
Chicago and Los Angeles Are Next Up for Google Fiber - iamlacroix
http://techcrunch.com/2015/12/08/chicago-and-los-angeles-are-next-up-for-google-fiber/
======
nkrisc
As a Chicagoan I'm excited, but also worried it will lead to the incarceration
of multiple public officials and a raw deal for the city, somehow.

~~~
skorecky
> incarceration of multiple public officials and a raw deal for the city.

What? How?

~~~
toomuchtodo
[http://pols.uic.edu/political-science/chicago-
politics](http://pols.uic.edu/political-science/chicago-politics)

> The Windy City has kept its crown as the most corrupt major city in the
> country over the last 40 years. But Houston is starting to give Chicago a
> run for its money.

> According to new research released today by University of Illinois at
> Chicago political science professor Dick Simpson, there were 45 convictions
> for public corruption in 2013 (the latest year available) in the U.S. court
> district that covers the Chicago area. That's way, way above the 19
> convictions in Los Angeles and 13 in the Southern District of New York
> (Manhattan). But Houston had far and away the most pols convicted on federal
> corruption charges in 2013, with 83.

~~~
platz
so the more convictions, the more corrupt?

~~~
thegreatpeter
I'm from Chicago. You gotta live here to understand.

~~~
platz
I'm from chicago too, so I guess I do understand by that logic.

I'm not even sure what we're arguing about, in fact

~~~
BuckRogers
You are both "from Chicago"? Meaning, the city itself or the suburbs. Big
difference. The suburbs are not Chicago.

~~~
thegreatpeter
I live in CHICAGO.

------
touchofevil
I can't wait for this in LA. I'm currently paying $115 per month for
1Mbps/10Mbps for Time Warner "business class" internet-only service. My
company does visual effects work, so I actually have to drive my video files
home on a USB drive to upload them since my home connection is 20Mbps/200Mbps
for $50 per month. The internet monopoly situation in the US is terrible for
businesses here.

~~~
vdaniuk
This is so ridiculous, it's literally unbelievable. My home city,
Kiev(Ukraine), has multiple 1 Gbit residential broadband providers for $6 -
$15. Not joking.

~~~
jpollock
As I learned in New Zealand, the data rate to the ISP is largely irrelevant. I
had a 100mbps+ connection in NZ, but rarely got over 2mbps to any
international location. It would speedtest at full line rate.

However, here in the US, I've got a 50mbps connection, and I regularly get
50mbps.

~~~
ethbro
US broadband interconnects with the rest of the network are pretty terrible.

Reference: those name-and-shame articles a while back from a network company
(Level 3, from memory?) that produced hard numbers on how little $ US
cable/DSL internet companies were willing to put into improving their capacity
at the peer link.

 _[Edit]_ Yup, Level 3. I thought they were interesting because hard numbers
at this level seem difficult to come by. Here are the articles from 2014:

[http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/chicken-game-played-
chi...](http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/chicken-game-played-child-isps-
internet/)

[http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/observations-
internet-m...](http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/observations-internet-
middleman/)

------
WalterBright
Sadly, Seattle bureaucracy has ruined google fiber here:
[http://crosscut.com/2014/12/google-fiber-never-come-
seattle-...](http://crosscut.com/2014/12/google-fiber-never-come-seattle-
broadband-internet-2/)

~~~
arjunnarayan
I'm in Seattle, and I have gigabit (www.gowaveg.com) in my apartment. It's
$80/month, and I get ~15ms latency to AWS West (Oregon). It's wonderful.

Wave G has an interesting model - they mainly hook up apartment buildings (it
used to be called "Condo Internet"). They are experimenting with hooking up
houses on the street as well - they're doing fiber to the home in the Eastlake
area, but I don't know if that's working out yet.

I love them. When we moved to Seattle we only looked at apartments that had
Wave G service. I'm going to be very sad when we move out of Seattle and have
to return to normal Internet. But so far this model is encouraging, if non-
inclusive to people outside the nice apartments.

