10 ms·

Google in Kansas City: A Tale of Two-Speed America

87 points by wyclif 11y ago

lololololololol 11y ago
It's funny coz in mainland Europe and even in the UK we have had lightning fast internet way before 2011. Should we expect some 'american freedom' soon?
- adventured 11y ago
  The US has faster average Internet access speeds than the UK and most of mainland Europe. https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/downloads/pdfs/2015-q1-state-of-the-internet-report-infographic-americas.pdf https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/downloads/pdfs/2015-q1-st... https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/downloads/pdfs/2015-q1-state-of-the-internet-report-infographic-emea.pdf https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/downloads/pdfs/2015-q1-st...
  - MCRed 11y ago
    This is consistent with my experience in the UK in 2011. The cable internet was terrible, very slow, extremely expensive, and I was living in a "rich" town. There were several occasions where I resorted to using cell data service in its place. But that was super, super expensive (compared to the USA.) Basically, I can sum up my experience of the UK as this: "Wow, so this is what a second world country is like. It's a shame, everything costs 3 times as much and is lower quality." Other countries on the continent didn't have it so bad, Germany and the Netherlands, for instance the people were much better off. (Even in the "poor" east german side of Berlin where we lived.)
    - Spooky23 11y ago
      My very limited experience with the UK was that everything was incredibly expensive, except for beer.
rasz_pl 11y ago
Romania, and parts of Poland where new Fiber networks are laid out have ~$35-40 1Gbit unlimited internet. Meanwhile people in US wonder how much Google is losing on $100 per 1Gb clients? :)
- adventured 11y ago
  According to Akamai's State of the Internet report for Q1, the US has an average broadband speed of 11.9mbps. Romania is 12.8mbps, Poland is 9.8mbps. By comparison France is 7.5mbps, and Germany is 10.2mbps. Based on the median household income in Romania being 16% that of the US, if 1gbps Internet access there costs $35-$40, you're paying the US equivalent of $210-$240.
  - option_greek 11y ago
    While affordability is certainly an issue, the OP probably is probably referring to capital costs involved and whether Google can recover them back.
    - adventured 11y ago
      That was part of the point, doing anything in Romania is going to be drastically cheaper, because wages are so much lower. That includes putting fiber into the ground. If Romania's capital costs were $35-$40, and Google's are $100, the Romania cost is high by a significant margin if you adjust for the economies being so different.
  - cbg0 11y ago
    It's actually 14$/mo. with VAT in Romania for 1000mbps. I'm not sure if Akamai's state of the Internet also takes into account mobile connections, because those would certainly drop the average speed down. Edit: the speed itself is also not limited to just inside the country, although ISPs in Europe use public peerings a lot more than those in the US. http://www.speedtest.net/result/4647615600.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/4647615600.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/4647608031.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/4647608031.png
tudorw 11y ago
"Liimatta tried to convince Google to install connections in community buildings, to power a cheap WiFi service in low-income areas. The company refused, saying it violated its terms of service. “It’s our biggest disappointment. We would have loved to have taken Google Fiber to the worst places, where it could have really made a difference.”
- hueving 11y ago
  >where it could have really made a difference. Is there a study that shows that the low income population makes better use of high speed bandwidth? Right now it's mainly just a luxury product for HD video streams and the majority of the educational gains of an Internet connection can be had with 5-10mbps.
  - fulafel 11y ago
    The quote was "cheap WiFi" - he meant getting net access for people who don't currently have it.
    - dublinben 11y ago
      "Cheap WiFi" implies to me that they would still be charging users for access. Reselling a connection is obviously against their terms of service. Community organizations will probably have better luck simply paying for connections, and then running open access points to provide free access to the community.
- magicalist 11y ago
  Ha, community organizer talks about the ups and downs of what happened. Article presents complex issue without simplifying it. HN poster posts a clickbait quote.
Animats 11y ago
That looks an awful lot like a paid article.
- Elepsis 11y ago
  Paid by whom, exactly? It's not particularly complimentary towards Google. It's not particularly complimentary towards any incumbents, either. Unless you're suggesting that the less well off population of Kansas City pooled their resources to lobby for an article in the Financial Times, nothing in the article suggests any kind of untoward influence.
bsder 11y ago
I am always amazed that people can't figure out why Google is doing this. Google is rolling out fiber to neuter Comcast. Period. Comcast basically blackmailed Google several years back and thought they won. Google, rightfully, now saw Comcast as an existential threat to their business. Google will keep rolling out until they have Comcast by the balls. Only then will they stop.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  I am always amazed when people can't figure out that google is doing this because their business model is based on "targeted advertising", which necessarily requires gathering as much personal information as possible. All of their products are designed to give them different kinds of data, and being the man-in-the-middle to the entire internet on a per-household basis gives Google an incredibly fine-grained picture of the patter-of-life of the people that use their ISP service. Being able to steal Comcast's market is just a nice side benefit.
  - jpatokal 11y ago
    Genuinely curious here: what additional data would Google get as an ISP that it doesn't already get via search, Gmail, ads, etc? Or do you mean "man-in-the-middle" in the cryptographic sense, and you think Google is playing mini-NSA and start spoofing Facebook certs so it can eavesdrop on SSL connections or something? See also Google Fiber's privacy policy: Other information from the use of Google Fiber Internet (such as URLs of websites visited or content of communications) will not be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, except with your consent or to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request. https://fiber.google.com/legal/privacy.html https://fiber.google.com/legal/privacy.html
    - yummyfajitas 11y ago
