7 ms·

Summary: Google tried to "nano"-trench Louisville, KY using 2" deep trenches (by comparison micro-trenching is typically 6" deep) then use epoxy to cover the tr

by js2 3y ago

Summary: Google tried to "nano"-trench Louisville, KY using 2" deep trenches (by comparison micro-trenching is typically 6" deep) then use epoxy to cover the trench. The epoxy didn't stand up to tires. Google tried to replace the epoxy with asphalt but that damaged the fiber. Google determined at that point that nano-trenching wouldn't work and didn't want to spend additional money to remedy the situation, so they abandoned Louisville. My story in NC: Aug 2015: Google Fiber sent me a T-shirt promising Fiber would be available soon! Jan 2017: AT&T Fiber available to my address. $70/month for 1 Gbps. Aug 2023: Google Fiber finally available at my address. $70/mo for 1 Gbps, $100/mo for 2 Gbps. So yeah, Google got AT&T to get off their butts, but it took Google 8 years to get to my address. Meanwhile, AT&T is still $70/mo, includes HBO (er, Max), and is reliable, so I don't really have any reason to switch. That said, I'm considering having GF installed anyway as long as they're in the neighborhood and running dual-WAN for a while. I can always cancel it and then my home is setup for both ISPs.

bruce511 3y ago
I'm not in the US, but in my country the fibre-provider and the ISP are unrelated companies. There are multiple fibre companies (typically an area is served by one or another of them although my area has two) and of course a couple dozen ISPs that do the ISP part. This model works -really- well. ISPs compete on price, and service. Fibre folks do the physical stuff. Fibre companies are incentivised to get rolled out in an area first. ISPs can scale up without having to raise huge capital. And the roadside only gets dug up once (mostly the fibre is buried, although some makes use of existing pole infrastructure. ) It's one of those (rare?) cases where good regulation, and a free market collide, and the result us that everyone has fibre. I say this not to gloat, but rather to show that it can be beneficial to separate access from service for best customer service. [1] my first ISP went under. I switched to a new ISP within an hour after the cause of the outage was understood. [2] a couple of outages have been ascribed to the fibre provider, the ISP escalates those for me, and have been rectified within the hour. Who knew competition could lead to such good customer service...
- aednichols 3y ago
  Excuse my ignorance, but at that point what does the ISP actually do other than send bills to customers and pay invoices for fiber plant and upstream bandwidth?
  - monocasa 3y ago
    Peer in the internet.
  - watson 3y ago
    The ISP sets up rack-cabinets full of equipment in central buildings where the “last mile” fiber terminates, close to the neighborhoods that they service. Each ISP that provides service to the area needs to have their own equipment there. This is how they differentiate and how one ISP can do 1Gbps while another might be able to do 2Gbps. Simply because they have installed different equipment. The fiber itself can of course support much more
    - bruce511 3y ago
      Thats likely true in some places, here though there's no local ISP hardware. (I expect they're in national data centres level).
  - butlerm 3y ago
    It is possible for telcos to provide point to point or point to multipoint layer 2 permanent virtual circuits (PVCs) from customers to providers or branch offices to home offices, and it used to be common. Frame relay and ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) were quite popular technologies for that. In many if not most areas in the United States DSL (digital subscriber loop) based Internet access was originally delivered over PVCs established through a layer 2 ATM network. There were interesting problems with that so PPP or PPP over Ethernet is more common these days, even when the telco no longer really lets anyone compete with them in the provision of broadband Internet access services at layer 3 over the network they maintain thanks to a rather convenient federal court decision. Layer 2 mostly Ethernet access over VLANs (virtual local area networks) to a chosen provider does live on in certain mostly municipally owned multi-provider networks though, and in some countries that is normal, although usually with the incumbent telco or ILEC (incumbent local exchange company) installing and maintaining the last mile to homes and businesses rather than a municipal operator as in some parts of the United States. Either way more than one provider can provide layer 3 Internet service on the same physical facilities that way, with layer 2 (e.g. switched Ethernet) virtual lans or virtual circuits operated by one company or municipality.