~~~
steve-howard
One of the biggest losses moving out of my old First Hill apartment was that
they had CondoInternet and where I was going they didn't. I don't even care
about the throughput, it was just incredibly reliable.

------
Animats
It's just talk. Google has parts of three small cities wired. Google has never
done a big city, or an entire city. Sonic already has parts of San Francisco
hooked up with gigabit fiber.[1]

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

~~~
elliotec
I'm in Salt Lake City, where they announced they've been building a long time
ago, and we ain't seen sh*t yet.

~~~
noelsusman
I'm in Atlanta and we've seen the trucks out laying fiber already. I'm hoping
for the end of next year.

------
nosuchthing
LA has had notoriously bad ISP coverage. Most houses in the area only have a
choice between one cable provider or going DSL.

Nice to hear AT&T is planning to roll out gigabit fiber in LA as well.
[http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/12/att-bringing-
gigabit...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/12/att-bringing-gigabit-
fiber-to-la-and-dozens-of-other-metro-areas/)

For some reason Verizon Fios has avoided LA proper but laid out Fiber along
the outskirts and in Ventura County years ago.

~~~
hughes
TWC coverage is not bad - my addresses in LA each have had 300Mbps available
for $65/mo. Speed tests clock in around 330Mbps down.

~~~
ceejayoz
TWC coverage here in Rochester, NY is $84/month for 50Mbps.

I'd guess you only get 6x the speed for less money in LA in places where fiber
is a viable competitor.

~~~
tomkinstinch
I have gigabit fiber at my house in Rochester for $100/month via the new
upstart ISP, Greenlight (actually their lower 500Mbps tier for $75/mo).
They're expanding slowly, but they are expanding.

~~~
ceejayoz
I'm drooling over Greenlight. Thus far they seem to be prioritizing high-
density areas like apartment complexes, though. Down in Pittsford it's not
looking hopeful for a few years at least.

------
scott_karana
> Yes, San Francisco has been skipped again and I’m going to go cry into my
> slow internet from Comcast.

I seriously still cannot get over how funny this is.

SF pitches itself as the centre of the tech universe, and yet, it still hasn't
"disrupted" its own crappy broadband infrastructure. (Much less the rest of
the country's!)

I'm sure there's many good reasons for Google passing them over, but that
doesn't keep it from being hilarious.

~~~
mikeyouse
Chris Sacca (of Twitter / Uber investing fame) spent months / years of his
life working for Google trying to get San Francisco to agree to install free,
city-wide WiFi paid for by Google. It didn't happen.

[http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/S-F-stalling-Wi-Fi-
plans-...](http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/S-F-stalling-Wi-Fi-plans-Google-
executive-2551901.php)

~~~
samstave
Heh - I was doing this before Chris Sacca was!

Listen to what happened:

We were seeking to build wifi and wanted to get the city to allow us to put
the nema boxes on street lights and stop lights.

I cant recall the officials name now (this was ~2002 or so) -- and they came
back and stated they wanted video cameras on all stop lights. They then said
that they wanted "at least 60 frames per second" and that they wouldn't allow
us to put up the devices as they were already looking to pull fiber to every
stoplight to support cameras.

~~~
pizza
Wow.

------
pasbesoin
AT&T recently announced some initial "Gigabit" deploys in the Chicagoland
suburbs. I guess now we know why.

AT&T has been horrible in Illinois, with years and years of dragging their
feet as well as reneging on commitments made to the State in return for e.g.
tax breaks and rights of way.

Even with their announced Gigabit service, one really faces roughly twice the
cost of Google Fiber if one chooses to opt out of AT&T's connection/data
spying. And they impose a 1 TB / billing cycle (month) data cap. At the
supposed 1 Gbps maximum speed, that's a bit less than 154 minutes of data --
less than 2.5 hours. For the entire month / billing cycle.

It's not difficult to imagine a 4K household easily exceeding this cap, or
even a 1080p household with several users.

So... Go, Google Fiber. I don't hold out much hope they'll get out to me, but
I'm glad that they may finally be holding incumbents' feet to the fire in a
large urban market -- one that is considered AT&T's "home turf", to boot. (The
erstwhile SBC headquarters were/are in the Chicago suburbs, and a lot of
corporate management/leadership is or has been in the area.)

------
angryasian
If I had to guess, I imagine they would start out around where their offices
are in Venice and at least reach to where their Youtube studios are in Playa
Vista. Both areas are big for startups along with all new development in Playa
Vista.

