
Google Fiber is live in Kansas City, real-world speeds at 700 Mbps - zoowar
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/11/google-fiber-is-live-in-kansas-city-real-world-speeds-at-700-mbps/
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simonsarris
I think one incredible result of this is that it may raise expectations in the
mind of the common consumer. This is very important for the coming data limit
war in mobile and landline data caps, a war that consumers are already losing.

(I want to be clear: Speculation ahead.)

Mobile phone providers and internet providers (in America) seem to be setting
data caps artificially low and saying that it covers the most common use cases
(98% of customers) so it shouldn't be something we have to worry about.

Except that I imagine these very low caps are long play to justify price
increases when using 4 or 8 or 20+ GB per month on your phone becomes the
norm, or 600GB/month on your desktop becomes the norm.

Hopefully Google (and other companies) can show consumers in America (and
perhaps elsewhere) the possibilities of large amounts of data over the wire
TODAY so that its not a slow climb to higher caps, but a more abrupt shift for
some that leaves far more complaints at Comcast and Verizon's door.

They won't reply to power-user consumers, they don't care. One only hopes
they'll reply to mass consumers using their competition, even if it is merely
tangential competition for the most part.

~~~
cpeterso
I'm reminded of Fake Steve Jobs' dig at AT&T's short-term thinking:

[http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/12/a-not-so-brief-chat-with-
ra...](http://www.fakesteve.net/2009/12/a-not-so-brief-chat-with-randall-
stephenson-of-att.html)

 _"Now there was a lot of demand for [the "Meet the Beatles"] record — so much
that the plant that printed the records could not keep up. Now here’s the
lesson. Do you think the guys who were running Capitol Records said, Gee whiz,
the kids are buying up this record at such a crazy pace that our printing
plant can’t keep up — we’d better find a way to slow things down. Maybe we can
create an incentive that would discourage people from buying the record. Do
you think they said that? No, they did not. What they did was, they went out
and found another printing plant. And another one and another one, until they
could make as many records as people wanted.

[AT&T CEO] Randall is like, Okay, I get your point. I’m like, You know what, I
don’t think you do, because if you did, we wouldn’t be sitting here having
this conversation, would we?"_

~~~
backprojection
I don't think the analogy works, because you're already an AT&T customer. AT&T
building out capacity, doesn't necessarily lead to more sales; the price/GB
drops, they don't necessarily make more money, whereas building more printing
plants does lead to more sales. Unless of coarse their offering gets better
than Verizon's, and people start switching.

~~~
joonix
A better analogy is airplanes and air travel. We have the technology to build
supersonic passenger jets, but the economics don't work: leisure travelers are
unable/unwilling to pay more for their ticket to get at their destination two
times as fast. Their time isn't valuable enough to justify the added expense.
Yet, business executives are willing to pay for supersonic business jets
because their time _is_ that valuable. Supersonic private jets are already
under development.

Consumers would love faster broadband, but they can't afford to pay more for
it. Businesses can, and they have a variety of options available.

~~~
myko
Isn't Google Fiber showing us that the cost isn't as extreme as the providers
would have us believe?

~~~
tomasquintero
Google Fiber is a disruption play in a limited market. While not a loss
leader, this type of roll out isn't cheap, especially for existing plants.

That being said, I'm jealous, so very jealous of Kansas right now.

~~~
Zigurd
If Google's roll-out significantly more expensive than any other type of
facilities-based build-out?

In fact Google's product is rational: If you are going to bother to build out
in a competitor's territory, you want to get all of your competitor's
customers to switch, so you need a disruptive product.

~~~
tomasquintero
My understanding is that the new build out is cheaper than traditional HFC
builds. The difference here is incumbent providers would need to abandon large
swaths of their infrastructure to compete with a disruption play in Kansas.

Google is spot on to roll out FTTH, but existing plants aren't going to
disappear any time soon, and likely will not react to the disruption play at
large.

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ericfrenkiel
What's interesting is that increases in bandwidth lead to corresponding
increases in innovation.

Facebook and other Web 2.0 companies could not exist without DSL/cable/3G/4G
connectivity - photos would take too long to load, for example.

Beyond increases in resolution and fidelity in multimedia, I speculate what
would be truly innovative with this sort of speed. Any ideas?

For example, it would be possible to do sub-minute DNA analysis on the cloud
by quickly reading a tissue sample.

