> GFiber service will be available in parts of the metro area later this year. Nevada residents and business owners will be able to choose between Google Fiber’s plans with prices that haven’t changed since 2012 and speeds up to 8 gig.
The author of the press release is under the mistaken belief that unchanged broadband pricing is a good thing.
From the linked price page:
1gig: $70/mo
2gig: $100/mo
5gig: $125/mo
8 gig: $150/mo
There was a time I would have been insanely jealous of any fiber option at all here in the Bay Area, and I know how hard it is to find fiber anywhere in the US, even still here in many parts of the Bay.
But when the fiber actually arrives, it becomes clear how cheap it is to provide.
When AT&T finally rolled fiber to my house in ~2019 it was $80/mo for 1gig symmetrical.
And you know AT&T's shareholders are still making money hand over fist at that price, because today, I pay Sonic $50 per month for 10gig symmetrical.
A lot of people lately are complaining about a lack of price stability, it seems like a good angle.
Also as an SF resident with no realistic alternative to Comcast cable, I'd appreciate a provider who didn't try to sneak price increases onto my bill a couple of times a year.
In a healthy market I wouldn't expect big margins for sellers, but honestly if someone's making insane profits by selling me a product or service that's excellent and better than my non-empty set of alternatives I'm not going to complain.
Have you considered Monkeybrains? For the price the service is fantastic, and with some of their new upgrades speeds are pretty good for most of SF.
Caveat: I work from home so I keep my comcast subscription as a backup and have a router with automatic failover. I would say this is not worth it for most people and just Monkeybrains is sufficent.
I have the same issue, I'm in an area with underground utilities so Sonic isn't an option, it's just Comcast or Monkeybrains. But the problem with Monkeybrains is that they had me behind a IPv4 NAT with no IPv6, and when I asked them to change that, I ended up with very bad packet loss that their technical support couldn't resolve.
They're not but often it (monkeybrains, Verizon 5g, etc.) Require installing hardware on the roof of the building, that requires landlord approval and can be challenging in say, a huge office building
What kind of speeds? When I last contacted them (maybe 3 years ago?) they said they could only guarantee 35Mbps symmetrical, but that most people see more like 80Mbps. That's... not good at all.
It's still pretty hard to find fiber in the bay for decent prices. I have 1gb symmetric in SF, but that's pretty uncommon. The 10gb sonic is only in some neighborhoods. I lived in Palo Alto for a long time and the options there were awful. 1gb down 35mbps up Comcast was the best option and it was well over $100/mo - there may have been a 2gb option for $300/mo and a 2yr commitment.
Sonic covers large parts of Oakland too. Been really happy with their 10Gbps service, I have an Intel X520 SFP+ NIC in my PC and I get 7-8Gbps symmetrical if upstream isn't bandwidth-limited.
Yep, my in-laws in Menlo Park had insanely slow SBC DSL with high packet loss. SBC actually just discontinued the service rather than do anything useful.
I once paid that ridiculous $149/mo for the 1gig Comcast service until I got tired of the bill that I was really only paying for bragging rights, and went back to 250Mbps.
A couple of years ago I had my 6Mbps ATT DSL reduced down to less than 1Mbps, to the point of being absolutely useless. I had no forewarning or notice that my service had been compromised. Every attempt to obtain support from ATT was met with attempts to get me to switch to cellular internet.
Fortunately I was able to get accepted into the StarLink early access around that time and managed to cancel the DSL. Even though ATT clearly did not want my business anymore, they still made sure I had to jump through countless hoops to finally disconnect and terminate billing. I had to sit on the phone for a couple of hours, being transferred between phone reps and managers until I finally got one person with the authority to shut my account down.
Wow. In the EU, canceling subscriptions must be as easy as signing up for them by law.
My personal longest issue with ISP's was when the software config once went wrong in their side, took me a month and allmost daily phone calls until I got to 4th line support that was an actual techie who fixed it in 10 minutes.
I honestly don't understand what the big deal is with the higher speed tiers. I forget what my house theoretically gets but, in practice, it's less than 100 down from Comcast and that's perfectly fine for what I use it for. I'm a bit under $100/mo and wouldn't pay to upgrade.
I semi-frequently run into situations that are bottlenecked on my internet speed, that I could of course just walk away from if it took too long but is nice to really have complete in seconds instead. I think the biggest one for me is downloading updates and software tools.
Sure, and that’s worth spending how much per month?
I mean if I was forced to sit and stare at a download screen then sure it’d be worth it to me. However even at 2+Gigabit I’m not going to sit and stare about the download screen so it’s kind of meaningless how long it takes. I’ve got plenty of other stuff to do for a while.
Download/upload speed seems like a fairly weak argument for more bandwidth past a certain, fairly low, point. These days, it seems like it's more around a large household doing simultaneous 4K streaming where they're running into limits.
What common streaming services even offer 4K streams that are more than say 30Mbit a stream? Most Blu-Rays are what, ~40Mbit?
A 1Gb internet package would let you have a dozen 40Mbit streams (480Mb) and still have another several hundred megabits for gaming, http traffic, etc.
Yeah- I just spent so much time complaining about not being able to get fiber in the heart of the bay area that when the 1gig cable service came, I felt like it was time to put my money where my mouth was. Then the novelty wore off, and I downgraded. IIRC, the 250meg service still had "sufficient" upload.
That is how Comcast slices their meager upload capacity, but it looks better for them to advertise their bigger bullshit burst bandwidth numbers than advertise a pathetic upgrade of 5Mbps upload, which probably just means they downgrade someone else’s upload.
Comcast is now starting to support higher upload speeds. They upgraded their equipment in our area (Fremont, CA) and now I'm able to get 200 mbps uploads. But you do have use a newer cable modem which support higher upload speeds. I'm using Arris S34 because I can also eventually upgrade to 2gbps downloads.
it's mostly an artifact of shitty ISPs like Xfinity that haven't figured out that in 2025 non-symmetric download and upload is really dumb. I have 300mbps currently because if I dropped to 100, my upload would go from 30 to 5, and it's nice to be able to upload a file at higher than dial up speeds
> non-symmetric download and upload is really dumb.
IIRC all their asymmetric internet packages are based on their coax deployments. It's not a dumb tradeoff in the coax space even though I don't like their choices of how much in each direction they usually do. There are only so many useful channels they can deploy in a given physical network. They could offer more upload bandwidth at the expense of download bandwidth but generally speaking most customers don't upload much and value download bandwidth over upload.
I know that's the theory, I just don't think it's true. Video calls anc gaming are some of the higher bandwidth consumers and are symmetrical bandwidth.
Gaming often uses extremely little amounts of bandwidth for a match, often less than a megabit or two.
Video calls, sure, but still most platforms are still averaging a handful of megabits. Most people don't have high quality webcams at home, so really moving to 10Mbit+ uploads isn't really going to do much for them.
Meanwhile people will likely stream HD video for hours and hours on their TVs, averaging 15+Mbit. They'll stream music which is like a basic online game but only a single direction. They'll download 100GB game downloads, scroll social media, etc. Do you think the average user uploads more media or downloads more media to social media?
I'd agree something like 20Mbit is probably too low for even an average US household, but in the end I'd say most consumers are still going to care more about download speed than upload speed. Just look around here in the comments and notice lots of people talk about how a fast connection is great because of large game downloads and what not; few people are justifying fast connections to home users because of sending data.
I use a lot of my upload data, but I'm definitely not a normal household. I hop on my VPN and stream data from my SDRs remotely, which will use hundreds of megabits. I host media streaming servers. I do remote gaming from my gaming PC to my handheld sometimes. I have some other applications I connect to while out. But I'm definitely not normal. And yet I still on average have 5-10x down than up usage.
I'm in Fremont and I recently noticed they now have 2gbps for $105 in my area. Also they boosted the upload speed to 200-350mbps. I did have to upgrade my cable modem to get my faster upload speed but still I need a faster Wi-Fi router before I consider going to 2gbps.
Palo Alto has had AT&T fiber since 2019 depending on your location (but still not 100% coverage). I was lucky enough to be in an early coverage area but the price for 1GB symmetric has risen from $75/month to $115.
In RTP NC, GFiber's $70 pricing beats equivalent speed plans from the other two symmetric fiber providers in the area, AT&T and Spectrum (if you live on the right streets). It's not _dirt_ cheap, but it's the cheapest we can get.
(Oh, also if you request a /48 IPv6 prefix, you'll get it. Never had that work on AT&T's $90.75-after-fees plan.)
I've got a /48 IPv6 subnet with CenturyLink 1G/1G. It's a 6rd tunnel, but it's provided by the same ISP. Hopefully they'll go native soon, but it may not matter if I switch to Google Fiber.
My 1G/1G CenturyLink plan is $65/mo, which beats Google's $70 plan for the same thing in the same market, but I've had this plan for 5 years and it is no longer available.
It's just a protocol to tunnel IPv6 within IPv4 datagrams. The "RD" stands for "Rapid Deployment" and it was meant to be a temporary solution that would go away when the edge was updated. I'm not sure why it's still around.
The assigned IPs are dynamic, and hosting from a residence is probably against the ToS. I've never checked to see if any ports are blocked, but I know that UDP 51820 (Wireguard) is open.
At least the Vegas place has IPv6 provided by the same ISP. I've got another place in greater Los Angeles with Frontier fiber. It costs more money for half the bandwidth, and they have NO IPv6 support, or any plans for IPv6 support. For that location, I use an HE IPv6 (RFC4312) tunnel, which generally works fine, except many websites such as YouTube require authentication before they provide content. They're probably countering the AI training bots, and have flagged the HE IPv6 blocks.
I've had AT&T 1 Gbps in RTP NC at $70/mo since Jan 2017, with Max thrown into that price for free a few years back. I keep waiting for AT&T to raise my price but apparently it's permanent unless I change or cancel service.
My neighborhood was one of the first in Wake county that AT&T lit up, probably because it's one of the neighborhoods that re-used Bellsouth fiber[1]. It's been reliable service. No trouble with IPv6. I could've done without the AT&T privacy breach though.
Meanwhile Google didn't finally have fiber to my address till last year, many years after I got the free T-shirt[2] from them.
Yeah, my gripe with my snide comment is more about how bandwidth costs should be falling over time in a competitive market, not that 1gig for $70 isn't actually still a good deal for the US.
The real advantage in having Google Fiber move into Vegas (or anywhere else) is they they're creating competition. It's silly how fast broadband prices plummeted here with the 1-2 punch of 2 fiber providers coming in in relatively short order. All of a sudden, whoops, the major providers can profitably provide service at a fraction of the price! Who knew?
If only it covered all of RTP. I've lived in TWO places in Durham where there was Google Fiber across the street from me but I couldn't get it at my address. Where I live currently the people across the street can get Google Fiber or AT&T Fiber and I can only get Spectrum Cable.
Holy... Here in Switzerland we have an ISP, Init7, that offers two price options ("G" = "Gbps" and "M" = "Mbps" but shorter for clarity):
- Regular dynamic IPv4 + static IPv6 /48, 1G/1G, 10G/10G or 25G/25G (speed is your choice): $71.56/month
- CG-NAT IPv4 + static IPv6 /56, 500M/100M if you don't have fiber available or 1G/1G if you do: $48.63/month
The higher speeds have higher setup and equipment costs but the monthly costs are all the same.
For anyone wondering how this is possible/economical when the US is so expensive:
- The last-mile connectivity is treated as a monopoly and providers who install the infrastructure are obligated to offer fair (not free) access to their competitors - this ensures price competition.
- Init7 successfully argued in federal court that P2MP topologies are anti-competitive, so can't be the sole implementation in new infrastructure deployments - this enabled them to install their own hardware on the other end of a customer's fiber, so they can simply swap a 1G SFP for a 10G SFP or a 25G SFP and offer higher speeds.
I feel silly asking, but what do you use 10gig for? That speed sounds insane; I get maybe 800mbps and I've basically never felt like the speed is too slow. Most consumer devices are still on gigabit Ethernet at the fastest, no - or am I just badly out of date?
Heck, anywhere above a few gigs, I feel like you'd start getting bottlenecked by whatever's on the other end of the connection.
Still, pretty cool to hear that the option exists!
Anything which is front ended by a CDN tends to end up faster than your connection for even the fastest connections. That leaves most of the web, updates (Microsoft/Apple/Google), content services like Steam or cloud storage/backup providers, and centralized piracy like Usenet (decentralized like torrents obviously vary per the seeds for each torrent).
It's certainly convenient my games, AI models, cloud backups, and large file downloads tend to go many times faster than when I had gigabit but I'd by no means be crying on the sides of the road about how long things take to upload/download if I had to go back.
The biggest thing you'll run into is algorithms designed to increase performance for limited connections don't scale infinitely. E.g. updating games on the Epic Games Store tends to be core limited (even on an overclocked 9800X3D) rather than bandwidth limited because it puts so much effort into the encryption and differential updating with the assumption "it'll be fast enough to not worry about". Even in those cases... it's nice to max them out without even having contention on everything else you're doing.
