

Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet? - sk2code
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/01/google-fiber-shaming-exercise/

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georgemcbay
Shaming 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.

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Lockyy
I'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.

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tcwc
In the UK our situation is much better, although BT owns most of the physical
cable "Local loop unbundling" forces them to share their lines with
competitors.

It seems in the US the only people you can buy from own the physical
infrastructure. Once one company has already built their network in an area
they form a natural monopoly - it's not economical for competitors to come in
and rebuild the network when they know they'll only be able to get a certain %
of households to switch.

~~~
aidenn0
That used to not be the case with DSL, but about a decade ago the FCC
reclassified internet services in such a way that it was no longer the case.
The theory was that this would encourage the providers to upgrade the local
loop.

[edit] The above was from memory, and it is actually a lot more complicated
than that. The decoupling of broadband from voice was challenged in court and
the FCC had to change their rules somewhat. I'm not sure what current
requirements are. See also:

[http://openjurist.org/359/f3d/554/united-states-telecom-
asso...](http://openjurist.org/359/f3d/554/united-states-telecom-association-
v-federal-communications-commission)

A quick key for reading that: ILEC == people who own the copper CLEC == people
who want to use the copper.

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vsbuffalo
Everyone here is saying the word monopoly, but realistically ISPs are natural
monopolies (<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
The 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.

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pragmatic
What 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/> My father lives on a farm 18 miles from
the nearest town. He has fiber.

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snarkyturtle
Netflix, for one, can lessen their compression which is actually pretty
apparent if you pay attention. You see artifacts everywhere and it looks
nowhere as good as the HD torrents that I could get.

Also, transferring files between servers would be less painful. Syncing
between servers always takes me a minute or two at least and completely throws
off my coding flow. Instead of choosing to host it locally and fix things on
the server, I could just quickly sync files and fix things on there.

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rayiner
There 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.

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rayiner
FiOS 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
I think the problem is rather that "FiOS" is not the class of internet
connection that most places in the United States currently have.

~~~
rayiner
My 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
Wifi 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.

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derobert
802.11(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.

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bickfordb
In 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.

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rdl
I 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.

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smoyer
It'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.

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tensor
At 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>

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.

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darrenkopp
I 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
what provider and area if you don't mind me asking?

I'm stuck with around 15/10 for $60 sadly.

~~~
31reasons
I am stuck with 5 Mbps for $50 sadly.

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jws
I 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.

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jpeg_hero
<http://www.webpass.net/>

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aidenn0
[http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/13/sonic-net-starts-trial-
of...](http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/13/sonic-net-starts-trial-of-1gbps-
fiber-to-the-home-internet-in-ca/)

~~~
mtgx
Have 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
[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/02/gigabit-
internet-...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/02/gigabit-internet-
for-80-the-unlikely-success-of-californias-sonicnet/)

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PnuklOEvolu
All 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>

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31reasons
From 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?

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anonymousab
Monopolies.

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dsr_
tl;dr: Money.

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eof
It's not. Burlington Vermont's City owned "Burlington Telecom" offers gigabit
symmetrical.

[http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/Residential/Internet/Broadb...](http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/Residential/Internet/Broadband-
Internet)

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j2kun
tl; dr: Google wins.

