from the for-faster-story-submissions dept.
Noting that today's major providers lack any hint of competitive activity, the headline at El Reg reads Google reveals where AT&T, Comcast, Time Warner Cable Will Next Offer Gbps Broadband
The advertising giant said on Tuesday it will next roll out high-speed connections to 18 cities in and around Atlanta, GA; Charlotte, NC; Raleigh-Durham, NC; and Nashville, TN.
[...]The expansion will bring the total number of areas with Google Fiber deployments to seven: the California biz already offers fiber broadband in and around Kansas City, MO; Austin, TX; and Provo, UT.
[...]Google charges $70 a month for gigabit internet, $120 if you want TV with it, or free if you're happy with 5Mbit/s for the downlink. Only the freebie option requires a $300 installation fee. Despite the price tag, the service is hotly anticipated in the few chosen cities.
[...]Later this year, the Chocolate Factory will also make its decision on where the next set of Fiber rollouts will take place. Five areas are being considered: Portland, OR; San Jose, CA; Salt Lake City, UT; Phoenix, AZ; and San Antonio, TX.
Related Stories
Google is reportedly laying plans to enter the wireless phone service business, in competition with Verizon and AT&T and in co-opetition with T-Mobile and Sprint. In late January, The Information broke the news that the company had reached agreements with T-Mobile and Sprint (paywalled, but a secondary report is here) enabling Google to use their cellular networks. When placing a call, Google's handset would choose between the two carrier networks, or Wi-Fi, depending on the caller's location and relative signal strength of the alternatives.
This is not a new idea; mobile operators such as FreedomPop and Republic Wireless have created successful businesses selling Wi-Fi phone service while relying on cellular networks as a backup for locations with poor Wi-Fi signals. As the Washington Post's Brian Fung points out, though, Google brings formidable additional leverage to the table: they can compete while making little or no profit on phone service, because their main business involves providing access to data, and analyzing usage of it. Google has a brand name and huge financial resources. They control the Android operating system. And Google has laid fiber across several US cities, with more to come, for the purpose of offering Internet, TV, and phone services directly to consumers.
In an earnings call, Verizon's CFO Fran Shammo dismissed Google's projected entrance as not a big deal — Google would be yet another mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), or reseller of services from the major carriers:
"Resellers, or people leasing the network from carriers, have been around for 15 years," Shammo told Verizon investors. "It's a complex issue. You have to deal directly with the consumer. There is a whole infrastructure that is needed to do that."
Why Google Fiber Is High-Speed Internet's Most Successful Failure (archive)
In the Big Bang Disruption model, where innovations take off suddenly when markets are ready for them, Google Fiber could be seen as a failed early market experiment in gigabit internet access. But what if the company's goal was never to unleash the disrupter itself so much as to encourage incumbent broadband providers to do so, helping Google's expansion in adjacent markets such as video and emerging markets including smart homes? Seen through that lens, Google Fiber succeeded wildly. It stimulated the incumbents to accelerate their own infrastructure investments by several years. New applications and new industries emerged, including virtual reality and the Internet of Things, proving the viability of an "if you build it, they will come" strategy for gigabit services. And in the process, local governments were mobilized to rethink restrictive and inefficient approaches to overseeing network installations.
[...] Google went about announcing locations, and incumbent broadband ISPs, including AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable, would quickly counter by promising improved pricing, faster speeds, network upgrades or some combination of the three. A "game of gigs" had erupted. In the end, Google announced plans to build in 34 cities, playing a kind of broadband whack-a-mole game. Incumbents, who initially dismissed the effort as a publicity stunt, accelerated and reprioritized their own deployments city by city as Google announced follow-on expansion.
As the game of gigs played out, city leaders were forced to offer the same administrative advantages to incumbents as they had to Google Fiber. Construction costs fell, and the speed of deployments increased. Only six years after Google's initial announcement, according to the Fiber Broadband Association, 30% of urban residents had access to gigabit Internet service.
Related: Movie Studios Fear a Piracy Surge From Google Fiber
Google Files Letter with FCC Showing Positives of Title II for Broadband Providers
Google Fiber Announces Next 4 Cities to Get 1Gbps
AT&T Charges $29 More for Gigabit Fiber that Doesn't Watch Your Web Browsing
Austinites Outraged as Google Fiber Tears Up Texas Capital
Google Fiber Buys Webpass ISP
After Years Waiting for Google Fiber, KC Residents Get Cancellation E-Mails
FCC Gives Google Fiber and New ISPs Faster Access to Utility Poles
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Thursday January 29 2015, @03:16PM
HAHAHAHAHA SUCKERS!!!
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @04:01PM
Put it somewhere useful, like Southern California.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Thursday January 29 2015, @04:32PM
I am going to guess that they are going for the easy win targets.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @05:11PM
> Southern California
What a shithole. It's one big 1980's mall.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @07:09PM
Yeah well 1 Gbps will enable you to experience great virtual reality. So you can pretend you're not in Atlanta.
(Score: 2) by WizardFusion on Thursday January 29 2015, @04:52PM
Who the fuck are "the Chocolate Factory".???
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @05:34PM
It is Google. The Register likes to use pseudo cockney slang. Like they call Microsoft "the vole."
It seems to be a reference to willie wonka.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Thursday January 29 2015, @06:04PM
It is Google. The Register likes to use pseudo cockney slang. Like they call Microsoft "the vole."
Haven't noticed that one in a while, maybe it fell into disuse.
It seems to be a reference to willie wonka.
