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Google Fiber is live in Kansas City, real-world speeds at 700 Mbps
- macalicious 14y agoThe speed is just ridiculous. Especially the upstream. So many possibilities. So jealous. I like how he shares his connection though.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- johng 14y agoPretty pimp. I'd love to see this hit more and more people, and not just KC.
- marquis 14y agoWhat are the terms of service with this? Can I ask a friend in the area to install it and run some high-bandwidth services? I look forward to seeing whether this turns KC into a gold-mine town reminiscent of the 1800s. I don't even know what I'd do with 700mb upload. Invent wall-to-wall video streaming? It's always been a dream of mine to have breakfast with my family from a distance with near-perfect, full-size resolution like some sci-fi movie in the 80s. (Ok seriously, if someone does this please invite me over for breakfast, even if it's remote-breakfast with a neighbour).
- wmf 14y agoTheir unlinkable TOS says no servers.
- marquis 14y agoFair enough. But P2P applications can take the brunt of the load and you can run your API on Firebase or something. I look forward to innovation. I also would think that the boundary between server and P2P might start to blur, given sufficient saturation of such possibilities around the world. This seems to the ToS element you mention: http://support.google.com/fiber/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2659981&topic=2440874&ctx=topic http://support.google.com/fiber/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...
- Evbn 14y agoThat is sort of a catchall to say that they can cut off any node that causes trouble. Not to say it is a great idea to run a CDN from your house, but they aren't trying to crush everyone like Comcast does to people on home contracts -- there is no more expensive business tier Google wants to push you up to.
- rsheridan6 14y agoIt seems like a lot of risk to base your business on the proposition that Google probably won't enforce their TOS.
- wtallis 14y agoIt's no more unreasonable than running a business off any other ISP's residential/consumer service. Google says in their FAQ that if you want to run a business off their service, contact them directly - the service they're advertising isn't for you.
- rsheridan6 14y agoNobody's talking about moving to another city to take advantage of another ISP's residential/consumer service as a business decision.
- ilaksh 14y agoREALLY? Because I was just seriously considering moving to KC until I read that sentence. If the legal agreement says no servers, then what is the point? What is the point of moving your startup to KC if you technically aren't allowed to run a business off of Google Fiber?
- jonknee 14y agoWhat home ISP allows you to run a server? "Business class" is always required for that sort of thing. That said, few startups should be hosting their own servers, no matter the speed of their internet connection. Everything else you do will be blazing fast though.
- stusmall 14y agoI've run servers off residential IPs before. I use to maintain a community box for me and a bunch of friends when I lived with my parents. It wasn't fast but it met our needs. The only problems I ever ran into with the ISP was when I tried to run a mail server.
- sbalea 14y agoOptimum Online, on their Boost package
- dagw 14y agoFrom the FAQ: "For businesses located in qualified fiberhoods, we plan to introduce a small business offering shortly". If you're seriously interested I'd give them a call and get more details on the exact timeline.
- wmeredith 14y agoProductivity of your crew, mostly. Serving a consumer or b2b website is probably not something you're going to want to do out of a house any time soon. Google Fiber isn't redundant, it doesn't give you better RW security or route around any of the other problems of enterprise-grade hosting. It's just FAST internet.
- ujdtyhf 14y agoCan you run Torrent server, Minecraft server, Counter strike server, Web server for your blog, Web server for your micro business that uses 0.1 MByte/s - 2MByte/s upload? I can do all those things on my 10USD/month 20/20 mbit home net in Poland.
- alsnmadaps 14y ago.66
- alsnmadaps 14y ago6
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- SquareWheel 14y ago>"We just got it today and I’ve been stuck in front of my laptop for the last few hours," Mike Demarais, founder of Threedee, told Ars. "It’s unbelievable. I’m probably not going to leave the house." Is it just me, or does this read incredibly similarly to an Onion article?
- marshray 14y agoPerhaps you've been reading too much Onion. The Onion's style is a deadpan delivery imitating the predominant formatting and cadence of the popular press (e.g., USA Today).
- mikedemarais 14y agoThe reporter didn't mention that I have been sitting in this house without internet for over a week.. I need to catch up on a lot of work.
- kaptain 14y agoMike, Can you comment on Ben Barreth? I read the article but I don't understand how this could be sustainable. Mortgaging your 401K in the hopes of getting donations on a charity project seems like a no-win situation. And I'm not speaking strictly from a financial perspective. Can you give us some more perspective on this? Or if Ben is out there, maybe he can comment. Thanks!
