
Google Fiber Is Coming to Salt Lake City - Moral_
http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/google-fiber-is-coming-to-salt-lake-city.html
======
SQL2219
Real world speed, hard wired. [http://www.speedtest.net/my-
result/4084419705](http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4084419705)

[https://instagram.com/p/oRf3z3hgzW/](https://instagram.com/p/oRf3z3hgzW/)
[https://instagram.com/p/wBzu2SBgxW/](https://instagram.com/p/wBzu2SBgxW/)

~~~
vegardx
You can't really call it real world speeds when latency is less than a
millisecond, then you've hardly even exited the internal backbone of your ISP.
Generally when accessing things abroad or somewhat far away the throughput
will drop to 150-500Mb/s. So, not bad at all, but don't expect those speeds
everywhere.

On a side note, my current ISP just started rolling out 10Gb/s here. The geek
in me really wants to get it, but I'm having a real hard time even making up
excuses for the added cost, around $700, compared to $40 for gigabit.

~~~
blubblub
> Generally when accessing things abroad or somewhat far away the throughput
> will drop to 150-500Mb/s.

Isn't that usually caused by TCP and bandwith-delay product and not the
connection itself?

~~~
vegardx
A combination of that and congestion on transit providers, I think.

The biggest issue with a really fast connection is that your wireless becomes
the bottleneck, even if you buy really expensive gear.

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CyberDildonics
wireless and fiber? that's like putting ice cubes in wine

~~~
vegardx
Sure is, but it's kind of impractical to always have a wire connected to your
laptop. Sort of defeats the purpose of a portable computer.

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mbillie1
Living in SLC, this is super exciting. I cannot wait to ditch Comcast (who has
raised my rates for the same service every 6 months over the past 2 years) as
soon as conceivably possible.

~~~
ploxiln
Cable pricing is odd... it constantly rises, but is reset to a promotional
price whenever something changes (or threatens convincingly to change). It's
common to call, and say you want to cancel because the price went up, that
you're switching to satellite or something. That usually works.

I'm on Time Warner, and I just happened to move apartments, and I got the
price reset without really asking for it. Some sort of "new service" treatment
even though I only moved to a new address in roughly the same city.

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0xFFC
Right now I am living in third world country, So believe it or not , Imagining
internet speed more than 2 mbps is kinda hard for me , So I have question from
those have Google fiber or any internet connection with speed more than 100
mbps , Can you download file from torrent ? how much your speed is ? How about
ordinary web server's,Do they support download speed more than 30,40 mbps ?

~~~
higherpurpose
I usually get 8-9 MB/s file downloads with a 100Mbps connection. I think the
speed is actually limited by the laptop's slow HDD.

~~~
hwatson
Considering that 100Mbit/s is 12.5MByte/s, the speeds you're seeing aren't
horribly distant from your "up to" speed.

[For reference's sake, 8MByte/s is 64Mbit/s and 9MByte/s is 72Mbit/s

~~~
JoshTriplett
The usual rule of thumb I've seen for incorporating protocol overhead is to
divide by 10 instead of 8: a 100Mbps connection can usually download about
10MB/s in practice (over http, scp, rsync, etc).

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theandrewbailey
I know that Google bought a fiber build in Provo. Did they also/just now buy
an existing one for SLC? When I was at Neumont, I was sad that the fiber in
Sandy didn't come across I-15 to South Jordan.

~~~
batbomb
I'm assuming this is a new installation potentially piggy backing off of some
dark fiber. I'm wondering if they are partnering with XMission.

~~~
McKayDavis
> I'm wondering if they are partnering with XMission.

Very unlikely, as Pete Ashdown (founder/owner) was recently discussing
XMission investigating rolling their own fiber until wind of Google Fiber came
up:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/SaltLakeCity/comments/2yl51u/does_xm...](http://www.reddit.com/r/SaltLakeCity/comments/2yl51u/does_xmission_make_enough_profit_to_eventually/cpal5tj)

~~~
eco
Pete blogged about it today[1]. Sounds like his plan is to basically sell VPN
services for Google Fiber customers who are concerned about privacy.

1\. [https://xmission.com/blog/2015/03/24/google-fiber-in-salt-
la...](https://xmission.com/blog/2015/03/24/google-fiber-in-salt-lake-city-2)

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adorton
I wonder what this means for the metro Provo/Salt Lake Area. I live in between
the two cities and would love to have access. Has Google expanded to the metro
areas of other Google Fiber cities?

