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> GFiber service will be available in parts of the metro area later this year. Nevada residents and business owners will be able to choose between Google Fiber’
by rconti 2y ago
> GFiber service will be available in parts of the metro area later this year. Nevada residents and business owners will be able to choose between Google Fiber’s plans with prices that haven’t changed since 2012 and speeds up to 8 gig.
The author of the press release is under the mistaken belief that unchanged broadband pricing is a good thing.
From the linked price page:
1gig: $70/mo
2gig: $100/mo
5gig: $125/mo
8 gig: $150/mo
There was a time I would have been insanely jealous of any fiber option at all here in the Bay Area, and I know how hard it is to find fiber anywhere in the US, even still here in many parts of the Bay.
But when the fiber actually arrives, it becomes clear how cheap it is to provide.
When AT&T finally rolled fiber to my house in ~2019 it was $80/mo for 1gig symmetrical.
And you know AT&T's shareholders are still making money hand over fist at that price, because today, I pay Sonic $50 per month for 10gig symmetrical.
- doublepg23 2y agoI’m paying $59.95 for symmetric 1Gbps in Pittsburgh and my only complaint is the lack of IPv6. It’s absolutely rock solid.
- homefree 2y agoIt's still pretty hard to find fiber in the bay for decent prices. I have 1gb symmetric in SF, but that's pretty uncommon. The 10gb sonic is only in some neighborhoods. I lived in Palo Alto for a long time and the options there were awful. 1gb down 35mbps up Comcast was the best option and it was well over $100/mo - there may have been a 2gb option for $300/mo and a 2yr commitment.
- rconti 2y agoYep, my in-laws in Menlo Park had insanely slow SBC DSL with high packet loss. SBC actually just discontinued the service rather than do anything useful. I once paid that ridiculous $149/mo for the 1gig Comcast service until I got tired of the bill that I was really only paying for bragging rights, and went back to 250Mbps.
- ghaff 2y agoI honestly don't understand what the big deal is with the higher speed tiers. I forget what my house theoretically gets but, in practice, it's less than 100 down from Comcast and that's perfectly fine for what I use it for. I'm a bit under $100/mo and wouldn't pay to upgrade.
- rconti 2y agoYeah- I just spent so much time complaining about not being able to get fiber in the heart of the bay area that when the 1gig cable service came, I felt like it was time to put my money where my mouth was. Then the novelty wore off, and I downgraded. IIRC, the 250meg service still had "sufficient" upload.
- lotsofpulp 2y agoThat is how Comcast slices their meager upload capacity, but it looks better for them to advertise their bigger bullshit burst bandwidth numbers than advertise a pathetic upgrade of 5Mbps upload, which probably just means they downgrade someone else’s upload.
- pkaye 2y agoComcast is now starting to support higher upload speeds. They upgraded their equipment in our area (Fremont, CA) and now I'm able to get 200 mbps uploads. But you do have use a newer cable modem which support higher upload speeds. I'm using Arris S34 because I can also eventually upgrade to 2gbps downloads.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y agoit's mostly an artifact of shitty ISPs like Xfinity that haven't figured out that in 2025 non-symmetric download and upload is really dumb. I have 300mbps currently because if I dropped to 100, my upload would go from 30 to 5, and it's nice to be able to upload a file at higher than dial up speeds
- vel0city 2y ago
- sunshowers 2y agoSonic covers large parts of Oakland too. Been really happy with their 10Gbps service, I have an Intel X520 SFP+ NIC in my PC and I get 7-8Gbps symmetrical if upstream isn't bandwidth-limited.
- pkaye 2y agoI'm in Fremont and I recently noticed they now have 2gbps for $105 in my area. Also they boosted the upload speed to 200-350mbps. I did have to upgrade my cable modem to get my faster upload speed but still I need a faster Wi-Fi router before I consider going to 2gbps.
- sureshv 2y agoPalo Alto has had AT&T fiber since 2019 depending on your location (but still not 100% coverage). I was lucky enough to be in an early coverage area but the price for 1GB symmetric has risen from $75/month to $115.
