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Google Fiber
- suyash 14y agohow is it going to be useful for everyday developer?
- cloudwalking 14y agoOnce internet of this speed is ubiquitous, bandwidth is no longer a concern. Imagine what you can do when bandwidth is out of the picture.
- sliverstorm 14y agoYou are far more optimistic than I. I expect developers will quickly find ways to write software which consumes an entire 1Gbps link.
- nuclear_eclipse 14y agoI expect that Google already has plenty of ways to consume an entire gigabit link; eg, Google Play music/movies/tv, Google Drive, etc. I'm sure they'd be more than happy for all of your data to be stored in the cloud, and have all of your access streamed to you in realtime over that gigabit link. Come to think of it, I would be more than happy for all of my data to be held securely in the cloud so that I would never need to worry about backups or syncing my data between multiple machines. Assuming reasonable privacy and security practices, of course.
- nitrogen 14y agoAssuming reasonable privacy and security practices, of course. How about an in-kernel or FUSE Tarsnap driver? Are you reading this, cpercival?
- nl 14y agoI expect developers will quickly find ways to write software which consumes an entire 1Gbps link. You say that like it is a bad thing!
- sliverstorm 14y agoIt usually is. Designers tend to say, "Gee, I've got an entire 1Gbps link! I don't need to think about efficiently using bandwidth ever again!". This is fine if the pipe never fills up, but if it does (like I am sure it will) you pay the price. This is a cycle that has repeated for decades with every type of computing resource, and the end result is usually, for a 10x improvement in hardware capacity, you get a correlated but much smaller improvement in performance.
- jacques_chester 14y agoAKA the Jevons Paradox, first observed with regards to efficient coal stoves.
- nl 14y agoIt usually is. Designers tend to say, "Gee, I've got an entire 1Gbps link! I don't need to think about efficiently using bandwidth ever again!". This is true, but is only a problem if everything else is equal - which they aren't. I'm not defending badly performing graphics heavy websites which have no reason for existence except to display 24bit versions of things that could be done in CSS. BUT I am looking forward to the ability to transmit multiple streams of 1080p (and higher) video while my children play games with rich, 3D video assets and my electricity supply optimization company monitors the temperature of every cubic centimetre of air to determine if the air conditioner's fans need to be turned up. Yes, that will chew up a lot of bandwidth - and I'll love every single bit travelling over that beautiful, beautiful, fibre...
- sliverstorm 14y agoIt'll just be better per bandwidth, if the growth comes slowly, is mostly what I'm getting at.
- nitrogen 14y agoThat's a good thing. Instead of relying on third-party providers with loads of bandwidth for cloud storage, you and your family create your own private cloud, with direct peer-to-peer transfers across your gigabit links. The reliability would be as good as the size of your family.
- sliverstorm 14y agoThe thing stopping that from happening today is not bandwidth.
- nitrogen 14y agoIn my case it is definitely one of the limiting factors. Try editing your family's latest HD home movies over the 2mbit upload speed that comes with most cable plans. Good software support is another hurdle; I believe AeroFS is one of the companies working on this, though since I'm fully comfortable with sftp et. al. I never signed up for their beta to find out.
- slig 14y ago> I expect developers will quickly find ways to write software which consumes an entire 1Gbps link. Twitter .js app will be like 400mb.
- CrazedGeek 14y agoContinue worrying about latency? :P (This speed isn't going to be ubiquitous for a long time, at least in North America. Too many rural and cell phone users.)
- Cogito 14y agoI think bandwidth will continue to be a problem, no matter how big the pipe gets. The domain of bandwidth restricted problems may shift, but it will almost certainly still be an issue. Historically we seem to be really good at using whatever bandwidth is available. The main thing that might prove this sentiment wrong is the other choke points in the system: it's no use pumping data down the line if our hard drives can't store it quickly enough, or we can't render it as fast as we get it.
