.
Where I live where Google Fiber is available, spectrum fiber actively cut its price to $30/month (for 12 month). While three blocks away, spectrum fiber is still about $70/month. Difference is Google fiber does not go there.
I work in Nashville... (Score:5, Informative)
The city is largely bending over backwards to try to help Google Fiber. The problem is our state legislature, which is flaming red and never misses an opportunity to fellate AT&T for more bribes, sorry, "campaign contributions". Our legislature has never seen a broadband bill favoring AT&T that they didn't like, nor a broadband bill helping Google or municipalities/utilities that they wouldn't go out of their way to squash.
The people living in cities are being held political hostage by the people in rural areas who voted (R) without thinking. I'd imagine Kansas is in a similar predicament.
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Par for the course for Google (Score:2)
Pretty much everything is a "try".
And past some arbitrary point, they just stop trying...
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I think they need a new slogan:
"Google: the ADHD company"
No Google Fiber Here (Score:2)
There is no Google Fiber offering where I live, but just the thought of them persuading a city 130 miles away forced local ISPs to step up their game. I'm now on symetrical gigabit fiber from CenturyLink because of what Google pushed. Google wasn't about overtaking ISPs nation wide, they were all about showing that gigiabit internet could be provided and still profitable. They succeeded in this, and forced the hands of ISPs who were lying all along about the cost of doing business. Overall, they did indeed
Stop putting the cart before the horse (Score:2)
If Google wants to drive the adoption of high speed fiber Internet then why don't they develop an application that requires it? You don't need gigabit speeds to stream Netflix.
I guess chasing away all the people who were actually developing products in favor of SJWs is beginning to backfire.
One of phone and cable company tactics (Score:2)
They like to offer big deals to people as the network is being built if they will agree to being locked into long term contract. They did that in the city I live in as well.
Microtrenching is kind of nasty (Score:2)
I live in Austin, and I do have to say that microtrenching is kind of nasty -- it's all over my neighborhood.
It "scars" the roads and leaves bumps that are getting worse over time as whatever it is that they used to fill them in gets pushed in more. It's not so noticeable in a car, but on a bicycle it is.
And I fear what might happen when they resurface the roads (which they do periodically.) If the fiber really is only an inch or two down, when they scrape off the top of the road it might tear up the fiber
I live in a Google Fiber city. (Score:3)
The service is excellent. Google's uptime has been flawless, the original install appointments went smoothly and were kept, the equipment is high quality, and the gigabit service does actually deliver a full gigabit of bandwidth up *and* down in tests. And all for $70/month, which includes 1TB online storage via Google Drive.
Just as cool, you can simply log into fiber.google.com and downgrade to 100mbps ($50/mo.) or 5mbps (free) at will. You can upgrade and downgrade, click, click, click, and it will pro-rate costs for you automatically. Basically, it's a flawless service in every way.
One of the things that I'm convinced hurt Google in this area is that there was already entrenched competition from the usual suspects in national broadband brands.
For decades, it had been 5mbps-10mbps down and a fifth of that upstream as the maximum service tier at every major provider. And for that you paid $50-$70 monthly. As soon as Google Fiber deployed, suddenly *every provider* offered Gigabit for less than $100/mo. plus value adds and promos. I mean, it took weeks max, once Google Fiber started scheduling installations. Just like that. And a lot of people stuck with the devil they already know, particularly if they were already getting TV and/or landline service through them, and particularly if Google had install times a week or two out but their current provider could bump them up within a day or two.
Google broke the market wide open here, but at the same time ended up with scraps in the end. Most of the people that I know stuck with their previous provider and ended up with gigabit speeds anyway at or near their previous subscription cost once Google entered the local market. I worry that if Google were to pull out of the market for some reason, suddenly "market realities" would reduce the offerings of the other providers once again to $70/mo. for 5mbps, as it had previously been.
So I hope Google stays.
boiling frogs in the slow lane (Score:2)
That was always half the point: to provide a convenient lightning rod for customer anger, should the incumbent's lay a heavy hand on their escalating coefficient of customer rape.
Because Google fiber merely exists, incumbents must boil their frogs in the slow lane, everywhere in America, or
Google made it's own messy bed (Score:2)
Everyone wants Google Fiber, but they can't get it, because Google only installed it for people who signed up two years in advance (as it turned out in Austin), and then, only installed for those homes during a brief period before moving on to another region. It's Google's fault for making such a complicated process.
I had a Google Fiber fan blog to get the word out and spread the news. I heard from SO MANY people who pish-poshed the signup and deposit requirement and told me confidently that they would simp
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too bad the cost of deployment is more than years of revenue you will get.
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The answer to those rural areas is 600MHZ [phonescoop.com] or Band 71 wireless service. This requires some cooperation between providers and those previous users who are abandoning [spectrumgateway.com] the bands.
OF course there is money involved, as
Note some glitches:
NYC will not get a realistic Band 71 deployment until WRNN-TV abandons the band, and now they plan to move in 2023, though that is not easily independently confirmed.
There is a perception that the money allocated to assist stations in moving won;t cover the expenses for the next 2-
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Rural areas are much more difficult. Small governments (Where the mayor also works in an auto garage) who cave in towards the might of a big business and cannot deal with the lawyers from these big companies.
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That would seem to be the best argument, but the story says that even in those densely populated cities Google Fiber only has a half million subscribers.
Maybe going to the remote towns across the midwest would give better return after all.