- mikedemarais 14y agoI'll get Ben on here tomorrow, but he has a few ideas to make this sustainable. The housing market here is really affordable and there are already some companies interested in sponsoring the house, so its not as crazy as it sounds. I believe his current focus is finding investors to buy other homes in the area who are down for the cause.
- bogrollben 14y agoI'm open to any ideas. So far: 1) rent one of the rooms on airbnb? Need 16+ days a month rented to break even. Maybe push Fiber tourism? 2) get corporate sponsorship. Ask 10 small-mid businesses to sponsor $100/month for the house. Stick their logo all over the walls and the website 3) when google comes out with the business plan, install a new fiber drop and host a mini data center in the home for non-production clients (I imagine I'd have to compete with a bunch of ppl in KC for this service, once Google opens those doors).
- Xcelerate 14y agoIt's probably not quite as insane as it sounds until the rest of the internet catches up. I had 650 Mbps at Georgia Tech and realized most websites can deliver nowhere near that speed.
- plorkyeran 14y agoYeah, my brief experience with a gigabit connection in school was pretty underwhelming. I could break 50 MB/sec down with bittorrent, but a lot of websites couldn't even hit 1 MB/sec and even CDNs rarely broken 10 MB/sec.
- est 14y agoBitToreent should utilized more building next generation high speed Interweb. Deliver gigs of multimedia in microseconds.
- onenine 14y agoSomething tells me gatech and google have different links to the internet....
- Xcelerate 14y agoI'm not sure if it's true or not, but when I went to school there, the OIT people bragged that GT had the second fastest internet connection to the Pentagon.
- mileswu 14y agoUniversities and research institutes are also connected to private peering links such as ESNet[1] or Internet2[2]. This is actually a huge benefit because these links are typically uncongested and you can get much more reliable transmission on them (and hence consistent latency and faster transfer speeds). Other countries/continents also have their own private academic networks that peer with the US ones. I think I read somewhere that they are upgrading the ESNet backbone to be 100Gbit/s and GEANT's[3] to be 1000 Gbit/s, so I wouldn't immediately write off University/academic networking as automatically inferior to Google's. Honestly it's hard to tell without knowing any of the details of how much capacity Google is provisioning in Kansas City (and how much contention there is). How much backbone fiber is laid to KS/MO - it doesn't seem to be where existing big-scale connectivity is (unlike say, DC Metro area where a ton of datacenters are located or London/Paris/Amsterdam). [1] http://www.es.net/ http://www.es.net/ [2] http://www.internet2.edu/ http://www.internet2.edu/ [3] http://www.geant.net/pages/home.aspx http://www.geant.net/pages/home.aspx
- citricsquid 14y agoDoes anyone do anything that would greatly benefit from a connection like this in their home or have any examples of things that aren't possible now and these speeds will make possible (businesses, technology etc)? I can only really think of backup that will be greatly affected. I currently have 75/20 in my apartment and I don't think I've yet to be in a situation where I needed more speed or was frustrated about my speeds, the problem for consumer broadband seems to be that while there are people with good connections there are still tens of millions scraping by with 1 or 2mbps which is holding their internet enjoyment back a great deal. My parents are living with around 1.5mbps (with fluctuations) making even basic streaming difficult. Hopefully the fact that Google are managing to do this will make ISPs step up their game, although I'm not sure what Google are going for here (proof of tech? entering consumer ISP space?).
- nitrogen 14y agoYou could have remote recording sessions between musicians within a 100-200 mile radius, with live video, if the packet switching latency is low enough. Within the same city, it could feel like being in the same room.
- richforrester 14y agoStreaming HD quality video, remote access to files, heck even something as simple as photographer's portfolio sites who could start using images that are way bigger, higher quality, etc. which is especially useful with ever increasing screen sizes. So many applications for this, one can't even begin to name 'm all. .edit: ooh, remote desktop gaming... sweet!
- fleitz 14y agoTor.
- apawloski 14y agoLimiting factor is the slowest node in the circuit. Not your connection to the network.
- hiddenstage 14y agoUnfortunately the telecom companies should be able to keep Google out of larger markets with zoning laws and political power. I severely hope to be proven wrong, however.
- wmf 14y agoYeah, rolling out fiber in the easiest city doesn't prove much.
- hospadam 14y agoHonest question - what makes it uniquely easy to roll out in KC vs. other cities?
