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I live in Provo, which has Google Fiber. As the article says, Google took over their failed public fiber project. (Google purchased the infrastructure for $1.)
by mholt 12y ago
I live in Provo, which has Google Fiber. As the article says, Google took over their failed public fiber project. (Google purchased the infrastructure for $1.)
Provo is a very unique city. It's a big city, but most of its residents are college students or young, newly married recent graduates. It's also a technology hotspot. Comparing the success of its fiber project to predict the success in other cities is hardly fair. For the record, Google Fiber has really lit up this town. Internet service here is unbearable unless you have Google Fiber (or deep pockets to dish out for Comcast). My building only has CenturyLink, and service just came back up an hour ago after suffering 80% packet loss for the last day. And this is our regular experience.
Competition for ISPs, especially around here, is good (Veracity has been grappling to upgrade their network, and Comcast, well, everyone still hates them). On the other hand, the behavior and quality of service from American ISPs in the last 10 years is inexcusable. While I do think that private companies will do better "in the long run", time is running out for them to prove themselves.
- ScottBurson 12y agoSo with Provo having so many young people and being a technology hotspot, why do you think the public fiber project failed? (In general I'm in favor of municipal broadband, so I'm curious why it didn't work as well as hoped in this case.)
- mholt 12y agoI actually don't know, since I wasn't here during the "iProvo" days. One guess is that so much of the housing are rental units. Since residents don't own the properties they live in, the landlords have to approve the installation of a fiber link, but that costs money (even if it's cheap), and they can justify not spending it since there's an existing DSL or cable connection. Google Fiber faces the same problem, and this, I suspect, is precisely why my building's management company decided to forgo Google Fiber for DSL. Yuck. Fortunately, Google Fiber generated enough hype and made the installation fee so low that it appealed to lots of landlords.
- driverdan 12y agoThe fact that the municipal fiber network failed shows that we shouldn't inherently trust the government to run these networks for us.