

Google Fiber: 151Mbps down / 92Mbps up - 11031a
http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-cetera/google-fiber-shows-its-potential-with-151mbps-download-speeds-20110823/

======
jsz0
_The obvious question now is, if Google can do this, why aren’t network
operators banging down the company’s door to get involved and roll this out
everywhere. Yes, there’s big investment involved, but these companies are
kidding themselves if they think waiting and dealing with a lack of bandwidth
in the future is going to work for them. Whoever jumps first and starts
investing in these fiber-to-the-home initiatives is going to be rewarded with
a lot of new customers in years to come._

They don't need Google to do it. FTTH/G-PON solutions are available to any ISP
in the country and have been for several years. They haven't done it yet
(besides Verizon FIOS who provisions at much lower speeds) because the demand
really isn't there yet. Most customers do not pay more for faster speeds even
when they are available. You've got a lot more customers who downgrade to
_slower_ speeds to save money than customers who pay more for faster speeds.
More competition would certainly help but until you can convince normal people
they actually need faster Internet connections it's not much of a competitive
advantage. (as long as you can match or slightly exceed your competitors)

Once you hit about 20Mbit/5Mbit faster speeds are almost completely
unnoticeable by most people who are just doing some normal browsing, IP video,
e-mail, FaceBook, etc. That's what most people are using their Internet
connections for these days. We really need a killer app that pushes the limits
of most Internet connections and you'll see more companies betting on
(expensive) upgrades to deliver those speeds. I don't see much on the horizon.
You can already do pretty decent 1080P video at 10-20Mbit/sec. What type of
apps are going to push the demand?

~~~
drinian
How about just convincing Verizon to sell the higher speeds to those who want
them, at a higher price? The hardware's there, but their most expensive FiOS
business connections are far short of Google's numbers.

~~~
jsz0
Verizon does offer up to 150Mbit/35Mbit for their business packages. They
probably don't see a market for it on the residential side. CableVision,
Comcast, TWC, etc do offer 100Mbit+ connections for residential use in some
limited markets. From what I've head they are not big sellers. (less than 1%
of customers upgrade) That has probably slowed down wider deployment.

~~~
k33l0r
Over here in Helsinki, Finland there's a cable operator that offers
connections that go up to 200/10Mbit (54,90€/month) and one of the biggest
ISPs is putting together a 1000Mbit residential connection trial (they already
offer 100/10Mbit fibre connections).

I think the demand is there if the pricing is decent.

~~~
adestefan
I don't know if I'd call $80 reasonable. I pay $35 for my 25/5 with FIOS and
am very happy with what I get and wouldn't pay more just for fast speeds.

------
sp332
To me, the 5ms ping is the most impressive part. I might not use 100Mbps on a
daily basis, but the low latency is nice all the time.

Edited for clarity.

~~~
ulvund
A lower bound for latency to the 'other side of the earth':

(20 000 km) / the speed of light = 66.712819 milliseconds

[http://www.google.dk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&...](http://www.google.dk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=A+lower+bound+for+latency+to+the+other+side+of+the+earth%3A\(20000+km\)+%2F+the+speed+of+light+%3D+0.066712819+milliseconds#sclient=psy&hl=da&source=hp&q=\(20000+km\)+%2F+the+speed+of+light+in+ms&pbx=1&oq=\(20000+km\)+%2F+the+speed+of+light+in+ms&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=9481l10628l0l10691l7l4l0l0l0l0l218l638l1.2.1l4l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=e829e03d004bbee2&biw=815&bih=702)

~~~
abarrett
Since we're talking hypothetically, the lower boundary would really be the
diameter of Earth.

    
    
        12,756.2 km / c = 42.5501031 ms
    

[http://www.google.com/search?q=diameter+of+earth+%2F+the+spe...](http://www.google.com/search?q=diameter+of+earth+%2F+the+speed+of+light+in+ms)

~~~
mellery451
not with a molton core, unless I misunderstood you...

~~~
jrockway
Fiber optic cables may not be able to penetrate the molten core of the Earth,
but there is no law of physics that prevents information from traveling
through the core of the Earth. Compare this to the speed of light, which is an
absolute upper bound on how quickly information can propagate. There is simply
no way, in this Universe, to do better than the straight-line distance through
the center of the Earth.

