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Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet?
- darrenkopp 14y agoI have 100Mb/100Mb for $45/month which is pretty decent I think. It's not 1Gb, but still beats the pants off everything else in the area.
- selectout 14y agowhat provider and area if you don't mind me asking? I'm stuck with around 15/10 for $60 sadly.
- 31reasons 14y agoI am stuck with 5 Mbps for $50 sadly.
- darrenkopp 14y agoUTOPIA in Utah with the ISP being XMission
- pragmatic 14y agoThat is really good. What location and what provider, if you don't mind me asking?
- darrenkopp 14y agoUTOPIA in Utah with the ISP being XMission
- beatgammit 14y agoI have 40 mbit through CenturyLink (DSL) in Utah as well. Not as awesome as fiber (inconsistent latency), but the competition from UTOPIA/iProvo does seem to drive speeds higher. Wish this were more common in other parts of the country. I only pay 30/mo (35 or so after modem rental) on a promotion, 45 or so afterwords without contract. I'm thinking of switching to veracity unless I move to a UTOPIA city. Good times in Utah...
- darrenkopp 14y agoVeracity is a UTOPIA provider as well. I had them for a bit and was happy with them, but switched back to XMission due to price, but now they have the same price as XMission. It's worth pointing out that I switched from XMission to Veracity because Veracity had a much better price to start with.
- dsr_ 14y agotl;dr: Money.
- j2kun 14y agotl; dr: Google wins.
- anonymousab 14y agoMonopolies.
- aidenn0 14y agohttp://www.engadget.com/2011/06/13/sonic-net-starts-trial-of-1gbps-fiber-to-the-home-internet-in-ca/ http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/13/sonic-net-starts-trial-of...
- mtgx 14y agoHave they actually offered 1 Gbps to anyone yet? Last I read about them about a year ago they were "only" offering up to 300 Mbps, I think.
- aidenn0 14y agohttp://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/02/gigabit-internet-for-80-the-unlikely-success-of-californias-sonicnet/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/02/gigabit-internet-...
- jpeg_hero 14y agohttp://www.webpass.net/ http://www.webpass.net/
- georgemcbay 14y agoShaming won't work when so many places in the USA only have one viable cable provider. Here in my area of San Diego I'm stuck with Time Warner. Even ignoring the relatively slow speeds, I'd be happy just to not have my connection randomly disappear for about 5 minutes 2 or 3 times a day. I'd switch to a competitor in a second except there aren't any. The ISPs have no shame, unless you're willing to force real competition with them nothing will change for those in areas with defacto monopoly ISPs.
- Lockyy 14y agoI'm assuming that the various ISPs have agreements between each other to not expand onto each others "turf"? Otherwise how does competition not naturally spread? If they do, how do they get away with that? More puzzling to me is how ISPs squash towns plans to implement their own networks. I'm very ignorant on how things got so bad over in the US, I've always had a multitude of ISPs over here in England.
- wwwtyro 14y agoI was under the impression that local governments offer them franchise agreements and keep competitors out.
- rayiner 14y agoThey don't have agreements (which would be illegal), but they don't need them. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly. When Comcast owns all the fiber in, say Chicago, it's pretty much impossible to encroach on their turf in a cost-effective way. Say Verizon wanted to come in. They'd have to build their own network, and so could never compete with Comcast on price because of the huge capital expenditure required.
- velodrome 14y agoThe US should do what it does for gas mileage (CAFE Rules). A national roadmap for bandwidth speed (and latency).
- PnuklOEvolu 14y agoAll those veritable mountains of wireless routers spread across every city but can we build an easy to use open source mesh network? <samuelljackson> Hell no! </samuelljackson>
- vsbuffalo 14y agoEveryone here is saying the word monopoly, but realistically ISPs are natural monopolies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly). We don't see competition because startups (even incredibly well funded ones) just don't have the funds to start pulling fiber all across cities. This is also why most high-speed internet today is based on some new utilization of older technology: DSL utilizes phone lines and cable utilizes, well, cable — it's even too expensive (and in terms of business, not worth it given their natural monopoly status) for existing companies. This situation will persist for a while, until either Google starts pulling fiber through tunnels in major cities and the threat forces other ISPs to improve. The only other alternative is fast wireless, as then infrastructure investments decrease drastically.