I’ve got 10 gig with 5 millisecond ping to Ashburn (Comcast’s gigabit x10, so it’s a full 10 gig port to the head end, not PON) and web surfing still sucks because JavaScript.
Are you surfing the web on a toaster? I only run into network bottlenecks or pages that suck because it loads tons of ads, which isn’t a javascript issue really. Yeah its not Wasm fast, and JS has some terrible stuff from a language perspective, but I don’t blame a slow web on Javascript. Certainly not for everyday browsing
For a lot of people the benefits show up because they have more devices sharing that connection. Before our kids moved to school we had 5 people on our home connection. Each with multiple devices, all trying to work or play games or stream content at the same time.
For one person with one computer it’s probably delightful overkill. For a modern family unit it can make everyone happy.
But even for your 5 people, a gigabit is plenty to all stream content at the same time, right? How often are all 5 people trying to download a 5 gigabyte file at the same time such that they collectively really benefit from more than a gigabit?
- Download games from Steam
- Download or upload AI models and datasets from Huggingface and similar
- Any kind of remote work where you are regularly working with multi GB files
A little server I just put inside my apartment has dual 10Gb/s ethernet ports.
So many resources are large , the last deepseek model was 700Gb, games can easily run into hundreds of gbs these days. Just updating Xcode can be 10Gb
High speed internet opens up new use cases open up , for example, if I had a 10 gig symmetrical connection I could run my own self hosted CI runner for free* with my old hardware lying about and recoup my investment.
Any sort of spatial computing will need lot more speed and/or local assets to be useful - with today’s speed all we can reliably get is what Facebook is doing with metaverse .
Not 10 gig but I am on an apartment with 1gig down. It made a difference when I downloaded deepseek the other day. It took a few minutes instead of hours/days. I think if you have a family with a couple kids it can come in handy when everyone tries to connect online. Kids can be downloading games/streaming, you working and partner video-calling on high res.
Nothing, really! It's cheaper than 1gig, and my ISP doesn't even give me the option of paying for less. I could save about $10 a month to downgrade to AT&T 300Mbps fiber though (which would have data caps, bad privacy policy).
I'd be happy down to say 250/250. Gigabit feels like "all I could ever need" (for now), and 10gig is fantasyland.
It's always interesting to read these discussions from a misdeveloped country like Australia.
Where symmetric broadband is a pipe dream. And the lived reality in the city is 100Mps down and something like 17Mbps up. I mean it still works for everything. But in comparison other people are living in some kind of techno utopia.
At least our banking system is modern so we can pay for our shitty internet without having to fax cheques /s
Just for a global comparison. Fibre is pretty ubiquitous in the UK but very little over 1G, and not usually symmetrical.
Most top end packages are 1G and go for between $45-70 depending on the reseller. But you can get it pretty much anywhere that qualifies as a decent sized town.
Not true re Openreach monopoly - openreach ftth is approx 51% premises covered, altnets cover 40% of the country (https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/uk), so not much in it at the moment.
On top of that, Virgin Media is upgrading their existing 18m home DOCSIS network to FTTH plus their nexfibre build will take them to probably 25m+ homes.
So by the end of the decade the average UK household is going to have access to at least 3 separate FTTH networks.
Only OR FTTH is not symmetrical btw. Everyone else offers symmetrical and YouFibre offers 8/8gig.
Fair but apart from Virgin, many of those Altnets rely on (and pay for) OR ducts & poles.
Am surprised to see Gb coverage that low!
Edit: that link is super interesting but I think they need to break it down a bit more. E.g. CityFibre, YouFibre and LightSpeed all seem to be counted under Altnets but all are very different setups.
Another global comparison point - in Japan, 1 Gbps fiber is available pretty much nationwide (I just checked the address of my in-laws' rural ancestral home in the middle of the rice fields)
10 Gbps is available in increasingly smaller cities (e.g. it was recently made available in a city of 100,000 near me).
Even if OR roll out symmetrical I doubt that many retail ISPs will sell it because that's one of the main selling points for Ethernet/"leased line" circuits for businesses
This seems to be A Thing; city centers get bad internet. In Dublin if you look at coverage maps, the whole central area is an island of VDSL and DOCSIS in a sea of FTTH.
> which is why its population is lower now than in the 1800s
I'm not sure that that's correct; modern planning permission as a concept was only really introduced around 1970, at which point the population was 3 million. The population is now 5.2 million. Ireland's depopulation was down to, initially, the famine, followed by almost constant economic crisis from the 19th century to the 1990s. We tend to emigrate very enthusiastically (this is particularly visible in the 1980s, when population actually _dropped_ for much of the decade).
(I do think that clearly with more sensible planning the population would now be somewhat higher, but you're probably talking an extra couple of hundred thousand.)
Interestingly, though, expectations about population did contribute to our current housing and infrastructure crisis. Around 2010, a lot of long-range planning was done on the basis that the population would reach something like 4.8 million by 2040; of course, this turned out to be wildly incorrect.
The estimate seems to have been based on the theory that, after the financial crisis, Ireland would go back to our historical pattern of decades-long recessions and mass emigration, now that that has failed to happen, well, all that planning is dramatically wrong. Ireland now completes more housing units per capita per year than any other OECD country, and it's still not enough. There's a massive housing deficit, the railways are over capacity with no relief until at least 2026, electricity and water infrastructure are under tremendous pressure, and so on. All of this is essentially a consequence of assumptions made 15 years ago that we'd just go back to mass emigration, and thus it was reasonable to have a decade where ~nothing got built.
“[The Famine] is a punishment from God for an idle, ungrateful, and rebellious country; an indolent and un-self-reliant people. The Irish are suffering from an affliction of God’s providence.”
“The judgment of God sent the calamity to teach the Irish a lesson. That calamity must not be too much mitigated. The greater evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the Irish people.”
~ Sir Charles Trevelyan, 1st Baronet, Assistant Secretary to Her Majesty’s Treasury, 1847 (Knighted, 1848, for overseeing famine relief)
Meanwhile, I'm paying 120/month for 150MB down, 75 up to my rural telco-op, and compared to the satellite internet I had before, I'm happy to be paying it.
That's rural life. I'm downtown in one a big Canadian city, and the best I can get is 400 down and 10 up for ~100$/month. You're getting better up than me, and I'm literally at the core of a major city.
They are probably still making bank on that I bet, my rural area got co-op fiber 2 years ago and its $85 for 250 mbps, which I actually get closer to 350 mbps from, and $125 for full gig symmetrical. And it is rural enough to not even have DSL before now. They have made enough money that they have covered a large chunk of this part of my state which is mostly all rural and have only sped up their area and roll-out of more service.
In practice, I think I've seen only a handful of people use them directly. It is soo conspicuous using one of these in broad daylight. Lots of people use the ports for charging, though. Also how NYC is this:
> Each Link has cameras and over 30 vibration sensors to sense if the kiosk has been hit by an object
So I’d take my expensive, heavy PS5, unplug it, and carry it to a download kiosk? And then wait 2-3 hours for a patch because it might be server-side throttled? And I’d also need a display of sorts to monitor progress.
I don’t think the idea is going to sell in this day and age.
For a laptop I could just occupy a coffee shop WiFi, and get coffee.
Reminds me of when I was in university, and only had dial-up at home, so I bought a Zip drive for my PC, knowing the computer labs had the same, and I could take stuff home that way.
I mean my "symmetrical 10G fiber" is actually 150MB up/down once it come through my router to my laptop, so while expensive, your speed is perfectly respectable.
> The author of the press release is under the mistaken belief that unchanged broadband pricing is a good thing.
You say that like it (edit to clarify: "it" = "unchanged broadband pricing") is a bad thing, though. Sure, it'd be nice if we had 1 Gb internet for <$30 like Denmark or wherever. But I will gladly sing praises to GFiber's speeds and stable prices given the hellhole of Comcast and CenturyLink I was previously living with.
Wait, an optical fiber is that expensive in the USA?
In France, the price for a symetrical 8 Gbit/s optical fiber is 50€/month (about $52) at the two fastest and most expensive companies! It's also 50€/month for professionals.
I can't get Sonic because apparently they don't have permits to operate in the underground conduits in my neighborhood. For some reason, AT&T has that. It's frustrating to say the least.
Google fiber is also full of shit when they say their prices havent changed because I was paying like 25 a month for 1g fiber in 2019 ain kansas city and now I pay 70 a month for the same service
It was not in Kansas city and I believe it was because it was a pilot program in kc for a while since it was one of the earliest locations for gfiber.
I could go dig up my old bills
Edit : yeah just found my bill from october 2019 and I was charged 50 dollars.
They quietly raised the price ghen claimed it was always 70 dollars. Obnoxious.
For what it’s worth it’s not even remotely a factor of price/bandwidth. The capex of laying the fiber and doing the last-mile construction is huge and highly variable depending on existing fiber, construction costs, regulatory requirements, etc. What bandwidth they can provide is also due to these requirements, and if they’re profitable as well.
Once they actually get the service in place the final price-per-gbps is more a factor of physics than of corporate greed.
If it's anything like where I am, they paid little or nothing to actually get the fiber to their house.
As with all rural infrastructure, low population density means high costs, especially if not everyone is a customer but you still have to run a cable past their house.
My rate is a little better than that- I think $120 for 150 or 200 symmetric- but it's still simultaneously more expensive than what I'd pay in the city and a far better deal than what we had before. Eventually they'll maybe make some money back on what I'm sure was a not inexpensive outlay just getting it to my house in the first place.
But at the same time fiber is even cheaper to rollout than copper lines, and we managed to roll out telephone lines all across the US and to every house without nearly as much trouble. Taking into account inflation it wasn't exactly real cheap to but a telephone line at first, but it was at least available.
> The author of the press release is under the mistaken belief that unchanged broadband pricing is a good thing.
It kind of is.
In a reasonably competitive ISP market, I'd expect the plans to slowly increase in price over time and significantly increase in speed over time. Keeping the basic tier at $70 is a good thing, even without a speed change. Gigabit is fast enough to still be solid in another 13 years.
Sorry but this is just incorrect on many fronts. I can speak to this issue as a former engineer on Google Fiber so I got to see just how the sausage was made.
Existing national ISPs just have inbuilt advantages that a newcomer cannot replicate or can't replicate cheaply. This is the result of decades of lobbying state and local governments.
Take something as simple as where you run cables in the streets. You basically have two choices: you dig trenches or you string up cables on a pole. There is no best answer here as it depends on a lot of factors like weather and climate, local soil conditions, natural disaster risks (eg wildfires, earthquakes), distances involved and existing infrastructure and legislation.
So imagine in a given area trenching is uneconomical. This could be just because there's a lot of limestone rock in the soil so it's difficult, slow and expensive to actually dig the trenches and this may be complicated by local noise ordinances, permitting, surveying, existing trenches and so on. So you end up stringing up cables on poles.
Who owns those poles? Is it the city? Is it AT&T? You may have rights to string up cables on those poles but the devil really is in the details. You might have to apply for a permit for each and every pole separately. They might be approved by the city but then how does the work happen? Can you do it? Maybe. But you might need AT&T (or whoever) to do something first like move their own cables. Maybe several other companies have to move cables first. Maybe each company has 90 days to do that work and this can add up so it can take over a year just to be able to put a cable up on a pole. And you can't really do any work until all the poles are available. That's just how fiber works.
And where do you run the fiber too? Do you run it back possibly several miles to a POP? There are advantages in that but obvious disadvantages like cost and just overall cable size and weight. Or do you use local substations? If so, what kind of building is that? Is it a large building that residents find "ugly" and object to on aesthetic grounds or maybe even environmental grounds that means more delays? How much does that cost? Is AT&T grandfathered in with their substations and nodes?
And then after you've done all that and you have your last mile fiber, how many customers do you get? Roughly 30-40% of houses get fiber by how many companies are you splitting that pool with? You have to amortize your entire network build over your projected customer base and it makes a massive difference if it's 10% of dwellings or 15% or 30% or 40%.
In industry parlance this is called an "overbuild" and is inherently economically inefficient. It'll actually raise the cost of every ISP because each will get a lower overall take up rate.
That's why the best solution is municipal broadband that either provides service or acts as a wholesaler to virtual ISPs.
The cost of running a fiber cable from a POP to a house has only gone up over th eyears and it's the majority of your cost. That's really why Internet costs haven't come down. And also why the best Internet in the US is municipal broadband and it isn't even close.
Speaking as a former Google Fiber software engineer, I'm honestly surprised this is still around.
In 2017, basically all the Google Fiber software teams went on hiatus (mine included). I can't speak to the timing or rationale but my theory is that the Google leadership couldn't decide if the future of Internet was wired or wireless and a huge investment in wired may be invalidated if the future Internet was wired so rather than guessing wrong, the leadership simply decided to definitely lose by mothballing the whole thing.
