The only business model for fiber that will work to produce the competition, low prices, and world-class data transport we need — certainly in urban areas — is to get local governments involved in overseeing basic, street grid-like “dark” (passive, unlit with electronics) fiber available at a set, wholesale price to a zillion retail providers of access and services
That's an interesting assertion, but not supported by any evidence that I can see. And OTOH, there is direct contradictory evidence suggesting that there is another viable business model for building this kind of infrastructure: non-profit member-owned cooperatives. The same kind that provide telephone, cable and electric service all over the country[1].
Note that I'm not saying that cooperatives are a panacea, but their existence is evidence that other options are available. And before somebody screams "but aren't they all subsidized by the government", I would argue that if the kind long-term stable returns that the author of TFA speaks of are really available, then there's no reason to think that a coop couldn't get a loan (or equity investment) from private institutions.
My guess is that the biggest thing preventing this kind of thing from happening more often is exactly the amount of red-tape and government regulation involved.
> My guess is that the biggest thing preventing this kind of thing from happening more often is exactly the amount of red-tape and government regulation involved.
I was briefly and directly involved with the Google Fiber rollout here in Austin. Here's the thing: anyone with firsthand information is unlikely to drop in to set things straight in a way that gives away any amount of detail, purely because in the professional world it would be unbecoming to say the kinds of things that would necessarily come out.
I don't expect that local government intervention and red-tape could be called the major contributing factor here.
From someone involved at the end I was working from, dbg31415's comments are exactly what I would expect the other end to feel like.
The thing you have to understand is this: generally speaking, the people involved with the labor on this kind of project inhabit a completely different world than the one that you or I or the rest of a site like HN lives in. That applies to the boys in the field doing the work, to the boys in the office shuffling paperwork and signing off on their checks.
It's unsurprising to me to hear that the labor costs are out of control, and to hear that Google was halting expansion to other cities this past fall was like hearing someone say that they smashed their fingers in the door and it hurt.
It's somewhat common for people in some security circles to post hashes of messages they don't want to post publicly, but might want to refer to disclose privately or at a later date, and have some reasonable proof they didn't make it up later.
This, for example, is a throwaway account. Perhaps there's something in the message that'll let them prove they left that message at a later date, if they desire to.
>I don't expect that local government intervention and red-tape could be called the major contributing factor here.
I can call absolute, first-hand-knowledge, bullshit to this assessment for the city of Alameda, California...
Plus, common.net has recently started service (I am a customer) but:
I spoke with the Mayor of Alameda, and they said specifically that they sold the communal rights to comcast (I can only assume it was a bribe) and this is the reason we have poor choices available to us
I don't know if I was lucky, or dbg was unlucky, or if Google streamlined things by the time they got to my hood, but the fiber install was great for me here in Austin.
Yes, we have Horry Telephone Cooperative here in Myrtle Beach, SC. They've been laying fiber in the ground for 20 years, and I've been petitioning them for the last few years to offer faster speeds. They just started offering gigabit fiber a few weeks ago for $134.99/mo. I'm thankful to have an alternative to national cable companies, the only disadvantage is that local cooperatives can move slow!
Yes, we have Horry Telephone Cooperative here in Myrtle Beach, SC.
Hah, what an interesting bit of synchronicity. I'm originally from Brunswick County, NC, just a hair north of you. We are served by Atlantic Telephone Membership Cooperative and Brunswick Electric Membership Corporation.
It's a form of single purpose government where you know that your "taxes" are only ever going to the one thing the "government" was set up to do (also, there's the bit where you can resign your membership without moving to Somalia).
Most of the problems with modern government can be understood as a case of severe feature creep.
I think the key difference being that with the hypothetical cooperative they can't compel your membership just based on where you live.
If that statement stopped holding true (as it sometimes does in the real world, with block associations that are compulsory) then yes I'd say it's equivalent to government in all the important ways.
Maybe the differences are subtle, but there are differences. That said, I've long been a proponent of shifting more and more services from "the state" per-se to these kinds of cooperatives. But I'm a government hating libertarian, so...
It can be argued, that communications, in particular internet connectivity is considered essential infrastructure, like roads and is the responsibility of the government to deliver. This doesn't really stray from my pragmatic libertarian view, but is just an argument of what is or isn't "essential infrastructure" or how it should be delivered and paid for. A backed cooperative is fine, so long as other providers are allowed to continue to operate (should they choose to), so as to establish baselines and competition.
> A backed cooperative is fine, so long as other providers are allowed to continue to operate (should they choose to), so as to establish baselines and competition.
That generally doesn't work out very well. If the incumbent keeps half the customers, the cooperative then has almost all of the same expenses but half as much revenue. And so does the incumbent. So costs per customer are double until one of them goes out of business.
This is what's happening now in the areas that have a legacy telephone company and a legacy cable company. The telephone companies have essentially given up on upgrading their infrastructure and are just milking what already exists until the cable companies put them out of business, because coax can carry more traffic than telephone wire. And neither of them is interested in installing fiber while the other still exists, because it would force the other to either do the same or slash prices, either of which is worse for both of them than the status quo.
But the initial outlay of Fiber won't be recouped in a short period of time regardless, and a government backed coop will have that paid via tax dollars regardless... If they're laying fiber via taxes, they're laying fiber, that is a fixed expense. And frankly as part of what I consider as essential infrastructure (communications), I'm mostly okay with that expense being from tax funding at a local level.
So, the coop actually has a pretty unfair advantage, but as long as it's local communities, I'm mostly okay with it. And as to local communities, larger cities are more disconnected than smaller towns. So there's some difference there. The coop doesn't have to be setup to recover initial outlay... it depends on the structure and how it's setup with the local municipality. As to the incumbents, they were also largely funded via tax dollars for initial outlay, and instead of planning for reinvestment/growth, they've chosen not to do so, and deserve to see upstarts encroaching on them.
In a cooperative, people voluntarily cooperate. But government compels them to cooperate.
But it's more complicated than that because the more local a government is, the easier it is to walk away from and the less crap it can do without strong negative feedback. It is more like a co-op, albeit it one that can change the rules on you after you've made a sizable investment. And one where people who've invested nothing have the same amount of say that you do!
She's really trying to say that the government manages the physical grid monopoly with no overlying network. Networks pay for access. Otherwise there are multiple fiber runs and waste.
it could also include a local agency fed up and finally looking to provide a service Comcast, AT&T, etc refuse to provide/expnad/etc.
In gold rush area along Highway 49 in Califnornia you have two prominent Coop/Local solutions .. Plumas Sierra Telecom who provides service to Plumas, Sierra and (I believe) Lassen county with different broadband options... PSREC has been adding fiber options.
Down towards Volcano/Sonora/Hwy 88, you have Volcano Communications.
In each case, rural communities stepping up where AT&T/Comcast and others step aside. These are endeavors I happily support.
I recently moved to an area where the local coop did step up and is bringing Fiber to one of the least populace continues in California -- Plumas County -- and the spinoff of the coop is Plumas Sierra Telecom. They've been providing some form of internet to the area for 11-12 years (maybe more).
They've been bringing fiber slowly up from Reno to communities along Highways 70 and 89. The condo I just bought, PSREC installed fiber to the unit. I hope to help find ways to invigorate the adoption in the community and maybe some more tech up here. Reno is about an hour away.
Coops and small rural companies are the ones investing in infrastructure (in the town I am in, the cable company folded and the telecom stepped up) rather than the big telecoms which are trying to disinvest from things.
There are many areas, and we can see that in many parts of the world, where the government will do a better (cheaper to the citizens) job compared to private businesses. Among them are public transportation, Internet connectivity, Phone/Gas/Electricity. Google moving out of Fiber or proving that it is not economically viable to them is a disappointment but not a surprise
I think that tends to be the case the more localized the cooperative/utility is... at the City level, more than the state, more than the federal govt. That's because a city-level org can make pragmatic decisions that become harder the higher you get.
I think you've got your categories wrong and very selectively chosen.
* Water / Sewer: Regulated OR 'off grid' (EG: well + septic field)
* Roads: Local roads always regulated (taxpayer provided)
* Hospital: Many areas only have one, denser areas may have a small handful; in an emergency you don't choose.
* Electricity: Regulated (Possibly a choice of generation providers, usually never a choice of 'line transmission' providers.)
* Natural Gas: Regulated, one provider.
* Schools: Regulated, there's a basic default option.
* Police: Regulated, there's a basic default option.
* Fire: Regulated, there's a basic default option.
* 'Emergency': Your 911 call goes to one place* (for a source area)
* Data: Many municipalities have //regulated// a monopoly (sometimes a duopoly)
Yet they don't regulate the performance of that monopoly sufficiently.
That was my plan, too. It's already proven out by one rural ISP doing something like that. You also have the angle of people willing to pay extra or sacrifice some features for a good the community owns. There's also a pride aspect that can happen.
It's intellectually dishonest to call out Kevin Phillips as "Reagan's conservative economist." He never worked for Reagan, never worked in the Whitehouse, opposed Reagan's tax cuts, and wrote a book criticizing Reagan's trade policies in 1984. He has written several additional attacks since.
By all means bring up Phillip's ideas, I agree with some of Phillips' critiques, but it is wrong to portray him as some sort of conservative insider. This is how Jacob Weisberg described him:
Phillips long ago left behind both obscurity and conservatism, becoming one of our most ubiquitous political commentators and one of the most left-wing. His biennial books have become illogical, dizzying screeds. And his diagnoses, predictions, and advice to Democrats have been consistently, embarrassingly wrong.
One trouble with fiber is that most people (who have cable) think the cable service they have is "good enough" in terms of performance, but they'd rather pay less for it. In fact, fiber is not that much better than cable, particularly when you factor in that TCP can't move a gigabit per second across the public internet anyway. And particularly when you consider that DOCSIS 3.1 is pretty fast and that cablelabs is working on filling in the gaps such as Full Duplex transmission.