~~~
tdaltonc
It might actually emanate out of One Wilshire.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Wilshire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Wilshire)

~~~
angryasian
Yeah actually that is a really good point. The place is integral for
connectivity on the west coast.

------
legohead
Has Google announced San Diego officially yet? My friend said he noticed they
were putting up hiring ads [1] there. But their San Diego page [2] doesn't
make it sound quite official yet.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=137035...](https://www.google.com/about/careers/search#!t=jo&jid=137035001&)

[2]
[https://fiber.google.com/cities/sandiego/](https://fiber.google.com/cities/sandiego/)

~~~
technofiend
Tries
[https://fiber.google.com/cities/houston](https://fiber.google.com/cities/houston)
on a lark

    
    
         500 Internal Server Error
         The server has either erred or is incapable of performing the requested operation.
    

I feel like Olya Povlotsky - "Dog bite me, Seth. I think finally I will die.
The dog die, Seth. I was poison to that dog."

Sigh.

------
hissworks
I'd assumed that cities like Chicago with relatively old/dense/complex
infrastructure would pose a tremendous challenge to a project like Google
Fiber. Happy to have assumed incorrectly, but it does seem a significant jump
from mid-sized metros like Provo/Austin/Kansas City.

------
BuckRogers
I lived in Chicago (proper, not the burbs) for years. The existing city cable
provider, RCN, was one of the best I ever had the pleasure of using. It's
definitely no Comcast like the suburbanites are stuck with.

The city is too old.. they don't even have all the schematics for all the gas
lines and other pipes and wires laid over the centuries. Digging in Chicago is
very dangerous and restricted. It will be interesting to learn how they deploy
this if it happens.

As for likelihood this goes through, I can't see this ever happening. It's
very corrupt, city employees don't want to work too hard, it's running on
borrowed time.

Oh, I'm in Austin now. :) Can't say I care to return to the Windy City but
this would certainly help pull in migrants other than native midwesterners.

------
awqrre
How much would it cost for the US government to connect all US households to
fiber? about 1 month of war?

~~~
orky56
Your first question is fair. Your second question brings politics into here
for no reason.

~~~
marshray
I think it's entirely reasonable to discuss tech priorities and national
infrastructure spending. Maybe 'war' has a particularly political dimension,
but so does Social Security, welfare programs, national health care, manned
space exploration, etc. Basically any large spending program is going to be a
political, almost by definition.

~~~
orky56
I agree with your point but framing things as war instead of defense spending
is leading and politically inclined.

~~~
marshray
I think most people distinguish between "baseline defense spending" and
"elective war" in a general sense without either term feeling overtly
political.

But if we were to take the set of [Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama,
Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq] and try to decide in particular
which are which, we would quickly find that to be political.

So in America, the political-ness of "war" tends to shift with the times.
Right now, those times are 'interesting'.

------
mc808
Five years ago, I honestly thought everyone in major cities would be using
encrypted gigabit mesh networks by now. Maybe in 2020.

~~~
hellameta
There's some promising mesh projects. Stay strong!

------
skorecky
Really hope this happens. Our current choice of Comcastholes or AT&T's Slow
DSL is ridiculous for a city like Chicago.

~~~
sredne
I have RCN and I really enjoy it. I've heard their TV service is garbage but I
haven't had any problems with RCN and I only pay $50/mo for 50/10 speeds.

~~~
thoughtpalette
Had RCN in Uptown, forced with Comcast in Logan. I really miss RCN. Couldn't
beat the price/performance ratio.

------
schwap
Los Angeles will be an impressive feat. The ridiculous number of jurisdictions
will generate an ungodly amount of red tape.