At that time, several proposed cities were put on hiatus, some of which had already hired local people. In 2019, Google Fiber exited Louisville, KY, paying penalties for doing so [1]. That really seemed like the end.
I also speculated that Google had tried or was trying to sell the whole thing. I do wonder if the resurrection it seems to have undergone is simply a result of the inability to find a buyer. I have no information to suggest that one way or the other.
There were missteps along the way. A big example was the TV software that was originally an acquisition, SageTV [2]. Somebody decided it would be a good idea to completely rewrite this Java app into Web technologies on an embedded Chrome instance on a memory-limited embedded CPU in a set-top box. Originally planned to take 6 months, it took (IIRC) 3.5+ years.
But that didn't actually matter at all in the grand scheme of things because the biggest problem and the biggest cost was physical network infrastructure. It is incredibly expensive and most of the issues are hyperlocal (eg soil conditions, city ordinances) as well as decades of lobbying by ISPs of state and local governments to create barriers against competition.
> In 2019, Google Fiber exited Louisville, KY, paying penalties for doing so
Those mistakes in Louisville were huge. Literally street destroying mistakes that city Civil Engineers predicted and fought from happening in the first place, but Google Fiber did them anyway. Left a huge bill to the city taxpayers. It wasn't bigger news and a bigger upset because of NDAs and other contract protection things involved, but as an outsider to those NDAs/contracts, I can say it was an incredibly bad job on too many fronts, and should have left Google Fiber with a much more tarnished reputation than it did.
> There were missteps along the way. A big example was the TV software that was originally an acquisition, SageTV [2]. Somebody decided it would be a good idea to completely rewrite this Java app into Web technologies on an embedded Chrome instance on a memory-limited embedded CPU in a set-top box. Originally planned to take 6 months, it took (IIRC) 3.5+ years.
I worked on the "misstep" with a small team, and it’s wild to see Fiber still around and even expanding to new cities. As far as I can tell, the set-top box software had nothing to do with why Fiber was scaled down. Also, usability surveys showed people really liked the GUI!
The client supported on-demand streaming, live TV, and DVR on hardware with... let’s call them challenging specs. Still, it turned out to be a pretty slick app. We worked hard to keep the UI snappy (min 30 FPS), often ditching DOM for canvas or WebGL to squeeze out the needed performance. A migration to Cobalt [1], a much lighter browser than embedded Chromium, was on the table, but the project ended before that could happen.
Personally, it was a great experience working with the Web Platform (always a solid bet) on less-traditional hardware.
+1 to what was said above; the UI didn't take 3.5 years to make - we launched it fairly quickly and then continued to improve on it. Later there was large UX refresh, so maybe that's where OP is getting confused? Either way, that software continued to work for years after the team was moved on to other projects. SageTV was good, but the UI wasn't java - it was a custom xml-like layout.
> In 2017, basically all the Google Fiber software teams went on hiatus (mine included).
What does a hiatus entail in this case? Did these teams all just stop working on Fiber stuff and sit around all day hoping they would be given something to do?
They laid us all off. They had huge plans - millions of users! Then they intersected reality in KC where all people wanted was 5Mbit service and free TV... There were many, many people working to perfect the settop box for example. We got fq_codel running on the wifi, we never got anywhere on the shaper, the plan was to move 1+m units of that (horrible integrated chip the comcerto C2000 - it didn´t have coherent cache in some cases), I think they barely cracked 100k before pulling the plug on it all....
and still that box was better than what most fiber folk have delivered to date.
At least some good science was done about how ISPs really work... and published.
Too bitter. I referenced a little of that "adventure" here, in 2021... gfiber was attempting to restart with refreshing their now obsolete hardware... https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/trouble_in_paradise/
I was thinking the same thing, not to mention that when Google Fiber was first announced, I was happy to be all in on Google for services but now, I’d be hesitant to use them for anything more than I’m already tied to.
Back when I lived in Ukraine in 2021, I got our family a 1Gbps fiber connection.
We lived on the edge of the city, and it was insanely hard to find a provider.
I knew internet was super cheap in Ukraine and was going to leave Ukraine in the following years, so getting a 1Gbps fiber as an all-time-at-home person was a great idea.
I ended up finding 2 providers that had fiber, and 1 of them had 1Gbps.
I was super happy to have symmetrical 1Gbps for $15 a month for the time I could spend there.
Here, in Vancouver, I am happy to have 250Mbps/15Mbps for $40 per month.
$15 for 1gpbs is insane. That was costing me $120+ over on Vancouver Island. If you want a good deal wait for BF / CM / Boxing Week. I upgraded to 3gbps fibre for $75/mo from Telus over boxing week. Almost as good a deal as your Internet in Ukraine.
Any examples you'd care to point out? All the high-profile Google shutdowns I can think of either failed in the marketplace (Stadia, Plus) or were successful but not making money (Reader, Hangouts).
I have also had Google Fiber since near its inception. I imagine it is profitable for Google because instead of tracking my browsing data, Google can just track all my packets now.
I think it must be that it will have the net effect of making people less free. They throw out stuff that could make money when it's good for freedom like Google Reader.
It does align pretty closely to their mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it accessible and useful for everyone", so it might be easier to make a case for its continued existence.
It also is another branch of Alphabet so not directly in the Google mgmt chain.
Though it looks like Alphabet is looking to sell it off, according to a reuters article Feb 5th, 2024.
They basically did at some point about a decade or so ago maybe. Wimax and LTE were taking off at that time. Then about 2 years ago, Google woke up and started pushing fiber again.
It's clear now that high speed fiber is the future. Cable companies aren't upgrading their networks anymore. It's unclear if the wireless companies will be able to support 10gig service. And the single mode fiber laid into the ground a decade or more ago has only increased in value.
I'm actually downloading one right now off Steam, and I'm limited more by IOPS on the drive I'm installing to than I am my internet speed due to the compression/encryption/unpacking. Not even using much more than 100Mbits consistently here, but I am installing to a microSD on a gaming handheld. But devices like this are getting more popular especially for a multi-kid household.
But even then, it's not something most people are constantly doing. Maybe a couple of times a month.
I'd still probably go with more than 200Mbit for a family, but knowing how many of the families I know use their home internet they're rarely coming even close to routinely maxing out a 500Mbit connection even with several kids.
No, a single user would routinely max out their dial-up connection just doing normal browsing things. Even just pulling a lot of email from a pop endpoint could max out that connection. Browsing web pages with graphics would absolutely crush a dial up connection. Some places tried to do things like handle video over such a connection, but it was pretty painful and pretty much useless. Streaming a song was pretty pointless.
These days a 200Mbit connection would handle five or so users doom scrolling social media with videos and images while a few TVs play 4K streaming media while smart home devices chirp home all the secrets in the house and the door bell cam uploads a few clips every hour and the Sonos is playing a few different songs in a few different zones throughout the house for ambiance.
> These days a 200Mbit connection would handle five or so users doom scrolling social media
Is that because all you can do is doom scroll on an internet connection, or are there higher bandwidth possibilities waiting for 10gig home internet service to arrive?
To some extent making that argument is like Bill Gates saying "All anyone will ever need is 640k."
Tons of households (even in the US) have access to 1G+ home internet connectivity and yet that seems to be most of what their usage is.
According to the FCC, in December 2023 something like 79% of all households had at least 100Mbit fixed internet, ~24% had 940Mbit or better. The NCTA claims 91% have access to gigabit or better. I do agree they're probably overselling that number (cable companies maps are often trash), but it wouldn't surprise me if it was really something more like 80% or more have some kind of access to gigabit but might just be cost prohibitive for what they care to spend.
If these households aren't even really utilizing their gigabit connections very much today, what makes you think they're just waiting for 10 gigabit connectivity? What applications would they even really do with 10gig connectivity with hardware they'll have in the next five years, something normies would really care to do?
By and large people don't even care that much about 4K or ultra-high-quality video streaming. The two most popular Netflix plans are Standard and Standard with Ads. Blu-Rays are dead. VR acceptance is still pretty slow.
Even something like cloud gaming is really only using like 40-60Mbit of throughput for even a 4K gaming stream. Quadruple it, we're at 240Mbit. And even if we did ship 10gig home internet, it's not like we're just going to stop compressing the stream; a 4K 120Hz HDR stream is going to be ~32Gbit. Average household size in the US is about 3.23, so all three and a third people could be using 240Mbit and still have another 280Mbit of throughput.
Don't get me wrong, some percentage of home users would use a multi-gig home internet connection. But even though I can subscribe to a 5gig internet package and I'm more on the enthusiast end of things with a family with multiple kids and several 6E AP's with wired backhaul, hosting multiple applications and SDRs from my home, it's just not worth it to me to bother paying for it over the gigabit plan. Even if it was only $10/mo more I probably wouldn't jump to the higher plan. It wouldn't change my access or usage at all while costing another $120/yr.
Sell me on a 10gig home internet plan over a 1gig home internet plan. How is it going to radically change my usage with the kind of hardware most consumers actually buy and use? For that matter, sell me on a 1gig plan over a 500Mbit plan for a typical US household, let's say two adults and two teenage-ish kids. Would they really even see much of a difference in their day to day lives?
Back in the 90s it was pretty obvious what could be unlocked by having an always on multi-megabit internet connection over a single dial up connection for a household. It was just very prohibitively expensive for most people. I wouldn't say its anywhere near as obvious what benefits are to be had for a household today to jump from 500Mbit to 1gig or especially 1gig to 10gig.
They did in my area 7 years ago almost as soon as it was announced. They wired new condos and apartments but nothing else. Luckily AT&T installed it on the pole by my house. I moved and lost fiber but have 1.2 down over coax but only 200 up.
There was a spur from them starting up at all. I don't want to diminish that too badly. But since then, increasing their coverage area from a fraction of a percent up to 1% of the US population, I don't think that has spurred very much.
Well that's good, but they haven't even installed GFiber in cities they're in right now such as Omaha and Chicago etc. It's surprising how many places still don't have Fiber, and you can check your area with FCC's website: https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/home
Google Fiber was announced for Austin in 2013, and 12 years later it's still not available at my Austin address. I have used AT&T Fiber for as many years and it works great (currently at 2G symmetrical for $105/m).
(benign) peak-to-average problem - I'll go ahead and just assume that defcon attendees use a lot more internet bandwidth than the average Vegas-goer, so during defcon the network is overwhelmed, but the rest of the year the capacity is adequate. Upgrading the links to satisfy the peak (defcon) traffic load costs the casinos significant money, but gives minuscule benefit since the rest of the year they only need to support the much lower average load.
(malign) the casinos don't actually want you to have good internet because they don't want you staying in your room internetting - they want you down on the floor gambling. Other non-gambling amenities (shows, restaurants, etc.) are mostly time limited - you only spend so much time eating, and shows are only a couple hours each - and can be a differentiator that draws people to a specific casino (because of specific food/entertainment preferences). Those people then spend the rest of the day gambling at that casino.
"Better" internet it's actually a negative differentiator - people who want to spend all their time infinite-scrolling will gamble less, so casinos don't want to attract them in the first place.
Event venues AND anyplace that might EVER have expense account holding business travelers just want to charge for it. Even if fiber literally rolled right up to the side of the building, it'd be resold by either the hotel or a 3rd party vendor with a focus on profit rather than just being good.
My wife and I started traveling a lot as leisure travelers (50+ days last year, 240 days the year before) post Covid and my wife goes to conferences. We stay in mostly Hilton and Hyatt brands with the occasional Marriot. It use to be true that the high end brands charge for WiFi. But I haven’t seen a separate WiFi charge in all of these time.
Admittedly the only hotel I stayed in that was considered high end was the Conrad in Los Angeles.
Non anecdotally, I did a search and I couldn’t find a hotel that still charged separately for WiFi, just a “resort fee” that everyone pays.
The largest hotels around, like Caesars Palace, might have 4000 rooms.
So if they had, for example, a 10 Gbps link for the building - that's only 2.5 Mbps per room if everyone wants to use it. Fine when 98% of guests don't want to use it, totally inadequate if all your guests want to use it.
And as I understand things, if someone's offering you a 10 gigabit link for $150 they're relying on you only using it a tiny % of the time. So if you put your 4000 room hotel on a Google Fiber link you'll probably run into the secret download limits after a day or two. And the price for a non-oversold 10-gigabit link seems to be "call our enterprise sales team for pricing"
I mean, no one is expecting commercial-grade fiber at residential prices, but even taking that into account, these hotels (which are almost all owned by 3 companies) can afford to drop a few dozen grand a month on internet and not even notice the bill
I can't speak for Amazon 's team directly but for large events on that scale, totally reasonable to have your own links brought to the facility.
For a casino, they probably already have spare conduit or dark fiber to a close by POP so they don't even need LoS microwave links.
Efficiently distributing all of that bandwidth across the many, many, many different wireless access points efficiently is an art and science all on its own and that's probably the aspect most people are complaining about.