~~~
bo1024
Think about what a Chromebook would be capable of with always-on 700Mbps.

They could sell that thing with practically _nothing_ inside -- no hard drive,
barely any RAM, no processor to speak of, just a screen and a keyboard -- and
it could outperform the best desktops that money can buy, just by offloading
computation to Google's massive data centers in real time.

Of course, in the short term latency will still be an issue. So more realistic
would be to just get rid of the hard drive (why bother? It's practically the
same delay to access the nearest data center's SSD as your own), but keep the
RAM and GPU, and enough of the CPU to keep things running smoothly. But I
definitely expect to see computation offloaded to the cloud as Internet speeds
ramp up. It would be super cool to be writing a python script to test
something out and just type in a call MapReduce or whatever on gigs of data,
and have it Just Work in the cloud in real time.

~~~
maerek
Latency to access a SSD is calculated in nanoseconds, whereas latency across
networks is typically calculated in terms of milliseconds. Order of magnitude
difference here.

That being said, to an end user, the difference between 100 nanoseconds and
100 milliseconds is - probably - very small.

~~~
vidarh
The difference is small for a single file. Then they try to start an app that
loads 1000 files on startup (say, a game or Rails...), and those milliseconds
turns to seconds, while the nanoseconds turns to still mostly imperceptible
microseconds.

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SquareWheel
>"We just got it today and I’ve been stuck in front of my laptop for the last
few hours," Mike Demarais, founder of Threedee, told Ars. "It’s unbelievable.
I’m probably not going to leave the house."

Is it just me, or does this read incredibly similarly to an Onion article?

~~~
mikedemarais
The reporter didn't mention that I have been sitting in this house without
internet for over a week.. I need to catch up on a lot of work.

~~~
kaptain
Mike,

Can you comment on Ben Barreth? I read the article but I don't understand how
this could be sustainable. Mortgaging your 401K in the hopes of getting
donations on a charity project seems like a no-win situation. And I'm not
speaking strictly from a financial perspective. Can you give us some more
perspective on this? Or if Ben is out there, maybe he can comment. Thanks!

~~~
mikedemarais
I'll get Ben on here tomorrow, but he has a few ideas to make this
sustainable. The housing market here is really affordable and there are
already some companies interested in sponsoring the house, so its not as crazy
as it sounds. I believe his current focus is finding investors to buy other
homes in the area who are down for the cause.

~~~
bogrollben
I'm open to any ideas. So far:

1) rent one of the rooms on airbnb? Need 16+ days a month rented to break
even. Maybe push Fiber tourism? 2) get corporate sponsorship. Ask 10 small-mid
businesses to sponsor $100/month for the house. Stick their logo all over the
walls and the website 3) when google comes out with the business plan, install
a new fiber drop and host a mini data center in the home for non-production
clients (I imagine I'd have to compete with a bunch of ppl in KC for this
service, once Google opens those doors).

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Xcelerate
It's probably not quite as insane as it sounds until the rest of the internet
catches up. I had 650 Mbps at Georgia Tech and realized most websites can
deliver nowhere near that speed.

~~~
onenine
Something tells me gatech and google have different links to the internet....

~~~
mileswu
Universities and research institutes are also connected to private peering
links such as ESNet[1] or Internet2[2]. This is actually a huge benefit
because these links are typically uncongested and you can get much more
reliable transmission on them (and hence consistent latency and faster
transfer speeds). Other countries/continents also have their own private
academic networks that peer with the US ones.

I think I read somewhere that they are upgrading the ESNet backbone to be
100Gbit/s and GEANT's[3] to be 1000 Gbit/s, so I wouldn't immediately write
off University/academic networking as automatically inferior to Google's.

Honestly it's hard to tell without knowing any of the details of how much
capacity Google is provisioning in Kansas City (and how much contention there
is). How much backbone fiber is laid to KS/MO - it doesn't seem to be where
existing big-scale connectivity is (unlike say, DC Metro area where a ton of
datacenters are located or London/Paris/Amsterdam).