~~~
Shivetya
Well the announcements are kind of dishonest, they aren't doing whole cities.
Select neighborhoods get the service and you actually be a street over and
miss out. I remember the excitement when they announced Atlanta, until we saw
the map.

Yes it is impractical to cover a "city" but it would be more honest to say
"Coming to select areas of X"

~~~
Axsuul
DTLA needs it badly too. Some of us are stuck with DSL :/

~~~
shampine
Look into that, my building on 7th & LA now offers TWC. It took a while
though.

------
mmanfrin
Does anyone know what it takes to start up municipal fiber? There is a dark
fiber line about 4 blocks from my house (in Berkeley), I feel that if I got
enough neighbors to sign on to helping fund the initial costs of piping a
connection to that, we could all get much better internet service -- but I
don't know where one would start with that.

~~~
dboreham
Only time + money. But more of both than you likely want to invest.

Disclosure: built my own ISP 13 years ago after a similar "how hard can it
be??" moment.

~~~
jessedhillon
Have you written up this experience anywhere? I'd love to read that.

~~~
ccallebs
I second this. I'd love to know how ISP companies back then were operated.

~~~
pyvpx
a bit easier with less scale; otherwise identically to today.

------
top1percentduh
LOL force change with the pocketbook. yes internet is needed for modern use,
use phone carrier for banking, bills, and email. disconnect cable, internet,
Netflix, and all other streaming and cloud services, games and all the digital
crap. Put a digital antenna on TV. Many businesses will quickly lose money and
force change back to somewhat affordable rates. In the mean time back to
reading, board games, hobbies, parks, exercise, etc.. they don't cost a penny.
If everyone disconnected for a few months you would realize that there is life
beyond these time wasting distractions. The best things in life are free
anyway.

------
davidf18
Congrats to the residents of Chicago and LA for having the local government
leadership to work with Google.

I wish I could say the same for NYC where I live.

Despite the fact that Google owns one of the largest office buildings in the
city where many engineers and other staff work, there is no Google fiber here.

Sadly, the mayor seems more focused attempting to slow the growth of Uber
until the residents vociferously protested.

Now he is trying to ban the popular horse drawn carriages in Central Park --
or ban most of them. Sigh....

~~~
ugh123
> popular horse drawn carriages

Popular with whom? The minimal revenue it brings from primarily tourists? Most
of the backlash has come from NYC residents who deplore the conditions for the
horses. The welfare of the horses should take precedence over the minimal
revenue they bring.

~~~
davidf18
According to a recent NYTimes article, most New Yorkers like the horse drawn
carriages but the mayor made a commitment to a group that spent $1 million for
ads against Ms. Quinn who was the mayor's leading competitor.

------
intopieces
I'm still wondering if Google Fiber is a foundation for Google's ambitions to
resurrect their city-wide WiFi plans that stalled in SF years back. Ever since
Google-Fi rolled out, I've been more convinced that Google doesn't actually
need to wire every home with Fiber, just to put it in enough places and
blanket the area with their own fine-tuned data network. Then, charge people
for accounts to access it.

------
drcode
In the current fiber cities, does anyone know if the service made it out of
the city limits into the burbs?

(Asking as someone right outside the Chicago city limits...)

~~~
Qiasfah
In Austin, no, the map follows closely to the city limits.

They provide maps of the rollout too:
[https://fiber.google.com/cities/austin/fiberhoods/](https://fiber.google.com/cities/austin/fiberhoods/)

~~~
carussell
To be fair, the city limits in Austin are pretty huge, already encompassing
lots of what would qualify as the suburbs. Take, for example, the West
Gate/South Manchaca/Stassney/William Cannon area (marked as Emerald Forest
above), where there's already heavy build out going on.