      MITM attacks. Verizon currently injects tracking headers into HTTP pages. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh A variety of ISP's (Comcast, MTNL, IDEA) also run MITM attacks and inject ads in pages, sometimes on behalf of law enforcement. I imagine they inject tracking as well. https://blog.ryankearney.com/2013/01/comcast-caught-intercepting-and-altering-your-web-traffic/ https://blog.ryankearney.com/2013/01/comcast-caught-intercep... https://medium.com/@sushubh/delhi-police-is-literally-doing-a-mitm-attack-on-all-mtnl-broadband-subscribers-in-delhi-these-days-e26e4d673e50 https://medium.com/@sushubh/delhi-police-is-literally-doing-... Google could either do these things or block others from doing them.
Elepsis 11y ago
This is just mentioned as an aside in the article, but is this accurate? "Even now, the schools in Kansas City, Missouri, are effectively segregated, with almost all white children at private schools. Just nine per cent of pupils in the state system are white. Almost 90 per cent are on free lunches." That statistic was totally shocking to me. Are there any other places in the U.S. where there's such a dramatic disparity in the race of students in public school relative to the overall population?
- Teodolfo 11y ago
  http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/2014-press-releases/new-york-schools-most-segregated-in-the-nation http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/2014-... Although that isn't the exact same statistic. Basically in NY black kids go to school with black kids and white kids go to school with white kids, although there might be both a white public school and a black public school.
- chrisrogers 11y ago
  St. Louis has a similar disparity, especially vs its MSA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_Public_Schools#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_Public_Schools#Demog... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis#Demographics
  - gopowerranger 11y ago
    Like most people, your links confuse people by combining St. Louis city with St. Louis county. However, St. Louis county is not part of St. Louis city. The statistics, such as this and the too often ballyhooed crime stats, are falsely skewed. It's like taking the crime stats of the baddest part of your town alone to represent the crime (or education) of your city as a whole. Here's another example. The City of St. Louis has a population of under 300K. The County of St. Louis has a population of over one million! And that does NOT include St. Louis city. It's both fair and unfair to not include St. Charles City in this (for reasons I won't go into) which includes another 300K. So most stats you read about St. Louis are based on 300K out of a total population of 1.6 million! And the city is the baddest part of town. Not that I don't agree that there is disparity but, as someone else pointed out, it's by choice, not anything the government does. That's another story, a truth, that no one on HN wants to believe and would downvote me into oblivion if I stated it.
Asbostos 11y ago
Either something's missing from the report of Vogl's argument, or she's trying to do something purely destructive in shutting down the startup offices. This seems to be the entirety of her case: - The workers use up too many parking spaces. - They're richer than us. - They think we're poor. - They commute to work instead of living in the office. - They're untrustworthy because they're outsiders.
- VLM 11y ago
  Imagine she has a clone in the same governmental position right next door. This is a thought experiment, obviously. Her neighborhood will have a slightly lower standard of living than her clone because the residents have no where to park, are not a cultural fit with the neighborhood, their voting patterns and motivations are not the same as their neighbors or are otherwise screwing up carefully gerrymandered districts (WRT funding local schools or police, for example). Also there are likely zoning issues based on old laws, for example maybe the zoning laws somehow prohibit my long dead great grandfather from running a small accounting practice or a yoga studio next door by banning retail traffic, but somehow they're skirting the zoning laws by sneakily not allowing retail traffic or visitors or some other cheaty hack of the local zoning laws. This will also make her life a living hell when the zoning laws are inevitably changed to permit the outsiders and suddenly neighbor X is screaming because neighbor Y used the new loosened rules to sneak in an autobody repair business and is legally running a weld grinder at 2am every night and neighbor Z is dumping waste from his home electroplating business in his backyard. Now she can't go out in public and start whining that she doesn't want to do work and take risks in exchange for the same salary she got for doing basically nothing, like in the past. And she can't whine in public about how they screwed up the perfectly gerrymandered districts. And she can't whine in public about cultural fit because we tolerate, even encourage, that in business but in public thats just old fashioned racism, whatever-ism, etc, and that doesn't fly in public. But she can go in public and rant about how "they hate us because we cling to our God and our guns" and "they hate us because they're rich" or whatever. So she's a bundle of hate and anger but all she can say in public about it is babble. So from an empathy standpoint, whats in it for her? Oh nothing? But there is a huge potential downside? Well there you go.
- mcguire 11y ago
discardorama 11y ago
"In February, local Congressman Emanuel Cleaver sent a letter to Larry Page, co-founder of Google, warning that “preliminary statistics [for Google Fiber] suggest the beginning of a ‘digital redlining’ in our city”" But this Congressman couldn't find the funds to subsidize the poor people's signup fees, which are just $10 each?
- kohito 11y ago
  Subsidy is one way of handling the signup fees. And it might work. But I can't tell if you're saying subsidy is the right answer here, or if you're saying the congressman's complaint to Google is out of line.
  - discardorama 11y ago
    I'm saying that throwing about words like "redlining" is just an attempt to browbeat Google. If the Congressman was so concerned, he could get the $10/family subsidy from somewhere; which, I think, is the proper use of funds.
SG- 11y ago
Just curious, but realistically if I wanted to move to KC and rent a single or double bedroom apartment or small home that could get Google Fiber, what would I be looking at? Seriously pondering moving out of Canada and back to the US and I'm not interested at all in paying for a place like Boston where I used to live.
- peacemaker 11y ago
  Take a look on Craigslist but the prices vary quite a bit around here. We're in Overland Park, where Google Fiber isn't here for another year or two and a 1400sqft 2 bed with a garage will set you back between $1000-$1500 a month.
- theschwa 11y ago
  I had a beautiful spacious apartment in midtown for $800 with all utilities included. I now rent a two story three bedroom house in midtown for $1300 not including utilities. Overall, it's extremely affordable, and there are single bedroom options that aren't as big as those places for even less. Not all of these are listed on sites like Craigslist, so it helps to reach out to some property management places.