Not sure about 100gig, but hotels charge crazy amounts of money for Internet entrance. They like provide it themselves, but if you insist on running your own they will happily charge you to give you access to the various parts of the hotel you'll need to make it happen.
I haven't been involved in the last decade, but I'm kind of known as "the guy that makes PyCon networking work", and it can easily be $5K to $10K (from memory) for the hotel, even if you are providing all your own connectivity and gear. I haven't had to do it in recent years because venue Internet has gotten much, much better.
well the CCC crowd has many years of experience on their belt dealing with the absurd amount of traffic that only a nerd conference can sustain - and they do all of it on their own, the only thing the venue has to give them are rooms, power and fiber uplinks. CCC erects a whole damn ass datacenter and tears it down in a few days, that's a massive expense both financially and in volunteer time. Oh and on top of that comes all the video streaming and recording infrastructure, that stuff is rivaling actual large TV networks from what I hear.
In contrast, for almost all other venues, providing networking is the responsibility of their owner, and they plan their networking gear not for the "one conference to rule them all" but for your everyday trade show.
The video team has a wiki [1] and the NOC a few photos on mastodon [2]. There used to be at least one more detailed report but FFS Google is useless these days.
I'm gonna need a source on that one beyond LTT just going "the hotels on the strip collude with each other".
Convention wireless is a pain in the ass as a whole, and I've seen it both from venue-hosted networks and privately-operated-on-site networks being deployed as an overlay.
Did you actually look at the video/transcript? They were specifically talking about the internet service in the rooms being bad, and how it used to be good in specific hotels.
I'm not saying it's "a source" to the collusion, I'm saying the reasons you gave to entirely reject the LTT clip were invalid. He wasn't talking about the show floor, and he personally experienced a better connection in certain hotels so we know they can manage it.
It might or might not be connected to the show floor issues, but it's relevant information for a bunch of the in-room internet experience to get significantly worse over time. It suggests that they are not even trying, so the fact that convention wireless is hard is not an excuse.
Do y'all have fiber at all? Most if not all of remote middle TN from Cookeville to Winchester has cheap FTTH. I live in unincorporated acreage, and was surprised they just came out this year to run a fiber line to my house. 57/mo for symmetrical gig. Goes up to 8, but that's a couple hundred.
That's how it is in Vegas presently: CenturyLink has fiber service but it's scattered around unpredictability, and in areas where it's not available it may never be.
Hopefully Google fiber (un)availability doesn't overlap too much, but I expect that it will.
I've had Google Fiber for almost a decade now. It's fine enough. I've had weird issues in the past though and it's been rather unfriendly when it comes to setting up things like a VPN on a router -- though this was many years ago. Perhaps things have changed?
I also had an issue 6 or so years ago where Google Fiber would block sites that did not have both an IPv6 and IPv4 address.
Nonetheless, service has been fine otherwise. I'd say Google Fiber has probably been the second best ISP I have used despite my ever slowly growing hatred of all things Google.
My parents have had Google Fiber since 2011 or 2012. It's been a joy. The uptime has been great and the price has pretty much remained the same for 1Gig. In Los Angeles I pay $90/mo for 100mbps Spectrum connection which drops once a week and has gone up from $40 to $90/mo in just under 2 years. Worst of all is Spectrum has complete monopoly and I have nowhere else to go.
We used to have Spectrum, but switched to Frontier Fiber as soon as it was available, a couple years ago now. Apart from a few hiccups during the first few weeks of service, it's been very reliable.
Can’t come soon enough. I pay over $200/mo for Cox here in LV (including a surcharge for “unlimited data”) and still get 20% of advertised speeds at 7pm and nastygrams when I upload a 2TB photography backup.
Cox and CenturyLink are monopolistic criminals and should receive corporate death penalties for their misconduct.
I cant shake a feeling that above 50pM/1gig, it doesnt matter how fast residential Internet is. Back when WFH really meant FTPing a whole file down, working on it, and then FTPing it back up, sure. But gdrive and OneDrive and so on all seem quite happy to only send you the blocks you are working on, Teams/Zoom uses remarkably little bandwidth, and games distribution seems to use a combination of CDN and JIT downloads, at least after the initial 80G download for the first user. I know this is n=1 sampling, but my house of 5 was merrily WFH-ing on 100M for ages with nary a whimper. Does it really matter, in 2025?
What does seem to matter is variability: latency and jitter, and the stability of the network inside the house (eg wifi contention). The pipe is the least of one's worries, it would seem.
I remember reading about Google Fiber in the news 10+ years ago. At that time the idea of having a multi-gigabit internet connection at home felt very exciting and futuristic.
Today, fiber at home is almost a given in many countries. I mean, it is good that LA residents will have access to fast internet. But this is commodity now. I don't get it why is this in the news.
Mesa AZ signed a deal with Google in 2022 and I got fiber installed last summer. It was all new fiber in the streets in my neighborhood too. And I still see lots of constructions signs for it around. Definitely seem to still be growing. Two other new competitors are also in the area.
I've got a place in Vegas that's presently served by CenturyLink. It has 1G/1G symmetrical fiber at a guaranteed fixed price of $65/mo. 8G is appealing. So far I haven't seen a map or a timeline of where/when. I signed up for status emails from Google over a year ago.
They just raised the price on my fixed for life deal from Century Link. If you look back, there's nothing in the documentation/terms that actually claimed it was for life. Super shady on their end and I'm going to switch to Google Fiber once they're finished installing it in my neighborhood (they're currently in the installation process)
The only way they could have raised the price was if you opted into their new "Quantum Fiber" plan. I got the snail-mail postcards offering me the "upgrade", but I did not see any benefit. They offered exactly the same service I already have. I assumed (correctly) that they were just trying to get out of the $65/mo "lifetime" deal they promised.
I still have the deal.
Edit:
I just checked, and Quantum Fiber now offers 2G/1G (two down, one up) fiber in my Vegas neighborhood for $95/mo. They are claiming it's a "lifetime" price guarantee.
Same here ($65 -> $75); I think it's an "equipment fee." I don't even use the router. My employer covers the cost so I haven't called to complain, but I suspect if you do you can return the router and lose the fee.
I keep the router they gave me in one of my garages. The only time I've ever connected it was when their service had a problem and they wanted to run remote diagnostics. The other 99.9999% of the time, I use an OpenWRT VM.
I would not have accepted the router if there were any strings attached, and they're welcome to take it back if they want to start charging me for it.
Meanwhile; in the world capital of tech, I’m paying Cox for lousy coaxial over nearly 30 year old cable because nobody will pay to lay a fiber on my street (not even neighborhood… street)
> It started in 2010. How much longer should we wait for your prediction to come true?
Google has already actively started soliciting outside investors to spin off Google Fiber. Don't hold your breath. Nothing escapes the Google Graveyard, its gravitational mass is simply too large.
"GFiber has already hired an investment bank to start the process of selling equity in the company, according to a source close to Alphabet's efforts. The future goal is for GFiber to be independent from Alphabet, the source said on condition of anonymity."
I wouldn't hold my breath. At my previous house, CenturyLink/quantum site said it was available. I called half a dozen times to get it installed, each time some contractor would show up and tell me it's not available. I was confused because they spent months very visibility installing it throughout the neighborhood. Talking to some of the contractors, it was interesting to hear stories about why it was available in some areas but not others just a few houses down.
Eventually, one of them did figure out how to get me connected.
I didn't fully understand the details when they were explaining it to be, but iirc something was disconnected around the corner, and they couldn't just reconnect it because it wasn't the right hardware.
Since Google made a big donation, maybe Trump will clear the way for google to plow through the red tape to create more high-speed internet competition, which should lower the price for many Americans. I doubt it will happen, but one can dream.
AFAIK Xfinity (Comcast) is not deploying FTTP anywhere. It's a cable network on DOCSIS. The fiber usually stops at the CMTS which is far away from the home; one CMTS serves multiple neighborhoods if not the entire town.
> GFiber service will be available in parts of the metro area later this year. Nevada residents and business owners will be able to choose between Google Fiber’s plans with prices that haven’t changed since 2012 and speeds up to 8 gig.
The author of the press release is under the mistaken belief that unchanged broadband pricing is a good thing.
From the linked price page:
1gig: $70/mo
2gig: $100/mo
5gig: $125/mo
8 gig: $150/mo
There was a time I would have been insanely jealous of any fiber option at all here in the Bay Area, and I know how hard it is to find fiber anywhere in the US, even still here in many parts of the Bay.
But when the fiber actually arrives, it becomes clear how cheap it is to provide.
When AT&T finally rolled fiber to my house in ~2019 it was $80/mo for 1gig symmetrical.
And you know AT&T's shareholders are still making money hand over fist at that price, because today, I pay Sonic $50 per month for 10gig symmetrical.
A lot of people lately are complaining about a lack of price stability, it seems like a good angle.
Also as an SF resident with no realistic alternative to Comcast cable, I'd appreciate a provider who didn't try to sneak price increases onto my bill a couple of times a year.
In a healthy market I wouldn't expect big margins for sellers, but honestly if someone's making insane profits by selling me a product or service that's excellent and better than my non-empty set of alternatives I'm not going to complain.
Have you considered Monkeybrains? For the price the service is fantastic, and with some of their new upgrades speeds are pretty good for most of SF.
Caveat: I work from home so I keep my comcast subscription as a backup and have a router with automatic failover. I would say this is not worth it for most people and just Monkeybrains is sufficent.
I have the same issue, I'm in an area with underground utilities so Sonic isn't an option, it's just Comcast or Monkeybrains. But the problem with Monkeybrains is that they had me behind a IPv4 NAT with no IPv6, and when I asked them to change that, I ended up with very bad packet loss that their technical support couldn't resolve.
I use monkeybrains with the same ipv6 problem. One workaround is to run a VPN. Planning to switch but haven't gotten around to it
Yes, but it requires landlord cooperation.
I would recommend talking to Monkeybrains they should be familiar with the law, I don't think landlords in San Francsico are allowed to limit isp choice https://www.sfexaminer.com/our_sections/forum/san-francisco-...
They're not but often it (monkeybrains, Verizon 5g, etc.) Require installing hardware on the roof of the building, that requires landlord approval and can be challenging in say, a huge office building
What kind of speeds? When I last contacted them (maybe 3 years ago?) they said they could only guarantee 35Mbps symmetrical, but that most people see more like 80Mbps. That's... not good at all.
I think it depends where you’re at. I got 1gb through them and it was pretty dependable.
How’s MonkeyBrains during rain?
It's still pretty hard to find fiber in the bay for decent prices. I have 1gb symmetric in SF, but that's pretty uncommon. The 10gb sonic is only in some neighborhoods. I lived in Palo Alto for a long time and the options there were awful. 1gb down 35mbps up Comcast was the best option and it was well over $100/mo - there may have been a 2gb option for $300/mo and a 2yr commitment.
Sonic covers large parts of Oakland too. Been really happy with their 10Gbps service, I have an Intel X520 SFP+ NIC in my PC and I get 7-8Gbps symmetrical if upstream isn't bandwidth-limited.
Yep, my in-laws in Menlo Park had insanely slow SBC DSL with high packet loss. SBC actually just discontinued the service rather than do anything useful.
I once paid that ridiculous $149/mo for the 1gig Comcast service until I got tired of the bill that I was really only paying for bragging rights, and went back to 250Mbps.
A couple of years ago I had my 6Mbps ATT DSL reduced down to less than 1Mbps, to the point of being absolutely useless. I had no forewarning or notice that my service had been compromised. Every attempt to obtain support from ATT was met with attempts to get me to switch to cellular internet.
Fortunately I was able to get accepted into the StarLink early access around that time and managed to cancel the DSL. Even though ATT clearly did not want my business anymore, they still made sure I had to jump through countless hoops to finally disconnect and terminate billing. I had to sit on the phone for a couple of hours, being transferred between phone reps and managers until I finally got one person with the authority to shut my account down.
Wow. In the EU, canceling subscriptions must be as easy as signing up for them by law.
My personal longest issue with ISP's was when the software config once went wrong in their side, took me a month and allmost daily phone calls until I got to 4th line support that was an actual techie who fixed it in 10 minutes.
$149/mo for 1gbps doesn't seem too bad compared with the $699/mo I was paying for 8mbps DSL back in the 90's.
At the time, it was still cheaper than a T1 (1.544mbps).
This is a joke, right? Please let this be a joke.
I honestly don't understand what the big deal is with the higher speed tiers. I forget what my house theoretically gets but, in practice, it's less than 100 down from Comcast and that's perfectly fine for what I use it for. I'm a bit under $100/mo and wouldn't pay to upgrade.
I semi-frequently run into situations that are bottlenecked on my internet speed, that I could of course just walk away from if it took too long but is nice to really have complete in seconds instead. I think the biggest one for me is downloading updates and software tools.
Pretty nice to be able to download a modern game in a few minutes instead of a few hours.
Sure, and that’s worth spending how much per month?
