
My New FiberHouse in Kansas City - pash
http://www.feld.com/wp/archives/2013/02/my-new-fiberhouse-in-kansas-city.html
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bri3d
What innovations are enabled by founders possessing gigabit fiber to the home?
Is there any evidence from other houses of this nature suggesting that fast
to-the-home internet enables some sort of workflow or product development
that's not possible with conventional ~20mbit cable internet?

It seems to me like most bandwidth-critical businesses also require a
datacenter anyway, and while fast to-the-home internet may enable the
_delivery_ of innovative technology (like high-definition gaming in the cloud)
a fast connection to the home isn't necessary for the _creation_.

With that being said I do appreciate the concept: if building high-speed fiber
can attract entrepreneurs (regardless of if it actually helps them), the
incentive for municipalities to encourage high-speed buildout grows.

~~~
willholloway
Its a lot cheaper to buy the fastest consumer cpu + 32gb ram + ssds and have
it in the home office than it is to rent that same server in a good data
center.

Having a 1gbps network would let you run more of your hardware at home where
it's cheaper. This makes sense for certain specific cases.

For startups that need this power, hosting at home can save money. Also you
can't beat the security of having physical access and control of your
hardware.

For my app streamjoy.tv I run all the intensive tasks on a core i7 at home and
then just push the rendered results to a $5 a month digital ocean vps.

For the kind of computation that I am doing it is much less expensive and
faster to use my local hardware and push static pages to my nginx server at
digital ocean.

If I had a 1gbps connection I would run even more of my setup at home. Its not
that important for the features I have coded so far but in the future it would
be helpful.

~~~
thechut
While this is a valid point. I assume you are probably violating the ToS laid
out by your ISP. In general a "home" or "personal" account is not allowed to
run a webserver. There is usually strict language in the ToS regarding this.

Can anybody comment on whether or not this any different with Google Fiber?
Are they fine with you running whatever you want on that connection?

~~~
cbhl
"Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so,
you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection"

[http://support.google.com/fiber/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...](http://support.google.com/fiber/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2659981&topic=2440874&ctx=topic)

(Whether they will enforce this remains to be seen.)

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pash
This is the second house in the neighborhood that's been offered to founders
rent-free. The first [0] is home to some people working on an API for 3D
printing [1], an app for online jam sessions, and a couple of other projects.

Down the street is another house shared by several more startups working on
things like real-time search [2], retinal authentication [3], etc. There are
other similar endeavors scattered nearby, plus some web-dev shops, etc.

0\. <http://www.homesforhackers.com/>

1\. <http://threed.ee/>

2\. <http://leap2.com/about.php>

3\. <http://eyeverify.com/>

~~~
mikedemarais
hey pash!

We just rebranded threed.ee to gethandprint.com and moved our entire team of
four from Boston to KC!

@gethandprint

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mkinsella
This is great for the area. There is a lot of unsung innovation coming out of
the Midwest with Kansas City playing a large part of it. Coupled with a ton of
very smart people, Kansas City is ripe to become a major player in the startup
community.