[1] <http://www.es.net/> [2] <http://www.internet2.edu/> [3]
<http://www.geant.net/pages/home.aspx>

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marknutter
I've currently got gigabit fiber internet where I live (a tiny segment of the
Minneapolis market) and although it is fast I can't say that it has
dramatically improved much of my online experiences. Downloading happens much
faster in most cases, but I don't do a whole lot of downloading and often
times the rates are limited by the provider of the content. Websites seem to
load up about as fast as they used to. The rest of the internet needs to catch
up before fiber connections can truly be utilized.

~~~
mkr-hn
People had cable and DSL for years before YouTube showed up.

------
hiddenstage
Unfortunately the telecom companies should be able to keep Google out of
larger markets with zoning laws and political power. I severely hope to be
proven wrong, however.

~~~
fleitz
Most of what the telcos have going for them are barriers to entry and a nice
duopoly.

The barriers they have to entry might be significant to you or me, but they
are pretty trivial to Google, especially in the wired space. In the wireless
space they still need to overcome the insane bidding for spectrum that the
duopoly permits.

Google needs KC to prove that the $70 price for fibre is not 'below market',
once they've rolled out a profitable fibre service @ $70 per month they can
roll into markets full of regulatory capture and the FTC will be largely
unable to say that they are using their search monopoly to undercut telcos.

If they don't offer phone service the telco is even more screwed as that's
where most of the regulatory power is.

~~~
hiddenstage
I used to live in a city which had only one ISP. They have a deal with the
city that restricts building of infrastructure from competing products (just a
rumor - but competing ISPs just so happen to be available in smaller
surrounding cities 5-10 miles away).

I'm not sure if this is common in other cities, but it really wouldn't
surprise me one bit.

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citricsquid
Does anyone do anything that would greatly benefit from a connection like this
in their home or have any examples of things that aren't possible now and
these speeds will make possible (businesses, technology etc)? I can only
really think of backup that will be greatly affected.

I currently have 75/20 in my apartment and I don't think I've yet to be in a
situation where I needed more speed or was frustrated about my speeds, the
problem for consumer broadband seems to be that while there are people with
good connections there are still tens of millions scraping by with 1 or 2mbps
which is holding their internet enjoyment back a great deal. My parents are
living with around 1.5mbps (with fluctuations) making even basic streaming
difficult. Hopefully the fact that Google are managing to do this will make
ISPs step up their game, although I'm not sure what Google are going for here
(proof of tech? entering consumer ISP space?).

~~~
alwaysinshade
> Does anyone do anything that would greatly benefit from a connection like
> this

Replacing optical media with high speed lines would allow some funky new
market mechanics like...

Games:

\- Instead of downloading the full 12Gb+ game, simply load levels/textures as
needed

\- Distributed game session hosting where the players temporarily and reliably
become the host of a shard

\- Something like OnLive could be high res/low image compression/ultra low
latency

\- Download 12Gb+ games on a whim and pay as you go for playing it - stop
playing/paying for it and the provider can cancel the game's certificate and
it gets pulled from the system. Want it back? Download it again in a minute,
save games and all

Movies:

\- Make way for 4k video via net

\- Make way for low compression 1080p video via net

\- Make way for every person in the household streaming 1080p...while video
chatting in 1080p, while playing an RTS on an OnLive-like service...while
backing up their files to a remote server. Etc.

The future is going to need some big pipes.

~~~
sliverstorm
_Download 12Gb+ games on a whim..._

Sort of. 12GB (I presume you meant GB) still takes a minute or two to move
around locally- storage isn't fast enough to flush 12GB in seconds.

Now, if your device just had comical amounts of RAM, you could manage it.

~~~
huggah
How is ~12GB ram comical? It's a lot easier for the common consumer to get 16
gigabytes of RAM today that is to get the kind of network speeds we're talking
about here.

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marquis
What are the terms of service with this? Can I ask a friend in the area to
install it and run some high-bandwidth services? I look forward to seeing
whether this turns KC into a gold-mine town reminiscent of the 1800s. I don't
even know what I'd do with 700mb upload. Invent wall-to-wall video streaming?
It's always been a dream of mine to have breakfast with my family from a
distance with near-perfect, full-size resolution like some sci-fi movie in the
80s. (Ok seriously, if someone does this please invite me over for breakfast,
even if it's remote-breakfast with a neighbour).

~~~
wmf
Their unlinkable TOS says no servers.

~~~
ilaksh
REALLY? Because I was just seriously considering moving to KC until I read
that sentence. If the legal agreement says no servers, then what is the point?
What is the point of moving your startup to KC if you technically aren't
allowed to run a business off of Google Fiber?

~~~
jonknee
What home ISP allows you to run a server? "Business class" is always required
for that sort of thing.

That said, few startups should be hosting their own servers, no matter the
speed of their internet connection. Everything else you do will be blazing
fast though.