- lytfyre 14y ago>[...] other choke points in the system: it's no use pumping data down the line if our hard drives can't store it quickly enough, or we can't render it as fast as we get it. Or have the resolution to display it. Displays have been lagging capture technology for a while, and I don't think it's entirely delivery constrained.
- suyash 14y agoexactly and also understand that the 802.11g standard for wireless networking supports a maximum bandwidth of 54 Megabits per second (Mbps) so unless you're wired, you can't really see the difference.
- jrockway 14y ago802.11g is quite old, however. The current version of 802.11, 802.11n, supports rates up to 450Mbps. My laptop with a 2x2 antenna configuration (and pricey access point) does pretty close to the theoretical 300Mbps. Incidentally, once you have a fiber optic connection between two points, you can do a lot better than 1Gbps.
- simoncion 14y ago2-antenna 802.11n is very likely to saturate a 100mbit link. 4-antenna 802.11n will saturate a 100mbit link. (Remember, insist on 5ghz gear!)
- cloudwalking 14y ago
- kennywinker 14y agoBackground for those who aren't following this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber
- Cogito 14y agoThanks for the context, the page itself was quite devoid of information. I would love to see how this service compares to the roll out of fibre we are seeing in Australia at the moment. There is a lot of resistance from the opposition as the government is largely funding our new network. In particular, many commentators claim that rolling out wireless technology is more financially viable then fibre to the home. In Australia we do have a sparse consumer distribution, so the context is a little different, however if google's model is viable (as you would assume) it might make a strong case study for our situation. Looking forward to seeing how it all progresses. EDIT: spelling
- nl 14y agoIn particular, many commenters claim that rolling out wireless technology is more financially viable then fibre to the home. I don't think anyone claims that wireless isn't cheaper than fibre-to-the-home (FTTH). Some commentators claim it offers similar performance to fibre (They are wrong: at scale, with a large number of geographically concentrated users wireless doesn't offer anything near fibre performance. Comparing the best wireless case performance - where there is a single client on an uncongested network, against the cheapest available - bandwidth capped - fibre plans is clearly an invalid comparison)
- jacques_chester 14y ago> In Australia we do have a sparse consumer distribution Nonsense, Australia is one of the most urbanised countries on Earth. We are less dispersed than the USA. > There is a lot of resistance from the opposition as the government is largely funding our new network. The government is right that FTTP is the most future-proof technology choice. But the way the project is being run is shameful -- they're carefully hiding the costs and debts behind "commercial-in-confidence" for a company wholly owned by the government. And the dealing with Telstra, and creation of a new monopoly ... there's lots not to like.
- bcherry 14y agoUnlikely to be any news about service beyond their long-planned Kansas City project. The skyline in the teaser is a dead ringer for the Kansas City skyline (for example, http://4photos.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Kansas_City_Skyline-855x300.jpg http://4photos.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/Kansas_City_Skyli...)
- FPSDavid 14y agoGreat detective work!
- jtchang 14y agoI am absolutely ecstatic that Google is attempting to build the next generation wired network. Why does this matter? Well owning the pipe is always a good move especially in the face of net neutrality. But there are all sorts of other tie ins. For one, payments. Our current payment infrastructure is based around private leased lines. If you really wanted to take on the payments industry you have to start with the infrastructure. Otherwise you are always at the mercy of a credit card processor just shutting you off. When you own the network where the transactions actually flow it is a different story.
- ricardobeat 14y agoThat's basically what Dwolla did/is doing.
- wmf 14y agoIf you really wanted to take on the payments industry you have to start with the infrastructure. Otherwise you are always at the mercy of a credit card processor just shutting you off. Today Google Wallet is at the mercy of credit cards, but in the future... people will pay their Google Fiber bill with credit cards. I don't see where you're going.
- nl 14y agoOur current payment infrastructure is based around private leased lines. If you really wanted to take on the payments industry you have to start with the infrastructure. Otherwise you are always at the mercy of a credit card processor just shutting you off. Umm.. Credit card processors have other, more obvious ways of shutting you off that taking away a leased line. The leased lines used for credit card processing are such a minor factor that you can pretty much ignore it. Yes, it is a weird way to do it, and no, if you were building a replacement you wouldn't use leased lines, but that isn't what is holding back payment technologies.
