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If Google Fiber came to your area, would you switch to it?
| 60% | 131 votes |
| 21% | 47 votes |
| 16% | 36 votes |
| 0% | 2 votes |
[ Voting Booth | Other Polls | Back Home ]
- Don't complain about lack of options. You've got to pick a few when you do multiple choice. Those are the breaks.
- Feel free to suggest poll ideas if you're feeling creative. I'd strongly suggest reading the past polls first.
- This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane.
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If Google Fiber came to your area, would you switch to it?
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Tonight you will pay the wages of sin; Don't forget to leave a tip.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Valkor on Tuesday July 01 2014, @02:58PM
"It isn't the cable company, so of course I will!"
(Score: 4, Funny) by Leebert on Tuesday July 01 2014, @03:13PM
That's what I came to say. I want nothing more than to give the big middle finger to Comcast.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Tuesday July 01 2014, @04:48PM
Pretty much, though it's also far superior to not only what I have in this southwestern desert shithole but also superior to most of the US. Both in price and speed. So there's that.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday July 02 2014, @01:43PM
Seriously. The cable companies became ISP's and the ISP's became cable companies. They all now have a vested interest in their own VOD services. I want to cut the cord but with Comcast buying TW and Verizon throttling netflix, who do I turn to? I live in NYC and figured I could find an alternative. There isn't an affordable one. Speakeasy was bought out by Megapath and DSL is available. But it starts at $59 for 1.5 Mbps Down and 384 kbps up. Their top tier is 20Mbps which is decent but the upload rate of 1 Mbps is quite limited and costs over $100/month.
I just switched from Time Warner to Verizon Fios. It's like switching from a shit sandwich to a shit salad, it's bad no matter what. But I didn't want to pay TW $200 per month for two cable boxes (one was a DVR) and 20mbps internet. The Fios intro pricing for the year is only $110 (15x5 internet & DVR w/second box) so it gives me a year to decide what to do. Google isn't likely to roll out fiber service anytime soon either. The only hope is somehow a miracle happens and Cable company ISP's are forced by law not to throttle competing traffic.
You know what? After writing this I say Fuck TV. I only really watch it at night when in bed for about an hour.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 02 2014, @03:01PM
"The only hope is somehow a miracle happens and"
Thought experiment time from an old telecom guy and ISP op from the 90s. Nobody wants to provide anything in telecom, they just want to pass thru charges and skim a profit on some sub contractor. This is nothing new or high tech and has been the case since the oldest private line days.
Anyway, the Mighty GOOG wants to sell fiber, my local cableco has plenty of cable, you can guess the reselling idea here. As long as GOOG did the routing and didn't screw up the connection, it wouldn't be so bad.
(Score: 2) by WanderCat on Tuesday July 01 2014, @03:10PM
When in a bad relationship, fantasies about a better one abound.
The best of bad options in my area is Time Warner, whose service will almost certainly decline, if and when the acquisition by Comcast goes through.
This inclines me to think that any alternative, especially one most focused on connectivity, has got to be better. But, may just be wishful thinking on my part. And, Google's self-imposed barriers to entering a market and the considerable inertia of local government makes me doubt it'll ever get here.
(Score: 1) by Kromagv0 on Wednesday July 02 2014, @02:33PM
I would love it if they started "investigating" more areas for deployment as that seems to light a fire under the existing providers ass to offer better service and lower costs. Then actually deploy to areas were the entrenched cable and DSL providers do little or nothing, but just to keep them on their toes move into some areas where they do as well.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:09AM
(I'm experienced enough to keep reasonable private whatever I feel it need to stay private)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 3, Interesting) by lhsi on Tuesday July 01 2014, @03:29PM
My internet is usually fast enough, and is fairly cheap I think. Faster would be nice, but not if it's going to cost a lot more.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Tuesday July 01 2014, @04:14PM
http://what-if.xkcd.com/31/ [xkcd.com]
And you only have to pay when you actually use it.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DECbot on Tuesday July 01 2014, @08:24PM
I wonder how viable an internet parcel service provider could be. Your customer can send you a USB stick with a text file of links to wget and a check or money order and then you ship the results back by mail. It could be interesting if your primary customers weren't shady dooche bags and those outside of FedEx's reach.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 01 2014, @08:55PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @02:36PM
No thanks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 04 2014, @10:47AM
You could order the complete Wikipedia once, and then look up as many individual items as you want locally at no extra cost (except electricity cost, but even that is lower if you don't have to power network equipment).
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Tuesday July 01 2014, @04:41PM
I really don't need that kind of bandwidth at home. I get a 50-80mbit down if I plug in via a network cable, but despite the router being 6' from my laptop, wireless is far more convenient, so I "suffer" 30mbit down 18 up.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 01 2014, @08:59PM
I don't need it either, but I still want it to come to my neighborhood. We need competition in the market more than anything.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bucc5062 on Tuesday July 01 2014, @05:28PM
I'd switch in country minute, but the chances of Google Fiber ever making it out to my neck of the woods is slim to none. Hard to get excited about it then. Our biggest regional city was in the running for GFiber, but lost out. As I'm at least 26 miles from downtown it still would have meant nothing.