------
r0m4n0
Heard about ATT gigabit coming to Sacramento yesterday (amongst many others).
Finally seeing these lazy companies upgrade infrastructure.

[http://about.att.com/content/dam/snrdocs/GigaPower/FINAL%20-...](http://about.att.com/content/dam/snrdocs/GigaPower/FINAL%20-%20Sacramento%20GigaPower%20Commitment%20Release.pdf)

------
jMyles
The top comment is a (seemingly half or less than half-) joking comment about
corruption in Chicago.

I have another, related thought:

These two cities are, without any reasonable dispute, centers of horrific
police brutality.

Will Google Fiber drive down internet prices (and promote more public wifi) so
as to cause a measurable increase in reporting and uploading of high-
definition video of incidents?

------
caycep
I wonder how much of LA will be covered? it is a gigantic area. I do hope they
go up to the Pasadena and San Marino areas...

------
tdaltonc
My start-up is in LA and we're been talking about moving to SF. This will
definitely factor in to our discussion.

~~~
HillaryBriss
Just curious: what specific factor(s) make you consider the move? I mean, in
your view, what are the big draws to SF, things that LA either lacks or has
only in low quantity/quality?

~~~
tdaltonc
We[0] make SAAS for developers, so we expect a lot more of our customers to be
in the bay. There’s also a deeper market for technical talent and VC capital.
LA has a lot of lifestyle perks (beach, forests, desert, great weather, more
daylight in the summer, more sqft of office/apartments per $). I imagine that
the bars and restaurants in LA are better (but I don’t know).

So mostly, The Bay is where to ecosystem is.

[0] [https://UseDopamine.com](https://UseDopamine.com)

~~~
nomel
Nice "Invalid security certificate" popup you have there?

~~~
tdaltonc
You don't say? . . . That's going on the list.

~~~
kanwisher
Same here ;/ looks bad on chrome osx

------
olivermarks
I'm on Sonic 1 gigabit fiber in Sebastopol 50 miles north of San Francisco,
one of the reasons we moved north from the city. Sonic are excellent and are
building out in San Francisco in small areas.

~~~
blackguardx
I used to live in Santa Rosa (working for Agilent). Do you work remotely or
have a job up there? The North Bay tech scene isn't as good as you think it
would be.

~~~
olivermarks
consultant, wfh

------
ojbyrne
As someone a few miles from Google HQ, this doesn't mean very much. Mountain
View has been on the "potential" list for at least 2 years, with no movement
whatsoever.

~~~
rconti
The less movement you have, the more you need fiber.

------
ocdtrekkie
I won't mind if my Comcast Internet suddenly gets a free speed boost here!
(But I won't sign myself up for an ISP that's primary business is tracking
your data.

------
snowwrestler
I can't understand why Google hasn't picked Alexandria, VA. It's a small,
fairly dense, highly educated city with high average household income.

I bet the city government would welcome it. It's pretty much all Comcast right
now, and the city is researching muni fiber.

Plus it's right outside Washington DC and plenty of government officials live
there. The effect of competition on broadband quality and price would be
highly visible to federal lawmakers.

edit: I'm curious why this is getting downvoted.

~~~
rhino369
Has Google Fiber ever gone head to head with Fios areas? I'd imagine Fios can
provide 1Gbps with minor upgrades.

I get 75/75 from Fios for 60 bucks in Crystal City.

Cox is rolling out gigabit for 100 dollars in Fairfax county.

~~~
snowwrestler
No FiOS in Alexandria. Edit: or Cox.

------
bfrog
Excellent, I await an actual gigabit connection and support people that
actually know what their doing.

------
kristopolous
Come capitalism, save us from the vicious tyranny of capitalism!

------
jdstafford
Baltimorean here. Enjoy it, bastards :D

------
pkmiec
good for them to do a major city. i'm still waiting for pdx.

------
azinman2
Now Comcast is scared.

------
xigency
Whoo, Chicago.

------
niels_olson
Can we count San Diego as a large LA suburb? Please?