- damian2000 14y ago> owning the pipe is always a good move especially in the face of net neutrality ... so that Google can achieve further market domination in the search and search advertising space?
- dmishe 14y agoAny chance that in the future, this project will drive ISP prices down? Internet in the US is ridiculously expensive compared to, say, Eastern Europe.
- cloudwalking 14y agoThat is the goal of the project.
- ricardobeat 14y ago1gbps is not as impressive 2 years later... 100mbps broadband is already becoming affordable here in Brazil, it's a given that 1gbps will be available in large scale in 2-3 years.
- sliverstorm 14y agoInternet speeds may improve by 10x every 2-3 years in Brazil, but that isn't how it's been going in the USA. If it was, the USA would already have 10Gbps for bargain-basement prices.
- ricardobeat 14y agoHa, that's funny now. You're almost there :)
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- BadassFractal 14y agoIt'd be amazing to even have affordable 10mbps here in the US. We're pretty 3rd world as far as Internet speeds are concerned.
- rogerbinns 14y agoUntil December last year the fastest I could get was 3mbps. I was then able to double to just under 7mbps. I'm also forced to pay for landline service I don't want or use as part of that giving me a total bill of $65/ month ($5/mo less than when I had 3mbps plus phone line). I live in a city of 60,000 residents 20 km from Silicon Valley.
- jzawodn 14y agoWhich city?
- rogerbinns 14y ago
- dkasper 14y agoSo I'm all for getting better broadband in this country, and good on Google for trying to make it happen. But allow me to place devil's advocate for a minute. This is like AOL 2.0 right? Isn't it a really bad idea to have one of the largest sites on the internet also be your ISP?
- wmf 14y agoThis may be a case where in theory openness and competition are better but in practice well-executed vertical integration is better.
- lsc 14y agomeh, the last mile buried fiber is a 'natural monopoly' - personally, I think that fiber to the home should be a municipal service, like power, and fiber to the business in santa clara. I mean, the majority of the value there is the public right of way; private companies simply can't do it without subsidies (in the form of right of ways granted by the municipality) But, see, that only gets you from your house to the CO. I think that going from the CO to the internet could be an active and healthy free market. Paul Vixie has advocated something similar... http://public.freemuni.net/sf-news/paul-vixie/Page-4 http://public.freemuni.net/sf-news/paul-vixie/Page-4
- wmf 14y agoIn theory open access is a great model, but we've seen some problems in practice. DSL had a lot of buck-passing where your DSL was down but the telco and the ISP would both blame each other. Also, it's possible that all the competing ISPs could end up offering the same prices and evil TOSes. The easier it is to switch ISPs the easier it is to get adverse selection problems, like if you offer policies that are friendly to heavy users then soon you will have all heavy users which may invalidate your business model.
- lsc 14y ago> DSL had a lot of buck-passing where your DSL was down but the telco and the ISP would both blame each other. This is a huge problem, yes. It can be mitigated in general by having very clear lines between responsibility, and easy tests. Set the system up so you have one fiber strand from the house to the CO; at that point, well, if the light meters say it's okay, it's the fault of the ISP. (or the end user, in any case, it's not the fault of the owner of the fiber.) But yeah, every time you have a service that involves more than one person, you have that problem. Even when one company owns the whole thing, you often have people trying to point the finger at other departments; but yeah, this is worse when it's two different companies. >. Also, it's possible that all the competing ISPs could end up offering the same prices and evil TOSes. Possible, but unlikely. The capital to start an ISP at that level (e.g. selling connectivity within a datacenter) is way smaller than the capital required to, say, buy a house. (I mean, marketing that sort of thing is damn difficult, but re-selling bandwidth within a datacenter/co is not a capital intensive thing.) That's why I think that from the CO to the internet should be a free market; the barriers to entry are so low (except, maybe, marketing, but hell, I'll go knock on doors.) that if the existing players are doing something that irritates customers, there is a lot of incentive for new people to enter the market. >The easier it is to switch ISPs the easier it is to get adverse selection problems, like if you offer policies that are friendly to heavy users then soon you will have all heavy users which may invalidate your business model. I fail to see how that is a problem.