- joezydeco 14y agoThe ISPs that remain are not natural monopolies. My town is exclusively Comcast, but that doesn't mean Comcast beat out the other cable-tv companies on price/service and ran the competition out of town. Comcast was granted a franchise by the municipality. That's why Comcast spent the money to pull cable all through the town over poles and under trenches. You're granted the monopoly by virtue of spending on the physical plant and providing equal coverage to all sections of town, not just the wealthier neighborhoods that can afford coax-pulling crews. Google can "shame" the other companies all they want with speed and service but, at least in my town, Comcast doesn't have to do jack shit.
- pragmatic 14y agoWhat would you do with more bandwidth?[1] I've discussed this with several of my friends. In our area, we have multiple providers and can get up to 100MB down/ 30 up with residential service. (You can get all you want if you pay business prices, I work at a company that sells that). 30/5 is the standard. So what would we do with more bandwidth? Netflix streams in high def. Games from Steam download quickly. My Voip phone works well. In the future, I'm assuming we will find a use for more bandwidth, but right now, I cannot justify paying for a higher bandwidth connection. (I wouldn't complain if they upgraded our speed for the same price.) What am I missing? What _could_ I be doing with more bandwidth (besides pirating the entire output of Hollywood and the music and gaming industry)? By extension then, what argument do we use to force/persuade ISPs and the government (who pays for a lot of infrastructure [2], especially in rural areas) to increase speeds to end users, while maintaining an affordable price structure? I'm looking for honest answers, I'm not trolling, I promise :-) [1] Assuming that you already have a relatively fast, stable connection now (somewhere in the 30mb download and 5mb upload range). [2] BTOP http://www2.ntia.doc.gov/ http://www2.ntia.doc.gov/ My father lives on a farm 18 miles from the nearest town. He has fiber.
- moistgorilla 14y agoWhen I go to visit my family I would rather not have to wait hours to download a piece of software because my sister is watching a hq movie on netflix, my brother is voice chatting with a friend, and my mom is browsing cooking recipes on websites that load a video advertisement every 20 minutes.
- seanc722 14y agoWith a fast connection could do away with many harddrives. Could pay to purchase cloud storage that could be mounted and used. Wouldnt have to worry about personal backups etc. Would probably still keep a bit of space local but not nearly as much as now.
- gduffy 14y agoIf you're just asking for point examples, Dropcam (my company) could stream at higher quality (1080p+) and/or support many more cameras per household. At 1Gbps, cloud storage/backup becomes fast like local storage, but has the benefit of being geographically redundant.
- rayiner 14y agoFiOS is already at the point where the bottleneck is usually the wifi network not the internet connection. The market for "tethered to your desk" home internet is probably not that big.
- AnthonyMouse 14y agoI think the problem is rather that "FiOS" is not the class of internet connection that most places in the United States currently have.
- rayiner 14y agoMy point is that "super speed" Internet is pretty useless when wifi networks max out at 20-40 Mbps in practice. And while not everyone has access to 30 Mbps+ Internet, most people in urban areas do.
- AnthonyMouse 14y agoWifi networks max out at those speeds because "super speed" internet is elusive and so there is insufficient demand for faster/better wireless devices. 802.11n supports significantly higher speeds than that already, but nobody uses it because 802.11g is faster than most internet connections. Moreover, we're talking about building networks that haven't been built yet. By the time we build them there will likely be 802.11ac/802.11ad devices on the market that can handle even more.
- derobert 14y ago802.11(n), with three streams and a wide channel just barely covers my 75/35 FiOS connection, in one direction at a time only. Take a look at the speed tests on, for example, SmallNetBuilder. "450mbps" 802.11n gear does less than 100mbps—and that's half-duplex. 11(ac) gear will do better, at the cost of using up a ridiculous amount of the 5GHz spectrum. The speed listed on the box is, well, what most of would call a lie.