It is. There was even an extended metaphor some years back where the author called their engineers Oompah Loompahs and everything. I always interpreted it as a comparison of how people view Google with the same sort of mystery and awe as the chocolate factory was supposed to have.
The Register has some eccentric style guidelines, and every so often the random euphemisms and irreverence their authors come up with end up becoming the preferred ways of referring to certain companies and people. Like how they usually refer to scientists as boffins, psychiatrists and the like as trick cyclists, and their own authors as hacks; there's a whole list of things like this that show up, and sometimes they last a very long time.
They still write in a way that doesn't prevent the reader from inferring the context, though, so it's mostly harmless and gives their writing a clear style and personality. You can usually pick up Register snippets and figure out the source without even needing attribution because of it.
(Score: 1) by wirelessduck on Thursday January 29 2015, @11:39PM
"The vole" was coined by The Inquirer, not el reg.
http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1011251/wikipedia-deletes-vole-microsoft-term [theinquirer.net]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 29 2015, @05:57PM
I am happy for those many southern cities. Austin, Raleigh, Charlotte, Atlanta. They are pleasant places to live, people there are kind, the weather is mild. I do wonder why, in the epicenter of American capitalism, NYC, it. is. impossible. to get 1st world broadband. It is just not possible. You can pay thousands of dollars a month to get less than half the throughput that Google fibre gives you for free. And it will still not have uptime remotely close to 100%.
Yes, I do know the real answer is, "Politics, lawyers, and suck," but it still burns me that Nashville frickin' Tennessee will have greater throughput that my company here in Brooklyn. It's wrong.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @06:28PM
My guess is what you said and this
http://www.ops.fhwa.dot.gov/wz/construction/webinar92412/nycdot/images/s11.png [dot.gov]
That would be 'interesting' to try to run cable thru... a couple hundred years of cruft + tons of existing utils.
(Score: 3, Informative) by CyprusBlue on Thursday January 29 2015, @06:52PM
Well, you say Nashville like it's a backwater, but it had a VERY large amount of available dark fiber all around the entire metro region. Partly from utilities that were not allowed to use it due to regulation, and partly from a huge build by the now defunct American Fiber.
I'm from that city, and a network engineer. I would have been shocked to not hear Nashville was in the list. I was surprised it wasn't one of the first ones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @08:11PM
I am not too surprised NC is one of the states. Bellsouth was well on its way to wiring up the whole state with fiber. Pretty much a lot of the conduits are already in place and plenty of dark cable... AT&T bought them and then abandoned the whole project with fiber to the node. My neighborhood is at&t and wired up for fiber all the way up to my curb and POTS (built by bellsouth). AT&T right now does not even acknowledge I can even get DSL or their UVerse. Bellsouth was a company well on its way to being from the future. Then AT&T screwed it up. My apt, I used to have, had DSL in 1998. One of the first in the state.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 29 2015, @09:06PM
I am happy to hear that. Really, I am. But I'm a 10-minute taxi ride across a bridge from what should be the most connected place on planet Earth, as in, Lower Manhattan. I. Cannot. Get. 1st World. Broadband. Cannot. Doesn't matter how much money I have, I can't get decent throughput. A person could understand that lack in Nashville, being a much, much smaller city much, much further removed from other sizeable population centers. I'm glad for you that it's not so, but you have to understand how it doesn't track.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday January 29 2015, @07:32PM
Apparently, this [pilotfiber.com] is coming Real Soon Now(tm) to residential buildings in Manhattan. I sure hope so. No, it's not Brooklyn. Move out of the sticks, friend.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday January 29 2015, @07:46PM
Oh, and for you hypersensitive folks out there, that comment about Brooklyn being "the sticks" was a joke. I know, I know, taking the air out of your completely justified outrage at such an insensitive comment is just wrong -- and another reason why NYC's gun restrictions should be abolished.
I'd also point out that if you complain about the lack of FIOS on the radio [theverge.com] you should get service tout de suite. If you really want to deal with those scumbags.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 29 2015, @09:00PM
That's the thing. It shouldn't be. Brooklyn by itself is the 4th most populous city in America. But you can't get first-world broadband here. So it does feel like the sticks.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 29 2015, @10:49PM
Every time you talk, we hear banjo music. :D
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday January 29 2015, @07:51PM
Perhaps you should check this [bkfiber.com] out, Phoenix.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 29 2015, @08:57PM
Thank you!
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 30 2015, @03:12PM
In my city, the local telco is rolling out gigabit internet. They are doing it in neighborhoods with overhead wiring (on poles rather than buried) first because they have to upgrade the lines. Presumably Brooklyn has had its infrastructure burred for the last hundred years.
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Arik on Thursday January 29 2015, @06:01PM
Still, good for them. Let's see more competition.
That said, I wonder how badly they are going to mess it up with upload caps and unconscionable ToS.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Thursday January 29 2015, @06:42PM
Apparently, Google Fiber's policies are less abusive than most ISPs. From the Google Fiber Residential [sic] Accepted Use Policy [google.com]:
you agree not to use or allow third parties to use the Services provided to you for any of the following purposes:
...
...
...
To operate servers for commercial purposes. However, personal, non-commercial use of servers that comply with this AUP is acceptable, including using virtual private networks (VPN) to access services in your home and using hardware or applications that include server capabilities for uses like multi-player gaming, video-conferencing, and home security.
Note that this is for the residential service.
Not that this will do me any good. :(
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1) by Arik on Friday January 30 2015, @02:04PM
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?