~~~
drawkbox
It means lots of competitors will be upping their Mbps sometimes double while
they get their own Gb services in. Cox here in Phoenix doubled speeds and
since Google Fiber announced Phoenix, Scottsdale and Tempe they all are the
focus for Cox's new Gigablast service.

Google Fiber not only brings Gbps broadband they are encouraging it elsewhere
in those cities and surrounding areas. I just wish Chandler was in the
announcement as we were one of the first 4 cities to get cable broadband in
the 90's largely due to Intel. The cities that Google Fiber picks are getting
better internet just by being announced from Google and competitors alike.

Broadband cable during inception in the 90's was such a big leap it was almost
magic from 56k to up to 6mb down when you were new on a node. It was unreal
and the cable companies were heroes. They could have kept going, there are
still only a small percentage of channels used for data/broadband. They can
compete now but haven't, all that wasted on channels noone watches.

Now it feels like cities are winning the Google Fiber bandwidth lottery
because broadband providers have been throttling in their extract phase for so
long with no competition. Google Fiber is spreading competition and better
internet almost as magically as the cable companies did with broadband in the
90s.

~~~
eco
Comcast doubled their speeds throughout the Salt Lake metro area a few months
back (around the same time Google announced Salt Lake City as a potential
Google Fiber location). I'm on a 100 Mbps download now. It's a nice
consolation prize for those of us between Salt Lake and Provo because while we
aren't on the Google Fiber roadmap we still (seemingly) reap some of the
competitive benefits of it being nearby.

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whitecat
I think the LDS church leaders helped this along. They have a lot of people
around the world logging on to LDS.org to stream church videos.

~~~
uxp
I'd have to disagree. I don't have any insight into the church office
building's internal network, but I do know that they already have massive
lines going into the church office building and the surrounding Temple Square
area. The church itself has no need for more fiber. Even if they did, they
showed no desire to help UTOPIA along (they even have the capabilities of
becoming a private leaser), so what makes you think they would want to pipe
their traffic through a third party advertising agency?

Secondly, Salt Lake City proper, where I live and where this announcement is
declaring the buildout initiative, is very much not-mormon. The number of
people logging on to their site to stream videos is minuscule compared to the
number of people in the surrounding suburban sprawl. Google Fiber isn't coming
to Salt Lake Valley, it's coming to the City. This won't help them.

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Osiris
Does this have anything to do with the existing Utopia network or will it be a
completely separate build-out?

I was in college when iProvo was building out, but it didn't live up to the
hype. Over 10 years later and the dream of fiber in the front range is finally
coming to fruition.

~~~
elliotec
Completely separate. Pete Ashdown of Xmission (Utopia) has expressed
annoyance[1] that SLC approved Google but not Xmission, which has been
providing services to the city since its birth. I tend to agree with him, but
any news like this is good news, and maybe it will introduce more competition.

[1]: [https://xmission.com/blog/2014/02/19/google-fiber-in-salt-
la...](https://xmission.com/blog/2014/02/19/google-fiber-in-salt-lake-city)

~~~
McKayDavis
Pete's post today says he'll be getting Google Fiber to his house (and
encrypting everything through Xmission):

[https://xmission.com/blog/2015/03/24/google-fiber-in-salt-
la...](https://xmission.com/blog/2015/03/24/google-fiber-in-salt-lake-city-2)

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sliverstorm
Looking to the future, what is being done about in-home distribution? Ten
years from now, are we going to find ourselves with 1Gb/s fiber lines to our
houses, and still dependent on oversaturated 54Mbps WiFi to get to it?

What I'm getting at is, have we had any related push to wire up more homes
with cat6a (or something of that nature)? It isn't quite as future proof as
fiber, but it's cheap and 10Gb/s should keep up for a long time.

~~~
SG-
You know 802.11g released in 2003 offered maximum theoretical speeds of
54Mbit. It's been 12 years now and Wifi has evolved quite a bit since and will
continue to evolve.

802.11ac can currently do a maximum of 1300Mbit.

~~~
sliverstorm
The unfortunate key here is "theoretical". 802.11g is old, and it's true I
don't have any g-only devices left. But I do have a lot of wireless-N devices
that max out at 72Mbit, and interference is a frequent problem.

WiFi has evolved, yes. But my 900Mbps router paired with a 450Mbps wireless
adapter still underperformed my 10Mbps powerline network for network drives &
filesharing, and interference frequently drops WiFi speeds to a tenth of their
intended speed.

It has a valuable place, but so do hard lines.