- luxxx 14y agoDidn't even read the article, but the answer is quite simple: Because people are stupid enough to pay into slow internet. If you refused to pay for it, they would increase the speed. In addition, Google does it because their profits are almost directly proportional to how many people are using the internet. They are everywhere. It just makes sense. In addition, Optical Fiber is not new at all, plenty of people have it already and love it.....
- rdl 14y agoI have Comcast Business 50/10 at home -- it's pretty decent, but there is some crazy Comcast routing going on, so sometimes services like Netflix fail badly. With a VPN to a local server, it's pretty decent, especially since I pay around $60/mo due to a legacy discount (otherwise $200+/mo) What I really want is fast, reliable, dumb-pipe bandwidth from various locations to my datacenter, so I can do things like back up at ~100MB/sec to a SAN in the colo, move VMs around, etc. The only way that seems likely to happen is if I live immediately adjacent and run fiber, or find someplace in the downtown core of Palo Alto with metro fiber and get on there.
- tensor 14y agoAt least the US isn't as bad as Canada where you can pay $225 a month for 250mbit down and up. http://www.rogers.com/web/link/hispeedBrowseFlowDefaultPlans http://www.rogers.com/web/link/hispeedBrowseFlowDefaultPlans edit: a bit of searching shows that FIOS has a similar price for their top plan. On the other hand, we have a 500GB data cap. Smaller plans have caps that are lower than 100GB.
- jws 14y agoI think maybe the ISPs don't care. My u-verse modem is running something like 5mbps up, but they won't sell me more than 1.5. They have the infrastructure in place, at an existing customer and they cant be bothered to take my money. I just had to install a cable line to get 4mbps up for a project.
- eof 14y agoIt's not. Burlington Vermont's City owned "Burlington Telecom" offers gigabit symmetrical. http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/Residential/Internet/Broadband-Internet http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/Residential/Internet/Broadb...
- rayiner 14y agoThere are a whole host of reasons: 1) Verizon isn't peddling a lucrative side business to multiply their return on network capital expenditures. Google Fiber is not only making money on the connection fees, but also making money when you use your newly-found bandwidth to put your documents on Google Drive where they mine it and sell your information. 2) The major network providers in the U.S. are the legacy of the telecom utility monopolies. They have enormous networks that are the result of mandates to serve not just Kansas City, but suburban and exurban and rural Kansas. Google has the advantage of starting fresh. 3) ISP's don't have a lot of incentive to do capital investments because they are natural monopolies (in addition to being the legacy of utility monopolies). So you need government involvement to introduce competition in one way or another. However, there are no votes for such involvement. As a practical matter, super speed internet is something that only makes economic sense right now to build out in urban areas. But districts in the U.S. are heavily gerry-mandered to the point where rural votes count for much more than urban votes. At the governmental level, if you want to bring super speed internet to Kansas City, the whole debate will get bogged down in "but what about rural Kansas?" We look enviously at South Korea's high speed internet, but nobody ever points out that more than half of the country lives in Seoul If everyone in the U.S. lived in NYC we'd probably have awesome internet here.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- 31reasons 14y agoFrom the article: >Computers & Tele-Comm, Inc. (CTC) has been offering a 1 gigabit wireless service in Kansas City since before Google Fiber Why Kansas City is getting all the love?
- smoyer 14y agoIt's not actually, but ... I work at Penn State (one of the Internet2 participants) and have blazing fast internet at work. I've clocked it as high as 485MBps. When I go home (to a small village 4 miles from the campus), I have to suffer with Verizon DSL, Comcast cable modem service or a similarly rated line of sight radio service. Verizon planned to install FiOS in central PA, but the FiOS roll-out has been cancelled. Why can't I have high-speed and affordable Internet at home? Because the ISPs don't want me to get used to it. Nor do they want me to know how much they've been overcharging me the last 15 years.
- bickfordb 14y agoIn the US it's often really hard to establish any kind of cabling network due to right of way laws. This appears to be the worse in metro areas with the richest NIMBYs such as San Francisco or Palo Alto despite having the large populations interested in super-speed internet.