In much of Telco land, however, the problem is that fiber already has competition in the way that your phone company sees it. In my area, a double play costs about $90 a month for 2 Mbps internet. Google Fiber costs less than that, maybe people in my area "should" pay a little more because it costs more to provide, but I can't see it going much past $110 a month (what cable internet would cost for 25x better performance if they ever build out in my valley.) It's not that a fiber service could not be profitable, but it is not a rational decision for a company that can make huge profits by doing nothing.
Another problem is that there is always some new technology that is going to "solve" the problem in the sweet by-in-by so that communities don't show the moral fibre to do the right thing. Google's Willy Wonka approach to fiber optics was one of the first of these, but next it is baloons, then it is WiMax, then it is drones, then it is 4G, then it is 5G, then it is large satellite constellations (if those get built, Elon Musk won't have to bother sending astronauts to the space stations and can head straight for Mars or the Moon because the space station gets shredded by space junk.)
One trouble with fiber is that most people (who have cable) think the cable service they have is "good enough" in terms of performance
So wait.. if the customer is satisfied with the service they're receiving (eg, it's "fast enough") then exactly what problem are we trying to solve? The article talks about an "urgent demand" for faster home Internet, but I'm honestly not seeing it. My cable service (from TWC) is "fast enough" to the point that I don't even think about it. I have no idea what bandwidth I have, but I can't recall any time that I felt limited by it.
Would I take 1Gbps (or higher) home service? Sure, I guess. Do I need it? I don't see any reason to say that I do.
Edit: To be fair, I don't live in a rural area. So yes, it is possible that people in rural areas face a more urgent need for higher bandwidth than I do. That said, I grew up in a rural area and when I go home to visit, my friends and family all seem pretty happy with the Internet service they have. So even some rural areas seem to be getting at least a respectable level of service.
You're supposed to want "fiber" because it's intrinsically better and shiny and faster. People who write these pieces always assume that we should want "fiber" regardless of what it costs to build, or whether there is demand for it, or how it will improve our lives. The private sector has not found "fiber" to be profitable, so for some reason government should do it because it's inherently good. It never occurs to these "fiber" proponents that maybe "fiber" is not profitable because it's not necessary.
America's wireless operators plow billions into capital investment, because there's market demand for it. That's the future. "Fiber" inspires geek fetishes because it's fast. Non-geeks on the other hand are using their phones to watch video and don't care about the alleged goodness of "fiber". After all, if they did care, FiOS would be expanding and Google would add more Fiber cities.
Government investment in FTTH is a twenty-first century boondoggle waiting to happen. It's nowhere near my list of beneficial things government could do if it wants to start plowing billions of dollars into capital investment.
There have been numerous studies done on the economic benefits to having broadly deployed, super fast wired Internet. The results are always the same: the economic benefits are dramatically underwhelming. It's true in Romania, Netherlands, Latvia and it's just as true in Kansas City [1]. Finland has had among the fastest Internet speeds for years - they've been stuck in a decade long near-depression economically and could hardly be further away from being in a tech boom from their high average access speeds. So where is the evidence to support the societal benefit of going from good speeds, to extremely high speeds? I've seen no evidence for it over the last decade anywhere on the planet.
For now, it turns out anything beyond ~50 to ~100mbps, is practically useless for consumers in delivering a big leap in productivity or quality of life. That has been the case for a decade (despite the propaganda in favor of spending a trillion dollars so everyone can have 1gbps tomorrow). South Korea for example has had among the fastest wired Internet speeds on the planet for a long time, it hasn't turned them into the next economic juggernaut in any regard (GDP per capita lower than Puerto Rico).
People didn't know they wanted smartphones until we had them. Or more relevantly, people didn't know how slow their computers were until they got an SSD, and then suddenly mechanical storage was outrageously bad.
Fiber works the same way. There is wild potential for all kinds of new uses for computers if anyone anywhere could transmit at such tremendous data rates, in the same way solid state storage has enabled all matter of technologies through just raw throughput that couldn't be accomplished without it (mainly in the form of the highest definitions of video, or the recording thereof, which are the most common huge-bandwidth consuming tasks for consumers.
Private industry brought us smartphones. Private industry brought us SSDs. Those things are useful. I saw a smartphone and I said "oh, I can get my Gmail on it, cool." I saw SSDs and I said "I won't have to wait while my hard drive spins, cool."
No one has ever told me how my life would be better if I had massive Internet speed. I'm happy with the Internet speed I have now. That's why private investors have not been willing to roll it out, unlike with smartphones or SSDs. Government shouldn't go put up the money either.
In how many places was building copper profitable? If it wasn't for government intervention most of the world would still be waiting for copper connections.
I'm still waiting on ISPs to make good with the promised infrastructure rollouts when they received all that sweet government subsidies rather than hoarding it.
Hell there's been many times where I thought 'this is good enough' only to have my mind changed when something else improved upon it.
FiOS would be expanding if they charged a reasonable price for bottom tier service. I have a FiOS modem in my apartment and get tons of flashy junk mail urging me to sign up. No way will I ever pay for that when cable is good enough.
What is a "reasonable price?" It doesn't cost appreciably less for Verizon to wire up a 50/50 customer versus a 500/500 customer. The average FiOS customer spends about $110 per month, and even with that Verizon's wireline division only makes 2-5% operating profit each quarter.
Yes, exactly. In NYC, RCN is charging around $70/mo for 330 mbs down and something like 20 or 30 mbs/sec up. IIRC cable latency is very slightly worse than fiber. Still, Verizon charges well over $100 for more than 100 or 150 mbs down, and they are very keen on two-year contracts. No thanks.
Do you also believe that investment into physical transportation infrastructure is "unnecessary"? If not, why do you believe digital transportation infrastructure is less "necessary"?
I believe such investment with taxpayer dollars could be good, but someone needs to make the case first for why this is an effective use of taxpayer dollars. The only case I ever see is "fiber good, fiber fast," and no one makes the case for how it would make our lives better. Roads, bridges, and railroads have tangible positive impacts. What's the impact of rolling fiber to everybody's door, when many people are already served by hybrid fiber-coax and wireless networks that they find good enough?
Even a case for targeted rural broadband investment would be good, if rural areas lack broadband. Even then, the discussion should be about bringing those areas broadband, not bringing them FTTH. Fiber assumes a single solution to any possible problem...I guess because fiber, oh, that sounds cool.
I think it's an issue of being good enough for the types of things we do now. If it got astronomically better, it would enable things that we flat out can't even consider doing nowadays.
Plenty of people have it now and there isn't really a killer app for it. Even 4k streaming is only like 20mbit at reasonable quality.
"If you build it, they will come" isn't a good reason for such a large investment.
I think it makes more sense to focus on universal access to 50mbit for every household. Someone going from 600kb/sec DSL or Satellite to 50Mbit is a huge benefit. Going from 50Mbit to 1000mbit have very marginal benefits for a single family home.
For pre-encoded HDR 1080p Google (youtube) recommends 15Mbps target rate for the video and 0.5Mbps for the audio (5.1). For 4K the numbers go up to as high as 85 and 0.5.
I use a rough rule of thumb that 'livestramed' things at the same quality should be double those bit-rates as a maximum.
This gives:
FHD 16Mb/s
4K 86Mb/s
I'd say it's reasonable for a 'single household' to have a number of guests over, say if they're having a party or if relatives are visiting for the holidays. Lets call the peak use 12 guests.
86 * 12 ~= 1032 Mb/s ; Thus Gigabit is NOT overkill. It is capacity and freedom for a small family and some guests to enjoy content and/or collaboration without anyone 'hogging' the connection.
It's not uncommon to have 4-6 simultaneous streams in a household. Two children with a TV and a tablet each, and the parents watching a movie. And they need to be able to game/browse at the same time.
It may not be what the majority to, but it's a non trivial part of the population.
4-6 simultaneous streams of what? Browsing and gaming require little bandwidth on a sustained basis. 4K is the only thing that makes a dent in modern broadband connections, and it's not like people can watch more than one of those at a time even if they have multiple devices capable of doing so.
We're a "cord cutter" household with three adults and a four year-old who has her own iPad. I wouldn't be surprised if we were top 1% for bandwidth users. Tops for us is probably one 4K stream (25 mbps), 2 HD stream (5 mbps), and then trivial amounts on top of that from the three adults intermittently playing on their phones. I've got 150/150 now, and will be upgrading to 750/750 when Verizon rolls it out in Annapolis. But really only because I can, not because I can use it.
Teenagers stream some series to the TV, watch a twitch on the tablet and game. I kid you not, this seems to be a normal usecase for some teenagers. Thats potentially a 4k and 1080p stream. Have two of those in the house and parents that want to watch a movie. That is, with your numbers of todays streaming, 85mbit, so a 100mbit connection will have very little room for improvement.
And improvements are coming, 4k 60fps HDR streams will come sooner rather than later, and they consume upwards of 100mbit pr stream.
The fact that you had to concoct such an absurd scenario to get 1Gbps of throughput kind of hammers home just how far we are from having a real use for such speed.
Infrastructure enabling new uses and more waste seem to be intrinsically connected. The same bandwidth increase that enabled video streaming also enabled clueless people to put multi-megabyte hero images (or even worse, videos!) in their articles.
This is the campaign Google sent out when rolling out Google Fiber, imagine the possibilities.
Okay, get me started, what is something? If they possibilities are endless, there must be a concrete example, right?
When I had a 56.6k modem, I was trying things way beyond it's capabilities as far as sending and receiving large files, playing games online, it was a disaster and there was very obvious and very real problems to be solved. And much more came after that, streaming movies!? Who knew.
With fiber, nothing seems to be coming close to pushing that limit from a consumer perspective. If there was something that was kinda shitty but still works okay on cable, what is it? Or what thing just isn't possible that is waiting for a faster connection?