87 points by wyclif 11y ago

It's funny coz in mainland Europe and even in the UK we have had lightning fast internet way before 2011. Should we expect some 'american freedom' soon?

adventured 11y ago
The US has faster average Internet access speeds than the UK and most of mainland Europe. https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/downloads/pdfs/2015-q1-state-of-the-internet-report-infographic-americas.pdf https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/downloads/pdfs/2015-q1-st... https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/downloads/pdfs/2015-q1-state-of-the-internet-report-infographic-emea.pdf https://www.stateoftheinternet.com/downloads/pdfs/2015-q1-st...
- MCRed 11y ago
  This is consistent with my experience in the UK in 2011. The cable internet was terrible, very slow, extremely expensive, and I was living in a "rich" town. There were several occasions where I resorted to using cell data service in its place. But that was super, super expensive (compared to the USA.) Basically, I can sum up my experience of the UK as this: "Wow, so this is what a second world country is like. It's a shame, everything costs 3 times as much and is lower quality." Other countries on the continent didn't have it so bad, Germany and the Netherlands, for instance the people were much better off. (Even in the "poor" east german side of Berlin where we lived.)
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    My very limited experience with the UK was that everything was incredibly expensive, except for beer.

rasz_pl 11y ago

Romania, and parts of Poland where new Fiber networks are laid out have ~$35-40 1Gbit unlimited internet. Meanwhile people in US wonder how much Google is losing on $100 per 1Gb clients? :)

adventured 11y ago
According to Akamai's State of the Internet report for Q1, the US has an average broadband speed of 11.9mbps. Romania is 12.8mbps, Poland is 9.8mbps. By comparison France is 7.5mbps, and Germany is 10.2mbps. Based on the median household income in Romania being 16% that of the US, if 1gbps Internet access there costs $35-$40, you're paying the US equivalent of $210-$240.
- option_greek 11y ago
  While affordability is certainly an issue, the OP probably is probably referring to capital costs involved and whether Google can recover them back.
  - adventured 11y ago
    That was part of the point, doing anything in Romania is going to be drastically cheaper, because wages are so much lower. That includes putting fiber into the ground. If Romania's capital costs were $35-$40, and Google's are $100, the Romania cost is high by a significant margin if you adjust for the economies being so different.
- cbg0 11y ago
  It's actually 14$/mo. with VAT in Romania for 1000mbps. I'm not sure if Akamai's state of the Internet also takes into account mobile connections, because those would certainly drop the average speed down. Edit: the speed itself is also not limited to just inside the country, although ISPs in Europe use public peerings a lot more than those in the US. http://www.speedtest.net/result/4647615600.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/4647615600.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/4647608031.png http://www.speedtest.net/result/4647608031.png