I mean if I was forced to sit and stare at a download screen then sure it’d be worth it to me. However even at 2+Gigabit I’m not going to sit and stare about the download screen so it’s kind of meaningless how long it takes. I’ve got plenty of other stuff to do for a while.
Download/upload speed seems like a fairly weak argument for more bandwidth past a certain, fairly low, point. These days, it seems like it's more around a large household doing simultaneous 4K streaming where they're running into limits.
What common streaming services even offer 4K streams that are more than say 30Mbit a stream? Most Blu-Rays are what, ~40Mbit?
A 1Gb internet package would let you have a dozen 40Mbit streams (480Mb) and still have another several hundred megabits for gaming, http traffic, etc.
I pay £25 for 500Mbs, which I find reasonable.
Which just barely takes God Of War Ragnarok under an hour, but DCS World is over 2 hours. And game keep growing…
Oh sorry. I meant a reasonable price.
All these folks talking about >$100 for slower speeds is insane in 2025.
I could get ~1Gbs for £35.
I don't know what I would do if I was forced to go back to BT, so I can relate.
Yeah- I just spent so much time complaining about not being able to get fiber in the heart of the bay area that when the 1gig cable service came, I felt like it was time to put my money where my mouth was. Then the novelty wore off, and I downgraded. IIRC, the 250meg service still had "sufficient" upload.
That is how Comcast slices their meager upload capacity, but it looks better for them to advertise their bigger bullshit burst bandwidth numbers than advertise a pathetic upgrade of 5Mbps upload, which probably just means they downgrade someone else’s upload.
Comcast is now starting to support higher upload speeds. They upgraded their equipment in our area (Fremont, CA) and now I'm able to get 200 mbps uploads. But you do have use a newer cable modem which support higher upload speeds. I'm using Arris S34 because I can also eventually upgrade to 2gbps downloads.
it's mostly an artifact of shitty ISPs like Xfinity that haven't figured out that in 2025 non-symmetric download and upload is really dumb. I have 300mbps currently because if I dropped to 100, my upload would go from 30 to 5, and it's nice to be able to upload a file at higher than dial up speeds
> non-symmetric download and upload is really dumb.
IIRC all their asymmetric internet packages are based on their coax deployments. It's not a dumb tradeoff in the coax space even though I don't like their choices of how much in each direction they usually do. There are only so many useful channels they can deploy in a given physical network. They could offer more upload bandwidth at the expense of download bandwidth but generally speaking most customers don't upload much and value download bandwidth over upload.
I know that's the theory, I just don't think it's true. Video calls anc gaming are some of the higher bandwidth consumers and are symmetrical bandwidth.
Gaming often uses extremely little amounts of bandwidth for a match, often less than a megabit or two.
Video calls, sure, but still most platforms are still averaging a handful of megabits. Most people don't have high quality webcams at home, so really moving to 10Mbit+ uploads isn't really going to do much for them.
Meanwhile people will likely stream HD video for hours and hours on their TVs, averaging 15+Mbit. They'll stream music which is like a basic online game but only a single direction. They'll download 100GB game downloads, scroll social media, etc. Do you think the average user uploads more media or downloads more media to social media?
I'd agree something like 20Mbit is probably too low for even an average US household, but in the end I'd say most consumers are still going to care more about download speed than upload speed. Just look around here in the comments and notice lots of people talk about how a fast connection is great because of large game downloads and what not; few people are justifying fast connections to home users because of sending data.
I use a lot of my upload data, but I'm definitely not a normal household. I hop on my VPN and stream data from my SDRs remotely, which will use hundreds of megabits. I host media streaming servers. I do remote gaming from my gaming PC to my handheld sometimes. I have some other applications I connect to while out. But I'm definitely not normal. And yet I still on average have 5-10x down than up usage.
I'm in Fremont and I recently noticed they now have 2gbps for $105 in my area. Also they boosted the upload speed to 200-350mbps. I did have to upgrade my cable modem to get my faster upload speed but still I need a faster Wi-Fi router before I consider going to 2gbps.
Palo Alto has had AT&T fiber since 2019 depending on your location (but still not 100% coverage). I was lucky enough to be in an early coverage area but the price for 1GB symmetric has risen from $75/month to $115.
In RTP NC, GFiber's $70 pricing beats equivalent speed plans from the other two symmetric fiber providers in the area, AT&T and Spectrum (if you live on the right streets). It's not _dirt_ cheap, but it's the cheapest we can get.
(Oh, also if you request a /48 IPv6 prefix, you'll get it. Never had that work on AT&T's $90.75-after-fees plan.)
I've got a /48 IPv6 subnet with CenturyLink 1G/1G. It's a 6rd tunnel, but it's provided by the same ISP. Hopefully they'll go native soon, but it may not matter if I switch to Google Fiber.
My 1G/1G CenturyLink plan is $65/mo, which beats Google's $70 plan for the same thing in the same market, but I've had this plan for 5 years and it is no longer available.
I'm not familiar with 6rd, do you get actual routable IPs that you can use (to host services, etc)? Or is it just some kind of NAT equivalent?
It's just a protocol to tunnel IPv6 within IPv4 datagrams. The "RD" stands for "Rapid Deployment" and it was meant to be a temporary solution that would go away when the edge was updated. I'm not sure why it's still around.
The assigned IPs are dynamic, and hosting from a residence is probably against the ToS. I've never checked to see if any ports are blocked, but I know that UDP 51820 (Wireguard) is open.
At least the Vegas place has IPv6 provided by the same ISP. I've got another place in greater Los Angeles with Frontier fiber. It costs more money for half the bandwidth, and they have NO IPv6 support, or any plans for IPv6 support. For that location, I use an HE IPv6 (RFC4312) tunnel, which generally works fine, except many websites such as YouTube require authentication before they provide content. They're probably countering the AI training bots, and have flagged the HE IPv6 blocks.
I've had AT&T 1 Gbps in RTP NC at $70/mo since Jan 2017, with Max thrown into that price for free a few years back. I keep waiting for AT&T to raise my price but apparently it's permanent unless I change or cancel service.
My neighborhood was one of the first in Wake county that AT&T lit up, probably because it's one of the neighborhoods that re-used Bellsouth fiber[1]. It's been reliable service. No trouble with IPv6. I could've done without the AT&T privacy breach though.
Meanwhile Google didn't finally have fiber to my address till last year, many years after I got the free T-shirt[2] from them.
[1]: https://hack-gpon.org/ont-nokia-g-010g-a/
[2]: https://www.itbinsider.com/fall-fashion-fiber-shirts-are-her...
Yeah, my gripe with my snide comment is more about how bandwidth costs should be falling over time in a competitive market, not that 1gig for $70 isn't actually still a good deal for the US.
The real advantage in having Google Fiber move into Vegas (or anywhere else) is they they're creating competition. It's silly how fast broadband prices plummeted here with the 1-2 punch of 2 fiber providers coming in in relatively short order. All of a sudden, whoops, the major providers can profitably provide service at a fraction of the price! Who knew?
Huh I was able to get a /60 ipv6 prefix from my ATT fiber just fine, and it has been available since circa 2016.
Now you just need 4095 more /60s and you'll have that /48
If only it covered all of RTP. I've lived in TWO places in Durham where there was Google Fiber across the street from me but I couldn't get it at my address. Where I live currently the people across the street can get Google Fiber or AT&T Fiber and I can only get Spectrum Cable.
Holy... Here in Switzerland we have an ISP, Init7, that offers two price options ("G" = "Gbps" and "M" = "Mbps" but shorter for clarity):
- Regular dynamic IPv4 + static IPv6 /48, 1G/1G, 10G/10G or 25G/25G (speed is your choice): $71.56/month - CG-NAT IPv4 + static IPv6 /56, 500M/100M if you don't have fiber available or 1G/1G if you do: $48.63/month
The higher speeds have higher setup and equipment costs but the monthly costs are all the same.
I have the 25Gbps service and can actually get those speeds outside my ISP's network: https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/84db310f-2caa-4564-b5ff-b...
Also fun: they can offer you a BGP session so you can use your own IP space with your home internet connection: https://lists.init7.net/hyperkitty/list/swinog@lists.swinog....
For anyone wondering how this is possible/economical when the US is so expensive:
- The last-mile connectivity is treated as a monopoly and providers who install the infrastructure are obligated to offer fair (not free) access to their competitors - this ensures price competition.
- Init7 successfully argued in federal court that P2MP topologies are anti-competitive, so can't be the sole implementation in new infrastructure deployments - this enabled them to install their own hardware on the other end of a customer's fiber, so they can simply swap a 1G SFP for a 10G SFP or a 25G SFP and offer higher speeds.
I feel silly asking, but what do you use 10gig for? That speed sounds insane; I get maybe 800mbps and I've basically never felt like the speed is too slow. Most consumer devices are still on gigabit Ethernet at the fastest, no - or am I just badly out of date?
Heck, anywhere above a few gigs, I feel like you'd start getting bottlenecked by whatever's on the other end of the connection.
Still, pretty cool to hear that the option exists!
Anything which is front ended by a CDN tends to end up faster than your connection for even the fastest connections. That leaves most of the web, updates (Microsoft/Apple/Google), content services like Steam or cloud storage/backup providers, and centralized piracy like Usenet (decentralized like torrents obviously vary per the seeds for each torrent).
It's certainly convenient my games, AI models, cloud backups, and large file downloads tend to go many times faster than when I had gigabit but I'd by no means be crying on the sides of the road about how long things take to upload/download if I had to go back.
The biggest thing you'll run into is algorithms designed to increase performance for limited connections don't scale infinitely. E.g. updating games on the Epic Games Store tends to be core limited (even on an overclocked 9800X3D) rather than bandwidth limited because it puts so much effort into the encryption and differential updating with the assumption "it'll be fast enough to not worry about". Even in those cases... it's nice to max them out without even having contention on everything else you're doing.
I’ve got 10 gig with 5 millisecond ping to Ashburn (Comcast’s gigabit x10, so it’s a full 10 gig port to the head end, not PON) and web surfing still sucks because JavaScript.
Are you surfing the web on a toaster? I only run into network bottlenecks or pages that suck because it loads tons of ads, which isn’t a javascript issue really. Yeah its not Wasm fast, and JS has some terrible stuff from a language perspective, but I don’t blame a slow web on Javascript. Certainly not for everyday browsing
Anything that's not a < 3 year old MacBook Pro tends to chug.
MacBook Air M3.
For a lot of people the benefits show up because they have more devices sharing that connection. Before our kids moved to school we had 5 people on our home connection. Each with multiple devices, all trying to work or play games or stream content at the same time.
For one person with one computer it’s probably delightful overkill. For a modern family unit it can make everyone happy.
But even for your 5 people, a gigabit is plenty to all stream content at the same time, right? How often are all 5 people trying to download a 5 gigabyte file at the same time such that they collectively really benefit from more than a gigabit?
[flagged]
There are many use cases:
A little server I just put inside my apartment has dual 10Gb/s ethernet ports.I get up to 90 megabytes/s download over wifi at my current place, and decent upload. I don't use it much, I just appreciate that I can do it quickly
for the last year I've been downloading Large Language Models through LM Studio's Huggingface browser, and I'm glad I can do that quickly
and pirating movies and tv shows again
other things that rely on some data don't get disrupted either
I'd like to run some service from my place, but I probably won't.
So many resources are large , the last deepseek model was 700Gb, games can easily run into hundreds of gbs these days. Just updating Xcode can be 10Gb
High speed internet opens up new use cases open up , for example, if I had a 10 gig symmetrical connection I could run my own self hosted CI runner for free* with my old hardware lying about and recoup my investment.
Any sort of spatial computing will need lot more speed and/or local assets to be useful - with today’s speed all we can reliably get is what Facebook is doing with metaverse .
Not 10 gig but I am on an apartment with 1gig down. It made a difference when I downloaded deepseek the other day. It took a few minutes instead of hours/days. I think if you have a family with a couple kids it can come in handy when everyone tries to connect online. Kids can be downloading games/streaming, you working and partner video-calling on high res.
It is not a necessity but a nicety.
> what do you use 10gig for?
Nothing, really! It's cheaper than 1gig, and my ISP doesn't even give me the option of paying for less. I could save about $10 a month to downgrade to AT&T 300Mbps fiber though (which would have data caps, bad privacy policy).
I'd be happy down to say 250/250. Gigabit feels like "all I could ever need" (for now), and 10gig is fantasyland.
It's always interesting to read these discussions from a misdeveloped country like Australia.
Where symmetric broadband is a pipe dream. And the lived reality in the city is 100Mps down and something like 17Mbps up. I mean it still works for everything. But in comparison other people are living in some kind of techno utopia.
At least our banking system is modern so we can pay for our shitty internet without having to fax cheques /s
100Mbps? That does put it in perspective. We gotta design our sites first this y’all.
There are people who have 1 Mbps connections too.
Just for a global comparison. Fibre is pretty ubiquitous in the UK but very little over 1G, and not usually symmetrical.