I have a 25mbps connection, slow cable, and it does everything I need pretty flawlessly. Does it have to buffer sometimes for HD movies? Sure, not worth $50 more a month for that. I don't know what I'm missing out on with my slower connection, and if I am, people are doing a horrible job marketing what that is.
(I help people get faster internet connections): One common example I run into is people trying to stream IP security cameras to off-site. Once you have more than a couple of cameras then the upload on cable and DSL isn't enough.
Once they get things set up for their cameras, they realise that they can suddenly reliably watch 4K netflix; some have started streaming to twitch/youtube because it costs them nothing, and heaps more.
On the other side of the argument, there is the 'privacy' aspect of things: most people would never run a home server that runs email/social/backup for you (and connect to it from your phone while out and about). However once fast home internet connections are ubiquitous, I fully expect people to start taking back their data from google/facebook/etc of the world
Faster internet is like wider roads: the mere presence of it increases demand.
Well, with fibre every light bulb, ever thermostat, every smoke detector in your home could be sending all the details of your personal life to the Cloud! think of the possibilities: unaccountable corporations could analyse and parse your daily habits: your health insurance company could charge you more because you don't leave every morning to go for a run, the local Committee for the Promotion of Virtue & the Prevention of Vice could see when you're watching porn, the local fire department could see when you're using your charcoal grill, the local mafia could break in (because of course those unaccountable corporations are running unpatched and poorly-designed served) and see when you're not at home, and only break in when you're away! The future is now!
> then exactly what problem are we trying to solve?
speed is fine with big city cable internet, usually
customer service, price, etc often is not, and those companies have successfully lobbied to do away with net neutrality so it is going to get worse, and cities where google fiber didn't make it, you have no competitor to turn to, who might offer net-neutral service.
> Would I take 1Gbps (or higher) home service? Sure, I guess. Do I need it? I don't see any reason to say that I do.
I agree. I have a 125/25 cable connection and am never yearning for more speed. I would take fiber if I could get it for the same price or less, but I'm certainly not going to pay more today. Of course a killer application could be just around the corner that requires 1gb/1gb.
I would love to be able to backup my data (usual collection of photo images and family videos ~4TB) over the public network but the fastest retail connection available here is 100/7 so it would take a very long time.
I agree that download capacity of ~100Mbit is plenty for today's applications.
Yes I can write my data to a hard drive and mail it somewhere, and I do that, but that's not network backup.
I don't live in a rural area, I'd call it "remote". There are about 20,000 people in the county and I don't live in a town - but I have fiber to my house. I started out with the slowest plan of 20 up and down and haven't seen why I should pay more. Sure a 100 or more would be nice once in a while, but I always get what I pay for and it is "fast enough". I work from home, stream everything I watch and it does the job.
I used to live in a city that didn't have a major telco most people were on one of a handful of small WISPs. Wireless worked OK, a tower could cover entire neighborhoods. I had a 20 up and down plan there, but given the shared nature of wireless I rarely saw it.
Where I'm at now, wireless would never work, too many trees, hills and not enough people. At these distances, copper stinks - so fiber it is. It isn't a company, but a co-op, so prices are reasonable. I'm sure there had to be some grants to get fiber all over the place because I'm not sure it could ever exist without them.
The last three places I've lived, I've had the option of either Comcast cable or Verizon FiOS (two apartments, and a house). FiOS is way better (much faster upload, much lower ping times). But Comcast has better television packages so all my neighbors have always stuck with cable.
> One trouble with fiber is that most people (who have cable) think the cable service they have is "good enough" in terms of performance, but they'd rather pay less for it.
This is where I am. My local speeds and offerings (cable or a smaller local company with an ethernet jack in the condo's closet) are much better than yours, and I don't really need anything better. The tech to push speed requirements dramatically higher isn't there yet. For one or two people doing some streaming and light downloading, 20Mbps is fine for now, I'd just rather pay $20 than $50. 100Mbps for $50 would probably cover me into the near future for 4K streaming, too, but currently my local providers charge more than that for the faster speeds.
I'm not sure what the next big thing network-usage wise that pushes me to want more than 100Mbps would be. Heck, I was mostly happy at 5-6Mbps cable/DSL speeds for close to a decade before video streaming starting pushing those limits - downloading linux distros or such at those speeds kinda sucked, but I didn't do it that often to justify paying a lot more.
EDIT: the commercial world looks quite a bit different, both in need and demand, so maybe there are more opportunities there, but it also seems pretty well served currently, at least in big cities. I have hardly any direct knowledge, but have been at or heard of quite a few office spaces with direct fiber links to datacenters or such. When I worked in a small town it was much worse (Charter Business Cable wasn't the greatest, there, reliability- or speed-wise, to share across the small office), maybe there's a market there?
Note that the case for fiber in rural areas that don't have cable is that DSL doesn't have a real upgrade path for long distances. (Funny there is a standard for long-range high performance DSL, HDSL, but you've never heard of it because it makes fiber look cheap)
Another story you aren't hearing is that big improvements in communication speeds from current commodity protocols (i.e. 1Gig Ethernet, 4G wireless) aren't practical with Silicon-based technology as we know it, and these things are only likely to get affordable if the industry makes a transition to faster semiconductors such as Indium Phosphide.
It would be a strange turn of events for rural areas to become more desirable to technical people because they are the first to get fiber rollouts due to it being the only upgrade path for those areas.
No one in their right mind will plow the insane money into rural areas required to trench fiber to the curb. Meanwhile a quiet revolution is happening with point-to-point wireless, where $300 gets you a gigabit connection over up to 10 miles through a directional antenna that you point at your local water tower or something, where your ISP leases space on the roof.
Well that made me laugh since I actually build and operate wireless networks. Few things you should know:
1. When unlicensed wireless gear vendors talk about throughput, you can typically divide that number by 4 to get a real, achievable full-duplex throughput (because the radios are half-duplex and encoding and packet overhead accounts for roughly another factor of 2). So 750 becomes 150 which is an order of magnitude less than 1GBit.
2. That product has a range of roughly....not very far. You can do the path math yourself from their specs, but let's say it will work at full speed over 1Km. Not 10 miles.
3. To achieve the 750MBits they advertise you need to use 80MHz of contiguous spectrum in the 5GHz unlicensed bands. I will eat my keyboard if you can find a location with a water tower where that much usable spectrum is available.
To push 1GBit FD over 10 miles today needs licensed spectrum and 3' dishes with the associated high cost.
And this is before you have found an ISP willing to give you microwave access to their water tower POP (which they will not do since spectrum is so tight and they are using that tower for their own long-haul P2P links), and willing to sell you 1GBit transit for anything less than a fortune.
Thanks for the thorough reply. I've looked at how unlicensed links are set up in dense urban settings over about 1 km each, and encountered none of the problems you describe. But I can imagine they become issues over longer distances.
It's no more insane than the earlier deployments of electric infrastructure. The only difference is connection has to be made to rest of the internet at some point.
The 15 Mbps is TCP bandwidth, and the 100 Mbps is physical layer bitrate. They are not comparable. There are overheads and latency and packet loss can reduce how much physical bitrate TCP can use. So the 4k stream may or may not do great in 100mpbs.
Also, how about a second 4k screen ? Multiple TVs are the norm in American homes. How about multiple tablets or mobile devices consuming HD streams ?
It seems current access link infrastructure in the US cannot support current TV viewing habits, if all the TVs were switched to 4k digital streams.
> The 15 Mbps is TCP bandwidth, and the 100 Mbps is physical layer bitrate. They are not comparable.
In practice TCP gets very close to the link rate unless you have latency much higher than what you typically have on cable/fiber. Fast.com (which "performs a series of downloads from Netflix servers" according to Netflix) benchmarks at 155 mbps on my 150/150 connection. (Cable/fiber systems are usually provisioned at a higher link rate than what is marketed: http://www.dslreports.com/faq/15643).
Netflix won't enable 4K on a 15Mbit connection. Perhaps 50, definitely not 15. Remember they have to allow some headroom and for the possibility of more than one concurrent stream to the same subscriber.
I agree that with better modulation techniques on DOCSIS protocols, you could achieve higher throughput on the downstream.
However, IMO - what should have been the focus for Google Fiber is to come up with applications that consume more upstream traffic. That is where DOCSIS lacks in terms of throughput and a fundamental problem docsis nodes face called "noise funneling". To avoid that - cable companies push fiber nodes closer to last mile.
If Google would have been successful in creating a FTTH marketplace, it wouldn't be that difficult for cable companies to start investing on ONU/ONT and GPON solutions to compete. With competition, Google wouldn't really get the ROI they were expecting unless they really bring about change in applications that utilize the upstream bandwidth heavy.
I believe it has to do with the processing power of the intermittent routers/switches able to handle that many packets per second. Not sure how parallelizable ISP-scale switches are though.
Single-stream throughput is directly proportional to latency and jitter.
It is nearly impossible to push 1Gb/sec across the public internet because of the latency and jitter that get introduced via physical distance and multiple hops across multiple networks.
Outside of hitting a server within your metro area, and likely on Google's backbone itself, it would be nearly impossible to hit a gigabit (~110MB/sec) of throughput with a single stream of data.
A single stream of data is a bit unimportant, with BT and potentially multiple users on a home network. I'm getting gigE this year, and between 4k streaming, BT, and two teenage daughters, I fully expect to saturate the connection.
It's not at all unimportant. It's part of the reason people are upset that they paid for XXXMbps connection but "Only get XXXMbps" throughput.
In most households having a limited single-stream throughput isn't a big deal, but it IS a big deal specifically for things like your 4K streaming. It's VERY difficult to do TRUE sustained 4K streaming over any kind of distance. If your ISP happens to have a Netflix caching box at the local pop you're golden. If you need to traverse any kind of distance across the internet - good luck.
edit: I guess I should've also said, more to the point, it's why gigabit hasn't gotten the legs most people were hoping for. When you look at the per-stream throughput on that site - in general if you have any kind of packet loss you're talking about 10Mbps. Who has 100 different streams in an average household???