bradknowles 3y ago
I also got the t-shirt from Google, when they announced they were coming to Austin. I don't remember which year that was. Google did come to a couple of neighborhoods, but that's it. And while that spurred the AT&T fiber sales critters to come out of the woodwork, that didn't inspire much in the way of actual fiber investment from AT&T. The sales critters came to our neighborhood several times, but ultimately stopped. I think I may have had some influence there, because I kept asking them if they could actually deliver fiber to our house, and they kept failing to be able to answer the question. I kept showing them the AT&T website on my iPad and to show me where they could actually provide service, and they just walked away. Still no AT&T fiber here. But Spectrum was happy to walk around the neighborhood recently, offering their same sub-1Gbps cable modem service that they've had for years and years. Sadly, when Time Warner Cable was here, they could do symmetric 1Gbps connections, at least if you signed up for business class service. Not so much with Spectrum. They can give you 1Gbps down, but nowhere near that for upstream -- not even with business class. Sigh....
- yeukhon 3y ago
  Fwiw, TW was acquired by Spectrum several years ago. The acquisition did not help customers. I am in a lucky boat. Verizon took many years to break ground in many neighborhoods in NYC and neaby counties, after fought monopolies (which they are themselves ironically). But generally only Verizon is the reliable one here
  - bradknowles 3y ago
    Huh. I didn't realize Spectrum bought TW. I thought TW had exited the market and Spectrum was awarded a new monopoly contract. Sigh.... They bought out TW and then proceeded to make the service even worse.
stephenr 3y ago
I thought you must surely have meant `2'` vs `6'` (i.e. feet) and simply used the wrong symbol. I don't really understand how a 2" deep nano trench is meant to last any serious amount of time (compared to a regular conduit fully buried under the road), given how asphalt roads (particularly in a city where there is a fixed-height curb, and resurfacing works will regularly be ripping up a layer of the asphalt to be replaced.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- kalleboo 3y ago
  Supposedly while resurfacing, you're supposed to be able to just take the fiber out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvzGqA2b0aw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvzGqA2b0aw
- WorldMaker 3y ago
  It fails basic civil engineering on so many levels. Imagine doing that in a city with an active frost line well below 2". How many pothole-related outages would you expect to obviously experience if you were to try such an experiment? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    Is cold weather bad for fiber? I'm confused by this post. It fails basic civil engineering on so many levels. This is classic HN armchair engineering. I'm sure Google didn't put any thought into their physical rollout.
    - js2 3y ago
      The freeze/thaw cycle causes things to work their way out of the ground, so buried things you want to stay put need to go below the freeze line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_heaving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_heaving
    - 3y ago
johnbatch 3y ago
I’m also in Raleigh. I remember Aug 2015: Free T-shirt May 2017: ATT dug up my yard (Everyone was hopping it was google) Nov 2017: ATT fiber Installed (At least it’s not spectrum cable anymore) Dec 2021: Google Fiber dug up my yard. May 2022: Google Fiber installed. It’s a shame they re-trenched everything 4 years after ATT did.