- ebtalley 14y agoplease santa, please oh please oh please.
- donbronson 14y agoGoogle will have to offer cable TV for this to work. I really hope they do. The MSOs deserve some competition.
- Zigurd 14y ago"Google will have to offer cable TV for this to work." It isn't necessary to have separate bandwidth for TV. And any kind of bundling with Google Play would make the product a lot less attractive.
- rachelbythebay 14y agoHonest question: what sort of support can you expect when something goes wrong? Fiber attracts backhoes (buried routes) and bored hunters with shotguns (aerial ones). It's a fact of life. Who's going to do customer service, Google, or some other agency? What's their track record like? (As the old gag goes, this is why you should carry a short piece with you, in case you are stranded on a desert island. Bury it and when the backhoe shows up, get a ride back to land with the driver).
- jaggederest 14y agoKnowing google, they're just going to run 8 different routes to any given place and leave cut cable in the ground, then replace the whole network in 10 years or so.
- ajasmin 14y agoRight. Embrace failure.
- rapind 14y agoThis is a great question. I love Google for the most part, but their customer support is absolutely and utterly terrible. And by design it would seem. No doubt backed up by data mining and A/B testing telling them that offering good customer support is terrible for their bottom line? For something like this I sincerely hope they find and partner with a great customer support provider.
- robomartin 14y ago...until Google algos shut down your account; now you loose gmail, docs, drive, etc., etc., etc., and fiber. OK, I am kidding to some extent. Maybe not. I'd sure like to see them move in a direction that assures users that all services will not be cutoff without recourse for unknown algo violations.
- jellicle 14y agoI don't know why this was modded down. Google Fiber customers will certainly be required to use their Google Account to sign up.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoAnd that part scares me. That is a whole lot of my personal info to provide to a company that is really good at processing it. Of course, I'm probably being stupid about that. My network data was probably sold a long time ago. And they have also probably already correlated it with my google account.
- Zigurd 14y agoThat is a real concern. But the cure is found in faster service: With fast connections you can host your own services. What we really need is multiple competitors in connections this fast.
- angryasian 14y agowhy is it a concern. Just don't use their services then.
- dinkumthinkum 14y agoWell, that's true of you and I but if you care about other people that don't know any better it could be a real issue. There's millions of FB users that don't understand the implications of all their oversharing and will not be happy when/if it becomes a problem for them. But, I think it's too early to judge anything about Google Fiber yet, at least for me, without having much details.
- antimatter15 14y agoGoing to the 404 page reveals a menu which hints (well, it says that there's going to be some plural number of cities, not too much else) at what is being announced tomorrow: http://fiber.google.com/savethedate/404 http://fiber.google.com/savethedate/404 The main menu has links to "About", "How to get it", "Plans & Pricing", "Cities", "Help" and a button "Pre-Register" Also, since that page doesn't seem to indicate the time, the Google fiber blog (http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com/ http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com/) says it's at 11AM CDT. Also an impressive stat is that they've apparently laid down over a hundred miles of fiber.
- Cogito 14y agoInterestingly, they all redirect to a 404 page except Cities/Pre-register, at http://fiber.google.com/cities/ http://fiber.google.com/cities/ which is a 'broken' link. What could it mean??!?
- thronemonkey 14y agoIf this is in my city, I will be so upset. I just signed up for a year of comcast :(
- Tuna-Fish 14y agoEven if it is in your city, getting new fiber laid to you in a year is optimistic.