The calculator you linked to assumes a maximum TCP window size of 64KB for everything but "replication". TCP window scaling has been on by default in every major OS for 10 years or more, allowing much greater throughput. It's true that latency sets a limit on TCP throughput but it's not nearly as bad as your calculator would indicate.
The cause is a bit cyclical though, isn't it? We don't need Gbit because most people don't use that much. But most people don't use that much because consumer apps/devices rarely need to use that much bandwidth. But consumer apps/devices are designed to not use that much bandwidth because the average consumer doesn't have Gbit internet. And the average consumer doesn't have Gbit because they don't use that much. Etc.
Commonly called a "chicken-and-egg" problem, or more often "circular" rather than "cyclical" despite the words being nearly synonyms. Just a vocabulary nit, not disagreeing with the point.
> It's VERY difficult to do TRUE sustained 4K streaming over any kind of distance.
Your calculator is bunk. I've got a dedicated server in NJ, 11 milliseconds away. Gigabit on that end, 150/150 on mine. Your calculator says I should get under 50 mbps for file downloads, but I can definitely saturate my local link with both downloads and uploads.
I'm not sure what to tell you. It's literally based on a sound mathematics formula and the RFC that dictates how TCP operates. The only way you're getting maxed out gigabit with 11ms latency on a single stream is if you've got something on the pipe telling the TCP/IP stack to violate the RFC - IE: a piece of hardware like cisco waas, silverpeak, riverbed, etc.
There are literally hundreds of TCP throughput calculators out there and they all use the same formula.
TCP throughout is limited by window size divided by round trip time (I.e. How much you can send before having to wait for an ACK). With RFC 1323, you can specify a window size well above the 65,536 limit that would otherwise exist. With scaling you can have a window size up to a gigabyte. With an RTT of 11 ms, you can saturate a 150 Mbps link with a window size of 160-170kb.
I have a cheap shared server on the other side of the planet (250ms latency). Your calculator says I can get at most 2 Mbps(!), which is complete crap. With a single stream (rsync) I typically get around 80 Mbps.
> In most households having a limited single-stream throughput isn't a big deal, but it IS a big deal specifically for things like your 4K streaming. It's VERY difficult to do TRUE sustained 4K streaming over any kind of distance. If your ISP happens to have a Netflix caching box at the local pop you're golden. If you need to traverse any kind of distance across the internet - good luck.
We're talking about TCP - but most 4K streaming shouldn't be using TCP though, right? Especially not if you actually have 100MB/s bandwidth.
I'm happy if someone has a reference stating otherwise, but it's my understanding that both Youtube and Netflix utilize TCP for their video streams whether it's 4K or not.
Video buffering. With TCP you can ensure delivery of the traffic ahead of time, retransmitting if necessary before a particular segment needs to be played.
Using the 280MB Libreoffice source .deb from Ubuntu as a test, and the Ubuntu mirrors -- which are hosted on a mixture of commercial and academic networks.
From here in Denmark, I have no problem downloading at over 95MB/s from servers in the Nordic countries. 111MB/s from the Norwegian mirror!
From the rest Europe, including examples like Bosnia (60MB/s) and Russia (55MB/s), I get at least 50MB/s, 70-80 from GB, DE, NL etc.
Around 70MB/s also for Singapore, South Africa, Canada.
This isn't 1000Gb/s (125MB/s), but it's a lot faster than the 0.002Gb/s that tool predicts.
Raptor codes + UDP can saturate any link. Single Stream too. (And guarantee data integrity, so no need for TCP)
Try http://openrq-team.github.io/openrq/ for example.
You are assuming that TCP with current congestion avoidance algorithm is the only transport medium. When you have bigger pipes allowing you more bits to pack/unpack, you might find the era of newer transport protocols that do specific tasks more efficiently while increasing your overall throughput for specific use-cases. I can think of video streaming, gaming, file storage, etc that might add up to consuming the pipe to the ceiling.
Care to clarify? Throughput is determined by the bandwidth-delay product which is a function of bandwidth and, just as critically, latency (literally bandwidth * rtt). And jitter is just variable latency.
The bandwidth delay product is the amount of data in flight. That's not throughput. You can have a huge amount of data in flight on a fast connection just fine. Someone else said the calculator assumes a max window size of 64KB which is extremely unrealistic.
I have a fiber internet connection, the building I live in is wired for it and I just plug my router into the wall.
Anyway, I'd actually agree that it isn't materially much better than cable internet, except I never have to deal with a cable company. When I've had Comcast internet, the connection itself was fine. So, I can see why this isn't super compelling for anyone who doesn't have a huge need for bandwidth.
I think this is part of why they've embraced microwave internet. I have webpass, owned by google fiber, and it's up to 300 mbps^ for under $50 a month. I think it speaks well to your point though: If I could get 10d/1u for $20/month, I totally would. I don't really use the internet that heavily.
What's the latency like with the service? We had a microwave transit link until our fiber was installed and we noticed that we had great speed but horrible latency on the whole.
I have 30/5 for around $60CND a month, I can get 100/10 with my current set up $13CDN more a month.
I haven't bothered upgrading. I have no problems with ping or downloads. My SO and I can both watch Netflix at the same time and we both have Backblaze running. When with stream HD TV or movies from iTunes it works fine and we get amazing quality. I get great ping times on WoW or TF2. I'm not sure what fiber would get me that I'm not getting and I'm sure the vast majority of people feel the same.
Now, if real time VR sports or live concerts ever becomes a thing ...
From what I understood, Fiber wasn't a long term solution for Google. I think they anticipated that they could kick a American infrastructural movement into gear if they gave the other ISPs a real reason to compete.
I don't know if this is Google's response to those ISPs taking a different approach than they wanted, or if this is symptomatic of the company changing overall. Judging by the other ISP's marketing campaigns, competition doesn't seem to be the real message. That's a whole other can of worms.
I would venture to guess that given older company's paths, that it's the latter, and the problem is that they don't want to take big gambles like that; play a more conservative game.
It could also be a number of other factors. Maybe Google thinks Trump is looking to make good on infrastructural promises. It would be prudent of Google to capitalize on that momentum rather than spend their own resources.
Google may well consider Fiber's mission fulfilled. Gigabit connections are proliferating across the country from every major telco. Google's intent was to get internet speeds kickstarted, and they've successfully done just that.
While I can't get gigabit where I currently live for unspecified reasons (despite having a true FTTH connection), there are nearby areas that can, and almost every ISP has some type of gigabit pilot. That never would've happened without Google Fiber.
I think the _real_ answer to our telco issue is to go wireless. It's just so expensive to run real cables in the ground everywhere and the legal situation around who owns those cables, when they have to share with "competitors" (who are ultimately still dependent on the line owner to fill service requests, which means those competitors will always only be able to receive second-tier service), etc., is murky and can depend on the jurisdiction. Wireless is way cheaper and competition in that field is plausible.
While it would be ideal if we could get a reasonable public infrastructure to lease for wireless connections, it wouldn't be mandatory for a semi-competitive environment.
Also possible Google and SpaceX are teaming up. That constellation isn't going to manage or sell itself and Google put $1 billion into SpaceX two years ago.
AFAIK there is a maximum number of phased arrays in an area, something like one array per 5-cit blocks. So this is great if you are in a rural community but it isn't a substitute for high-speed fiber.
The idea is by sticking with LEO satellites vs geosynchronous the ping stays reasonable (~700 miles ~= 9ms vs ~22,236 miles ~= 279ms ping ping) and the bandwidth is much higher than traditional satellite internet. Further you don't need any effort aiming a dish thus vastly reducing installation issues.
It's interesting to me that our cities and their governance are so awful - with their limited voter participation, poor cost control, class warfare politics, crazy fringe political advocacy, and unreasonable franchise agreements - that going into space is considered easy compared to working with city governments to get fibre in the ground.
OneWeb will be putting their first LEO satellites into orbit this year. They raised another $1.2B from Softbank just a couple of months ago, and have the spectrum and launch contracts.
It looks like they will beat both SpaceX and Google to the task - which is unfortunate for them since the founder of OneWeb was involved with attempting to develop the same project with both companies.
SpaceX is looking at much lower costs to LEO which very much changes this equation. They charge around $2,500 per pound right now, but with reusable rockets there internal costs may be under 1,000$/lb. Putting up ~1,400 * 600lb * 1,000$/lb is less than 1 billion dollars to get into space. Worst case they are looking at ~3 billion in launch costs which is hardly an issue for world wide infrastructure.
Now, the costs of these satellites and receiver's will make or break this idea. But, it's surprisingly viable even if they only cover the continental US to start.
Now, the costs of these satellites and receiver's will make or break this idea. But, it's surprisingly viable even if they only cover the continental US to start
They also have to get radio spectrum for the uplink everywhere they operate. Have a good look through the history of Iridium (Iridium PREVIOUS?) and all of the unexpected costs Motorola ran into building and maintaining a satellite fleet.
I can see a situation where the USG would want this constellation to exist.
If you go to the middle east and many third world countries much of the Internet is still satellite. If a particular country wanted a way to insure that they still had access to most of the world's internet traffic (as economies grow and infrastructure is built) they might prefer a constellation of LEO sats capable of carrying the entire planet's traffic in a point to point fashion owned by a US based company who is very reliant on the USG for most of its other business.
I can see a situation where the USG would want this constellation to exist.
But would they want this to exist enough to pay for any of it or have a hand in maintaining it? Beyond how much they already are by awarding SpaceX government and NASA launch contracts?
> It's interesting to me that our cities and their governance are so awful
Most people rarely, if ever, need to deal with municipal departments that regulate infrastructure, health, and safety. As soon as you do, you find out that they're pretty uniformly terrible places with terrible people dealing with terrible things.