- ErrantX 2y agoJust for a global comparison. Fibre is pretty ubiquitous in the UK but very little over 1G, and not usually symmetrical. Most top end packages are 1G and go for between $45-70 depending on the reseller. But you can get it pretty much anywhere that qualifies as a decent sized town. (We do have close-to a monopoly on the backbone, which is good for coverage but bad for speeds, looks like they are finally starting to role out full 1G/1G this year https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/08/openreach-reveal-uk-plan-to-launch-symmetric-1gbps-fttp-broadband.html https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/08/openreach-reve... )
- zipy124 2y agoI can't even get it in zone 2 in London :(
- ErrantX 2y agoAh the one upside to rural Lincolnshire I guess?!
- rsynnott 2y agoThis seems to be A Thing; city centers get bad internet. In Dublin if you look at coverage maps, the whole central area is an island of VDSL and DOCSIS in a sea of FTTH. Not totally sure why.
- astrange 2y agoIt probably needs you to tear up the street and that's hard to get approved. (And while all Anglo countries are NIMBY, Ireland is the most NIMBY, which is why its population is lower now than in the 1800s.)
- inejge 2y agoIreland is the most NIMBY, which is why its population is lower now than in the 1800s Uh, are you sure that you haven't disregarded the Great Libertarian Sociological Experiment of 1847 in your reasoning?
- arebop 2y agoA lot of people lately are complaining about a lack of price stability, it seems like a good angle. Also as an SF resident with no realistic alternative to Comcast cable, I'd appreciate a provider who didn't try to sneak price increases onto my bill a couple of times a year. In a healthy market I wouldn't expect big margins for sellers, but honestly if someone's making insane profits by selling me a product or service that's excellent and better than my non-empty set of alternatives I'm not going to complain.
- advarkcal 2y agoHave you considered Monkeybrains? For the price the service is fantastic, and with some of their new upgrades speeds are pretty good for most of SF. Caveat: I work from home so I keep my comcast subscription as a backup and have a router with automatic failover. I would say this is not worth it for most people and just Monkeybrains is sufficent.
- arebop 2y agoYes, but it requires landlord cooperation.
- advarkcal 2y agoI would recommend talking to Monkeybrains they should be familiar with the law, I don't think landlords in San Francsico are allowed to limit isp choice https://www.sfexaminer.com/our_sections/forum/san-francisco-s-communications-choice-ordinance-is-working/article_d0d54312-9a69-53a7-b36c-988cf49c69cb.html https://www.sfexaminer.com/our_sections/forum/san-francisco-...
- iancmceachern 2y agoThey're not but often it (monkeybrains, Verizon 5g, etc.) Require installing hardware on the roof of the building, that requires landlord approval and can be challenging in say, a huge office building
- 2y ago
- treesciencebot 2y agoat a relatively new high-rise in rincon hill, AT&T still charges 80-90$ for 1 gig symmetrical (same with webpass/xfinity).
- MostlyStable 2y agoMeanwhile, I'm paying 120/month for 150MB down, 75 up to my rural telco-op, and compared to the satellite internet I had before, I'm happy to be paying it.
- algo_trader 2y agoI have this wacky idea of community fiber kiosks where you stop to fast-download large files/torrents/data dumps Any opinions on this from a user experience point of view?
- lelandfe 2y agohttps://wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkNYC https://wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkNYC In practice, I think I've seen only a handful of people use them directly. It is soo conspicuous using one of these in broad daylight. Lots of people use the ports for charging, though. Also how NYC is this: > Each Link has cameras and over 30 vibration sensors to sense if the kiosk has been hit by an object
- refactor_master 2y agoSo I’d take my expensive, heavy PS5, unplug it, and carry it to a download kiosk? And then wait 2-3 hours for a patch because it might be server-side throttled? And I’d also need a display of sorts to monitor progress. I don’t think the idea is going to sell in this day and age. For a laptop I could just occupy a coffee shop WiFi, and get coffee.
- comboy 2y agoIf you can bring that to kiosk and you live close enough to drive there, the problem is already solved. Even a radio bridge could do.