- kevinalexbrown 14y agoThis move might be good for Google, but I find it somewhat alarming as a consumer. Those who control or curate content (Google, NBC/Comcast, Facebook) should not control infrastructure. This was less of a concern when Google was acting as a conduit of information, but as Google moves to treat personal (if aggregate) data as property and profits from user-generated data like YouTube or Google+, the lines become significantly blurred. There may be nothing wrong intrinsically with controlling content and infrastructure, but it seems to be bad for consumers generally, as exhibited by Comcast[0]. And while a high-speed competitor to local cable monopolies is exciting, I worry about trading one dictator for another just because there's some competition in the transition period from the old guard to the new. Is there some safeguard in place Kansas City and other fiber recipients have arranged to prevent Google from having the power to exert cable-esque control? Not rhetorical, genuinely curious. EDIT: I'd like to make it clear that I'm not anti-Google, I don't think they're evil, or abuse consumer data, or are actively trying to become the next Comcast. I am, however, expressing concern over the position of power they will find themselves in if Fiber takes off. So far I've seen a lot of comments suggesting Google is not evil, to which I agree, but I haven't seen any indicating that there are adequate checks in place to (relatively easily) prevent the abuse of power. [0]http://scrawford.net/blog/comcastnbcu-will-raise-costs-for-consumers/1414/ http://scrawford.net/blog/comcastnbcu-will-raise-costs-for-c...
- grandalf 14y agoYou're worried about Google censoring content or protocols?
- zmmmmm 14y agoI think it is more about anitcompetitive effects. Consider a service competing with Youtube; will they have the same streaming performance when delivered over Google's fiber as Youtube? It might even just be accidental (say, Google colocates it's services with its fiber infrastructure) - but it could easily give competitors a big disadvantage if they can't get access to the same performance as Youtube has.
- 14y ago
- snorkel 14y ago! Gbps upload and download speed. Wonderful. Unless you can give me an static IP address and let me serve whatever I want from that IP than I'm not failling out of my chair over this.
- jmillikin 14y agoIf you're just looking to run a server, a VPN service like Linode or bulk hosting like S3 will be more effective and less expensive than residential hosting.
- ajasmin 14y agoSpeaking of IP addresses. Does Google Fiber supports IPv6? Not that you want to host an IPv6 only website just yet...
- spaghetti 14y agoWhat happens when a large company that Google deems a competitor tries to buy bulk use of the fiber? I could see Facebook lobbying for government regulation of Google's fiber in an attempt to secure competitive pricing.
- Nrsolis 14y agoHonestly, the more network is out there, the better. There is probably an upper limit on the number of networks any given city can support, so it's going to be natural for some combination of content sources to be partnered with fiber distribution networks to revenue share. It's enormously costly to deliver "wireline" fiber to the home service. Most of this is labor cost, but you also can't discount the impact of property taxes and upkeep on infrastructure that is supposed to weather the elements and wildlife (including human) for upwards of 30 years. Fiber is a great solution but wireless is still the most economical way to deliver access for the "last-mile". If we ever find a way to provide low-cost, high bandwidth wireless service within a one mile radius that doesn't make the NIMBY types have an aneurism, then fiber-to-the-home will seem as quaint as an individual copper pair to every residence. disclaimer: In 1997-1998 I worked at a municipally owned city utility that was able to deliver 10mbps symmetric Internet access to a development of homes in FL. Bellsouth subsequently had laws passed to prohibit political subdivisions from engaging in the provisioning of telecommunication services.
- jaggederest 14y agoFiber is fundamentally no different than wireless. It's just at a high enough frequency the light is visible. That means you get much higher bandwidth. There's just no way around that. If you could rig up visible-light laser communications, you wouldn't need the fiber. Fiber's just a convenient container.
- Cogito 14y agoFundamentally, the two are very different. Whilst the information carrier, photons, is identical in both cases, the medium is extremely different. In the case of fibre we have a highly controlled, flexible medium with extremely good quality of service and very little attenuation. This comes at the price of requiring relatively expensive infrastructure between network nodes. Wireless technology on the other hand travels through air as a medium. You remove the end-to-end infrastructure requirement, but the trade off is much higher attenuation and lower quality of service. Additionally, you require some amount of 'direct line of sight' depending on frequency. Lower (and hence slower) frequencies are able to refract around mountains and even off the outer atmosphere, providing quite good coverage, but visible light has no such capability. Repeater satellites or LOS base stations would be required to effectively use such a frequency. This is why HAM radios are great for talking to people kilometres away, but can't be used for effective wireless internet, and why hotspots don't cover more than a few hundred metres at most.