A satellite constellation like this will actually be more efficient for long distance communication than fiber as hops will be more or less a straight line between a few sats whereas fiber on the ground often takes crazy paths due to terrain and politics.
If SpaceX can prove reusability, which is looking likely, putting up a constellation like this will become significantly cheaper. They also can just reuse first stages that their own customers already paid for (their customers pay for the flight, not the stage itself).
I don't have SpaceX numbers. But, a constellation like this was supposed to provide ~200 Gbytes per month for 5 billion people, which works out to ~3000 terabytes per second or ~5 terabits per second per satellite at a minimum. (More if they are modeling the ocean.)
> The only business model for fiber that will work to produce the competition, low prices, and world-class data transport we need — certainly in urban areas — is to get local governments involved in overseeing basic, street grid-like “dark” (passive, unlit with electronics) fiber available at a set, wholesale price to a zillion retail providers of access and services. There’s plenty of patient capital sloshing around the US that would be attracted to the steady, reliable returns this kind of investment will return. That investment could be made in the form of private lending or government bonds; the important element is that the resulting basic network be a wholesale facility that any retail actor can use at a reasonable, fair cost.
Google Fiber had promised to operate an open access network[1], but they apparently changed their mind before they launched.
If you live in San Francisco, sign-up for Sonic Fiber. Even if Sonic hasn't reached your neighborhood (or city) yet, sign up now because it helps them with financial planning of their build out. If you can't sign up because Sonic has no existing plans for your neighborhood or city, call Sonic and demand to sign up.
I just got Sonic fiber service a few months ago, and it's been great. I had signed up nearly a year prior, as soon as my neighborhood could register, and I'm glad I did.
Sonic is persevering and succeeding. And profiting, apparently, at only $40/month! They're besting Comcast and AT&T without the whinging and excuse making. Not that they don't gripe about the bureaucracy and NIMBY-erected barriers, but they're committed. And they should be supported; not simply to be socially conscious, but because they deliver. The more [prospective] customers they have the more quickly they can build out.
If you don't know the backstory in San Francisco--both AT&T and Sonic spent years working with the City on fiber plans. At some point AT&T decided that if they weren't going to have a monopoly, they'd rather sabotage things by dragging things out in the hopes that Sonic would bleed cash and exit the market. The big hold up, IIRC, was NIMBY opposition to street-level cabinets. Also, Sonic was hoping for permits for micro-trenching. The city refused to permit micro-trenching, and AFAIK the cabinet issue still hasn't been fully resolved. But as best I can tell, Sonic decided to make lemonade from lemons, got permission to hang fiber from utility poles, and began building out a network in the Western half of the city (i.e. the parts with utility poles instead of underground conduits). Instead of making excuses or going home with their ball like the big guys tend to do, they've pushed forward as best they could.
Not unless the city changes its tune on micro-trenching. It's not financially viable to dig up the street just to lay fiber for the last segment. At least, not for a small company like Sonic.
Some supervisors have recently proffered (again) plans for the city to lay fiber underground. Unrelated, there are also plans to move the existing aboveground utilities in the outer neighborhoods below ground. Both sound like a colossal waste of money unless paired with required work like sewer replacement. In any event, like the sewer work I can't see how the timeline would be any less than a decade or two. (If you Google news articles discussing plans to move utilities underground you can find cost estimates. Spoiler: it's unfathomably expensive!)
Aside from micro-trenching, I think the best hope would be FTTN/FTTC. But the holdup there are the NIMBYs worried about larger utility cabinets on sidewalks. And because AT&T isn't keen on competing with Sonic, who would also benefit from newer cabinets, they've put that work on the back burner. Like Comcast I think AT&T has decided to opportunistically improve their network. So, for example, I'm sure all those new buildings in SOMA are getting fiber. But if you're in an older neighborhood, theoretically they may never come; not with FTTH or FTTN.
There's an epic, multi-year thread discussing all of these San Francisco issues.
(Probably best to go to the last page and work backwards.) The CEO regularly answers questions there. But Sonic tries to keep secret from AT&T and Comcast the details of their expansion plans. You may not be able to get any answers to the most important question, especially if you're not in the Sunset or Richmond.
The same questions tend to be asked repeatedly. If you read the last two dozen pages or so you've basically read the whole thing, especially regarding the more recent developments.
Every month or so last year I went back to that thread and could literally track Sonic's progress westward in the Outer Richmond, starting from the central office at Geary Blvd & 9th Ave. In fact, IIRC that's how news broke about the Richmond build out; people reported in that thread suspicious Sonic activity at the central office and nearby.
Also, if you read the CEO's, Dane's, comments, you begin to get a sense of the regulatory landscape they're treading. I think among the 2014-2015 posts, mostly discussing the Sunset, are some good posts from Dane explaining delays related to cabinet installation, including AT&T's behavior.
Fiber has operating margins of 99%. Yes there's a big upfront cost. But it recoups quickly and becomes pure profit. Goldman Sachs estimated the cost to wire the whole country at a mere $140 billion [1].
Apple has $230 billion cash on hand. Microsoft has $100 billion. Alphabet has $73 billion. There's no shortage of capital to start with metropolitan areas.
The issue isn't up front costs or capital. The issue is politics and rent seeking incumbents.
Hopefully the more competitive mobile marketplace and 5G will free us from the tyranny of Comcast.
That article appears to be misinterpreting the quote from the Goldman report. It says it would take 70B to wire up 50 million homes, which is less than half. The article then just doubles that figure and assumes that is what a nationwide deployment would cost.
That is flawed for two reasons:
1) First, 50 million homes is more like 40%. "less than half" isn't half.
2) Not all homes are equal. Presumably Goldman meant the easiest/most profitable 50 million homes. It costs much much much much more to wire up rural and exurban homes.
Verizon spent 15bn wiring 17 million houses, but it only did rich areas. And they only got 4 million of those houses to actually sign up. Nearly 4k capital outlay per subscriber is a lot for a service that only costs 75 bucks a month.
>Apple has $230 billion cash on hand. Microsoft has $100 billion. Alphabet has $73 billion. There's no shortage of capital to start with metropolitan areas.
Yea but those companies won't use that capital on a relatively low margin industry like telecom. There is a reason Verizon is selling off as much wireline as it can. It's really not a great investment.
Instead of believing fake news, you could actually look at financial statements. Here's the financials on Chattanooga's gigabit network: https://static.epb.com/annual-reports/2016. Operating revenues from fiber was $122m. Operating cost was $78m.
So if you're paying $70 for gigabit, $45 are immediately eaten up by operating expenses (customer service, maintenance, etc.). Out of the $25 you have left, you gotta pay for the thousands of dollars you spent hooking up that customer, continuing equipment upgrades, etc.
I wouldn't propose any single company pay that cost out of pocket up front. The point is that $140 in private infrastructure isn't as big of a number as people think. What's holding it back is NOT raising capital.
Verizon spends upwards of 10 billion a year on infrastructure. They might spend over a 100 billion in the next 10 years all by themselves. Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint combined will spend god knows how much.
There are many roadblocks to widespread fiber. Capital and profit are not among them.
One such roadblock apparently being that VZ is getting good return on its wireless spend, but putting that money into fiber would not generate the returns.
The private market is working as it should: not plowing money into things that don't have the ROI. The roadblock to fiber is that it is a boondoggle only government would like.
It's heavily local politics. Often having to do with utility pole ownership and rights. Here's a classic article for Seattle's situation. Over 18 months just to survey and "make ready" an existing pole. http://crosscut.com/2014/12/google-fiber-never-come-seattle-...
If you're the incumbent is can often be best to freeze the system. Sure you don't get to profit or benefit from progress. But no one else does either. Not a bad place to be if you're the presently entrenched winner.
Yes, broadband has a 97% profit margin if you attribute all of the costs of maintaining and operating the network to the TV service, and ignore the costs of building the network in the first place.
they do seem very willing to give rather long (12-24 month) massive discounts to new customers and people who threaten to leave. would seem to be in line with huge margins that they would behave that way.
That is in line with how low marginal cost businesses work. Each new customer is essentially free to them. But the first one is massively expensive. It makes sense to give massive discounts to keep people or to get them to sign up.
Because it's even more profitable for them to not deploy fiber, so that their political allies can continue to use the need to "encourage additional investment in broadband" as an excuse for policies that mostly serve to give them more money without increasing service.
If there wasn't an access problem, you couldn't blame the access problem on policy limitations holding back the big providers.
Also some variation of "never attribute to malice/greed what can be attributed to sheer laziness/neglect" probably applies here too. The incumbents don't have to do anything to keep margins stable, and so laziness implies they won't bother to do anything but the bare minimum.
(See also: every other bit of crumbling infrastructure.)
Because lobbying for more favorable regulation that makes your existing service more profitable under the premise that it will encourage you to add new service you have no intention of adding is only profitable for major existing incumbents, which Google isn't in the relevant space.
ATT is deploying lots of fiber lately, take a look at their map[1]. It takes a lot of time and labor to deploy though, so it may show a city on their map when they haven't covered very much of it. In terms of organization, they have huge advantages over google: they have a local labor force, including big equipment for running new street level cable -- because they need it occasionally; they have existing customers they can sell to and project use for; they already know how to get access to poles and navigate local government processes, because they've been building street level boxes forever.
Also, I don't know if Google was doing it, but ATT is running fiber on streets with factory spliced connectors custom sized to run to the poles that are already present, so the street team doesn't have to do any splicing.
Households in US: 110 million. Households in US w/ broadband: 102 million. So let's say 50 million fiber subscribers
140 billion / 50 million subscribers / $815 revenue per subscriber per year = 3.4 years
Three and a half years to recoup? Not bad! Installing fiber in dense neighborhoods with a high subscriber rate should recoup very quickly. It'd take a little longer in rural areas and poor areas. But there is absolutely no good reason for every metropolitan area in the US to not have gigabit fiber.