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Why should they. They have their little monopolies. So they are kings of their empires. Better off giving crappy products, but crappy in a different way so you can show how you are better then the competition, compared to everyone being equal and high quality, where you are just competing on price alone.
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Why should they. They have their little monopolies. So they are kings of their empires. Better off giving crappy products, but crappy in a different way so you can show how you are better then the competition, compared to everyone being equal and high quality, where you are just competing on price alone.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why we need to enact legislation rendering internet access essential infrastructure and mandating a 5- to 10-year transition period between private and public ownership. Too bad we're going in the wrong direction with that - we're already ceding things that are and should be public, (schools, prisons, healthcare, etc.), to private ownership and control.
On the whole we're sheep. We're being fleeced - and if it ever becomes profitable or otherwise necessary, we will also be
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Privatization works when there is competition and choice on the individual level. Issues where if a company fails, then we don't need someone to rush up and give them a helping hand, because there is no alternatives for their services.
If I don't like my ISP, I should have appropriate substitutions to choose from. If I don't then it should be a well regulated industry, where I as a consumer have a place to express my feelings towards the service, Even if it means talking to my elected official.
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The problem is, many of don't have that level of choice with their ISP, or anywhere near that. If we all did, we'd all be bitchin' about how much we had to pay for our paltry 500Mbps download speeds. So we should give them a choice. We give them a reasonable timeframe to surrender their de facto monopolies (both ISPs and the relevant government officials) or they get to spend 5-10 in prison. We present it as a win-win for them. "Hey look, we're being agreeable here. We've decided not to just kill you, yet.
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If I don't like my ISP, I should have appropriate substitutions to choose from. If I don't then it should be a well regulated industry, where I as a consumer have a place to express my feelings towards the service, Even if it means talking to my elected official.
Your elected representatives, at least the ones who take 'campaign contributions' from the big boys will tell you "You have plenty of competition. Look, you have Comcast cable. Or AT&T u-verse. Or Verizon cell service, because a cell phone connection is totally like home Internet broadband. They're totally the same. So you have T-Mobile and Sprint and all these other carriers. Oh, and look, we found an ISP willing to do some sort of over-the-air point to point thing to your location -- TOTALLY the same
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Healthcare has been mostly private ownership and control for most of our history. Nothing was ceded to them.
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Right. CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Security, no I don't know where the other 'M' went to) is private. For very unusual definitions of the word.
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Why can't we all just get along and all the companies get together to combine their funds to roll out 1 super fibre connection to every home etc between them then sell access to it that way they all get a cut.
We basically had that for a while when ILECs were forced to allow other DSL providers to colocate their equipment at the telco Central Office and resell the underlying line as DSL. Ultimately, the market collapse, however.
Broadband access with different technologies seems fine, but if we're going to re-roll fiber everywhere it probably means a massive government ownership of the lines. That said, the availability of "good enough" broadband over wireless technologies in a large chunk of the US changes some o
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We basically had that for a while when ILECs were forced to allow other DSL providers to colocate their equipment at the telco Central Office and resell the underlying line as DSL. Ultimately, the market collapse, however.
No market collapse. What happened is the presidency changed to a new party, and fiber-to-the-home became profitable to deploy. The line-sharing rules only applied to copper, so phone companies stopped improving DSL, started deploying fiber, and physically removed copper lines whenever someone switched.
The FCC, now stacked with the opposite party, said "free market! And lucrative jobs from telcos when we leave the FCC! W00T!"
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1: Taxpayers funded the national fibre rollout.
2: The dominant network owner/ISP was split up.
3: The new network owner company charges a fee to ISP's per connection, this is set by the regulator.
4: ?
5: Profit!
Seriously though, it has (mostly) worked quite well so far.
Re:Google doomed because of Google, nothing more (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually think, in a different way, this is why Google Fiber failed. I believe entrenched telecom interest ended up influencing (effectively controlling) Google from the board & investor perspective, and (with help) forced the creation of Alphabet. That effectively broke up Google allowing investors to have an ala-carte platter of knobs to turn, whereas when Google was monolithic they didn't get to have that level of insight or control. It isn't hard to win investor support on the idea that Google Fiber is a bad short term investment (it's a fact!), and with the facts exposed more clearly as they are now, that put a nail in the coffin.
If you look at how Google bifurcated, its more difficult now for the cash cow (Google) to provided the nearly unlimited funding Google Fiber would take to deploy. There's no question that down the road, Google Fiber would become hugely profitable... but that wasn't allowed to happen and there will be no competition for AT&T/Comcast/etc. I'm not sure Google wanted to have all these shell companies, it just became the political fallout of them having tried to take on a number of really big enemies, and those enemies fighting back hard.
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I'm not interested in Google's definition of "free", i.e. censored.
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Um...my other options are Time Warner and AT&T. If you think Google is evil, you really haven't looked into those two.
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Um...my other options are Time Warner and AT&T. If you think Google is evil, you really haven't looked into those two.
THIS ...
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The topic is how evil the companies are. Not what their service is like.
My service has improved drastically since the transition
They fuck up DNS resolution every other day. Some genius decided that they would shut off their name servers every so often. Probably in an attempt to force people to not hard-code their name servers. Problem is said genius failed to account for the length of DHCP leases when calculating that shutdown schedule. So every other day, DNS resolution breaks until the router fetches a new DHCP lease.
The fix is to use a competent ISPs na
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Some websites I visit also have an "in your face" section, but they have nothing to do with fiber.