- AustinGibbons 14y agoThe politicians in KC greatly supported the movement in an effort to boost entrepreneurship in KC. They are working on a program called LaunchKC (http://launchkc.com/ http://launchkc.com/) to foster tech innovation
- fleitz 14y agoMost of what the telcos have going for them are barriers to entry and a nice duopoly. The barriers they have to entry might be significant to you or me, but they are pretty trivial to Google, especially in the wired space. In the wireless space they still need to overcome the insane bidding for spectrum that the duopoly permits. Google needs KC to prove that the $70 price for fibre is not 'below market', once they've rolled out a profitable fibre service @ $70 per month they can roll into markets full of regulatory capture and the FTC will be largely unable to say that they are using their search monopoly to undercut telcos. If they don't offer phone service the telco is even more screwed as that's where most of the regulatory power is.
- hiddenstage 14y agoI used to live in a city which had only one ISP. They have a deal with the city that restricts building of infrastructure from competing products (just a rumor - but competing ISPs just so happen to be available in smaller surrounding cities 5-10 miles away). I'm not sure if this is common in other cities, but it really wouldn't surprise me one bit.
- simonsarris 14y agoI think one incredible result of this is that it may raise expectations in the mind of the common consumer. This is very important for the coming data limit war in mobile and landline data caps, a war that consumers are already losing. (I want to be clear: Speculation ahead.) Mobile phone providers and internet providers (in America) seem to be setting data caps artificially low and saying that it covers the most common use cases (98% of customers) so it shouldn't be something we have to worry about. Except that I imagine these very low caps are long play to justify price increases when using 4 or 8 or 20+ GB per month on your phone becomes the norm, or 600GB/month on your desktop becomes the norm. Hopefully Google (and other companies) can show consumers in America (and perhaps elsewhere) the possibilities of large amounts of data over the wire TODAY so that its not a slow climb to higher caps, but a more abrupt shift for some that leaves far more complaints at Comcast and Verizon's door. They won't reply to power-user consumers, they don't care. One only hopes they'll reply to mass consumers using their competition, even if it is merely tangential competition for the most part.
- meric 14y agoCould it have been - previously fundamental value of data limits was low because of low smartphone market penetration, but now that all consumers have smartphones and demand for bandwidth has skyrocketed, and before telecommunication companies can catch up with infrastructure upgrades, the value of existing bandwidth has gone up, and therefore, so has the price?
- cpeterso 14y agoI'm reminded of Fake Steve Jobs' dig at AT&T's short-term thinking: http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/12/a-not-so-brief-chat-with-randall-stephenson-of-att.html http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/12/a-not-so-brief-chat-with-ra... "Now there was a lot of demand for [the "Meet the Beatles"] record — so much that the plant that printed the records could not keep up. Now here’s the lesson. Do you think the guys who were running Capitol Records said, Gee whiz, the kids are buying up this record at such a crazy pace that our printing plant can’t keep up — we’d better find a way to slow things down. Maybe we can create an incentive that would discourage people from buying the record. Do you think they said that? No, they did not. What they did was, they went out and found another printing plant. And another one and another one, until they could make as many records as people wanted. [AT&T CEO] Randall is like, Okay, I get your point. I’m like, You know what, I don’t think you do, because if you did, we wouldn’t be sitting here having this conversation, would we?"
- ericfrenkiel 14y agoWhat's interesting is that increases in bandwidth lead to corresponding increases in innovation. Facebook and other Web 2.0 companies could not exist without DSL/cable/3G/4G connectivity - photos would take too long to load, for example. Beyond increases in resolution and fidelity in multimedia, I speculate what would be truly innovative with this sort of speed. Any ideas? For example, it would be possible to do sub-minute DNA analysis on the cloud by quickly reading a tissue sample.
- jacquesm 14y agoAlways 'on' mobile is a real game changer, outside of bandwidth increases. To do DNA analysis on the spot like that would require some more improvements in sequencing technology first before you could classify the upload to a service as the bottle-neck.
- bo1024 14y agoThink about what a Chromebook would be capable of with always-on 700Mbps. They could sell that thing with practically nothing inside -- no hard drive, barely any RAM, no processor to speak of, just a screen and a keyboard -- and it could outperform the best desktops that money can buy, just by offloading computation to Google's massive data centers in real time. Of course, in the short term latency will still be an issue. So more realistic would be to just get rid of the hard drive (why bother? It's practically the same delay to access the nearest data center's SSD as your own), but keep the RAM and GPU, and enough of the CPU to keep things running smoothly. But I definitely expect to see computation offloaded to the cloud as Internet speeds ramp up. It would be super cool to be writing a python script to test something out and just type in a call MapReduce or whatever on gigs of data, and have it Just Work in the cloud in real time.