It cost Verizon at least $26 billion,[1] to wire up 7 million subscribers, or about $3,700 per subscriber. Verizon's network is in dense northeastern/midatlantic states, so in reality much more than that once you start wiring up the rest of the country. Chattanooga's network was about $5,500 per subscriber.
The gross operating margin for Chattanooga's gigabit system is under 40%.[2] So $336 per year.
> 140 billion / 50 million subscribers / $815 revenue per subscriber per year = 3.4 years
$3,700 per subscriber / $336 revenue per subscriber per year = 11 years. You've broken even just in time for the next around of upgrades!
> Installing fiber in dense neighborhoods with a high subscriber rate should recoup very quickly
Verizon only averages about 33% uptake rate, and that's by avoiding low-income inner cities or sparse rural areas.
[1] The reports are $23 billion through 2010. Don't have records after that, but e.g. it spent $3 billion in NYC alone since then. The subscriber count is 2016.
[2] Verizon's margin is quite a bit less than that (single digits), but let's assume in this hypothetical that you're not maintaining a legacy POTS network and don't have a unionized workforce.
I should point out that the above assumes you're content making no profit during that 10 years. If you want to eke out a 5% annual return on your $3,700 investment, your pay-off time is 24 years.
That makes no sense unless we are suggesting that minorities are different in their ability to get internet service. The rest of the sentence uses "poor people" -- which could be accurate, but implying minorities by virtue of being minorities are less able to get internet access is patently racist. Socio-economics does have an influence but being a minority is not in itself a factor. Most rural Americans are white and they are more likely to be "left behind" than a minority living in Jersey City with access to FIOS -- if you adjust for income.
>> But although the cost of fiber — the glass itself — has fallen through the floor, and the gear needed to deliver signals over fiber has gotten cheaper over time, 80 percent or more of the cost of installing fiber is labor.
Surely Google must've known that though. The article seems to say they're just not making money fast enough and that's because of labor, and that cost won't drop, but that seems like a totally obvious thing they would've known about, doesn't it?
My gut reaction is always to wonder how a company this big can miss simple things, but I've worked for enough big companies to know how often critical elements of big decisions get delegated to a single person. You might think, 'how can a multibillion dollar company be so stupid' but it's really some guy named Bill who has 14 direct reports and can't even get enough server hardware unless he tells tall tales.
The soberest people in the organization don't get promoted often, and don't get their ideas approved because they are too conservative. They make small promises and say No a lot. Boring. It's always the loudmouth who goes off half-cocked that gets attention.
Yeah. Everything I've read it's because they've lost the lobbying war with incumbents.
Incumbents (in those locations they are pausing) used their lobbyists, political connections, right of ways, existing contracts, etc. To block, delay and vastly increase the time and costs for Google. Driving Google to go wireless.
[edit] here in Austin (where they didn't lose the lobbying war) it's full steam ahead. They have been continually spreading across city. Dug trenches at coworker's house last week.
> Everything I've read it's because they've lost the lobbying war with incumbents.
Like what? There have been some lobbying skirmishes. But where was the big lobbying war they lost that prevented them from bringing Fiber to New York, Philly, SF, Chicago, DC, LA, or pretty much any major city?
Because the existing cities are enough of a proxy war with the incumbents? Louisville's OTMR lawsuit involves AT&T and Spectrum (Charter/Time Warner). Nashville's involves AT&T and Comcast. That's a big majority of the incumbents right there covered by just two cities on the Google Fiber interest map, in already relatively low regulated states.
I think the lawsuits are kinda stupid, but saying they amount to a "proxy war" is ridiculous. Any infrastructure deployment will involve lawsuits to resolve competing rights to physical property. It's not like the incumbents are invoking some secret "we are guaranteed a monopoly in Louisville/Nashville" law. These are boring lawsuits about whether Google can touch/move AT&T/Spectrum's property while deploying its own infrastructure.
Verizon/AT&T/TMO/Sprint somehow manage to build cell networks despite dealing with hundreds of lawsuits in connection with cell tower siting. It's naive to assert that it's these two lawsuits stopping Google from building a service it would otherwise build.
I used "proxy war" very intentionally. A) Proxy: Google isn't even fighting these particular lawsuits directly, the cities themselves are. B) War: These examples are the first two off the top of my head out of many. As you point out there are hundreds of "boring lawsuits" involved in this process. There are many battles in a war, these are two of them as examples of the war between Google and incumbents.
In a war, you pick your theaters and you pick your battles. The question was "Why isn't Google Fiber fighting in theaters of war that are practically begging for it when they are already spread thin across a number of theaters?" and the answer I'm pointing to is probably "Because they are trying to pick their theaters/battles." Whether or not you think these example lawsuits are stupid is beside that core point of "Because they are trying to pick their theaters/battles."
Google obviously knew that; they may have thought that revenue over time would justify the high build-out costs (and their preferred profitability time horizon may have changed with corporate changes at Alphabet since then), or the reorg to Access may have given a broader mission than Fiber previously had and they may actually just be taking a real pause to evaluate whether the previous approach is really the best, given the tools available, for the new mission.
It's hard to know what Google was thinking since they've never said much. Installation labor of Google Fiber should be far lower than FIOS/GigaPower due to Google's "rally" redlining model, but we don't know if that panned out.
Google Fiber reminds me of Uber's business model; it looks like it can never become profitable yet everybody loves it.
I really cannot believe anyone actually though that Google was serious about bringing fiber to a huge area. They cherry picked cheap and easy areas to install. Their purpose was to light a fire under the existing telcos in order to protect their core business which relies on the internet. They never wanted to be in the ISP business, ads are way more profitable.
Digging up the ground or putting wires on the poles is very difficult, and costs a ton of money. This can be improved with regulation and removal of onerous regulation, but it is still the case now.
You have companies like Comcast which are the most loathed in the USA and you would think someone would certainly want to compete in a tremendous industry against a hated competitor. It is just too much to get started. The only real solution is to have the lines built and maintained by the government, and providers can lease them to provide service.
Google Fiber suffered the same fate that many other pet projects do at Google.
Google got bored when it wasn't as easy as a few steps, and just dumped the project. Also the whole needing "customer service" thing doesn't fit with the Google life either.
It was a nice gesture, but if they had put forth any actual effort into it they would have had an actual rollout in the market.
Still in operation in what, just a handful of markets? So it's the classic "works great for me, but the rest of the country forget em".
By those metrics Comcast is doing fantastic considering I've only had two outages with them while living on the West Coast, and they have a much larger market.
The google fiber (and customer service at Google in general) rollout is a complete joke for 2016, 2017 standards. Google has the time, capital, and resources to hit more markets. They got bored and the project is literally halted. Ask Louisville, they are still waiting for their "rollout" (which, odds are, isn't happening).
Right? I've got Google Fiber in my house and it's awesome. The hardware is solid, installation was fast. It's cheap and more reliable than my last TWC service was...
Not to mention when I called to cancel my TWC service the "retention specialist" straight up told me blatant indefensible lies to try and retain me.
TWC is one of the most dishonest companies I've ever dealt with. I second the fact about lying...absolutely hate that company, couldn't believe how I went through one year of their "service".
I know this post is old now... but here are some pictures of how Google left my neighborhood. It's been 8 months since they started construction, doesn't seem like they are done and we are told, "A cleanup crew will be by shortly..." We've been told that for 3+ months now.
Snapped these while walking my dogs... these only represent a small sample of the boxes on my street...
The work seems very sloppy... boxes not level in the lawns (means we forever can't use a lawn mower and have to bust out our edgers to trim around it), not enough dirt used, the wrong grass / sod planted (planting the wrong kind of grass is basically planting noxious weeds in a person's lawn... it's a huge pain to fix), sprinkler systems left broken (wastes water / kills the entire lawn if not fixed quickly)...
PS: Imgur is a fickle bitch this morning. Been slowly trying to add captions but it keeps spitting out errors.
I had a lecturer in a class on infrastructure policy at (German) university who was an ICT exec and always said that the first rule of the business was "Wer gräbt, verliert." (you dig, you lose).
Does anyone know what's going on with Google fiber in Atlanta ? Did they kill it midway, or will they still cover Atlanta ? Don't see much activity on their site.
Seems like they are focusing on multi-family condos/apartments. I don't see much activity either - they started in a few residential neighborhoods intown but growth has stalled.
It's incredibly frustrating - I don't even care if it's the same price (or more) than Comcast. I just want options. Would gladly pay good money for a reliable fast connection.
I have a Google Fiber outlet in my apartment and am signed up for once they get to my neighborhood. Rumor has it that will be 4/18. I saw a few installation trucks when I moved here last year but haven't seen one since probably Sep. or Oct. I think I only know 1 person who actually has it.
I remembered the story how Google created a 411 service that would connect to their search product. Microsoft scrambled to make something similar. At some point, Google discontinued it. The reason? By then, They had collected a lot of voice samples for training their voice recognition system. (And likely, it was easier to support a smartphone app than to support a call-in service).
When I was reading about Google Cloud Spanner, something struck me. Google Cloud Spanner was able to do what it does, not because of atomic clocks, but because Google has super-reliable private fiber that connects their data centers together. And I started wondering -- what was the hidden purpose of Google Fiber -- aside from stirring up the consumer broadband market?
One possible reason is that services like YouTube and Google’s messaging-app-of-the-week would require lots of bandwidth and Google definitely benefits from having those services be practical for as many people as possible. If 50% of your friends can’t realistically use online services because $ISP sucks at downloading lots of data, there is a problem.
The reason Spanner was possible is because Google does NOT use standard TCP/IP. Google created a logical circuit switch network that is determinate versus IP nondeterminat.