- nilsbunger 14y agoWe have google fiber at home - Stanford faculty homes have had it the past year, like Kansas City. It's pretty cool. My record so far is to consume 400Mbps, using 4 computers downloading from about 10 places, all wired through gigabit switches. In practice, though, it doesn't make much difference compared to a 30Mbps cable modem for most consumers: most streaming video is < 10 Mbps; large file downloads are generally limited by a server (or somewhere else in the network?), so it's hard to exceed 30-40Mbps download speed; web browsing feels about the same, because it's limited by round trips of DNS and http requests, not by bandwidth (spdy will help here?); many consumer-grade NAT boxes (linksys and friends) are capable of only 100-200 Mbps The one place it's made a big difference so far is uploads. For example, backup to a cloud backup service (backblaze) often goes 50Mbps or higher. But I did have to try several backup services because some were limited on the server side to a few Mbps. Running services from home could be a use case too, but then you get into reliability of power/etc, and the fact that so far you can't get a static IP address through google fiber. So for now google fiber is mostly a fast cable modem from a "don't be evil" provider. I think the real disruption will come with new services that don't really exist yet. What kind of new things can be built if there's enough audience?
- epikur 14y agoWhat cloud backup provider did you settle on? Dropbox has very slow uploads for me, so I'm curious what else is out there that works.
- nilsbunger 14y agoBackblaze. But it's really cloud backup, not storage/sync like dropbox.
- ghshephard 14y agoBackblaze has been a rock star for me over a year. It used to be very, very slow (My first backup took the better part of a week to get the "Initial" image in place) - but it was okay because their constant background backups only needed around 1 mbit to be effective (and, more importantly to me - invisible. Time Machine had a bad habit of ramping up my CPU). But, recently, they must have made modifications to their system - because I routinely see backup in excess of 15 mbits/second. Highly recommended.
- minikomi 14y agoSnooping through the css I found this cute hyper-rabbit http://fiber.google.com/static/img/cities/rabbit.png http://fiber.google.com/static/img/cities/rabbit.png Edit: Other interesting sprites: * http://fiber.google.com/static/img/sprite-devices.png http://fiber.google.com/static/img/sprite-devices.png * http://fiber.google.com/static/img/sprite-networks.png http://fiber.google.com/static/img/sprite-networks.png also, tooltip: http://fiber.google.com/static/img/cities/business_address_explanation_tooltip.png http://fiber.google.com/static/img/cities/business_address_e... Last edit : curl > grep > sed > jsfiddle: http://jsfiddle.net/LyHbH/embedded/result/ http://jsfiddle.net/LyHbH/embedded/result/
- petitmiam 14y agoDid you save the rabbit? It's a 404 now.
- minikomi 14y agoFound it: http://i.imgur.com/eXGWz.jpg http://i.imgur.com/eXGWz.jpg Edit: This looks ominous: .fooled-image{position:absolute;top:55px;right:-30px;width:160px;height:243px;background:url(/static/img/you_have_been_fooled.png) no-repeat;}
- rand_r 14y agoWhere is that quoted css ("fooled...") from?
- sakopov 14y agoAs a Kansas City resident, this is going to be inexplicably interesting. We have a pretty decent tech scene here. I'm just wondering how this will impact it, if it will at all.
- jebblue 14y agoIf Google doesn't do it who will? Who else has the vision? As long as they keep not doing evil everything is cool. If they do start doing evil we are screwed but we will have high bandwidth to get on the Internet and read about how messed up we are.
- ww520 14y agoThis is pretty amazing. It's a transformative move if Google can pull it off. Google might be best served by being the wholesale pipe provider rather than customer facing ISP.