- ivolimmen 3y ago
  Dug up your yard??? I am getting fiber in 2 months and they are going under my garden by injecting it with high pressure so that it "lands" in my service hatch under my house. Appointment after that someone will enter my house and connect it...
  - ramenbytes 3y ago
    To clarify, do you mean that they just shove the fiber down an underground electrical conduit hard enough for it to make it to your house?
    - ivolimmen 3y ago
      Yes. We have special equipment for this. Under high pressure they shoot the cable through the ground so my garden remains untouched.
MichaelRo 3y ago
>> $70/month for 1 Gbps. I'm paying $7 / month for 0.5 Gbps. I'd say it's worth the tradeoff.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  That is stunning it is so cheap. Same city? If not, where and how? I don't know how any ISP could make money.
  - MichaelRo 3y ago
    This ISP: https://www.digi.ro/servicii/internet/internet-fix https://www.digi.ro/servicii/internet/internet-fix
    - throwaway2037 3y ago
      That is bat shit crazy cheap! Thank you for the good share.
jeremyw 3y ago
If you run home servers and like having complete control, I recommend staying away from AT&T Fiber. They play lots of network games (port remapping/takeover, routing issues, no limits but limits!). Google Fiber, on the other hand, has been clean and clear.
- kayyyy 3y ago
  That's quite a shame, our area recently got AT&T fiber and I was excited to move off Comcast with the maximum of 35mbps up I get.
  - js2 3y ago
    I haven't had any trouble with AT&T fiber. My bandwidth has never been capped. I don't run public servers from my home, but I do have family who stream from a Plex server and it's never been an issue. I bypass the AT&T router: https://github.com/jaysoffian/eap_proxy https://github.com/jaysoffian/eap_proxy (I'm a crazy person so I also relocated their ONT to inside my home to keep it out of the summer temperatures.)
    - wcfields 3y ago
      I'm 90% satisfied with mine: * 500/500 for $60, can go up 5gbps symmetrical if I wanted * While not advertised as static, I've had the same IPv4 IP since I checked a year ago * No significant downtime * The provided router has a single 2.5gbps port and has 802.11ax Disatisfied: * The ONT and gateway is a Nokia BGW320 provided by AT&T that I must have. I cannot provide my own. There are some work-arounds with pfsense [1] and bridging 802.1X traffic. * The Nokia ONT/Gateway kinda sucks and it's ARP tables fill up and the general networking of it are fairly basic and what you'd expect for some $30 TP-Link. * I'm fairly confidant that AT&T uses CGNAT. I haven't been able to get Plex remote access to work correctly. [1] https://github.com/MonkWho/pfatt https://github.com/MonkWho/pfatt
fulafel 3y ago
8 years worth of comms tech progress should of course make 1 Gbps much cheaper if the competition worked (since the same fiber works for higher speeds).
Uptrenda 3y ago
This sounds like a plan cooked up by a shonky tradesman 'its ok, well use epoxy to patch her up. she'll be right, m8' (sound of house falling down.mp3)
cowmix 3y ago
This is the SAME situation here in PHX. Google made Cox / Centurylink get off their collective arses.
Dig1t 3y ago
Exact same experience in Austin, the quality of internet providers is so much better. There are multiple options for gigabit and none of them have data caps. When living in the Bay we only had one option and it had a data cap that we regularly hit; living in a house with 5 tech people will do that. In Austin there are no data caps, much better service, and a more consistent price. It's amazing what a little competition did.
prirun 3y ago
> So yeah, Google got AT&T to get off their butts, but it took Google 8 years to get to my address. Meanwhile, AT&T is still $70/mo, includes HBO (er, Max), and is reliable, so I don't really have any reason to switch. I'm guessing Google's presence is also what keeps your AT&T bill at $70/mo.
- js2 3y ago
  Well, the threat of it at the time did anyway. I don't think they still offer the same deal for new signups. I keep thinking I've slipped through some crack in their billing system.