- hakfoo 2y agoReminds me of when I was in university, and only had dial-up at home, so I bought a Zip drive for my PC, knowing the computer labs had the same, and I could take stuff home that way.
- 2y ago
- smitelli 2y agoIn RTP NC, GFiber's $70 pricing beats equivalent speed plans from the other two symmetric fiber providers in the area, AT&T and Spectrum (if you live on the right streets). It's not _dirt_ cheap, but it's the cheapest we can get. (Oh, also if you request a /48 IPv6 prefix, you'll get it. Never had that work on AT&T's $90.75-after-fees plan.)
- natebc 2y agoIf only it covered all of RTP. I've lived in TWO places in Durham where there was Google Fiber across the street from me but I couldn't get it at my address. Where I live currently the people across the street can get Google Fiber or AT&T Fiber and I can only get Spectrum Cable.
- rconti 2y agoYeah, my gripe with my snide comment is more about how bandwidth costs should be falling over time in a competitive market, not that 1gig for $70 isn't actually still a good deal for the US. The real advantage in having Google Fiber move into Vegas (or anywhere else) is they they're creating competition. It's silly how fast broadband prices plummeted here with the 1-2 punch of 2 fiber providers coming in in relatively short order. All of a sudden, whoops, the major providers can profitably provide service at a fraction of the price! Who knew?
- yegle 2y agoHuh I was able to get a /60 ipv6 prefix from my ATT fiber just fine, and it has been available since circa 2016.
- bhaney 2y agoNow you just need 4095 more /60s and you'll have that /48
- anonymousiam 2y agoI've got a /48 IPv6 subnet with CenturyLink 1G/1G. It's a 6rd tunnel, but it's provided by the same ISP. Hopefully they'll go native soon, but it may not matter if I switch to Google Fiber. My 1G/1G CenturyLink plan is $65/mo, which beats Google's $70 plan for the same thing in the same market, but I've had this plan for 5 years and it is no longer available.
- lhamil64 2y agoAnd then there's my parents, who live in a rural area and have a tiny fiber ISP charging $70/mo for 50mbps. That's not missing a zero...
- zdragnar 2y agoIf it's anything like where I am, they paid little or nothing to actually get the fiber to their house. As with all rural infrastructure, low population density means high costs, especially if not everyone is a customer but you still have to run a cable past their house. My rate is a little better than that- I think $120 for 150 or 200 symmetric- but it's still simultaneously more expensive than what I'd pay in the city and a far better deal than what we had before. Eventually they'll maybe make some money back on what I'm sure was a not inexpensive outlay just getting it to my house in the first place.
- AngryData 2y agoBut at the same time fiber is even cheaper to rollout than copper lines, and we managed to roll out telephone lines all across the US and to every house without nearly as much trouble. Taking into account inflation it wasn't exactly real cheap to but a telephone line at first, but it was at least available.
- erulabs 2y agoFor what it’s worth it’s not even remotely a factor of price/bandwidth. The capex of laying the fiber and doing the last-mile construction is huge and highly variable depending on existing fiber, construction costs, regulatory requirements, etc. What bandwidth they can provide is also due to these requirements, and if they’re profitable as well. Once they actually get the service in place the final price-per-gbps is more a factor of physics than of corporate greed.
- xzjis 2y agoWait, an optical fiber is that expensive in the USA? In France, the price for a symetrical 8 Gbit/s optical fiber is 50€/month (about $52) at the two fastest and most expensive companies! It's also 50€/month for professionals.
- dgfitz 2y agoDoesn’t France have a lot of installation incentives and a large govt push towards 100% fiber? Amazing what an administration with a goal can achieve…
- KerrAvon 2y agoI mean, be careful what you wish for; the current US administration has a goal (white power).
- dgfitz 2y agoI think you’re blind if you include the “white” part. It’s just power. Megalomaniacs. You’re buying into the narrative if you truly think race has anything to do with it. Race is a tool, and it was made a tool, which sucks.
- fooker 2y agoYes, you earn 3x and pay 2x. Works out pretty well.