- revelation 14y agoThere is not much difference in perception to a normal customer between 50Mbit and 1Gb - the former manages two 1080p YouTube streams perfectly well with quite some headroom for extra misc traffic. Torrenters will always crave more bandwidth, but even there its going to be tough to fill 1Gb downstream. But all of that is missing the point. The internet is not just a better TV with cats - it has true full duplex communication! It's hard to believe because the monopolies in control of the last mile will generally offer you tons of downstream with little to no upstream. In some cases, the upstream is merely enough to send TCP ACKs for when you use all of your downstream. Its a natural move for these big old companies because upstream traffic from customers is more expensive for them and they are still stuck in the mindset of the "media consumption machine". Google, of course, realizes that 1Mb of upstream is bad news for Google Hangouts and terrible for uploading 1080p video to YouTube. And all kind of distributed systems benefit tremendously from matching upload and download bandwidth.
- Legion 14y agoThere's no good reason why I shouldn't be able to participate in lifelike HD video conferences from here in Austin with my team back in CA, along with our other remote members. But, of course, the problem is that while all of us easily have enough bandwidth to pull down streams of high-quality HD video, the video streams we're trying to pull down are choked into low quality by the sender's lack of upstream bandwidth.
- jsz0 14y agoFor cable systems there have historically been some good technical reasons why upstream speeds are much lower. DOCSIS3 solves most of those problems. If there is a demand for it cable upload speeds can jump to 10-15Mbit/sec in the near future without much trouble.
- MrFoof 14y agoThese speeds are already available. I've had 50Mbps/15Mbps from Comcast for over a year, for about $100/month -- and I actually get those speeds so long as the server with the content is willing. Dual-stack support is soon as well, so I'll have an IPv6 address. In the next week or so, my downstream will be increasing to 105Mbps at no additional charge[1]. In some markets (mine included) Comcast will be offering 305Mbps downstream service (granted at $300/mo), which is 90% of the bandwidth the DOCSIS 3.0 specification would allow over 8 channels. Granted, on the opposite end we have Verizon now trying to slowly kill their DSL service and replace it with LTE. [2] [1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/comcast-internet-to-hit-305mbps-5-megabits-faster-than-verizon-fios/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/07/comcas... [2] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/op-ed-verizon-willfully-driving-dsl-users-into-the-arms-of-cable/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/07/op-ed-verizon-wil...
- Legion 14y agoMan, was I pissed when Austin lost out to Kansas City for the Google Fiber for Communities pilot project. The lack of FIOS in a city like Austin is painful. Austin is "AT&T territory" and AT&T's UVerse service isn't even worth talking about. I sure hope this announcement is, "Fiber is coming, and Austin's in the first wave!"
- astrojams 14y agoI've got Fiber through Time Warner Austin (Wideband) and it pulls at like 50Mbit down and 5Mb/sec up. Not too shabby.
- lkbm 14y agoIsn't that $350/mo.? I'm hoping Google's fiber will be a little cheaper.
- jrockway 14y agoNo, it's not. TWC's TV/Phone/50Mbps Internet plan costs me $170 a month. (I think I have HBO in there too.) Now incidentally, a firmware update bricked my cable box and I haven't had the desire to talk to anyone at Time Warner about it, but $170 is a fine price for 50Mbps Internet. (I don't use the phone either. Again, not wanting to talk to anyone in a call center, this is the best I could do.) Their DNS does lie about NXDOMAIN responses, however. If you try to resolve a nonexistent domain name, it returns NOERROR and an A record pointing to their servers. I run my own DNS server fed from the root servers, so I don't really care, but I thought I'd mention it. The technician that did the install was also not happy that I didn't have a Windows or Mac computer for him to insert a shady-looking CD in. "What kind of router do you have." "It's an OpenBSD box." "..." (I had Speakeasy before and kind of miss them. 24 hour phone support, and they were always extremely knowledgeable. Someone I talked to once also used OpenBSD at home.)