tudorw 11y ago

"Liimatta tried to convince Google to install connections in community buildings, to power a cheap WiFi service in low-income areas. The company refused, saying it violated its terms of service. “It’s our biggest disappointment. We would have loved to have taken Google Fiber to the worst places, where it could have really made a difference.”

hueving 11y ago
>where it could have really made a difference. Is there a study that shows that the low income population makes better use of high speed bandwidth? Right now it's mainly just a luxury product for HD video streams and the majority of the educational gains of an Internet connection can be had with 5-10mbps.
- fulafel 11y ago
  The quote was "cheap WiFi" - he meant getting net access for people who don't currently have it.
  - dublinben 11y ago
    "Cheap WiFi" implies to me that they would still be charging users for access. Reselling a connection is obviously against their terms of service. Community organizations will probably have better luck simply paying for connections, and then running open access points to provide free access to the community.
magicalist 11y ago
Ha, community organizer talks about the ups and downs of what happened. Article presents complex issue without simplifying it. HN poster posts a clickbait quote.

Animats 11y ago

That looks an awful lot like a paid article.

Elepsis 11y ago
Paid by whom, exactly? It's not particularly complimentary towards Google. It's not particularly complimentary towards any incumbents, either. Unless you're suggesting that the less well off population of Kansas City pooled their resources to lobby for an article in the Financial Times, nothing in the article suggests any kind of untoward influence.

bsder 11y ago

I am always amazed that people can't figure out why Google is doing this. Google is rolling out fiber to neuter Comcast. Period. Comcast basically blackmailed Google several years back and thought they won. Google, rightfully, now saw Comcast as an existential threat to their business. Google will keep rolling out until they have Comcast by the balls. Only then will they stop.

pdkl95 11y ago
I am always amazed when people can't figure out that google is doing this because their business model is based on "targeted advertising", which necessarily requires gathering as much personal information as possible. All of their products are designed to give them different kinds of data, and being the man-in-the-middle to the entire internet on a per-household basis gives Google an incredibly fine-grained picture of the patter-of-life of the people that use their ISP service. Being able to steal Comcast's market is just a nice side benefit.
- jpatokal 11y ago
  Genuinely curious here: what additional data would Google get as an ISP that it doesn't already get via search, Gmail, ads, etc? Or do you mean "man-in-the-middle" in the cryptographic sense, and you think Google is playing mini-NSA and start spoofing Facebook certs so it can eavesdrop on SSL connections or something? See also Google Fiber's privacy policy: Other information from the use of Google Fiber Internet (such as URLs of websites visited or content of communications) will not be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, except with your consent or to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request. https://fiber.google.com/legal/privacy.html https://fiber.google.com/legal/privacy.html
  - yummyfajitas 11y ago
    MITM attacks. Verizon currently injects tracking headers into HTTP pages. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/verizon-x-uidh A variety of ISP's (Comcast, MTNL, IDEA) also run MITM attacks and inject ads in pages, sometimes on behalf of law enforcement. I imagine they inject tracking as well. https://blog.ryankearney.com/2013/01/comcast-caught-intercepting-and-altering-your-web-traffic/ https://blog.ryankearney.com/2013/01/comcast-caught-intercep... https://medium.com/@sushubh/delhi-police-is-literally-doing-a-mitm-attack-on-all-mtnl-broadband-subscribers-in-delhi-these-days-e26e4d673e50 https://medium.com/@sushubh/delhi-police-is-literally-doing-... Google could either do these things or block others from doing them.

Elepsis 11y ago

This is just mentioned as an aside in the article, but is this accurate? "Even now, the schools in Kansas City, Missouri, are effectively segregated, with almost all white children at private schools. Just nine per cent of pupils in the state system are white. Almost 90 per cent are on free lunches." That statistic was totally shocking to me. Are there any other places in the U.S. where there's such a dramatic disparity in the race of students in public school relative to the overall population?