------
mrb
These 151/92 Mbps numbers are almost certainly flawed results because
speedtest.net is a _very poor_ tool to measure high-bandwidth connections.

Let me show you why.

I was in Tokyo in August 2009 at my sister's house. She had 100Mbit/s to the
internet. I could easily reach close to the maximum theoretical bandwidth by
downloading multiple kernel images from jp.kernel.org, at 95+ Mbps. However
speedtest.net would only give me download speeds of 50-60 Mbps. My system was
running Linux, so I ran top, and saw speedtest.net's Flash app (npviewer.bin)
at 100% CPU... it was being bottlenecked by the CPU! It was an old Pentium 3
1.2GHz, but still. Even a modern 2-3GHz CPU core is only about 3x-4x faster.

Bottom line, speedtest.net, due to the _high overhead of the Flash VM_ , is a
very poor choice to benchmark high network speeds, as it is CPU-constrained at
about 150-200Mbps even on a modern CPU, which is exactly the number reported
by this Google fiber user. I am shocked that no one knows this.

~~~
bobbles
Sorry but I'm having a hard time believing that any modern CPU would only be
3-4x faster than a Pentium 3 1.2GHz. Just generally looking at the difference
between levels of modern processors in something like 3D mark vantage
[http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/desktop-cpu-
charts-2010...](http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/desktop-cpu-
charts-2010/3DMark-Vantage-High,2418.html) shows massive performance
differences.

If I'm missing something obvious here let me know

~~~
quantumhobbit
The flash app is probably only running in one thread and therefore only one
core without any hyperthreading and doesn't take advantage of modern
vectorized instructions. Moving from 1.2 GHz to 3.6GHz will give you a 3 times
speedup. So sounds about right.

~~~
mrb
Exactly. Speedtest.net does not take advantage of the multiple CPU cores.

------
darklajid
Cologne, one of the bigger/biggest German cities, has a provider that tries to
give fiber to every household. You can get a 100 MBit plan from them (not sure
about the upstream right now. Probably much less, maybe 10?).

The call it the most modern network in Europe (are they? No clue), market it
as CitynetCologne. It's affordable and available for a good part of 1.000.000
people.

Is Google Fiber really big news? And - tin foil hat on - would you want Google
to be your ISP..?

~~~
simonsarris
If I had a choice between Google and Comcast?

Yeah I'd take Google.

~~~
darklajid
You're arguing service (I guess. I've no clue about Comcast).

I'm arguing that your ISP knows _everything_ about you, unless you are really
making sure that you're using encryption everywhere.

Now - you'd opt in for a plan that gives you great access to the network where
all traffic is handled by the company that stores everything forever and ever
and already owns most of your online activities? Really?

Maybe I'm _seriously_ paranoid, but I'd never fall for that. Free, like in the
article? Maybe. With precautions. But that won't last forever, so they will be
announcing a plan. And at that point I cannot imagine supporting G anymore.
You're feeding the beast..

~~~
wmf
Google is not going to look at your traffic, because if they did they'd be hit
with something ten times worse than the street view fiasco.

~~~
marshray
Your ISP likely looks at your traffic. What makes you think Google will not?

~~~
DasIch
Unless you live in a country with basically no privacy laws your ISP will
almost certainly not.

------
daimyoyo
Why is the up speed so much slower than the down speed? I thought that fiber
was symmetric by design. Is google throttling?

------
tadfisher
I'm wary of speedtest.net's results. Comcast operates a speedtest server
nearby, and it consistently reports exactly 20Mbps/4Mbps, which (no surprise
here) is exactly the service I pay for. Another nearby server, not operated by
Comcast, hovers around 12-13Mbps/1-2Mbps, which I suspect is the reality of my
connection.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
That may not be completely inaccurate, if the bottleneck is on the link
leaving comcast. You get your full bandwidth for internal network stuff, but
get less once you leave the internal network. So, technically, you are getting
what you pay for, even if that is meaningless.