Most top end packages are 1G and go for between $45-70 depending on the reseller. But you can get it pretty much anywhere that qualifies as a decent sized town.
(We do have close-to a monopoly on the backbone, which is good for coverage but bad for speeds, looks like they are finally starting to role out full 1G/1G this year https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/08/openreach-reve... )
Not true re Openreach monopoly - openreach ftth is approx 51% premises covered, altnets cover 40% of the country (https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/uk), so not much in it at the moment.
On top of that, Virgin Media is upgrading their existing 18m home DOCSIS network to FTTH plus their nexfibre build will take them to probably 25m+ homes.
So by the end of the decade the average UK household is going to have access to at least 3 separate FTTH networks.
Only OR FTTH is not symmetrical btw. Everyone else offers symmetrical and YouFibre offers 8/8gig.
Fair but apart from Virgin, many of those Altnets rely on (and pay for) OR ducts & poles.
Am surprised to see Gb coverage that low!
Edit: that link is super interesting but I think they need to break it down a bit more. E.g. CityFibre, YouFibre and LightSpeed all seem to be counted under Altnets but all are very different setups.
Another global comparison point - in Japan, 1 Gbps fiber is available pretty much nationwide (I just checked the address of my in-laws' rural ancestral home in the middle of the rice fields)
10 Gbps is available in increasingly smaller cities (e.g. it was recently made available in a city of 100,000 near me).
Both priced at about $30/mo
Even if OR roll out symmetrical I doubt that many retail ISPs will sell it because that's one of the main selling points for Ethernet/"leased line" circuits for businesses
Fibre in NZ - 1Gbps $55USD 2Gbps $74USD 4Gbps $82USD
I can't even get it in zone 2 in London :(
This seems to be A Thing; city centers get bad internet. In Dublin if you look at coverage maps, the whole central area is an island of VDSL and DOCSIS in a sea of FTTH.
Not totally sure why.
It probably needs you to tear up the street and that's hard to get approved.
(And while all Anglo countries are NIMBY, Ireland is the most NIMBY, which is why its population is lower now than in the 1800s.)
> which is why its population is lower now than in the 1800s
I'm not sure that that's correct; modern planning permission as a concept was only really introduced around 1970, at which point the population was 3 million. The population is now 5.2 million. Ireland's depopulation was down to, initially, the famine, followed by almost constant economic crisis from the 19th century to the 1990s. We tend to emigrate very enthusiastically (this is particularly visible in the 1980s, when population actually _dropped_ for much of the decade).
(I do think that clearly with more sensible planning the population would now be somewhat higher, but you're probably talking an extra couple of hundred thousand.)
Interestingly, though, expectations about population did contribute to our current housing and infrastructure crisis. Around 2010, a lot of long-range planning was done on the basis that the population would reach something like 4.8 million by 2040; of course, this turned out to be wildly incorrect.
The estimate seems to have been based on the theory that, after the financial crisis, Ireland would go back to our historical pattern of decades-long recessions and mass emigration, now that that has failed to happen, well, all that planning is dramatically wrong. Ireland now completes more housing units per capita per year than any other OECD country, and it's still not enough. There's a massive housing deficit, the railways are over capacity with no relief until at least 2026, electricity and water infrastructure are under tremendous pressure, and so on. All of this is essentially a consequence of assumptions made 15 years ago that we'd just go back to mass emigration, and thus it was reasonable to have a decade where ~nothing got built.
Ireland is the most NIMBY, which is why its population is lower now than in the 1800s
Uh, are you sure that you haven't disregarded the Great Libertarian Sociological Experiment of 1847 in your reasoning?
https://youtu.be/yvKTG8pE_70?t=526
I mean, I suppose when you make a really _catastrophic_ fuckup at work, saying "God did it" is... an option?
That was a long time ago. Also, it only recently recovered to the level from 1851.
Ah the one upside to rural Lincolnshire I guess?!
You can look this up! https://investors.att.com/~/media/Files/A/ATT-IR-V2/financia.... Page 2. Consumer wireline operating margin was 4.8%.
Meanwhile, I'm paying 120/month for 150MB down, 75 up to my rural telco-op, and compared to the satellite internet I had before, I'm happy to be paying it.
That's rural life. I'm downtown in one a big Canadian city, and the best I can get is 400 down and 10 up for ~100$/month. You're getting better up than me, and I'm literally at the core of a major city.
They are probably still making bank on that I bet, my rural area got co-op fiber 2 years ago and its $85 for 250 mbps, which I actually get closer to 350 mbps from, and $125 for full gig symmetrical. And it is rural enough to not even have DSL before now. They have made enough money that they have covered a large chunk of this part of my state which is mostly all rural and have only sped up their area and roll-out of more service.
I have this wacky idea of community fiber kiosks where you stop to fast-download large files/torrents/data dumps
Any opinions on this from a user experience point of view?
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/LinkNYC
In practice, I think I've seen only a handful of people use them directly. It is soo conspicuous using one of these in broad daylight. Lots of people use the ports for charging, though. Also how NYC is this:
> Each Link has cameras and over 30 vibration sensors to sense if the kiosk has been hit by an object
So I’d take my expensive, heavy PS5, unplug it, and carry it to a download kiosk? And then wait 2-3 hours for a patch because it might be server-side throttled? And I’d also need a display of sorts to monitor progress.
I don’t think the idea is going to sell in this day and age.
For a laptop I could just occupy a coffee shop WiFi, and get coffee.
If you can bring that to kiosk and you live close enough to drive there, the problem is already solved. Even a radio bridge could do.
Reminds me of when I was in university, and only had dial-up at home, so I bought a Zip drive for my PC, knowing the computer labs had the same, and I could take stuff home that way.
I mean my "symmetrical 10G fiber" is actually 150MB up/down once it come through my router to my laptop, so while expensive, your speed is perfectly respectable.
> The author of the press release is under the mistaken belief that unchanged broadband pricing is a good thing.
You say that like it (edit to clarify: "it" = "unchanged broadband pricing") is a bad thing, though. Sure, it'd be nice if we had 1 Gb internet for <$30 like Denmark or wherever. But I will gladly sing praises to GFiber's speeds and stable prices given the hellhole of Comcast and CenturyLink I was previously living with.
Wait, an optical fiber is that expensive in the USA?
In France, the price for a symetrical 8 Gbit/s optical fiber is 50€/month (about $52) at the two fastest and most expensive companies! It's also 50€/month for professionals.
Doesn’t France have a lot of installation incentives and a large govt push towards 100% fiber?
Amazing what an administration with a goal can achieve…
I mean, be careful what you wish for; the current US administration has a goal (white power).
I think you’re blind if you include the “white” part. It’s just power. Megalomaniacs.
You’re buying into the narrative if you truly think race has anything to do with it. Race is a tool, and it was made a tool, which sucks.
Yes, you earn 3x and pay 2x.
Works out pretty well.
I can't get Sonic because apparently they don't have permits to operate in the underground conduits in my neighborhood. For some reason, AT&T has that. It's frustrating to say the least.
Google fiber is also full of shit when they say their prices havent changed because I was paying like 25 a month for 1g fiber in 2019 ain kansas city and now I pay 70 a month for the same service
AFAIK, GFiber has always been $70/month for 1gig.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20131218122258/https://fiber.goo...
It was not in Kansas city and I believe it was because it was a pilot program in kc for a while since it was one of the earliest locations for gfiber.
I could go dig up my old bills
Edit : yeah just found my bill from october 2019 and I was charged 50 dollars. They quietly raised the price ghen claimed it was always 70 dollars. Obnoxious.
For what it’s worth it’s not even remotely a factor of price/bandwidth. The capex of laying the fiber and doing the last-mile construction is huge and highly variable depending on existing fiber, construction costs, regulatory requirements, etc. What bandwidth they can provide is also due to these requirements, and if they’re profitable as well.
Once they actually get the service in place the final price-per-gbps is more a factor of physics than of corporate greed.
And then there's my parents, who live in a rural area and have a tiny fiber ISP charging $70/mo for 50mbps. That's not missing a zero...
If it's anything like where I am, they paid little or nothing to actually get the fiber to their house.
As with all rural infrastructure, low population density means high costs, especially if not everyone is a customer but you still have to run a cable past their house.
My rate is a little better than that- I think $120 for 150 or 200 symmetric- but it's still simultaneously more expensive than what I'd pay in the city and a far better deal than what we had before. Eventually they'll maybe make some money back on what I'm sure was a not inexpensive outlay just getting it to my house in the first place.
But at the same time fiber is even cheaper to rollout than copper lines, and we managed to roll out telephone lines all across the US and to every house without nearly as much trouble. Taking into account inflation it wasn't exactly real cheap to but a telephone line at first, but it was at least available.
> The author of the press release is under the mistaken belief that unchanged broadband pricing is a good thing.
It kind of is.
In a reasonably competitive ISP market, I'd expect the plans to slowly increase in price over time and significantly increase in speed over time. Keeping the basic tier at $70 is a good thing, even without a speed change. Gigabit is fast enough to still be solid in another 13 years.
Nice post. Thank you to share.
I believe you, but why is Google Fiber so slow to expand?I’m paying $59.95 for symmetric 1Gbps in Pittsburgh and my only complaint is the lack of IPv6. It’s absolutely rock solid.
at a relatively new high-rise in rincon hill, AT&T still charges 80-90$ for 1 gig symmetrical (same with webpass/xfinity).
Sorry but this is just incorrect on many fronts. I can speak to this issue as a former engineer on Google Fiber so I got to see just how the sausage was made.
Existing national ISPs just have inbuilt advantages that a newcomer cannot replicate or can't replicate cheaply. This is the result of decades of lobbying state and local governments.
Take something as simple as where you run cables in the streets. You basically have two choices: you dig trenches or you string up cables on a pole. There is no best answer here as it depends on a lot of factors like weather and climate, local soil conditions, natural disaster risks (eg wildfires, earthquakes), distances involved and existing infrastructure and legislation.
So imagine in a given area trenching is uneconomical. This could be just because there's a lot of limestone rock in the soil so it's difficult, slow and expensive to actually dig the trenches and this may be complicated by local noise ordinances, permitting, surveying, existing trenches and so on. So you end up stringing up cables on poles.
Who owns those poles? Is it the city? Is it AT&T? You may have rights to string up cables on those poles but the devil really is in the details. You might have to apply for a permit for each and every pole separately. They might be approved by the city but then how does the work happen? Can you do it? Maybe. But you might need AT&T (or whoever) to do something first like move their own cables. Maybe several other companies have to move cables first. Maybe each company has 90 days to do that work and this can add up so it can take over a year just to be able to put a cable up on a pole. And you can't really do any work until all the poles are available. That's just how fiber works.
And where do you run the fiber too? Do you run it back possibly several miles to a POP? There are advantages in that but obvious disadvantages like cost and just overall cable size and weight. Or do you use local substations? If so, what kind of building is that? Is it a large building that residents find "ugly" and object to on aesthetic grounds or maybe even environmental grounds that means more delays? How much does that cost? Is AT&T grandfathered in with their substations and nodes?
And then after you've done all that and you have your last mile fiber, how many customers do you get? Roughly 30-40% of houses get fiber by how many companies are you splitting that pool with? You have to amortize your entire network build over your projected customer base and it makes a massive difference if it's 10% of dwellings or 15% or 30% or 40%.
In industry parlance this is called an "overbuild" and is inherently economically inefficient. It'll actually raise the cost of every ISP because each will get a lower overall take up rate.
That's why the best solution is municipal broadband that either provides service or acts as a wholesaler to virtual ISPs.
The cost of running a fiber cable from a POP to a house has only gone up over th eyears and it's the majority of your cost. That's really why Internet costs haven't come down. And also why the best Internet in the US is municipal broadband and it isn't even close.
And let’s not overlook the shit show of “shallow trenching” in Louisville, KY.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/googl...
What is "gig"?
I'm familiar with Gbps and GB/s, one is 8x of another. But what is "gig"?
1 Gbps.
Speaking as a former Google Fiber software engineer, I'm honestly surprised this is still around.
In 2017, basically all the Google Fiber software teams went on hiatus (mine included). I can't speak to the timing or rationale but my theory is that the Google leadership couldn't decide if the future of Internet was wired or wireless and a huge investment in wired may be invalidated if the future Internet was wired so rather than guessing wrong, the leadership simply decided to definitely lose by mothballing the whole thing.
At that time, several proposed cities were put on hiatus, some of which had already hired local people. In 2019, Google Fiber exited Louisville, KY, paying penalties for doing so [1]. That really seemed like the end.
I also speculated that Google had tried or was trying to sell the whole thing. I do wonder if the resurrection it seems to have undergone is simply a result of the inability to find a buyer. I have no information to suggest that one way or the other.
There were missteps along the way. A big example was the TV software that was originally an acquisition, SageTV [2]. Somebody decided it would be a good idea to completely rewrite this Java app into Web technologies on an embedded Chrome instance on a memory-limited embedded CPU in a set-top box. Originally planned to take 6 months, it took (IIRC) 3.5+ years.