Right now I have the choice between AT&T and ...oh wait, only AT&T for high speed internet. DSL is my one option and I'm grateful (how sad is that) for my 12mps down. For cable we have three choices, AT&T Uverse, Direct, and Dish. Note that two are satellite driven. Charter stops at the end of my road and will not run cable 300 yards down the street.
God, I love this free market country we live in. (do I need a /s for that one)
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 1) by Freeman on Wednesday July 02 2014, @09:09PM
I would love to be stuck with DSL. My only options are 3G/4G Wireless or Satellite. Currently I am gaming on my 4G LTE 5GB/Month Phone plan about $50/month and doing everything else through a company called Blue Mountain Internet (Sprint 3G "Unlimited" / we will investigate your usage, if it goes over 30GB/month) at $99/month.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday July 01 2014, @08:50PM
Depends on the price, and on whether you can use it without extensive data collection on Google's side.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Nerdfest on Wednesday July 02 2014, @12:06PM
... as opposed to the type your ISP is almost guaranteed to be doing? There is some value on having your personal information spread amongst multiple entities rather than a single one, but I actually trust cable companies, etc, less than an advertising company. Google losing control of your personal information hurts them as that is the basis of their business. For a cable company, selling your info is just another profit centre.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Thursday July 03 2014, @11:54AM
I pay $25-30/month to DSL Extreme [dslextreme.com] for 6mbps -- that's enough to watch HD videos and download large files as fast as most servers will send them. I could get Comcast or AT&T U-Verse, but I value having an ISP that has sane fees, doesn't cap usage, allows home servers, includes SuperNews Usenet + binary group access, and still has USA-based support staff.
I regard the decision the same as which tech news community to spend my time at... That is, if I stayed with the old site or used a big-name ISP, I would be sending the message it's perfectly fine to have management that openly doesn't care what we want or need as users, and things would never get any better.
(Score: 2) by e_armadillo on Tuesday July 01 2014, @08:54PM
56k is all I need :-)
"How are we gonna get out of here?" ... "We'll dig our way out!" ... "No, no, dig UP stupid!"
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 02 2014, @07:27AM
I guess the current ISP landscape must be god awful for anybody to even consider google. I mean how much spying can you take? google already knows quite enough about your habits...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 02 2014, @12:39PM
In a similar vein, how much MORE spying before they know everything about you? I feel that I am closer to THAT edge of the map, where it no longer matters.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Wednesday July 02 2014, @01:25PM
basically google has shown us all, the bandwidth on offer is pathetic. The more places that get it, the better the chance the dinosaurs will follow suit...
(Score: 2) by n1 on Wednesday July 02 2014, @07:19PM
I agree with you about artificial scarcity, but...
Last time I looked at areas covered by Google Fiber and the high-speed 4G deployments. They were being extremely careful to avoid populations centers where people might actually use the bandwidth offered. Google also does not offer it's services to business clients, unless things have changed.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Wednesday July 02 2014, @03:45PM
You will be assimilated.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday July 02 2014, @05:24PM
With no knowledge of googles terms, I finally have unlimited bandwidth at a price that seems okay to me (Bell keeps wanting me to 'upgrade' to 60 GB/month... not sure how that works out better for me, though, lol).
Without unlimited funds, I'd have to read the terms. If i hit the lottery, i will change my vote to "HELL YES!!! Yippee ki-yay, Dad!"
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 02 2014, @06:18PM
No cap, 1 gigabit/s, they provide the router/modem which also has wireless built in.
$70/month.
(Score: 2) by RaffArundel on Thursday July 03 2014, @01:51PM
Which, even at half the speed is cheaper and faster than my current fios package. Anyone around here actually have Google fiber? Do they deliver what they promise?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:33PM
Two people marked so on the poll. I am going to be getting it by the end of the Month, from what I hear, it is everything it promises.
(Score: 2) by EvilJim on Wednesday July 02 2014, @11:10PM
if I see a speed improvement over my 300bps dial up connection. it cant be much better right?
(Score: 2) by meisterister on Thursday July 03 2014, @04:45PM
I hear that on a good day, Comcast will give you a full 14.4Kbits/sec for only $78,000/month.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 1) by pogostix on Thursday July 03 2014, @05:54AM
on whether I could encrypt or tunnel everything to avoid google analyzing every packet....
(Score: 2) by Kilo110 on Thursday July 03 2014, @11:55AM
I'm a sub of a small regional ISP. Great speeds, great service, good price. And they're not assholes!
I'm voting with my wallet and I'd stick with them.