- dgudkov 14y agoI use 30Mbps cable internet and pay $12/mo (Eastern Europe).
- chestercheetaz 14y agoFrom a business perspective, this seems like a horrible idea. Google's expertise is in web, specifically in search and search related services. Google is a SOFTWARE company, and specifically a WEB SOFTWARE company. They are not a hardware company, and they certainly are not a telecommunications company. I don't doubt this will launch with great fanfare, but judging from how many "new & exciting" products Google rolls out on a weekly basis, and then shutters shortly thereafter (~2 yrs), I wonder how long this project will stick around. Plus, there's really no evidence to convince me they'll actually be any better than current ISPs at providing wired broadband service. Laying fiberoptic cables is a very involved, complicated process due to federal, state and local laws. Verizon has been the leader in fiber optics, and the reason they don't cover a larger area of the U.S. has more to do with local & state bureaucracy than it does with them being "evil". Naive assumptions aside, this announcement would have made a lot more sense had they acquired or partnered with an existing telecom company. Under that scenario, the telecom co. would assume the costly burden of laying and maintaining the cables, and if the project failed there'd be a myriad of avenues for Google to extricate itself and lay the blame for failure elsewhere. If "hardware is hard" (it is), then I can't imagine how difficult telecom must be...
- lizzard 14y agoFor about 3 seconds I thought maybe this was about yarn.
- csense 14y agoWhat does Google hopes to accomplish with making fiber available? They want to enable entirely new applications. For example, online video was an application enabled by the widespread availability of broadband Internet. Before broadband, downloading videos was possible, but streaming was not. Simply put, the (average) rate at which you download frames of video has to be greater than the rate at which frames are displayed for streaming to work. The most interesting changes were not quantitative, but qualitative. Google -- and most HN readers -- probably believe that higher broadband speeds are an inevitability, although the process has been going much slower in the US than most of us would like. And new ways of using the Internet will be enabled as speeds get faster. And, if it offers fiber, Google will be at the forefront of that wave, which will help Google by: (1) Accelerating the change, pushing those new markets to be created sooner than they would have been created without Google Fiber (2) Putting it in a good position to capture the new markets -- i.e. if Application X is eating a lot of bandwidth on Google Fiber, that might be an early signal that the Application X space is a growth market and Google should find a way to get involved.
- radarsat1 14y agoGoogle is coming out with a breakfast cereal?
- salimmadjd 14y agoAs google gets larger and larger the slower and less nimble it becomes. But given the other competitors in this market, I'm glad google is making their move, US is falling behind other countries when it comes to broadband access and this will only open up so many new business opportunities in US. However, as others said I'll be curious about neutrality of Google when it comes to content. Will they block vimeo in favor of youtube?
- conradfr 14y agoI'm so dumb I thought for a moment that Google would announcing some kind of new clothes fabric.
- corkill 14y agoIn Turkey at the moment. Just got a fibre plan 20mbps for $30 US per month, no contract, they also give the router and modem. Although had to pay $70 or so upfront for the no contract option. They also have a 1000mbps plan. First world countries really dragging there feet on fibre networks.
- andyjsong 14y agoHow does Google fiber compare to other countries around the world like S. Korea and Japan where their bandwidth is much higher. We're #1? USA?! USA?! err Kansas City?!
- DonnyV 14y agoI work for a GIS Services company and I know one of the major issues from us not going full cloud is that we deal with really large data-sets. If we had access to a large fiber pipe we could easily dump all our servers. I would imagine any engineering, graphics or video production office runs across the same problem. I see this as completing the cloud story and alleviating business of having to run there own data centers.
- jervisfm 14y agoThe announcement is now streaming live at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uZVqPuq81c&feature=player_embedded https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uZVqPuq81c&feature=play...
- vampirechicken 14y ago> hose who control or curate content (Google, NBC/Comcast, Facebook) should not control infrastructure. And those who were granted a monopoly in order to build the infrastructure should not control the content.
- allbombs 14y agoThis confirms Google can't win the TV race without owning internet access