by js2 3y ago

bruce511 3y ago

I'm not in the US, but in my country the fibre-provider and the ISP are unrelated companies. There are multiple fibre companies (typically an area is served by one or another of them although my area has two) and of course a couple dozen ISPs that do the ISP part. This model works -really- well. ISPs compete on price, and service. Fibre folks do the physical stuff. Fibre companies are incentivised to get rolled out in an area first. ISPs can scale up without having to raise huge capital. And the roadside only gets dug up once (mostly the fibre is buried, although some makes use of existing pole infrastructure. ) It's one of those (rare?) cases where good regulation, and a free market collide, and the result us that everyone has fibre. I say this not to gloat, but rather to show that it can be beneficial to separate access from service for best customer service. [1] my first ISP went under. I switched to a new ISP within an hour after the cause of the outage was understood. [2] a couple of outages have been ascribed to the fibre provider, the ISP escalates those for me, and have been rectified within the hour. Who knew competition could lead to such good customer service...

aednichols 3y ago
Excuse my ignorance, but at that point what does the ISP actually do other than send bills to customers and pay invoices for fiber plant and upstream bandwidth?
- monocasa 3y ago
  Peer in the internet.
- watson 3y ago
  The ISP sets up rack-cabinets full of equipment in central buildings where the “last mile” fiber terminates, close to the neighborhoods that they service. Each ISP that provides service to the area needs to have their own equipment there. This is how they differentiate and how one ISP can do 1Gbps while another might be able to do 2Gbps. Simply because they have installed different equipment. The fiber itself can of course support much more
  - bruce511 3y ago
    Thats likely true in some places, here though there's no local ISP hardware. (I expect they're in national data centres level).
- butlerm 3y ago
  It is possible for telcos to provide point to point or point to multipoint layer 2 permanent virtual circuits (PVCs) from customers to providers or branch offices to home offices, and it used to be common. Frame relay and ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) were quite popular technologies for that. In many if not most areas in the United States DSL (digital subscriber loop) based Internet access was originally delivered over PVCs established through a layer 2 ATM network. There were interesting problems with that so PPP or PPP over Ethernet is more common these days, even when the telco no longer really lets anyone compete with them in the provision of broadband Internet access services at layer 3 over the network they maintain thanks to a rather convenient federal court decision. Layer 2 mostly Ethernet access over VLANs (virtual local area networks) to a chosen provider does live on in certain mostly municipally owned multi-provider networks though, and in some countries that is normal, although usually with the incumbent telco or ILEC (incumbent local exchange company) installing and maintaining the last mile to homes and businesses rather than a municipal operator as in some parts of the United States. Either way more than one provider can provide layer 3 Internet service on the same physical facilities that way, with layer 2 (e.g. switched Ethernet) virtual lans or virtual circuits operated by one company or municipality.

bradknowles 3y ago

I also got the t-shirt from Google, when they announced they were coming to Austin. I don't remember which year that was. Google did come to a couple of neighborhoods, but that's it. And while that spurred the AT&T fiber sales critters to come out of the woodwork, that didn't inspire much in the way of actual fiber investment from AT&T. The sales critters came to our neighborhood several times, but ultimately stopped. I think I may have had some influence there, because I kept asking them if they could actually deliver fiber to our house, and they kept failing to be able to answer the question. I kept showing them the AT&T website on my iPad and to show me where they could actually provide service, and they just walked away. Still no AT&T fiber here. But Spectrum was happy to walk around the neighborhood recently, offering their same sub-1Gbps cable modem service that they've had for years and years. Sadly, when Time Warner Cable was here, they could do symmetric 1Gbps connections, at least if you signed up for business class service. Not so much with Spectrum. They can give you 1Gbps down, but nowhere near that for upstream -- not even with business class. Sigh....

yeukhon 3y ago
Fwiw, TW was acquired by Spectrum several years ago. The acquisition did not help customers. I am in a lucky boat. Verizon took many years to break ground in many neighborhoods in NYC and neaby counties, after fought monopolies (which they are themselves ironically). But generally only Verizon is the reliable one here
- bradknowles 3y ago
  Huh. I didn't realize Spectrum bought TW. I thought TW had exited the market and Spectrum was awarded a new monopoly contract. Sigh.... They bought out TW and then proceeded to make the service even worse.

stephenr 3y ago

I thought you must surely have meant `2'` vs `6'` (i.e. feet) and simply used the wrong symbol. I don't really understand how a 2" deep nano trench is meant to last any serious amount of time (compared to a regular conduit fully buried under the road), given how asphalt roads (particularly in a city where there is a fixed-height curb, and resurfacing works will regularly be ripping up a layer of the asphalt to be replaced.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
kalleboo 3y ago
Supposedly while resurfacing, you're supposed to be able to just take the fiber out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvzGqA2b0aw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvzGqA2b0aw
WorldMaker 3y ago
It fails basic civil engineering on so many levels. Imagine doing that in a city with an active frost line well below 2". How many pothole-related outages would you expect to obviously experience if you were to try such an experiment? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_line
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  Is cold weather bad for fiber? I'm confused by this post. It fails basic civil engineering on so many levels. This is classic HN armchair engineering. I'm sure Google didn't put any thought into their physical rollout.
  - js2 3y ago
    The freeze/thaw cycle causes things to work their way out of the ground, so buried things you want to stay put need to go below the freeze line. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_heaving https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frost_heaving
  - 3y ago

johnbatch 3y ago

I’m also in Raleigh. I remember Aug 2015: Free T-shirt May 2017: ATT dug up my yard (Everyone was hopping it was google) Nov 2017: ATT fiber Installed (At least it’s not spectrum cable anymore) Dec 2021: Google Fiber dug up my yard. May 2022: Google Fiber installed. It’s a shame they re-trenched everything 4 years after ATT did.

