
Netflix says Google Fiber is "most consistently fast ISP in America" - Libertatea
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/12/netflix-says-google-fiber-is-most-consistently-fast-isp-in-america/
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JoeCortopassi
_Is anybody really surprised by this?_ I mean, Google has some of the best and
brightest engineers working for them, a substantial budget, a purpose other
than profitable retail of their service, and a tiny town outside of major
populations to work with. I would be hard pressed to find a reason why they
_wouldn't_ be faster than anyone else out there. Shoot, I bet you could find
similarly sized cities were Verizon/Comcast/Charter handily beat Google Fiber.
Don't get me wrong, I love that they are doing this, but everything breaks at
scale

EDIT: Misread the part about it being Kansas City vs. a city in Kansas. I feel
my point about scale still stands, as Kansas City in total (Missouri and
Kansas) is in the 6-700,000 person range, and is still a fraction of total
user base of the other ISPs mentioned

~~~
wmeredith
>Tiny Town!?

There's 2 million people in the Kansas City metro area. (I'm from Kansas City.
Grumble.. grumble...)

~~~
w1ntermute
For many people who spend most of their time in SF, anything other than SF,
LA, and NYC is "flyover country".

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rayiner
It's absolutely hilarious to put SF in the same category as LA and NYC.

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w1ntermute
That's why I had the qualifier that it only applied to people in SF. Their
view that SF is in the same category as LA and NYC shows how myopic and
inward-looking many of the people in SF are.

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checker
I was wondering what the population breakdown looked like and I found this:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_United_States_Metropol...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_United_States_Metropolitan_Statistical_Areas)

Edit: This list is also interesting -
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city>

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jcdavis
I'd love to see more regional ISPs on this list. Kinda annoying to see Google
under "Major ISPs" when they only serve a single city currently

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ChuckMcM
Interesting, having used Netflix and having it 'step down' from HD to not HD
when something kicked in (like a Windows update) this result suggests that
they are pretty good at traffic management as well. That was one of the
questions I had for my sister who lives in Kansas City.

Now this also means that folks will start advertising their botnets for a
premium if they have a strong contingent of 'Google' hosts. And that will be
the next interesting test.

If Google can run as an ISP and effectively deal with zombie PCs (which is to
say mitigate them), they will replace any other ISP out there just because
operationally they are that much more efficient.

Still waiting to hear which city is #2 on the list.

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shurane
isn't 2.55 Megabits/s for Google Fiber a bit low? I imagine Netflix throttles
the bandwidth. After all, there's no point downloading the whole movie if a
person decides to switch to something else after 10 minutes.

If throttling is happening, what is Netflix testing then?

~~~
notJim
The Ars article biffed, it should be megabytes per second (MBps vs Mbps). It's
kind of confusing on the Netflix graphic, because the headings are in all
caps, so you just have to use context/knowledge to differentiate.

~~~
majormajor
From the mention of a "variety of encodes" affecting their numbers, my
interpretation of this figure is the average bandwidth used to stream a video
to a subscriber, and in that case 2.55MBps sounds shockingly high for an
online streaming video bitrate. 2.55MBps would put it a bit above over-the-air
broadcast MPEG2 HD rates, whereas not everything on Netflix is HD, and I would
assume they're using more efficient codecs than MPEG2. Especially since, from
my past experience, I know that they have HD streams that are playable on
sub-6Mbps connections.

EDIT: and as tedchs points out, the other provider numbers definitely
reinforce the interpretation of it being Mbps: I don't think I've ever seen
AT&T advertise a non-Uverse DSL speed of above 6Mbps, which wouldn't let it
hit 1.5MBps.

~~~
JshWright
It doesn't have to be 2.55MBps averaged over the entire stream. It could be
2.55MBps during bursts of buffering.

That being said... Listing the headers in all caps (without so much as
clarifying in the accompanying post) was a mean thing to do...

~~~
redthrowaway
I'd argue that deciding to name 8 bits a byte and making the abbreviation of
the latter simply the capitalization of the former was an ill-considered
choice, and has led to much confusion, consternation, and gnashing of teeth
over the years.

~~~
noselasd
We should adopt the telecom term octet, and just get rid of the term byte.

Then again "Megaoctet" doesn't quite flow, but there would be no confusion
between a bit and an octet however you abbreviate it. We're still left with is
deciding whether to multiply by 1000 or 1024 for each magnitude though.

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DigitalSea
And in other news, the sky is blue and Barack Obama is the president of the
United States once more. Google have access to some of the best engineers
money can buy, they're certainly not broke and can afford to invest into
better infrastructure and the means for implementing it, not to mention they
don't have a legacy customer base or legacy infrastructure to consider either.

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tsotha
Bah. Verizon stopped installing FIOS and Google wired Kansas City. I don't
care how fast your service is if you don't offer it where I live.

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techsupporter
Netflix appears capable of breaking out fiber versus DSL subscribers of the
same ISP, so I wish they'd separate Frontier FiOS[0] from Frontier DSL. It
would be nice to see how the ex-Verizon system is still doing in comparison to
its much more prevalent cousin.

0 - Yes, it is still called FiOS even when being sold and serviced via
Frontier: <http://www.frontierforhome.com/fios/triple.php>

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Mordor
Google's objective appears to be in delivering the best quality broadband,
instead of driving profits. A great comparison to this would be Apple under
Steve Jobs.

Patiently awaiting for Google's entry into the mobile broadband domain...

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bajsejohannes
This is a great move by Netflix. It will hopefully be visible enough that ISPs
will try increasing their standing, which is ends up being good for customers.

~~~
georgemcbay
I wish you were right.

My ISP (Time Warner Cable) is basically openly hostile towards its customers
and can afford to be since it has a de facto monopoly position where I live.
I'm pretty sure this Netflix report will do nothing to get them to fix their
many, many problems.

I'm very hopeful that in the long term Google Fiber will make a big impact on
the ISP landscape here in the United States, but I think it is going to take a
very long time and the entrenched players are going to have to be dragged into
the present kicking and screaming (and lobbying) and Google is going to have
to expand a LOT more before the other guys start making real changes.

~~~
politician
Is CLEAR (4G WiMax) an option for you? It works pretty well here in Austin,
and by well I mean streaming video with minimal buffering.

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untog
A friend here in NYC tells me that the CLEAR service often gets terrible at
peak times.

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evoxed
Pretty much _everything_ gets terrible at peak times in NYC.

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benologist
Thanks Ars, nobody could have guessed that the "super fast internet" is the
"most fast" without your help!

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mikeevans
I wonder how the customer service is.

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saltzman
Bring it to San Jose and we'll see what's up!

