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I think my experiences as a Google Fiber subscriber here in Provo might help illustrate why things haven't gone as well for Google as they (and we) initially ex

I think my experiences as a Google Fiber subscriber here in Provo might help illustrate why things haven't gone as well for Google as they (and we) initially expected. It turns out that delivering gigabit fiber to the home, though a remarkable technical achievement, isn't transformative in the way that all of us living here assumed it would be. It turns out that almost none of the internet resources commonly consumed in the home are even remotely provisioned for gigabit residential connections. ESPN.com loads about as quickly as it always did. Your Netflix streams don't look any different (the absence of buffering, while nice, is a pretty subtle thing). Even Google services, which you'd expect to be optimized for Fiber subscribers, are no faster than before. Downloads from Google Drive at my home are just as pokey as they are on my Comcast connection at the office. A few things are amazing (Apple downloads are so fast you feel like you must be on the company LAN in Cupertino) and, if you're the rare person who can make use of it, the fact that Google Fiber also provides 1 Gbps UPSTREAM... well, words don't exist to express what that's like. But those are the exceptions. And those exceptions are only achievable by the rare person who actually wired the house with Ethernet. Oh, and it turns out that you've also got to upgrade all of your NICs (every technically-inclined person in the city quickly discovered that Ethernet controllers in consumer PC's can't come close to pushing gigabit Ethernet, regardless of what's printed on the box). If you're on wifi, forget it, especially if you're one of the vast majority connecting solely via the underpowered 802.11n wifi router that Google provided. It was a source of enormous community pride when Google made the announcement. (And a source of validation for the politicians who years earlier had pushed through the municipal fiber network that Google purchased for a dollar.) Everyone was so excited to sign up, and it was great to celebrate with your neighbors as the blue and white Google Fiber vans slowly moved up your street. But now, a couple of years in, no one really talks about it anymore. It's definitely nice. The Google folks are great to deal with if you ever have an issue (which, in any case, is exceedingly rare). The pricing is straightforward and easy to understand. But, to your average household here in Provo, on an average evening doing average things on the Internet, it just doesn't seem very different than what we had before.

toast0 10y ago
> every technically-inclined person in the city quickly discovered that Ethernet controllers in consumer PC's can't come close to pushing gigabit Ethernet, regardless of what's printed on the box Really? I have a chromebox (CPU is Haswell Celeron 2955U, NIC is Realtek 8168), running Windows and can hit about 950M down/833M up on dslreports speedtest when my ATT fiber is having a good day. I thought Realtek nics were considered poor, but getting to 95% of theoretical over the internet seems pretty ok to me. In a browser and going through my NAT box, plus ATT's mostly useless residential gateway. What are good examples of junky gigabit nics that don't cut it?
- red_phone 10y ago
  Macs also do pretty well with stock NICs. This is well outside my area of expertise, but I think it may have been as much a chipset or bus issue as anything (e.g. other limitations presented by the motherboard), as all the issues I've observed or heard about have been with onboard NICs. Even the cheapest add-on cards performed loads better...
  - toast0 10y ago
    I guess most of the iffy onboard NICs I've had weren't 1G. But I do now recall some issues with speed on an nForce integrated nic, although it was still fast enough, much faster than 100M anyway.
- NotSammyHagar 10y ago
  I measured my pcs can all do about 1 gig too. I think that claim is incorrect.
pjwal 10y ago
I can second this to some degree from a fairly nice new construction neighborhood (1.2-1.6M $ homes, all homes cat-5e wired) in San Diego (I know that's considered lower middle class in the Bay Area) that has Cox Gigablast service available (1 Gbps up/down). Personally, I was super excited to have the service, was literally like the first to sign up, immediately made use of it with five webcams pushing 1080p to the cloud, running dokku for my company projects staging/qa environments, multiple 4k TVs, etc. However, I was shocked that so many of my neighbors reactions were like "meh." And the neighborhood consists of mostly tech, doctors, small biz owners or some combo thereof...and everyone knows everything going on (whole neighborhood on FB groups together), so it certainly wasn't a market education thing. Most were simply like, "I don't need that much bandwidth," and were perfectly content with getting a lower tier package at 10-30% of the bandwidth for half the cost. I think it's going to take a bit more time before 4k and IoT drive the demand...that much bandwidth still does not have the "killer app" for the typical consumer apparently.

toast0 10y ago

> every technically-inclined person in the city quickly discovered that Ethernet controllers in consumer PC's can't come close to pushing gigabit Ethernet, regardless of what's printed on the box Really? I have a chromebox (CPU is Haswell Celeron 2955U, NIC is Realtek 8168), running Windows and can hit about 950M down/833M up on dslreports speedtest when my ATT fiber is having a good day. I thought Realtek nics were considered poor, but getting to 95% of theoretical over the internet seems pretty ok to me. In a browser and going through my NAT box, plus ATT's mostly useless residential gateway. What are good examples of junky gigabit nics that don't cut it?

red_phone 10y ago
Macs also do pretty well with stock NICs. This is well outside my area of expertise, but I think it may have been as much a chipset or bus issue as anything (e.g. other limitations presented by the motherboard), as all the issues I've observed or heard about have been with onboard NICs. Even the cheapest add-on cards performed loads better...
- toast0 10y ago
  I guess most of the iffy onboard NICs I've had weren't 1G. But I do now recall some issues with speed on an nForce integrated nic, although it was still fast enough, much faster than 100M anyway.
NotSammyHagar 10y ago
I measured my pcs can all do about 1 gig too. I think that claim is incorrect.

pjwal 10y ago

I can second this to some degree from a fairly nice new construction neighborhood (1.2-1.6M $ homes, all homes cat-5e wired) in San Diego (I know that's considered lower middle class in the Bay Area) that has Cox Gigablast service available (1 Gbps up/down). Personally, I was super excited to have the service, was literally like the first to sign up, immediately made use of it with five webcams pushing 1080p to the cloud, running dokku for my company projects staging/qa environments, multiple 4k TVs, etc. However, I was shocked that so many of my neighbors reactions were like "meh." And the neighborhood consists of mostly tech, doctors, small biz owners or some combo thereof...and everyone knows everything going on (whole neighborhood on FB groups together), so it certainly wasn't a market education thing. Most were simply like, "I don't need that much bandwidth," and were perfectly content with getting a lower tier package at 10-30% of the bandwidth for half the cost. I think it's going to take a bit more time before 4k and IoT drive the demand...that much bandwidth still does not have the "killer app" for the typical consumer apparently.