ivolimmen 3y ago
Dug up your yard??? I am getting fiber in 2 months and they are going under my garden by injecting it with high pressure so that it "lands" in my service hatch under my house. Appointment after that someone will enter my house and connect it...
- ramenbytes 3y ago
  To clarify, do you mean that they just shove the fiber down an underground electrical conduit hard enough for it to make it to your house?
  - ivolimmen 3y ago
    Yes. We have special equipment for this. Under high pressure they shoot the cable through the ground so my garden remains untouched.

MichaelRo 3y ago

>> $70/month for 1 Gbps. I'm paying $7 / month for 0.5 Gbps. I'd say it's worth the tradeoff.

throwaway2037 3y ago
That is stunning it is so cheap. Same city? If not, where and how? I don't know how any ISP could make money.
- MichaelRo 3y ago
  This ISP: https://www.digi.ro/servicii/internet/internet-fix https://www.digi.ro/servicii/internet/internet-fix
  - throwaway2037 3y ago
    That is bat shit crazy cheap! Thank you for the good share.

jeremyw 3y ago

If you run home servers and like having complete control, I recommend staying away from AT&T Fiber. They play lots of network games (port remapping/takeover, routing issues, no limits but limits!). Google Fiber, on the other hand, has been clean and clear.

kayyyy 3y ago
That's quite a shame, our area recently got AT&T fiber and I was excited to move off Comcast with the maximum of 35mbps up I get.
- js2 3y ago
  I haven't had any trouble with AT&T fiber. My bandwidth has never been capped. I don't run public servers from my home, but I do have family who stream from a Plex server and it's never been an issue. I bypass the AT&T router: https://github.com/jaysoffian/eap_proxy https://github.com/jaysoffian/eap_proxy (I'm a crazy person so I also relocated their ONT to inside my home to keep it out of the summer temperatures.)
  - wcfields 3y ago
    I'm 90% satisfied with mine: * 500/500 for $60, can go up 5gbps symmetrical if I wanted * While not advertised as static, I've had the same IPv4 IP since I checked a year ago * No significant downtime * The provided router has a single 2.5gbps port and has 802.11ax Disatisfied: * The ONT and gateway is a Nokia BGW320 provided by AT&T that I must have. I cannot provide my own. There are some work-arounds with pfsense [1] and bridging 802.1X traffic. * The Nokia ONT/Gateway kinda sucks and it's ARP tables fill up and the general networking of it are fairly basic and what you'd expect for some $30 TP-Link. * I'm fairly confidant that AT&T uses CGNAT. I haven't been able to get Plex remote access to work correctly. [1] https://github.com/MonkWho/pfatt https://github.com/MonkWho/pfatt

fulafel 3y ago

8 years worth of comms tech progress should of course make 1 Gbps much cheaper if the competition worked (since the same fiber works for higher speeds).

Uptrenda 3y ago

This sounds like a plan cooked up by a shonky tradesman 'its ok, well use epoxy to patch her up. she'll be right, m8' (sound of house falling down.mp3)

cowmix 3y ago

This is the SAME situation here in PHX. Google made Cox / Centurylink get off their collective arses.

Dig1t 3y ago

Exact same experience in Austin, the quality of internet providers is so much better. There are multiple options for gigabit and none of them have data caps. When living in the Bay we only had one option and it had a data cap that we regularly hit; living in a house with 5 tech people will do that. In Austin there are no data caps, much better service, and a more consistent price. It's amazing what a little competition did.

prirun 3y ago

> So yeah, Google got AT&T to get off their butts, but it took Google 8 years to get to my address. Meanwhile, AT&T is still $70/mo, includes HBO (er, Max), and is reliable, so I don't really have any reason to switch. I'm guessing Google's presence is also what keeps your AT&T bill at $70/mo.

js2 3y ago
Well, the threat of it at the time did anyway. I don't think they still offer the same deal for new signups. I keep thinking I've slipped through some crack in their billing system.