- cornstalks 2y ago> The author of the press release is under the mistaken belief that unchanged broadband pricing is a good thing. You say that like it (edit to clarify: "it" = "unchanged broadband pricing") is a bad thing, though. Sure, it'd be nice if we had 1 Gb internet for <$30 like Denmark or wherever. But I will gladly sing praises to GFiber's speeds and stable prices given the hellhole of Comcast and CenturyLink I was previously living with.
- cletus 2y agoSorry but this is just incorrect on many fronts. I can speak to this issue as a former engineer on Google Fiber so I got to see just how the sausage was made. Existing national ISPs just have inbuilt advantages that a newcomer cannot replicate or can't replicate cheaply. This is the result of decades of lobbying state and local governments. Take something as simple as where you run cables in the streets. You basically have two choices: you dig trenches or you string up cables on a pole. There is no best answer here as it depends on a lot of factors like weather and climate, local soil conditions, natural disaster risks (eg wildfires, earthquakes), distances involved and existing infrastructure and legislation. So imagine in a given area trenching is uneconomical. This could be just because there's a lot of limestone rock in the soil so it's difficult, slow and expensive to actually dig the trenches and this may be complicated by local noise ordinances, permitting, surveying, existing trenches and so on. So you end up stringing up cables on poles. Who owns those poles? Is it the city? Is it AT&T? You may have rights to string up cables on those poles but the devil really is in the details. You might have to apply for a permit for each and every pole separately. They might be approved by the city but then how does the work happen? Can you do it? Maybe. But you might need AT&T (or whoever) to do something first like move their own cables. Maybe several other companies have to move cables first. Maybe each company has 90 days to do that work and this can add up so it can take over a year just to be able to put a cable up on a pole. And you can't really do any work until all the poles are available. That's just how fiber works. And where do you run the fiber too? Do you run it back possibly several miles to a POP? There are advantages in that but obvious disadvantages like cost and just overall cable size and weight. Or do you use local substations? If so, what kind of building is that? Is it a large building that residents find "ugly" and object to on aesthetic grounds or maybe even environmental grounds that means more delays? How much does that cost? Is AT&T grandfathered in with their substations and nodes? And then after you've done all that and you have your last mile fiber, how many customers do you get? Roughly 30-40% of houses get fiber by how many companies are you splitting that pool with? You have to amortize your entire network build over your projected customer base and it makes a massive difference if it's 10% of dwellings or 15% or 30% or 40%. In industry parlance this is called an "overbuild" and is inherently economically inefficient. It'll actually raise the cost of every ISP because each will get a lower overall take up rate. That's why the best solution is municipal broadband that either provides service or acts as a wholesaler to virtual ISPs. The cost of running a fiber cable from a POP to a house has only gone up over th eyears and it's the majority of your cost. That's really why Internet costs haven't come down. And also why the best Internet in the US is municipal broadband and it isn't even close.
- sedatk 2y agoI can't get Sonic because apparently they don't have permits to operate in the underground conduits in my neighborhood. For some reason, AT&T has that. It's frustrating to say the least.
- ipdashc 2y agoI feel silly asking, but what do you use 10gig for? That speed sounds insane; I get maybe 800mbps and I've basically never felt like the speed is too slow. Most consumer devices are still on gigabit Ethernet at the fastest, no - or am I just badly out of date? Heck, anywhere above a few gigs, I feel like you'd start getting bottlenecked by whatever's on the other end of the connection. Still, pretty cool to hear that the option exists!
- andersa 2y agoThere are many use cases: - Download games from Steam - Download or upload AI models and datasets from Huggingface and similar - Any kind of remote work where you are regularly working with multi GB files A little server I just put inside my apartment has dual 10Gb/s ethernet ports.