Also, the city is wonderful. Beautiful, amazing food, great schools, cheap,
clean, and great transportation options for vacations (out of a great
airport!). As someone who lived there for 18 months before moving to San
Francisco, there is a lot about Kansas City that I miss.

~~~
sakopov
KC is mostly a financial tech hub. Lots of development in banking and
insurance. Not much innovation really and i do agree with you that it is great
for the area in that respect.

Here are some downsides (I agree/disagree with you in some things):

1\. Crime rate is astonishing. There are deadly shooting nearly every other
day. In fact, last one i heard involved 2 deaths at Westport, which is right
where Google Fiber planted its roots.

2\. City is beautiful in early spring. Summers are incredibly hot and humid
and burn the entire city to the ground. Winters are freezing-cold.

3\. Schools are no different than anywhere else. Some good. Some bad.

4\. Public transportation is non-existent. Unless you consider waiting for a
bus for 40 minutes a good transportation system. Any attempt to put rails to
use failed miserably. KC is ultra-conservative. Nothing will ever happen here
unless it has something to do with the Chiefs & Arrowheads Stadium. Bottom
line is if you don't own a car you will have very difficult time getting
around. Some neighborhoods don't even have sidewalks. Walking to a store 2
miles away would mean walking on public roads and dodging cars until you find
a sidewalk.

5\. This is something that everyone who lives here for more than a year
complains about. There is nothing to do in KC. It's the same people and same
places. Summer time is more event-friendly. Winters are dead. Nothing to do
but go out to drink and eat somewhere.

6\. Majority of people are overweight... and don't care. It's actually scary
how much of the population is overweight. That's because you're forced to
drive everywhere.

And some upsides:

1\. It is VERY clean. Almost pristine.

2\. Living is VERY cheap even in the center.

3\. Food is amazing.

4\. Airport is very convenient and conveniently placed.

5\. Great place for sports. Chiefs will always have fans here. Regardless of
how bad they are. Tailgating is amazing. Unfortunately, every team except for
Sporting KC has been miserable for decades with no signs of recovery, but
still have very solid fan bases.

6\. You're 2/3 hours away from everywhere in the country.

Take what you want from this. If i were in my early/mid twenties and single I
would never move here. If i had a family or looking for a place to retire, I
would definitely consider KC. IMHO, if KC wants to attract young talent like
Boston, New York, San Francisco or Seattle it'd have to be a bit more engaging
than getting fiber installed in every house.

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erva
The biggest advantage I thought of with fiber access is being able to run
initial production servers from you home. This would be a decent way to keep
costs down while having the physical server only an arms length away (not
really necessary, but makes me feel better anyways).

As a northern Kansas City resident I am patiently waiting for Google fiber
expansion to my area (Currently in "Coming Next"). Having an extra bedroom I
am excited to make my home available to the Homes for Hackers project as soon
as the fiber is available. It will be great to see a startup progress from my
couch.

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trotsky
I find it exceedingly hard to fill my 85mbit connection without using some
kind of synthetic bandwidth test. Obviously it's easy to do if you're
aggregating enough people's usage (like at an office) but for a single user
it's tough. Single stream downloads rarely if ever get that high, my nntp
provider seems to not be able to do it even with 20 connections but that could
be the fault of the nas thats decoding the binaries. Pretty much the only time
one task fills it is when im dumping from my colo that doesn't have a bunch of
other streams to fair share with.

It's not even that easy to get 1gb traffic to flow over the lan, though of
course its pretty easy to get 70%-80% or so. To get sustained gigabit it
pretty much has to be an ssd or array on both sides. And this is from the
perspective of someone that runs three 3x1gb port channel bonds at home
between a multi-tier san and a few virtualization hosts.

I could upgrade my home internet from 85 to 150 or 300 but i have no desire to
- it'd pretty much be impossible to tell the difference 99% of the time.

Will this always be the case? Nope. 10 years ago it was hard to push 100mbit
datacenter to datacenter. As computers & io speeds catch up and content
targets higher speeds something like 1gb at the home will become much more
useful.

But I sure wouldn't move to kansas city just get 1gb right now.

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kjackson2012
It's a cool idea, but has Google actually guaranteed any certain level of
support? What if someone ends up creating a site with a huge amount of
bandwidth, and then Google pulls the plug?

I know that the offered amount of bandwidth is drool-worthy, but realistically
how much of it can be used without drawing the ire of Google and getting shut
down?

~~~
mikedemarais
Right now Fiber is only available to residential customers and the TOS
restricts using your connection to serve content.

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kayoone
whats the typical internet speed in the US ? In europe i got 120Mbits (only 5
up though) which only comes to its limits when i use A LOT of bandwidth
intensive stuff at the same time. So while Google Fiber is nice, would that
really be the deal maker for entrepreneurs ? The fact that its free rent would
appeal to me much more than the internet connection though :)

~~~
clauretano
I'd say typical is something around 20Mbps down, 3Mbps up, but if you look it
up you'll find an average quite a bit lower than that because a lot of the US
(by land area) can't even get broadband.

~~~
cowsaysoink
To give an example of what the increased land area leads to: I get 1Mbit/s
down and 0.5Mbit/s up for the same price that my uncle in the city gets
40Mbit/s down and 8Mbit/s up.

The reason is that I live in a rural area about 20-30 miles from major cities.
If you go another 10 miles your only option is satellite or dial-up (if you
have phone lines to your house).

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alexfoobar
As a swedish person I laugh at this.

~~~
cbennett
intrigued by your comment; may I ask why specifically? two guesses come to
mind: comparably fast internet (if not on the exact level as Fiber) is
relatively standard there, or the fact that a freemium style housing
arrangement for entrepreneur(ship) is more standard practice- even government
supported?

~~~
jonas_b
I would guess that he refers to moving somewhere to get a good internet
connection. Fiber has become increasingly available the past 2-3yrs. This
article says that, as of 2011, 49% of Swedish household could sign up for
internet speeds of least 100mb/s [1].

[1].
[http://www.pts.se/sv/Dokument/Rapporter/Internet/20122/PTS-b...](http://www.pts.se/sv/Dokument/Rapporter/Internet/20122/PTS-
bredbandskartlaggning---PTS-ER-201211/)