That said, I've often wondered if Qwest (my provider) prioritizes packets for
speed tests.

~~~
jmesserly
That's funny, I've usually had the opposite experience with Qwest (in
Seattle): inconsistent results in speed tests, but very consistently good
download times for large files. Tis strange.

------
kapitalx
The 151mbs down might be a limitation of speedtest.net and not google's fiber.

Speedtest's minimum requirement for a test server is 100mbs.

~~~
juiceandjuice
No, I can get 400 from speedtest.net occasionally. I get inconsistent results
sometimes though: (300mb/200mb on the first one)

<http://www.speedtest.net/result/1447015910.png>

<http://www.speedtest.net/result/1447014970.png>

<http://www.speedtest.net/result/1447013001.png>

~~~
kapitalx
Nice that refutes my point. I was basing it on this link
<http://speedtest.net/support.php> under "What are the requirements to be a
testing host".

Edit: But now I noticed that they follow it up with "[in some countries] we
are now requiring gigabit connectivity."

------
mbreese
I wonder what kind of router they put in at the home. I doubt your standard
Linksys WiFi router will be able to cope at that speed.

~~~
patrickgzill
<http://routerboard.com/RB750GL> current retail is $59.95, I am sure they
would make Google a deal ...

Actually there are many single-chip, 4x Gigabit ethernet solutions on the
market. These do wire-speed gbit "in hardware" as it were.

~~~
wmf
According to the very page you linked its maximum _routing_ throughput is 631
Mbps which is respectable but hardly wire-speed.

~~~
jrockway
Indeed. I have a Soekris router with a gigabit card, but the best it can do is
around 400Mbps. Packet filtering and NAT require some computation, and 1Gbps
is a lot of data.

Then again, I can actually use Bittorrent without having to reboot the router
:)

------
btam
It seems like giving all of the people in the test area Chromebooks would be a
really great move by Google, because people would associate Chromebooks with
"lightning-fast" once they advertised the two products together.

Thoughts?

~~~
ben1040
Based on my month with a Chromebook, the only thing lightning-fast about it
was its bootup. It was pretty choppy at rendering pages, while Chrome on my
desktop was in fact lightning-fast.

------
strmpnk
You have to wonder at what point the speed test server itself becomes the
bottleneck. I bet the connection is actually faster and I'd try running a few
of these simultaneously to different locations.

~~~
wmf
The server is probably not a bottleneck; this test is actually quite slow
compared to the Internet at the 'plex:
[http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/03/29/how-fast-is-
the-...](http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2011/03/29/how-fast-is-the-internet-
at-google-mind-blowing/)

------
csomar
This is not accurate. He is testing a server which is 50 miles away.

I use a 3G internet connection, location: Tunisia

Server: San Francisco: (6450 miles) Latency: 264ms. Down (0.37mbps) Up
(0.32mbps)

Server: Tunisia: (50 miles) Latency: 133ms. Down (0.93mbps) Up (0.39mbps)

~~~
jroll
It does make a difference, but there's a very good chance a lot of traffic
goes to nearby servers when you live in the bay area.

------
8ig8
I tried to read this article on a few occasions today, but all I get is an
empty (what may be) OnSwipe page from both my iPhone and iPad. All I see is
the TOC graphic in the corner and the gear at the bottom, neither of which go
anywhere.

------
dvdhsu
Unfortunately Google Fiber at Stanford does not allow torrenting.

~~~
wmf
No offense, but [citation needed]. After all their net neutrality lobbying
this would be hard to imagine.

~~~
dvdhsu
I have a friend who lives at Stanford, where his mother is a professor. After
he torrented some legitimate software (but used a Pirate Bay tracker), he was
contacted by Stanford authorities. That was the first warning he received, he
did not try to appeal the decision or break it again.