- righteous 14y agoIts time for the government to seize last mile infrastructure in the US and convert it to a municipal style utility. The existing broadband monopolies have no incentive to evolve their value propositions, quality of service, or adopt favorable consumer practices; plainly evident with anti-consumer moves such as six strikes policies, arbitrary bandwidth caps, and breaking net neutrality. With last mile infrastructure secured, the government would wholesale the infrastructure to anyone who wants to be an ISP. Competition could finally exist and new business models could be brought to market. Furthermore, the federal government could fund programs for a substantial last mile upgrade program very similar to the Eisenhower highway system. 1gig connections to all Americans in populated areas could reasonably be achieved in 10 years. Just as improved roads and physical connectivity multiplied economic growth with auto manufacturing, transportation, oil and fuel -- improved, open broadband will serve as a platform for decades of future economic growth.
- supersaiyan 14y agoI can only dream of the MMORPGS possible with this, hopefully these speeds hit critical mass in NA within a decade
- supersaiyan 14y agoIf this was offered by bell or rogers you'd get 1Gbs transfer, with 100gb of bandwidth
- geoka9 14y agoYes, I wonder what Google's plans wrt to Canada are (if any). It's hard to believe that the Canadian big telcos will let it happen, though.
- supersaiyan 14y agoI think the current law prohibit non canadian companies from entering the market, but I might be wrong on this
- indiecore 14y agoIf it doesn't I'm sure the lobbyists will start sliming out of their holes soon enough.
- wiggins37 14y agoI like to think how this could change how ideas are spread and organizing. I imagine something like google hangout but with 100 like minded people all present at the same time discussing a common interest, with something like a real time voting mechanism in place so that those with (presumably) better ideas are more likely to be heard. In one example I'm imagining a city council meeting, where anyone who just has the time to log in can take part. And then I realize that maybe this would lead to horrible popular ideas being more easily spread.
- omnisci 14y agoI'd like to think that this will remove people from an office enviroment and allow people to work from home more. This is probably a bit much for most people, but is there really a need for you to sit at a desk in an office when you can do the same thing at home? Real time communications (via video) allow for instant communication between employees, and you can easily add someone to the conversation. The implications of something like this are actually quite big. A change to the 9-5 grind (for better or worse will depend on how it's implemented). The impact of this could be significant when you think of all of the things the 9-5 encompasses, for example, getting stuck in traffic at 8:30am.
- marcamillion 14y agoIt is ridiculous to see how disk seek speed will really be the next big bottleneck. In a few years, I expect these types of inet speeds to be relatively more commonplace.
- frabcus 14y agoVideo conferencing is the main pain I have that this would help with. Obviously, really high quality audio, HD video, with multiple participants. Then I'd like a bit more than that - panorama video so I can see all the surroundings in detail of where the other person is. Not just point audio, but a mesh of audio so I can move around in the space. All streamed to Google Glasses or similar. And if that isn't enough, Kinnect-like 3D, so my body is scanned with depth as well. Done well, so that tech geeks actually start to have their conferences online rather than in the flesh... This'll reduce carbon emissions, and mean people can spend more time with their families. Will that use enough bandwidth?
- marknutter 14y agoI've currently got gigabit fiber internet where I live (a tiny segment of the Minneapolis market) and although it is fast I can't say that it has dramatically improved much of my online experiences. Downloading happens much faster in most cases, but I don't do a whole lot of downloading and often times the rates are limited by the provider of the content. Websites seem to load up about as fast as they used to. The rest of the internet needs to catch up before fiber connections can truly be utilized.
- damian2000 14y agoHere in Australia the government is rolling out 1Gbps fibre to everyone as part of the National Broadband Network project. Unfortunately its projected to take until 2021 before its completed.
- anonDataUser 14y agoIs it just a coincidence that Kansas City is also home to a very small shop that frequently accounts for 10% of US equity volumes?
- wmeredith 14y agoAre you referring to BATS?
- mildweed 14y agoYes. BATS has been a positive member of KCMO's tech community for years and had no part in KCK landing the Google Fiber deal.
- anonDataUser 14y agoMuch smaller shop than BATS. I believe they have less than 20 employees.
- bwb 14y agois anyone else afraid of outbound ddos attacks :), what do they have in place to cut these off really quick?
- epaik 14y agoOne of my pet peeves is how data stream rates are always represented in bits per seconds. It's extremely deceptive to people who don't know the difference between a bit and a byte. We shouldn't measure storage in bytes, but internet speeds in bits.
- WiseWeasel 14y agoYou also have to factor in error correction overhead for TCP transmissions. I find it pretty accurate to shift the decimal one spot to the left when estimating maximum real-world Internet transmission speeds in bytes, rather than dividing by 8.
- purephase 14y agoI really wish this would come to Canada, and Toronto specifically. The business internet market in this city is ridiculous and ripe for a real disruption.