But that didn't actually matter at all in the grand scheme of things because the biggest problem and the biggest cost was physical network infrastructure. It is incredibly expensive and most of the issues are hyperlocal (eg soil conditions, city ordinances) as well as decades of lobbying by ISPs of state and local governments to create barriers against competition.
[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/googl...
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/googl...
> In 2019, Google Fiber exited Louisville, KY, paying penalties for doing so
Those mistakes in Louisville were huge. Literally street destroying mistakes that city Civil Engineers predicted and fought from happening in the first place, but Google Fiber did them anyway. Left a huge bill to the city taxpayers. It wasn't bigger news and a bigger upset because of NDAs and other contract protection things involved, but as an outsider to those NDAs/contracts, I can say it was an incredibly bad job on too many fronts, and should have left Google Fiber with a much more tarnished reputation than it did.
> There were missteps along the way. A big example was the TV software that was originally an acquisition, SageTV [2]. Somebody decided it would be a good idea to completely rewrite this Java app into Web technologies on an embedded Chrome instance on a memory-limited embedded CPU in a set-top box. Originally planned to take 6 months, it took (IIRC) 3.5+ years.
I worked on the "misstep" with a small team, and it’s wild to see Fiber still around and even expanding to new cities. As far as I can tell, the set-top box software had nothing to do with why Fiber was scaled down. Also, usability surveys showed people really liked the GUI!
The client supported on-demand streaming, live TV, and DVR on hardware with... let’s call them challenging specs. Still, it turned out to be a pretty slick app. We worked hard to keep the UI snappy (min 30 FPS), often ditching DOM for canvas or WebGL to squeeze out the needed performance. A migration to Cobalt [1], a much lighter browser than embedded Chromium, was on the table, but the project ended before that could happen.
Personally, it was a great experience working with the Web Platform (always a solid bet) on less-traditional hardware.
--
1: https://developers.google.com/youtube/cobalt
+1 to what was said above; the UI didn't take 3.5 years to make - we launched it fairly quickly and then continued to improve on it. Later there was large UX refresh, so maybe that's where OP is getting confused? Either way, that software continued to work for years after the team was moved on to other projects. SageTV was good, but the UI wasn't java - it was a custom xml-like layout.
> In 2017, basically all the Google Fiber software teams went on hiatus (mine included).
What does a hiatus entail in this case? Did these teams all just stop working on Fiber stuff and sit around all day hoping they would be given something to do?
They laid us all off. They had huge plans - millions of users! Then they intersected reality in KC where all people wanted was 5Mbit service and free TV... There were many, many people working to perfect the settop box for example. We got fq_codel running on the wifi, we never got anywhere on the shaper, the plan was to move 1+m units of that (horrible integrated chip the comcerto C2000 - it didn´t have coherent cache in some cases), I think they barely cracked 100k before pulling the plug on it all....
and still that box was better than what most fiber folk have delivered to date.
At least some good science was done about how ISPs really work... and published.
https://netdevconf.org/1.1/talk-measuring-wifi-performance-a...
> They laid us all off.
I think you mean "they advanced their amazing bet".
https://fiber.google.com/blog/2016/10/advancing-our-amazing-...
That's fascinating actually. You should consider doing a full blog writeup if that's something you're into.
Too bitter. I referenced a little of that "adventure" here, in 2021... gfiber was attempting to restart with refreshing their now obsolete hardware... https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/trouble_in_paradise/
I was thinking the same thing, not to mention that when Google Fiber was first announced, I was happy to be all in on Google for services but now, I’d be hesitant to use them for anything more than I’m already tied to.
Back when I lived in Ukraine in 2021, I got our family a 1Gbps fiber connection.
We lived on the edge of the city, and it was insanely hard to find a provider.
I knew internet was super cheap in Ukraine and was going to leave Ukraine in the following years, so getting a 1Gbps fiber as an all-time-at-home person was a great idea.
I ended up finding 2 providers that had fiber, and 1 of them had 1Gbps.
I was super happy to have symmetrical 1Gbps for $15 a month for the time I could spend there.
Here, in Vancouver, I am happy to have 250Mbps/15Mbps for $40 per month.
$15 for 1gpbs is insane. That was costing me $120+ over on Vancouver Island. If you want a good deal wait for BF / CM / Boxing Week. I upgraded to 3gbps fibre for $75/mo from Telus over boxing week. Almost as good a deal as your Internet in Ukraine.
I'm surprised Google hasn't forgotten about Google fiber.
I'm forced to conclude that it's actually making money, else they would have killed it by now.
I have it - signed up the day it was available at my house. One of the few Google things I'm pretty sure will continue to exist.
Google is perfectly willing to shut down a profitable product
Any examples you'd care to point out? All the high-profile Google shutdowns I can think of either failed in the marketplace (Stadia, Plus) or were successful but not making money (Reader, Hangouts).
Their DNS service comes to mind- although I guess it was divested, not killed.
I have also had Google Fiber since near its inception. I imagine it is profitable for Google because instead of tracking my browsing data, Google can just track all my packets now.
They did kill it before. But it's back again.
GOOGLE: There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive.
And when they’re all dead, there’s only one thing you can do: Run their pockets and look for loose change.
Fiber was not killed in the cities where it had already launched. What's new is that they're expanding again.
I think it must be that it will have the net effect of making people less free. They throw out stuff that could make money when it's good for freedom like Google Reader.
I've been told why Reader was shut down and it was the opposite of this.
(I can't repeat it because I forgot most of it.)
It does align pretty closely to their mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it accessible and useful for everyone", so it might be easier to make a case for its continued existence.
It also is another branch of Alphabet so not directly in the Google mgmt chain.
Though it looks like Alphabet is looking to sell it off, according to a reuters article Feb 5th, 2024.
They basically did at some point about a decade or so ago maybe. Wimax and LTE were taking off at that time. Then about 2 years ago, Google woke up and started pushing fiber again.
It's clear now that high speed fiber is the future. Cable companies aren't upgrading their networks anymore. It's unclear if the wireless companies will be able to support 10gig service. And the single mode fiber laid into the ground a decade or more ago has only increased in value.
is there any desire for residential 10g service? it's pretty hard to image how 90% of families would use up 200meg
Ever download a 100GB game? The 5x speed increase from 200mbit to 1gbit is significant. Most families have kids that game.
I'm actually downloading one right now off Steam, and I'm limited more by IOPS on the drive I'm installing to than I am my internet speed due to the compression/encryption/unpacking. Not even using much more than 100Mbits consistently here, but I am installing to a microSD on a gaming handheld. But devices like this are getting more popular especially for a multi-kid household.
But even then, it's not something most people are constantly doing. Maybe a couple of times a month.
I'd still probably go with more than 200Mbit for a family, but knowing how many of the families I know use their home internet they're rarely coming even close to routinely maxing out a 500Mbit connection even with several kids.
That's kinda like saying back in the 1990's that 90% of families wouldn't use more than 56.6k.
Well, because that's all they had access to.
No, a single user would routinely max out their dial-up connection just doing normal browsing things. Even just pulling a lot of email from a pop endpoint could max out that connection. Browsing web pages with graphics would absolutely crush a dial up connection. Some places tried to do things like handle video over such a connection, but it was pretty painful and pretty much useless. Streaming a song was pretty pointless.
These days a 200Mbit connection would handle five or so users doom scrolling social media with videos and images while a few TVs play 4K streaming media while smart home devices chirp home all the secrets in the house and the door bell cam uploads a few clips every hour and the Sonos is playing a few different songs in a few different zones throughout the house for ambiance.
> These days a 200Mbit connection would handle five or so users doom scrolling social media
Is that because all you can do is doom scroll on an internet connection, or are there higher bandwidth possibilities waiting for 10gig home internet service to arrive?
To some extent making that argument is like Bill Gates saying "All anyone will ever need is 640k."
Tons of households (even in the US) have access to 1G+ home internet connectivity and yet that seems to be most of what their usage is.
According to the FCC, in December 2023 something like 79% of all households had at least 100Mbit fixed internet, ~24% had 940Mbit or better. The NCTA claims 91% have access to gigabit or better. I do agree they're probably overselling that number (cable companies maps are often trash), but it wouldn't surprise me if it was really something more like 80% or more have some kind of access to gigabit but might just be cost prohibitive for what they care to spend.
https://www.fcc.gov/internet-access-services-reports
https://www.ncta.com/industry-data/91-of-us-homes-have-acces...
If these households aren't even really utilizing their gigabit connections very much today, what makes you think they're just waiting for 10 gigabit connectivity? What applications would they even really do with 10gig connectivity with hardware they'll have in the next five years, something normies would really care to do?
By and large people don't even care that much about 4K or ultra-high-quality video streaming. The two most popular Netflix plans are Standard and Standard with Ads. Blu-Rays are dead. VR acceptance is still pretty slow.
Even something like cloud gaming is really only using like 40-60Mbit of throughput for even a 4K gaming stream. Quadruple it, we're at 240Mbit. And even if we did ship 10gig home internet, it's not like we're just going to stop compressing the stream; a 4K 120Hz HDR stream is going to be ~32Gbit. Average household size in the US is about 3.23, so all three and a third people could be using 240Mbit and still have another 280Mbit of throughput.
Don't get me wrong, some percentage of home users would use a multi-gig home internet connection. But even though I can subscribe to a 5gig internet package and I'm more on the enthusiast end of things with a family with multiple kids and several 6E AP's with wired backhaul, hosting multiple applications and SDRs from my home, it's just not worth it to me to bother paying for it over the gigabit plan. Even if it was only $10/mo more I probably wouldn't jump to the higher plan. It wouldn't change my access or usage at all while costing another $120/yr.
Sell me on a 10gig home internet plan over a 1gig home internet plan. How is it going to radically change my usage with the kind of hardware most consumers actually buy and use? For that matter, sell me on a 1gig plan over a 500Mbit plan for a typical US household, let's say two adults and two teenage-ish kids. Would they really even see much of a difference in their day to day lives?
Back in the 90s it was pretty obvious what could be unlocked by having an always on multi-megabit internet connection over a single dial up connection for a household. It was just very prohibitively expensive for most people. I wouldn't say its anywhere near as obvious what benefits are to be had for a household today to jump from 500Mbit to 1gig or especially 1gig to 10gig.
Or maybe leadership has, and that’s why it’s still alive.
They did in my area 7 years ago almost as soon as it was announced. They wired new condos and apartments but nothing else. Luckily AT&T installed it on the pole by my house. I moved and lost fiber but have 1.2 down over coax but only 200 up.
> Luckily AT&T installed it on the pole by my house
This seems to be Google Fiber's purpose. Spurring the telcos into investing to maintain share.
There was a spur from them starting up at all. I don't want to diminish that too badly. But since then, increasing their coverage area from a fraction of a percent up to 1% of the US population, I don't think that has spurred very much.
That's the problem. I'd be afraid that if I signed up for it they'd just cancel it a year or two later.
Maybe the AI people convinced them that downloading models would require faster internet.
Well that's good, but they haven't even installed GFiber in cities they're in right now such as Omaha and Chicago etc. It's surprising how many places still don't have Fiber, and you can check your area with FCC's website: https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/home
I thought they killed this project years ago
It was basically dead for a while, apparently it's being resurrected.
Google Fiber was announced for Austin in 2013, and 12 years later it's still not available at my Austin address. I have used AT&T Fiber for as many years and it works great (currently at 2G symmetrical for $105/m).
Same. My neighbors have it and apparently I am never getting it.
A common complaint I hear at defcon and other cons in vegas is that the hotel internet is terrible.
Hopefully good internet service comes as a result of this?
I can think of two reasons why it wouldn't
(benign) peak-to-average problem - I'll go ahead and just assume that defcon attendees use a lot more internet bandwidth than the average Vegas-goer, so during defcon the network is overwhelmed, but the rest of the year the capacity is adequate. Upgrading the links to satisfy the peak (defcon) traffic load costs the casinos significant money, but gives minuscule benefit since the rest of the year they only need to support the much lower average load.
(malign) the casinos don't actually want you to have good internet because they don't want you staying in your room internetting - they want you down on the floor gambling. Other non-gambling amenities (shows, restaurants, etc.) are mostly time limited - you only spend so much time eating, and shows are only a couple hours each - and can be a differentiator that draws people to a specific casino (because of specific food/entertainment preferences). Those people then spend the rest of the day gambling at that casino.
"Better" internet it's actually a negative differentiator - people who want to spend all their time infinite-scrolling will gamble less, so casinos don't want to attract them in the first place.
It's worse.
Event venues AND anyplace that might EVER have expense account holding business travelers just want to charge for it. Even if fiber literally rolled right up to the side of the building, it'd be resold by either the hotel or a 3rd party vendor with a focus on profit rather than just being good.