~~~
kentbuckle
Stanford gives out automated warnings if you have a lot of torrent-y network
activity (I got a few back in the day after downloading some linux distros),
but as I recall they are only to notify students that if they are pirating
music/movies/etc, they will be held accountable if someone from the RIAA or
some other group contacts Stanford about it. If you're downloading legitimate
software you shouldn't have anything to worry about (except for some
occasional automated spam)

~~~
thatjoshguy
I'm not sure what my uni's stance on torrenting is, but it definitely has not
stopped me from downloading over 1TB of... "legitimately vague" content
<http://i.imgur.com/oQE4J.png>

------
exadeci
France fibre provider: <http://www.universfreebox.com/article13240.html>

Eat that google :P

------
joe24pack
Not Google Fiber

Local ISP with fiber

<http://www.speedtest.net/result/1447021540.png>

~~~
calloc
The speed isn't there but that latency is to die for!

~~~
joe24pack
Well according to my ISP I have 8Mbs down and 4Mbs up ... or at least that is
what they bill me for and yes the latency on my connection is good. I'm not
sure how accurate those numbers are.

------
brainless
Can someone please explain the ISP to be Tata Communications in a US city? It
is an Indian company. So is it because it owns some broadband company in US?

~~~
calloc
I've got a friend that have had to deal with Tata Communications in a UK
datacenter and he said they were the absolute worst company to deal with.

Comcast has a link with Tata Communications that it apparently runs at a 100%
capacity day in day out ... there was a story about it not too long ago.

~~~
wmf
_Comcast has a link with Tata Communications that it apparently runs at a 100%
capacity day in day out_

<http://www.merit.edu/mail.archives/nanog/msg15911.html>

To be clear, that is Comcast's fault because they're too cheap to buy more
bandwidth.

------
muppetman
Ahh Speedtest.

Running a speedtest and reporting the results is akin to running a ApacheBench
on your index.html, recording how fast it goes, then telling everyone your PHP
server can serve pages that fast.

Speedtest by default finds a local server, which is almost always delivered
over local uncontended peering. Of course you're going to see great results,
you might as well be testing to a Speedtest server plugged into your LAN.

Run speedtests to ~10 sites around the country and a few around the globe and
report those figures.

~~~
ars
But that's not what they want to measure. All they want to know is the speed
of the local link, and speedtest measures that.

It's not everything you need to know, but it does provide the desired
measurement.

------
paulnelligan
And people say that Google are competing with Facebook. Give it 20 years and
see ...

------
waffle_ss
Who do I have to kill for this?

------
dmerfield
Will this extend to the greater Palo Alto area?

~~~
wmf
No.

------
bgurupra
can anybody explain how is Google able to do this or point to an explanation
of it?

~~~
wmf
Gigabit FTTH is not technically difficult; it's just expensive to install.
Google is supposed to be working on some secret sauce to make it cheaper, but
they haven't revealed anything yet.

~~~
joe24pack
How is Gigabit FTTH different from ordinary FTTH ? Is it the fiber itself or
the equipment on the endpoints ?

~~~
wmf
I guess these days FTTH is all Gigabit, but I remember a few years back when
some companies were talking about 100 Mbps FTTH; that's nearly pointless now
that cable can deliver that speed.

------
crizCraig
Cross site poll: What would you pay to get something like Google Fiber?

[http://www.wepolls.com/p/2028308/How-much-would-you-pay-
for-...](http://www.wepolls.com/p/2028308/How-much-would-you-pay-for-Google-
Fiber-with-150Mb/s-down,-92Mb/s-up,-and-5ms-ping)

~~~
thyrsus
I need to know more.

Right now (though without any contractual guarantees I'm aware of) Time Warner
hands me via DHCP a publicly routable IPv4 address that doesn't change except
during extended outages, which don't happen very often (the address stays the
same through brief outages - less than an hour every month or so).
Effectively, I can initiate a connection to my home machine. There are no
explicit data caps, though if TWC were to start slowing things down after more
thann 100Gbyte per month, I wouldn't know. Tomorrow I could find out that TWC
has decided to use NAT'd private addresses and quenching at 40Gbytes, and I'd
lose all that, with the only recourse being to use AT&T ADSL.

I haven't adopted use of any dependencies on high bandwidth - no internet
backups, no TOR participation, yell at the kids when they torrent anything
already available to them on Netflix.

TWC business class effectively guarantees the features which I'm getting but
not paying for - for an extra $200/month. I would pay that if I were running a
server for customers, but I'm not.

------
codingsolo
Googles owns all your surfing.

------
anshargal
speedtest.net at WWDC download area was about 700Mbps down, so I am waiting
for Apple Fiber )

~~~
FireBeyond
Because Apple supplies fiber to Moscone Center, right? ;)