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yzh
I wonder what are the considerations when Google decides the next city for
Google Fiber? Some people mentioned NYC's bureaucracy, I guess the existing
infrastructure is also another factor, Google would of course want to make
larger impact. Now it seems that they are targeting middle-level cities
(especially southern ones).

~~~
DubiousPusher
It's gotta be legal and infrastructural challenges. Don't know if you've been
to SLC but aside from its downtown it's a very very spread out city. I don't
know the numbers but I imagine the ppl/m^2 is less than 2,000 maybe even under
1,500.

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agumonkey
2014 potential cities map [http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7PjU-
KYQDWo/UwToJwZHrAI/AAAAAAAAOD...](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7PjU-
KYQDWo/UwToJwZHrAI/AAAAAAAAODw/fu-aao_DTOU/s1600/1200map_updated_green2.png)
for evolution.

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wldcordeiro
This is awesome! Great to see it coming to my city. I hope I fall under their
area.

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Animats
Google announced this back in 2013.[1] And in 2014. We went through this with
Verizon FIOS, which got a lot further than Google has before Verizon gave up
expanding it. Google has only a few little projects. Verizon FIOS covers 12%
of the US population.

Sonic.net is bringing gigabit fiber to San Francisco.[2] Construction is
underway in the Sunset District. Next, Bernal Heights and the Castro. Also,
Berkeley. Already operational in Sebastopol, Brentwood, and Santa Rosa. Sonic
may have more actual users than Google does.

[1] [http://anewdomain.net/2013/04/07/how-does-google-fiber-
work-...](http://anewdomain.net/2013/04/07/how-does-google-fiber-work-optical-
fiber-infographic/)

[2] [https://www.sonic.com/gigabit-fiber-
internet](https://www.sonic.com/gigabit-fiber-internet)

~~~
JoshTriplett
> Sonic.net is bringing gigabit fiber to San Francisco.[2] Construction is
> underway in the Sunset District. Next, Bernal Heights and the Castro. Also,
> Berkeley. Already operational in Sebastopol, Brentwood, and Santa Rosa.
> Sonic may have more actual users than Google does.

All of them in California. Those of us outside Silicon Valley would like fiber
too, thanks.

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trueballer
With the ridiculous caps on upload and download speeds, this certainly sounds
like a gift from Santa.

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SoftwareMaven
It sucks. I live right in between Provo and Salt Lake City, and I can't get
it. _sigh_

~~~
pc2g4d
Ironic given the concentration of tech companies in the in-between zone.
(Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.)

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shmerl
When is it coming to NYC?

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rayiner
So far, every single Fiber city is in a red state: GA, TX, NC, KS, TN, UT. My
guess is you'll be waiting a long time.

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yefim
Pretty sure Google Fiber doesn't have much to do with politics. Correlation
does not imply causation. However, I do agree that it will be a while until
NYC gets Google Fiber.

~~~
TulliusCicero
Actually Google has made it pretty clear that it does have to do with
politics; specifically, how easy the local/state governments make it for them
to roll out fiber. It shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that red states
may have a lighter regulatory/more pro-business hand.

~~~
s73v3r
Red states also seem to be more in bed with the entrenched ISP monopolies. The
states which are prohibiting municipal broadband are all red states.

~~~
ams6110
It may be less about being "in bed" with the ISPs than the philosophical point
of view that internet service is properly a private sector concern, not a
governmental one.

~~~
shmerl
All the "philosophical" views become rather hypocritical when those who have
them receive a lot of money from monopolists who want to prevent competition.
So stop the nonsense please. It's not about any philosophy. It's about money.

~~~
rayiner
Source?

~~~
shmerl
[https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?type=C&c...](https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?type=C&cid=N00003105&newMem=N&cycle=2014)

~~~
rayiner
Worth reading the footnote:

> This table lists the top donors to this candidate in the 2013-2014 election
> cycle. The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came
> from the organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or
> owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals
> include subsidiaries and affiliates.

~~~
shmerl
_> The organizations themselves did not donate, rather the money came from the
organizations' PACs, their individual members or employees or owners, and
those individuals' immediate families._

And that makes a difference how exactly? ISPs are owned and controlled by
various family clans and key people there.

In the end, the result is that politicians are paid to push the agenda of
existing monopolists.

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josefresco
Lots of network infrastructure in Provo - like bringing gold to a golden city.

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ams6110
I'd certainly run everything over a VPN or proxy to keep google's snooping to
a minimum.