Teodolfo 11y ago
http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/2014-press-releases/new-york-schools-most-segregated-in-the-nation http://civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/news/press-releases/2014-... Although that isn't the exact same statistic. Basically in NY black kids go to school with black kids and white kids go to school with white kids, although there might be both a white public school and a black public school.
chrisrogers 11y ago
St. Louis has a similar disparity, especially vs its MSA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_Public_Schools#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis_Public_Schools#Demog... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis#Demographics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis#Demographics
- gopowerranger 11y ago
  Like most people, your links confuse people by combining St. Louis city with St. Louis county. However, St. Louis county is not part of St. Louis city. The statistics, such as this and the too often ballyhooed crime stats, are falsely skewed. It's like taking the crime stats of the baddest part of your town alone to represent the crime (or education) of your city as a whole. Here's another example. The City of St. Louis has a population of under 300K. The County of St. Louis has a population of over one million! And that does NOT include St. Louis city. It's both fair and unfair to not include St. Charles City in this (for reasons I won't go into) which includes another 300K. So most stats you read about St. Louis are based on 300K out of a total population of 1.6 million! And the city is the baddest part of town. Not that I don't agree that there is disparity but, as someone else pointed out, it's by choice, not anything the government does. That's another story, a truth, that no one on HN wants to believe and would downvote me into oblivion if I stated it.

Asbostos 11y ago

Either something's missing from the report of Vogl's argument, or she's trying to do something purely destructive in shutting down the startup offices. This seems to be the entirety of her case: - The workers use up too many parking spaces. - They're richer than us. - They think we're poor. - They commute to work instead of living in the office. - They're untrustworthy because they're outsiders.

VLM 11y ago
Imagine she has a clone in the same governmental position right next door. This is a thought experiment, obviously. Her neighborhood will have a slightly lower standard of living than her clone because the residents have no where to park, are not a cultural fit with the neighborhood, their voting patterns and motivations are not the same as their neighbors or are otherwise screwing up carefully gerrymandered districts (WRT funding local schools or police, for example). Also there are likely zoning issues based on old laws, for example maybe the zoning laws somehow prohibit my long dead great grandfather from running a small accounting practice or a yoga studio next door by banning retail traffic, but somehow they're skirting the zoning laws by sneakily not allowing retail traffic or visitors or some other cheaty hack of the local zoning laws. This will also make her life a living hell when the zoning laws are inevitably changed to permit the outsiders and suddenly neighbor X is screaming because neighbor Y used the new loosened rules to sneak in an autobody repair business and is legally running a weld grinder at 2am every night and neighbor Z is dumping waste from his home electroplating business in his backyard. Now she can't go out in public and start whining that she doesn't want to do work and take risks in exchange for the same salary she got for doing basically nothing, like in the past. And she can't whine in public about how they screwed up the perfectly gerrymandered districts. And she can't whine in public about cultural fit because we tolerate, even encourage, that in business but in public thats just old fashioned racism, whatever-ism, etc, and that doesn't fly in public. But she can go in public and rant about how "they hate us because we cling to our God and our guns" and "they hate us because they're rich" or whatever. So she's a bundle of hate and anger but all she can say in public about it is babble. So from an empathy standpoint, whats in it for her? Oh nothing? But there is a huge potential downside? Well there you go.
mcguire 11y ago

discardorama 11y ago

"In February, local Congressman Emanuel Cleaver sent a letter to Larry Page, co-founder of Google, warning that “preliminary statistics [for Google Fiber] suggest the beginning of a ‘digital redlining’ in our city”" But this Congressman couldn't find the funds to subsidize the poor people's signup fees, which are just $10 each?

kohito 11y ago
Subsidy is one way of handling the signup fees. And it might work. But I can't tell if you're saying subsidy is the right answer here, or if you're saying the congressman's complaint to Google is out of line.
- discardorama 11y ago
  I'm saying that throwing about words like "redlining" is just an attempt to browbeat Google. If the Congressman was so concerned, he could get the $10/family subsidy from somewhere; which, I think, is the proper use of funds.

SG- 11y ago

Just curious, but realistically if I wanted to move to KC and rent a single or double bedroom apartment or small home that could get Google Fiber, what would I be looking at? Seriously pondering moving out of Canada and back to the US and I'm not interested at all in paying for a place like Boston where I used to live.

peacemaker 11y ago
Take a look on Craigslist but the prices vary quite a bit around here. We're in Overland Park, where Google Fiber isn't here for another year or two and a 1400sqft 2 bed with a garage will set you back between $1000-$1500 a month.
theschwa 11y ago
I had a beautiful spacious apartment in midtown for $800 with all utilities included. I now rent a two story three bedroom house in midtown for $1300 not including utilities. Overall, it's extremely affordable, and there are single bedroom options that aren't as big as those places for even less. Not all of these are listed on sites like Craigslist, so it helps to reach out to some property management places.