

Ultra high-speed broadband is coming to Kansas City, Kansas - yanw
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/ultra-high-speed-broadband-is-coming-to.html

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ghshephard
As soon as I saw the release, I immediately considered what might be like
moving to Kansas City, Kansas (aka KCK).

Given that a large percentage of the city will soon have access to Gigabit
Broadband, I wonder if we could simply consider the entire City to be one
large LAN.

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archon
If you're considering moving just for gigabit broadband, you might consider
Chattanooga, TN. We already have it.

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megamark16
Don't tempt me, my brother in law lives in Murfreesboro and it's absolutely
gorgeous down there. Beautiful brick homes all over the place, and very mild
weather. Throw in gigabit broadband and you've just about got me convinced.

~~~
archon
It's a beautiful part of the country. I love it down here.

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jordan0day
Living nearby in Overland Park, this is pretty exciting stuff. It will
certainly be nice to see someone big give Time Warner and AT&T a little
competition.

It's a little surprising that they would pick Kansas City, Kansas over the
much-bigger Kansas City, Missouri, but then again, there's probably a lot less
politics and red tape to cut through when dealing with a smaller community.

Sprints headquarters are in Overland Park -- does anyone know if they have
their hand in this?

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wmeredith
I'd say the Kauffman Foundation had a big hand in it. A smaller community may
have been more attractive for a project like this because of logistics.

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binxbolling
But doesn't UPS serve just about everywhere?

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wmeredith
I'd love to hear what some of the business implications of this are from
fellow HN'rs. (Good and bad, is there a downside?) What sort of local
community problems can you solve with an internet that's 100 times faster?

I'm in Kansas City, Missouri. My office is about 1 mile East of the state
line. I'm pretty excited about the community impact of this and I only live
and work _nearby_.

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westbywest
A 16dB+ panel antenna and Ubiquiti Networks Bullet2HP radio, and a suitably
high location, would shorten that distance for you very nicely. ;)

From my own experience working on a community wireless project in St. Louis,
the benefit of a 1Gbit/s fiber uplink (or several) would be that you could use
newer 5GHz radios with MIMO features to build out >=50Mbit/s distribution for
that uplink over a few square miles. So, 1Gbit/s could be parted out to 20 end
users getting 50mbit/s each, and with an infrastructure cheaper than running
fiber or some other wired medium directly to those 20 users.

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nantes
Upvoted twice for UBNT. Downvoted once for math:

50mbps x 200 users = 10,000mbps

Arithimetic aside, Ubiquiti is quickly changing the Wisp world. At Freenet, we
switched from Canopy and upgraded our backhauls to Ubiquiti Airmax and saved
money in the process. I am typing this now from a mesh node connected via a
NanoStationM5!

Given my experience with city-wide wireless in Lawrence, ubiquitous WiFi in
KCK really needs to happen, IMHO.

~~~
Retric
Sadly, plenty of ISP's use that math. (Users * Bandwidth / 10) = uplink.

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nantes
I can't disagree too much, upload speeds are really disappointing. As one
other poster pointed out, this can have a negative effect on entrepreneurs
trying to bootstrap businesses from home.

As for why upload speeds are awful, my experience has been that it is a trade-
off that has been calculated by the ISP. But not in the way I suspected. Any
link level device that uses a single (simplex) medium (wifi, fixed wireless,
mobile wireless, cable modems, DSL modems, etc. as opposed to Ethernet, which
is generally duplex) only has so much bandwidth available.

At the WISP I worked for, we used to use Canopy 900mhz radios to provide fixed
wireless service as well as backhaul for our city-wide mesh network. Since
these radios only had ~3.3mbps aggregate bandwidth, we had to decide how to
allocate it. In our case, we chose something like 5:1 download to upload
ratio. This was a conscious choice about how best to use the available
spectrum/bandwidth. I _believe_ the same is true for cable/DSL media. Please
feel free to correct me.

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frankwiles
One of the best things, from my perspective is that it will give Kansas
something that is positive for a change. There is lots of good tech here in
Eastern Kansas, but all anyone knows is about our issues around teaching
evolution and Fred Phelps. Sometimes makes it hard to convince a client on the
coast that we really do know what we're talking about and aren't running a
consultancy next to a barn.

~~~
nantes
Yes! All of my family and friends give me crap about choosing to live in KS. I
would be hard pressed trade Lawrence/KC for another location. Unless, you
know, there was no snow.

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hanibash
Probably largely because the Kauffman Foundation is there.

~~~
westbywest
And nearby Sprint HQ, as mentioned in the other HN post about this.

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coreyo
There are quite a few interesting possibilities with Google coming in. The 3rd
largest stock exchange, BATS, is based in Lenexa, KS. As others mentioned,
Sprint is located in a suburb. Cerner, the largest healthcare IT company, is
rapidly expanding into KCK. Garmin is in Olathe. KCMO has has a lot of
biomedical firms and research firms including Stowers Institute, TEVA, etc.
Kauffman Foundation has been pushing local startups more and more.

A lot of this though is beyond 2012 and would only be connected with an
expansion of the fiber network. KCK has a NASCAR track, an MLS Stadium, Minor
League Baseball Stadium, an outdoor mall and some factories...

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xiaoma
I can't really say I'm that impressed. They'll be charging $350/month for the
gigabit plan. That's about 10 times what the same service costs in Hong Kong
or 5 times what it does in Tokyo. And that service was available in 2009.

I guess for people used to paying way to much for really slow connections it
might be worth the $350, but it's certainly not a deal I'd be bragging about.

~~~
Jabbles
Where have you heard that price?

~~~
xiaoma
It's on their site: [https://epbfi.com/you-pick/#/fi-tv-essential&fi-speed-
in...](https://epbfi.com/you-pick/#/fi-tv-essential&fi-speed-internet-30)

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megamark16
Wow, so close, and yet so far. I'm just a few miles away, but I'm not moving
to KCK ;-). I wonder if they will eventually spread out from there within the
metro, that would be awesome! We need more options than AT&T and Comcast,
that's for sure.

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nantes
KCK Mayor and Google Kevin Lo on KCUR right now, speaking about Google Fiber
in KCK. <http://www.kcur.org/uptodate.html#Thursday>

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ashbrahma
From the musical/stageshow Oklahoma:

"Everything's up to date in Kansas City They gone about as fer as they can go"

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kin
woooo can't wait to switch out of time warner in a few years

-hopeful socal

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sriram_sun
Once I've ultra high-speed broadband, the first thing I'll probably get is an
iPad2 :).

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cookiecaper
Really exciting for a KC native like myself, even though I'm far away now.
We've been considering a move back in that direction and this only makes it
that much more likely. :D

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known
Facts about 3G/4G networks
[http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=251336,00.asp?h...](http://www.pcmag.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=251336,00.asp?hidPrint=true)

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devinus
This pisses me off. There was a stronger response from Austin, and our govt.
petitioned Google to do it here. What a letdown.

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ihumanable
According to Wikipedia, Austin is 10x larger than Kansas City, KS. Google is
planning on jumping into this with a test group of over 100,000 people, which
is ambitious. It's likely that Google is taking a pragmatic engineering
approach to this, like they are so famous for doing with all their products.

~~~
devinus
If Google is taking a pragmatic engineering approach with this, then why did
they even bother asking communities if they wanted this? According to
<http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/public/list#KS> Kansas City didn't
even bother responding.

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arst
Yes they did, it just shows up as Wyandotte County. Kansas City and Wyandotte
County share a unified government.