~~~
stusmall
I've run servers off residential IPs before. I use to maintain a community box
for me and a bunch of friends when I lived with my parents. It wasn't fast but
it met our needs. The only problems I ever ran into with the ISP was when I
tried to run a mail server.

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wiggins37
I like to think how this could change how ideas are spread and organizing. I
imagine something like google hangout but with 100 like minded people all
present at the same time discussing a common interest, with something like a
real time voting mechanism in place so that those with (presumably) better
ideas are more likely to be heard.

In one example I'm imagining a city council meeting, where anyone who just has
the time to log in can take part. And then I realize that maybe this would
lead to horrible popular ideas being more easily spread.

~~~
omnisci
I'd like to think that this will remove people from an office enviroment and
allow people to work from home more. This is probably a bit much for most
people, but is there really a need for you to sit at a desk in an office when
you can do the same thing at home? Real time communications (via video) allow
for instant communication between employees, and you can easily add someone to
the conversation. The implications of something like this are actually quite
big. A change to the 9-5 grind (for better or worse will depend on how it's
implemented). The impact of this could be significant when you think of all of
the things the 9-5 encompasses, for example, getting stuck in traffic at
8:30am.

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supersaiyan
If this was offered by bell or rogers you'd get 1Gbs transfer, with 100gb of
bandwidth

~~~
geoka9
Yes, I wonder what Google's plans wrt to Canada are (if any). It's hard to
believe that the Canadian big telcos will let it happen, though.

~~~
supersaiyan
I think the current law prohibit non canadian companies from entering the
market, but I might be wrong on this

~~~
indiecore
If it doesn't I'm sure the lobbyists will start sliming out of their holes
soon enough.

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frabcus
Video conferencing is the main pain I have that this would help with.

Obviously, really high quality audio, HD video, with multiple participants.

Then I'd like a bit more than that - panorama video so I can see all the
surroundings in detail of where the other person is. Not just point audio, but
a mesh of audio so I can move around in the space. All streamed to Google
Glasses or similar.

And if that isn't enough, Kinnect-like 3D, so my body is scanned with depth as
well.

Done well, so that tech geeks _actually start to have their conferences
online_ rather than in the flesh... This'll reduce carbon emissions, and mean
people can spend more time with their families.

Will that use enough bandwidth?

~~~
jjr
No, 50 Mbps will be sufficient for this with the right codecs and gear. Now if
you want it all as raw data - that makes a difference.

~~~
vidarh
50Mbps is barely sufficient for high quality current HD.

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epaik
One of my pet peeves is how data stream rates are always represented in bits
per seconds. It's extremely deceptive to people who don't know the difference
between a bit and a byte. We shouldn't measure storage in bytes, but internet
speeds in bits.

~~~
WiseWeasel
You also have to factor in error correction overhead for TCP transmissions. I
find it pretty accurate to shift the decimal one spot to the left when
estimating maximum real-world Internet transmission speeds in bytes, rather
than dividing by 8.

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supersaiyan
I can only dream of the MMORPGS possible with this, hopefully these speeds hit
critical mass in NA within a decade

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damian2000
Here in Australia the government is rolling out 1Gbps fibre to everyone as
part of the National Broadband Network project. Unfortunately its projected to
take until 2021 before its completed.

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marcamillion
It is ridiculous to see how disk seek speed will really be the next big
bottleneck. In a few years, I expect these types of inet speeds to be
relatively more commonplace.

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purephase
I really wish this would come to Canada, and Toronto specifically. The
business internet market in this city is ridiculous and ripe for a real
disruption.

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macalicious
The speed is just ridiculous. Especially the upstream. So many possibilities.
So jealous. I like how he shares his connection though.

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anonDataUser
Is it just a coincidence that Kansas City is also home to a very small shop
that frequently accounts for 10% of US equity volumes?

~~~
mildweed
Yes. BATS has been a positive member of KCMO's tech community for years and
had no part in KCK landing the Google Fiber deal.

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johng
Pretty pimp. I'd love to see this hit more and more people, and not just KC.

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bwb
is anyone else afraid of outbound ddos attacks :), what do they have in place
to cut these off really quick?