> what was the hidden purpose of Google Fiber -- aside from stirring up the consumer broadband market?
Isn't it obvious? So they can collect information about you at the packet level. There's only so much information you can get from people visiting your web properties or using your browser. When customers use your pipe, now you can track _everything_.
HTTPS still lets you know which sites you're visiting (Hostname has to be unencrypted).
But there's more than just web traffic. Say you like to play on your PS4 every night at 6. Now Google knows that. Run your own SSH server, OpenVPN, and mail server? Google knows that, and has profiled you as a "developer". And so on. Think big, man.
"... rural stories of telcos cutting off even crappy DSL service any time anyone stops a subscription; realtors are tearing their hair out trying to ensure that some narrow drip of data will be available to a new buyer of a home..."
I've seen this with my own eyes. When my wife's grandmother sold her house on 10 acres in west Georgia just outside of Carrollton (which is a biggish small town), she had to transfer her AT&T account along with her phone number of 30+ years to the buyer just so that they could keep internet service running. This is the kind of place where your cell phone signal drops to nothing as you turn onto the dirt road a mile from the house.
I wonder about using last-mile wireless as a way to distribute fiber internet. Something like a fiber-connected wireless hub that provides service to customers within a quarter-mile. At a density of 10000 households per square mile (pretty high) your service area is about 0.15 square miles and you need 1.5 Tbps bandwidth or so in the air around a hub for 1 Gbps service to the household. Feasible? It's a stretch, but I assumed a very high density of customers and I think many people would be happy with 100 Mbps.
I'm willing to bet the real catalyst to ISP competition will be LEO satellite constellations like the one SpaceX has mentioned they're working on. Much better ping, cheaper/faster than wiring up entire cities and having to dig through streets. This could actually become a huge source of revenue for them to fund their mars initiative. Imagine once several companies do that, you could pick whichever ISP you want and just have them mail you a receiver to put outside your window.
SpaceX wants to launch 4,425 satellites into low-Earth orbits, with altitudes ranging from 715 miles to 823 miles. By contrast, the existing HughesNet satellite network has an altitude of 22,000 miles.
<...>
SpaceX expects its own latencies to be between 25 and 35ms, similar to the latencies measured for wired Internet services. Current satellite ISPs have latencies of 600ms or more, according to FCC measurements.
SpaceX plans to have satellites at 1,100 kilometers (680 mi) altitude unlike previous attempts / current offerings. Latency would be closer to 25-35 ms.
I live in Austin and the rollout in my neighborhood has been a debacle. Dumpster fire from the get go. I can only imagine the mountain of money Google has dumped into Google Fiber at this point.
They started work back in August, marking gas and water pipes. 8 months later (today), I'd say less than 50% of the homes have service hooked up... they still have holes in some people's yards, clear evidence of broken sprinkler lines, and they still have a lot of cleanup left to do.
Every step has been painful. As a homeowner, Google is really miserable to deal with -- opting to punt the responsibility for managing the project to various contractors at each stage. Nobody from Google actually ever replies to issues. Nobody from Google ever actually walks the neighborhood to make sure the job is done correctly.
Round 1... first dig... they went through and dug holes for boxes in our yards. Destroyed a lot of sprinklers. Left it sit in my yard for a month with a big sheet of plywood over the hold... and no movement. Killed large areas of my lawn and flower beds not being able to water them.
Round 2... digging in the street... they dug a small channel in the street, and managed to cut a number of my neighbors water lines or water return lines. For a week some people had to stay in hotels because they had no water / no drainage in their homes. I was lucky, this didn't happen to me but did happen to my next door neighbor.
Round 3... putting the box in the front lawn... It was clear the work was being done by the lowest bidder. Boxes put in crooked, not flush with the lawn, so you couldn't drive a lawn mower over them after. They sent a repair crew around to fix lawns up... they used the wrong grass types, and they put sprinklers back random places... for me they broke 2 sprinklers heads but only put one back... and put it back so it could only really water my driveway. Also they "fixed" the sprinklers with electrical tape joining the PVC and it just broke the moment you turned the system on... more signs they were just using the lowest bidders for the work. Cost me an entire weekend to fix it all up again. (Still my lawn has the wrong grass growing in, looks like shit...)
Round 4... the line from the box to the house... another lowest bidder job. The guy putting it in put in hated sprinklers. That's the only explanation. He broke out 25 feet of line, 5 sprinkler heads -- he had to know he was breaking pipes, if you dig with a shovel you can feel the difference between dirt and digging into a PVC pipe. He also broke a bunch of pavers and just sort of tossed the pieces next to a tree; would have taken him less energy to lift them up. Finally, there were some cut pieces of pipe, some wires... broken pavers... he just tossed them into my flower beds.
Round 5... installation in the home. Was probably the least painful, but still far from professional. Having a contractor wear little boot covers is pretty common... the guy even showed up with them when he first came in, but at some point he just stopped putting them on and tracked mud all over my house. Then he moved my TV stand and left it in the middle of the room. (That's minor, easy to fix.)
So here's what happened when you call Google...
1) Nothing. You don't hear back, you don't get an email. You're like, "Well, I don't... they don't care... what do I do?"
2) Then some random contractor calls you to tell you that they got your message, but it wasn't their fault. They assure you they will talk to the contractor who was responsible and give you his number so you can follow up. When you call the number they give you, they clearly never followed up as it's his first time hearing from you and have you to re-tell / re-send the photos to the new guy's email.
3) Then you get the run around. "Oh, we're sending a crew to fix it all once we are done... may be a few weeks, sit tight." You wait... phone tag, and finally you just say, "Fuck it, I guess I'll eat the cost of fixing this myself." (I was fortunate enough to finally -- after about 30 emails / calls with photos of every step -- to get a refund check for the damages to cover my out of pocket expenses. But when my neighbors asked for the same treatment, they were told, "Sorry it's not in our budget to reimburse people who don't want to wait for our crews to do the repairs.")
It's been such a shit show.
And at the end of the day... I haven't seen speeds over 420 down, 80 up. I was getting 290 down from Time Warner. Can't say it's a noticeable improvement for anything. Not at all worth the hassle we went through to get this.
As someone also in Austin with G.Fiber, an opposing anecdote:
They were in and out of the neighborhood probably a month, month and half. Filled in the holes and reseeded where they dug up lawns. Patched up the street pretty well too. It was uneventful.
The contracted out installer couldn't understand I didn't want the Google Fiber box, so I had to figure out how to do that myself. That was my only issue.
P.S. If you're only getting 420 down, you might be CPU limited on network hardware. I know my router is around that speed (an option I have enabled disables hardware acceleration). 420 is fast enough such that I don't care about upgrading it.
Glad you had a good experience! I'm in Circle C, and I know that my friends in condos downtown said it seemed pretty painless for them. I was so excited to get this and be able to cancel Time Warner... Maybe in a year I'll be happy with it, but it's been a huge hassle dealing with the construction for as long as we have.
I have a feeling from observations at my parent's house that 'suburbia' is largely an under-documented mess (generally).
I think any fiber provider would have a better time if they used a model more like the water company, with a strong meter box at the curb and it being the customer's responsibility to get the last tens of feet hooked up the way they like.
Too bad this type of demarcation won't work for fiber.
Edit:
Though thinking about it, a non-passive termination unit and having a simple (gig) Ethernet port there WOULD be better than running fiber under someone's lawn... they'd just need lightning protection at both ends of the copper.
I wouldn't doubt that suburbia is a mess... I would expect city lines (like water lines and drainage lines) to be fairly accurate in the maps... but who knows. If I'm using a machine to cut through concrete, or a backhoe to dig a hole in the yard for a fiber box... yeah I wouldn't be able to tell if I was damaging a pipe as I went. If I was digging by hand though... I should totally be able to tell if I'm digging in dirt or breaking a pipe.
I installed my sprinkler system, and have done some work on it over the years. I had to avoid damaging other sprinkler pipe and my old cables from Time Warner / AT & T lines that were in the ground. You just dig sort of carefully and it's not hard to avoid breaking things. My gripe with Google is that they aren't hiring people who pay attention, and -- more importantly -- they aren't following up with adequate supervision of the work. (I doubt the contractor company is doing any training past, "Here's a shovel," or checking SSNs of their workers... which is more indicative of Texas than Google... but Google should know the work has to be supervised and verified.)
It's a mess of 5+ contracting companies tripping all over each other and blaming one another and ultimately the homeowners are just left to clean up the mess and pay for the damages themselves. We were promised that everything would be repaired and returned to the original state... and we trusted that Google wouldn't screw us over. They have done so much marketing for Google Fiber... I think it's been like 5 years since we heard it was coming. Take all that excitement and turn it into disappointment... it's bitter. (And add in all the wasted time trying to get them to fix it -- I'd be better off just fixing it all myself since I have to do it myself in the end anyway.)
But back to your comments... I think AT&T used a system similar to what you are describing. They put the line into the box on the street, and then the homeowner had to pay an installation fee to get a contractor out to run the line from the box to our house. When I had it installed I had to call 311 and get the lines marked before they came, and was asked to mark sprinkler lines... ultimately I had AT&T's service for under a month... there was something seriously wrong with it, I couldn't ever get a speed over like 3 down, 1 up (and was promised 30). Their support wasn't able to do anything about it, the store that sold me the service didn't even offer support, and after 3 weeks of that I just said the hell with it and switched back to Time Warner.
My experience aside... I think that very few people opted to pay the installation fee for AT&T so they lost money running boxes out and not getting people to sign up. With Google Fiber, I know they struck a deal with our HOA and we didn't have the option not to have boxes installed on hour homes -- one of my neighbors was like, "I don't want you digging in my yard at all... I don't care about this service." And she was given a letter from the HOA telling her she had to let Google do their thing. Her drip irrigation and stonework were all jacked up in the process... she was pissed. She had like some cement pavers of her kids handprints from when they were little... Google's crew just smashed through them.