- climb_stealth 2y agoIt's always interesting to read these discussions from a misdeveloped country like Australia. Where symmetric broadband is a pipe dream. And the lived reality in the city is 100Mps down and something like 17Mbps up. I mean it still works for everything. But in comparison other people are living in some kind of techno utopia. At least our banking system is modern so we can pay for our shitty internet without having to fax cheques /s
- zamadatix 2y agoAnything which is front ended by a CDN tends to end up faster than your connection for even the fastest connections. That leaves most of the web, updates (Microsoft/Apple/Google), content services like Steam or cloud storage/backup providers, and centralized piracy like Usenet (decentralized like torrents obviously vary per the seeds for each torrent). It's certainly convenient my games, AI models, cloud backups, and large file downloads tend to go many times faster than when I had gigabit but I'd by no means be crying on the sides of the road about how long things take to upload/download if I had to go back. The biggest thing you'll run into is algorithms designed to increase performance for limited connections don't scale infinitely. E.g. updating games on the Epic Games Store tends to be core limited (even on an overclocked 9800X3D) rather than bandwidth limited because it puts so much effort into the encryption and differential updating with the assumption "it'll be fast enough to not worry about". Even in those cases... it's nice to max them out without even having contention on everything else you're doing.
- Dylan16807 2y ago> The author of the press release is under the mistaken belief that unchanged broadband pricing is a good thing. It kind of is. In a reasonably competitive ISP market, I'd expect the plans to slowly increase in price over time and significantly increase in speed over time. Keeping the basic tier at $70 is a good thing, even without a speed change. Gigabit is fast enough to still be solid in another 13 years.
- DontchaKnowit 2y agoGoogle fiber is also full of shit when they say their prices havent changed because I was paying like 25 a month for 1g fiber in 2019 ain kansas city and now I pay 70 a month for the same service
- kxrm 2y agoAFAIK, GFiber has always been $70/month for 1gig. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20131218122258/https://fiber.google.com/cities/provo/plans/ https://web.archive.org/web/20131218122258/https://fiber.goo...
- DontchaKnowit 2y agoIt was not in Kansas city and I believe it was because it was a pilot program in kc for a while since it was one of the earliest locations for gfiber. I could go dig up my old bills Edit : yeah just found my bill from october 2019 and I was charged 50 dollars. They quietly raised the price ghen claimed it was always 70 dollars. Obnoxious.
- rayiner 2y agoYou can look this up! https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/financial-reports/quarterly-earnings/2023/3q-2023/T_3Q_2023_8_K_Earnings_8_01.pdf https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/financia.... Page 2. Consumer wireline operating margin was 4.8%.
- throwaway2037 2y agoNice post. Thank you to share. > And you know AT&T's shareholders are still making money hand over fist at that price I believe you, but why is Google Fiber so slow to expand?
- deepsun 2y agoWhat is "gig"? I'm familiar with Gbps and GB/s, one is 8x of another. But what is "gig"?
- saagarjha 2y ago1 Gbps.
- Youden 2y agoHoly... Here in Switzerland we have an ISP, Init7, that offers two price options ("G" = "Gbps" and "M" = "Mbps" but shorter for clarity): - Regular dynamic IPv4 + static IPv6 /48, 1G/1G, 10G/10G or 25G/25G (speed is your choice): $71.56/month - CG-NAT IPv4 + static IPv6 /56, 500M/100M if you don't have fiber available or 1G/1G if you do: $48.63/month The higher speeds have higher setup and equipment costs but the monthly costs are all the same. I have the 25Gbps service and can actually get those speeds outside my ISP's network: https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/84db310f-2caa-4564-b5ff-bd5578a74995 https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/84db310f-2caa-4564-b5ff-b... Also fun: they can offer you a BGP session so you can use your own IP space with your home internet connection: https://lists.init7.net/hyperkitty/list/swinog@lists.swinog.ch/thread/UGFZWUFSZ7GT2TQBEJB7NR3ZBRKLQS2J/ https://lists.init7.net/hyperkitty/list/swinog@lists.swinog.... For anyone wondering how this is possible/economical when the US is so expensive: - The last-mile connectivity is treated as a monopoly and providers who install the infrastructure are obligated to offer fair (not free) access to their competitors - this ensures price competition. - Init7 successfully argued in federal court that P2MP topologies are anti-competitive, so can't be the sole implementation in new infrastructure deployments - this enabled them to install their own hardware on the other end of a customer's fiber, so they can simply swap a 1G SFP for a 10G SFP or a 25G SFP and offer higher speeds.