My wife and I started traveling a lot as leisure travelers (50+ days last year, 240 days the year before) post Covid and my wife goes to conferences. We stay in mostly Hilton and Hyatt brands with the occasional Marriot. It use to be true that the high end brands charge for WiFi. But I haven’t seen a separate WiFi charge in all of these time.
Admittedly the only hotel I stayed in that was considered high end was the Conrad in Los Angeles.
Non anecdotally, I did a search and I couldn’t find a hotel that still charged separately for WiFi, just a “resort fee” that everyone pays.
Some hotels do charge for “premium” WiFi.
The largest hotels around, like Caesars Palace, might have 4000 rooms.
So if they had, for example, a 10 Gbps link for the building - that's only 2.5 Mbps per room if everyone wants to use it. Fine when 98% of guests don't want to use it, totally inadequate if all your guests want to use it.
And as I understand things, if someone's offering you a 10 gigabit link for $150 they're relying on you only using it a tiny % of the time. So if you put your 4000 room hotel on a Google Fiber link you'll probably run into the secret download limits after a day or two. And the price for a non-oversold 10-gigabit link seems to be "call our enterprise sales team for pricing"
I mean, no one is expecting commercial-grade fiber at residential prices, but even taking that into account, these hotels (which are almost all owned by 3 companies) can afford to drop a few dozen grand a month on internet and not even notice the bill
Amazon during re:Invent somehow manages to set up fast WiFi networks that service literally tens of thousands of attendees.
It's a skill issue from the hotel owners. They can't be bothered to fix their stuff.
I can't speak for Amazon 's team directly but for large events on that scale, totally reasonable to have your own links brought to the facility.
For a casino, they probably already have spare conduit or dark fiber to a close by POP so they don't even need LoS microwave links.
Efficiently distributing all of that bandwidth across the many, many, many different wireless access points efficiently is an art and science all on its own and that's probably the aspect most people are complaining about.
I'd love to know more about how Amazon do that.
How much does it cost to get a 100+ gigabit link set up for a 4 day long event?
Not sure about 100gig, but hotels charge crazy amounts of money for Internet entrance. They like provide it themselves, but if you insist on running your own they will happily charge you to give you access to the various parts of the hotel you'll need to make it happen.
I haven't been involved in the last decade, but I'm kind of known as "the guy that makes PyCon networking work", and it can easily be $5K to $10K (from memory) for the hotel, even if you are providing all your own connectivity and gear. I haven't had to do it in recent years because venue Internet has gotten much, much better.
No idea about the cost, there were some tidbits from 10 years ago: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/the-aws-cloud-goes-undergro...
I'm guessing that's mostly wifi congestion.
it's probably just a skill issue. the wifi at the Chaos Communication Congress, on the other hand, is spectacular.
well the CCC crowd has many years of experience on their belt dealing with the absurd amount of traffic that only a nerd conference can sustain - and they do all of it on their own, the only thing the venue has to give them are rooms, power and fiber uplinks. CCC erects a whole damn ass datacenter and tears it down in a few days, that's a massive expense both financially and in volunteer time. Oh and on top of that comes all the video streaming and recording infrastructure, that stuff is rivaling actual large TV networks from what I hear.
In contrast, for almost all other venues, providing networking is the responsibility of their owner, and they plan their networking gear not for the "one conference to rule them all" but for your everyday trade show.
Are there behind scenes videos of their wifi setup? I haven't found any.
The video team has a wiki [1] and the NOC a few photos on mastodon [2]. There used to be at least one more detailed report but FFS Google is useless these days.
[1] https://c3voc.de/wiki/hardware
[2] https://chaos.social/@c3noc/media
A recent LTT video attributes it to hotels colluding so that one's Wi-Fi isn't too much better than the others.
https://youtu.be/sYXh0AdBw-I?t=879
I'm gonna need a source on that one beyond LTT just going "the hotels on the strip collude with each other".
Convention wireless is a pain in the ass as a whole, and I've seen it both from venue-hosted networks and privately-operated-on-site networks being deployed as an overlay.
Did you actually look at the video/transcript? They were specifically talking about the internet service in the rooms being bad, and how it used to be good in specific hotels.
That's not a source. That's just an objective statement with no evidence to back it up. It's LTT talking uninformed shit as he always does.
I'm not saying it's "a source" to the collusion, I'm saying the reasons you gave to entirely reject the LTT clip were invalid. He wasn't talking about the show floor, and he personally experienced a better connection in certain hotels so we know they can manage it.
It might or might not be connected to the show floor issues, but it's relevant information for a bunch of the in-room internet experience to get significantly worse over time. It suggests that they are not even trying, so the fact that convention wireless is hard is not an excuse.
Ah, the memories of trying to get good internet for DEF CON CTF in some random hotel suite…
Is it really? Still waiting for it to be available everywhere in Nashville after they started here nearly a decade ago.
Got fiber here in Memphis last year (CSpire), don't lose hope!
Do y'all have fiber at all? Most if not all of remote middle TN from Cookeville to Winchester has cheap FTTH. I live in unincorporated acreage, and was surprised they just came out this year to run a fiber line to my house. 57/mo for symmetrical gig. Goes up to 8, but that's a couple hundred.
That's how it is in Vegas presently: CenturyLink has fiber service but it's scattered around unpredictability, and in areas where it's not available it may never be. Hopefully Google fiber (un)availability doesn't overlap too much, but I expect that it will.
I've had Google Fiber for almost a decade now. It's fine enough. I've had weird issues in the past though and it's been rather unfriendly when it comes to setting up things like a VPN on a router -- though this was many years ago. Perhaps things have changed?
I also had an issue 6 or so years ago where Google Fiber would block sites that did not have both an IPv6 and IPv4 address.
Nonetheless, service has been fine otherwise. I'd say Google Fiber has probably been the second best ISP I have used despite my ever slowly growing hatred of all things Google.
My parents have had Google Fiber since 2011 or 2012. It's been a joy. The uptime has been great and the price has pretty much remained the same for 1Gig. In Los Angeles I pay $90/mo for 100mbps Spectrum connection which drops once a week and has gone up from $40 to $90/mo in just under 2 years. Worst of all is Spectrum has complete monopoly and I have nowhere else to go.
Check again? https://frontier.com/shop/internet/fiber-internet
We used to have Spectrum, but switched to Frontier Fiber as soon as it was available, a couple years ago now. Apart from a few hiccups during the first few weeks of service, it's been very reliable.
Can’t come soon enough. I pay over $200/mo for Cox here in LV (including a surcharge for “unlimited data”) and still get 20% of advertised speeds at 7pm and nastygrams when I upload a 2TB photography backup.
Cox and CenturyLink are monopolistic criminals and should receive corporate death penalties for their misconduct.
I cant shake a feeling that above 50pM/1gig, it doesnt matter how fast residential Internet is. Back when WFH really meant FTPing a whole file down, working on it, and then FTPing it back up, sure. But gdrive and OneDrive and so on all seem quite happy to only send you the blocks you are working on, Teams/Zoom uses remarkably little bandwidth, and games distribution seems to use a combination of CDN and JIT downloads, at least after the initial 80G download for the first user. I know this is n=1 sampling, but my house of 5 was merrily WFH-ing on 100M for ages with nary a whimper. Does it really matter, in 2025?
What does seem to matter is variability: latency and jitter, and the stability of the network inside the house (eg wifi contention). The pipe is the least of one's worries, it would seem.
Still sad more cities don't roll out their own fiber and own the utility for the local community.
I remember reading about Google Fiber in the news 10+ years ago. At that time the idea of having a multi-gigabit internet connection at home felt very exciting and futuristic. Today, fiber at home is almost a given in many countries. I mean, it is good that LA residents will have access to fast internet. But this is commodity now. I don't get it why is this in the news.
Las Vegas, not Los Angeles.
On another note, I'm living in Switzerland and have 10Gbit/s symmetric up and download. For CHF 50/month ($55/month).
The comments here are interesting.
Mesa AZ signed a deal with Google in 2022 and I got fiber installed last summer. It was all new fiber in the streets in my neighborhood too. And I still see lots of constructions signs for it around. Definitely seem to still be growing. Two other new competitors are also in the area.
I've got a place in Vegas that's presently served by CenturyLink. It has 1G/1G symmetrical fiber at a guaranteed fixed price of $65/mo. 8G is appealing. So far I haven't seen a map or a timeline of where/when. I signed up for status emails from Google over a year ago.
They just raised the price on my fixed for life deal from Century Link. If you look back, there's nothing in the documentation/terms that actually claimed it was for life. Super shady on their end and I'm going to switch to Google Fiber once they're finished installing it in my neighborhood (they're currently in the installation process)
The only way they could have raised the price was if you opted into their new "Quantum Fiber" plan. I got the snail-mail postcards offering me the "upgrade", but I did not see any benefit. They offered exactly the same service I already have. I assumed (correctly) that they were just trying to get out of the $65/mo "lifetime" deal they promised.
I still have the deal.
Edit: I just checked, and Quantum Fiber now offers 2G/1G (two down, one up) fiber in my Vegas neighborhood for $95/mo. They are claiming it's a "lifetime" price guarantee.
I'll keep waiting for Google's 10G fiber.
Same here ($65 -> $75); I think it's an "equipment fee." I don't even use the router. My employer covers the cost so I haven't called to complain, but I suspect if you do you can return the router and lose the fee.
I keep the router they gave me in one of my garages. The only time I've ever connected it was when their service had a problem and they wanted to run remote diagnostics. The other 99.9999% of the time, I use an OpenWRT VM.
I would not have accepted the router if there were any strings attached, and they're welcome to take it back if they want to start charging me for it.
I have 2gig symmetrical from a non-Google provider that works fine in an (at least) second tier city for $100/mo.
It seemed really trivial to install, I don't think there's an excuse to not have it everywhere than can have a telephone line.
I forgot google fiber existed, but more shocked that google hasn't cancelled it.
Meanwhile; in the world capital of tech, I’m paying Cox for lousy coaxial over nearly 30 year old cable because nobody will pay to lay a fiber on my street (not even neighborhood… street)
I love the photo of the information sign "GFiber - Work being performed by ... Permit # ... Phone numbers:"
All the relevant information on one sign.
Wait, google fiber is not shutdown?
I was told by the pundits on here that it would be shutting down. Is there a new estimate?
They should rename the company to reflect their pivot to wireless broadband
It’s Google, it’ll be shut down a week after the fiber goes live.
It started in 2010. How much longer should we wait for your prediction to come true?
> It started in 2010. How much longer should we wait for your prediction to come true?
Google has already actively started soliciting outside investors to spin off Google Fiber. Don't hold your breath. Nothing escapes the Google Graveyard, its gravitational mass is simply too large.
"GFiber has already hired an investment bank to start the process of selling equity in the company, according to a source close to Alphabet's efforts. The future goal is for GFiber to be independent from Alphabet, the source said on condition of anonymity."
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/alphabet-is-s...
I don't see any reason to think that would involve a shutdown.
Especially because, who would invest in that?
Woah. gFiber still exists?
There are three different fiber ISPs all “coming soon” in Vegas. I hope they come sooner.
What are the other ones?
ATT and Quantum. Those both have fiber in some neighborhoods but don’t seem to be expanding quickly.
I wouldn't hold my breath. At my previous house, CenturyLink/quantum site said it was available. I called half a dozen times to get it installed, each time some contractor would show up and tell me it's not available. I was confused because they spent months very visibility installing it throughout the neighborhood. Talking to some of the contractors, it was interesting to hear stories about why it was available in some areas but not others just a few houses down.
Eventually, one of them did figure out how to get me connected.
Can you say what the issue was?
I didn't fully understand the details when they were explaining it to be, but iirc something was disconnected around the corner, and they couldn't just reconnect it because it wasn't the right hardware.
This played out over several months
Since Google made a big donation, maybe Trump will clear the way for google to plow through the red tape to create more high-speed internet competition, which should lower the price for many Americans. I doubt it will happen, but one can dream.
So the FCC is going to let them spy on the last mile with no restrictions. Nice of Sundar to come back from DC with a gift.
Google Fiber has been in existence since 2012.
Yes and it’s not profitable enough to be worthwhile - unrestricted spying changes that.
Let me guess ...
Download speed: 10Gbps
Upload speed: 10Mbps
Google Fiber is symmetrical.
Although this still happens in the UK, this hasn't been the case for years in the US.
Isnt fiber symmetrical?
It doesn't have to be, but Google fiber is.
Xfinity hasn't gotten that notice apparently.
They offer 1 Gbps download in my area with 20 Mbps upload. And it comes with a 1.2 TB limit.
EDIT: I'm wrong. The Xfinity in my area is on cable.
AFAIK Xfinity (Comcast) is not deploying FTTP anywhere. It's a cable network on DOCSIS. The fiber usually stops at the CMTS which is far away from the home; one CMTS serves multiple neighborhoods if not the entire town.
Took another look at the connection info and yeah you're right. The Xfinity connection in my area is cable. Not sure why I thought it was fiber.
Thanks for the correction.
It is symmetrical.