Anyway sorry for the book... this is still a bit of a raw subject for me.
You didn't provide sufficient information, however:
Most areas have easements for rights of way and roads that nibble at one or more sides of 'property'; because what good is land if there's no way of getting things to/from it.
It is unwise for a property owner to put anything they want to retain within such an area. It's quite likely that the family wasn't thinking about the parts of their property that weren't within such easements or the paths utilities were talking out of sight. Out of sight, out of mind.
I don't have pictures on me, but the pavers that were damaged were on the side of the driveway near the house, like when you get out of your car you'd see them. (Pavers are like little 2-inch thick pieces of cement, easy to pry up, that part takes like 10 seconds if you have a shovel... the installers just smashed through them -- and look, the kind of person who would just see a kids handprints and decide, "Cool, I'll smash that..." that's not the kind of person I want on my property.)
Situation would have been easily avoidable if they had let us know where they were planning to dig -- and they easily could have, they spray painted everything else around the yard / street. If they let us know, we could have moved the pavers and things ourselves. (And again, the only communication we had told us, "Don't worry, they will put everything back like it was before when they are done... they are professionals... it's Google...")
Their routes from the boxes to the homes weren't always the most logical. And it's not reasonable to expect a homeowner to take everything out of their yard before a dig.
Google fiber was installed in my hood in Austin. It went fine, google support was very responsive and friendly, everything worked first time, no damage, very clean install, only a tiny channel dug in the yard, it has been great. I didn't have to do anything except sign up.
Well here in metro Atlanta, if you can call being thirty miles or more out still being in metro we have fiber from AT&T. I live in hickville as some would call it, yet the county which is not of the bigger counties in this area has a lot of fiber.
The costs must be horrible, when going through the subdivisions near me they had people digging up lawns, guiding pipe under roads/drives, the whole nine yards. Props to them for not destroying my lawn as they only dug to get the pipe pushing contraption in and went as far as they could.
Now from I could tell AT&T moved because they did not want to have to ride another companies fiber. So unless fiber goes utility like electricity, water, and gas, its going to be who can invest first which isn't conducive to getting fiber deployed because they will certainly only go where density is high
The idea that there is tons of private capital sloshing around wanting to invest in municipal fiber is ridiculous. Baltimore and LA have been soliciting bidders for years to build such networks without success.
I think the author is saying there are municipal bond investors who would finance the deal (via the municipality) were there successful responses to the bids you reference.
Exactly. There are always willing lenders when the borrower has the sovereign power to tax so it can repay the debt. But apparently there are fewer willing investors who are willing to sink money into something that apparently is of little use and that, therefore, puts their capital at substantial risk.
What the FTTH proponents really want is a huge subsidy for an investment whose payoff is questionable, especially in an era when 4G LTE blankets the countryside and wireless operators are yet again selling "unlimited" data. Yeah, "unlimited" has limits...but wireless is improving, yet despite that, people want government to plow billions into laying wires to people's houses. Google tried it and it's apparently not profitable, so let's have government toss money into this sinkhole.
Where's the subsidy? These projects are usually paid for through usage fees, not taxation.
There is a lot of money that will only invest in Triple-A rated bonds. Local governments have the scale, return-on-investment horizon, and political willpower that private ventures lack.
The funding is easier to secure at lower cost because the investment is less risky. It's not a risk-free venture, but (worst case scenario) everyone has to pay double the projected cost and we end up with the standard Comcast bill. I would prefer to send that money to my local government than to Comcast for perpetuity.
Can someone tell me what the point of fiber is exactly? What use is it when pretty much every server rate limits its connection to you to below your cable throughout anyway? What difference would the user see?
It's useful when you have multiple streams in a household. In my 3 person household, a typical evening might have my son on Youtube, my wife and I streaming a TV show (sometimes 2 shows if we can't agree on what to watch) and light web surfing on our personal devices if the show isn't one that demands full attention. That all adds up. I've got 50/50 service and it's fine. 4K streaming would make it not so fine however.
How are (say) the 100-200 Mbps connections provided through regular cable not sufficient for this? And is all this fight really over being able to stream 3+ different 4k video streams? It seems like such a niche and low priority first world problem that if these are really the concerns I'm almost glad they're not being addressed. Is there really no other better use case people are fighting for here?
DOCSIS has a very difficult time providing 100+ Mib/s connections. It's really only possible when the distance to the cabinet is less than 1 km and the number of clients served by that cabinet is less than 50. This is why cable companies are able to offer 300 Mib/s connections in urban areas that have a cabinet for every block, but struggle to deliver 50 Mib/s connections in suburbs where a whole neighborhood must share a single cabinet. The cost of installing enough cabinets to give everyone 100+ Mib/s rapidly approaches the cost of fiber-to-the-premises as population density drops.
There is also the issue of the asynchronous nature of DOCSIS. Cable companies must make a trade-off between upstream and downstream bandwith, and tend to assume that people value downstream much more. This is why you see hilarious allocations like 300 Mib/s down and only 5 Mib/s up.
Agreed. My 100MBit down DOCSIS connection has only 7MBit up provisioned and the ACKs for 100MBit takes 2MBits of that 7 (and whatever traffic shaping box the cable co uses has horrible queuing behavior if you transit more than 6.6 for more than a few minutes, so I have it rate-limited at 6.5MBits on my router). So if I have a 100MBit download running, I actually only have 4.5MBit upload capacity free.
The cable companies might be changing this. I'm in suburbia, consistently get 125/25, and noticed the other day on Comcast's site that I can get 300Mb down if I want to upgrade.
Because cable QOS sucks. Both technical QOS and service from the vendor. I have a 16Mb connection right now through TWC/Spectrum. In the last year, it's gone out at least 15 times, usually during primetime. My upload speed is horrible, roughly 1.5mbps. In my town, a new fiber vendor is bringing FTTH, charging $65 for 100mb/sec, and $100 for gigE. This is symmetrical too, and upload speeds are important for good offsite backups etc. My vendor allows self-hosting, basically with the statement that as long as you're not doing anything illegal, you can use the pipe as you see fit. Try running an smtp host on TWC or the other bigCo vendors.
>And is all this fight really over being able to stream 3+ different 4k video streams?
Shit, three 4k streams should work with 110 mbit cable service that is pretty standard across the country. Gbit is more like 30.
I have 80mbit. I'd only pay maybe 10 bucks extra a month for Gbit. And I download copious amounts of video from usenet. TV shows already take under 5 minutes.
Williams communications ran fiber inside old gas/oil pipelines. [0]
Somebody somewhere will have to touch every household for some other reason and will piggyback fiber. An excuse for the last mile won't be for the last mile but for some other reason. Probably some hardware install or new gadget.
> And the only thing that will make those wireless connections competitive is firm public control over conduits and poles so as to ensure no monopolist bosses us around.
Seems like an oversimplification. City government workers are also perfectly capable of bossing us around.
If it's not a greedy monopoly (e.g. Time Warner Cable) defending its own interests, it will probably be an equally greedy collection of city workers and local politicians defending their own interests.
My need for fibre diminished after I started needing some combination of a VPN and Tor whenever I browsed political, sensitive or related content on the Internet. (I don't imagine this is a common phenomenon.)
"So far, no one has cracked the nut of getting extremely high-capacity wireless signals reliably through walls and doors"
Yes, they have. Maybe not fiber speeds.
The problem here is that people value freedom at zero but value entertainment (or even just big numbers on an advertisement) at non-zero.
That's the thing that bothers me about monopoly talk. It's no longer that some company owns all the critical infrastrucutre or all the production of critical goods. We are talking about a monopoly on exyraordinarily high speed internet which is really only used for entertainment.
Where? The theory is there. Experimental equipment exists. But something that can be deployed at scale to provide 100+Mb/s to each and every household in an area simultaneously?
The only people claiming this exists are the marketing departments of wireless carriers, who not coincidentally have an interest in discouraging wired infrastructure investment.
Theory is one thing. Scaling it and getting it into production is often the truly hard part--because technology, because business, because politics. And it's possible that the state of the art in wireless will trail the state of the art in fiber optics for quite some time.
I agree with your other points, though. People lack imagination about the potential of high-speed access. Although, that potential will be hard to realize unless and until those speeds become pervasive. Those speeds can't spur innovation and change until a large, viable market of potential consumers exists. So it's not only a collective action dilemma at the local level, but at the national level as well.
I wish there was a good account of the early days of broadcast television when ABC/CBS/NBC was really innovating technically in broadcasting and transmission before they became just as delivery systems.
I could then compare it to what's happening with Google as they shift from doing amazing things (e.g., make search before figuring out adwords) to only doing things that deliver ads better.
Google Fiber will allow for untold future revenue streams if figured out. But it seems like Alphabet is giving up because it's hard and uncertain, while Adwords keeps minting easier money.
If Google truly drops fiber it means they are truly just ad and not tech. Similarly if they ever drop Android (since it doesn't make them money).
I was under the impression that it was never meant to succeed as a business, it was merely a proof of concept. That despite the lobbying and stalling tactics of national ISPs, progress could still be made to improve infrastructure despite the incessant arguments to the contrary.
That's an interesting assertion, but not supported by any evidence that I can see. And OTOH, there is direct contradictory evidence suggesting that there is another viable business model for building this kind of infrastructure: non-profit member-owned cooperatives. The same kind that provide telephone, cable and electric service all over the country[1].
Note that I'm not saying that cooperatives are a panacea, but their existence is evidence that other options are available. And before somebody screams "but aren't they all subsidized by the government", I would argue that if the kind long-term stable returns that the author of TFA speaks of are really available, then there's no reason to think that a coop couldn't get a loan (or equity investment) from private institutions.
My guess is that the biggest thing preventing this kind of thing from happening more often is exactly the amount of red-tape and government regulation involved.
[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_cooperative