Google Fiber’s Next Destination?

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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May 9, 2000
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From the indications Google is sending out to cities under consideration, it appears that Google Fiber is coming to North Carolina. Interested parties in Charlotte, Raleigh and Durham have all received notifications to attend events on the 28th and 29th of January. If all three municipalities are chosen, it will be the first time Google has launched in multiple markets at the same time according to the article from DSL Reports.

A number of groups and Charlotte city officials are being invited to a Google reception that’s being held on Wednesday, January 28th” and that “invites are being sent out for a simultaneous event to be held in Raleigh on the same day, and one in Durham on January 29th.”
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Raleigh and Durham are really just 1 "market", they are the same Metropolitan area.

None the less, I was looking at moving there so this is good news.
 
i live about an hour away...

may have to move for this (and accept a hire paying job, :p)
 
leeleatherwood said:
Raleigh and Durham are really just 1 "market", they are the same Metropolitan area.

None the less, I was looking at moving there so this is good news.
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Move there, as in willingly? North Carolina is like the north end of Vegas, or Mexico: you don't go there, you end up there.
 
DPI said:
Move there, as in willingly? North Carolina is like the north end of Vegas, or Mexico: you don't go there, you end up there.
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You have probably never been there.

Raleigh Durham has a low cost of living, an abundance of IT jobs, protects my 2nd Amendment Rights, protects my rights to public lands, is close to both the mountains and the beach, lots of outdoor activities, the weather is great, trees and green grass are everywhere.

Whats not to like?

Its either that, or Austin. I would have including Colorado in the mix but all the Californians have completely fucking ruined that entire state.
 
And once again because the thread that is 99% gripe about how they made a poor choice, why don't you come to <city x>, and/or same tired story about one's personal woes with over priced internet.

That said, I'll add my 2 cents to the last one. I know for a fact Google fiber will never come to San Francisco, first Google fiber is mostly lighting up dark fiber not so much laying the infrastructure, and second the supervisors of this city is so god damn incompetent when it comes to anything that requires a permit and they're getting into a pissing match with AT&T over the Uverse boxes thinking they can win.
 
leeleatherwood said:
Its either that, or Austin. I would have including Colorado in the mix but all the Californians have completely fucking ruined that entire state.
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Blame the companies that unrooted and moved to Colorado, you don't big companies moving to a new state means that all those jobs are up for grabs do you?
 
Raleigh / Durham and Charlotte are in a completely different universe from the rest of NC. Most of the rest of it is a collection of rednecks and underachievers. The cities mentioned before are cutting edge in regards to tech. Stay in the cities and you'll love NC. Move out with the rest of us and you'll despise it.
 
cageymaru said:
Raleigh / Durham and Charlotte are in a completely different universe from the rest of NC. Most of the rest of it is a collection of rednecks and underachievers. The cities mentioned before are cutting edge in regards to tech. Stay in the cities and you'll love NC. Move out with the rest of us and you'll despise it.
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This.
 
cageymaru said:
Raleigh / Durham and Charlotte are in a completely different universe from the rest of NC. Most of the rest of it is a collection of rednecks and underachievers. The cities mentioned before are cutting edge in regards to tech. Stay in the cities and you'll love NC. Move out with the rest of us and you'll despise it.
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Can confirm, I work in the RTP area and it is absolutely wonderful. Everything is so close to wherever you live in this area that it makes life much easier.
 
Rural test time!

Cruiser Lake, Ontario.

Make it happen. There are literally tens of people here could put it to good use.
 
"In addition to being home to several cities ready to bend over backward for better broadband choices, it has been a key location in the battlefield over municipal broadband. Time Warner Cable, AT&T and Centurylink wrote and lobbied to pass a law hindering community broadband back in 2011 after three previous attempts." That is why there is zero competition here in NC. TWC actually told these lawmakers here in NC that once passed, the law killing municipal broadband would actually increase competition and the fool lawmakers believed it and passed it!!!
 
they can add all the cities they want, but at the rate they are going they won't actually do anything there for about a decade. By then everyone else would have upgraded their offerings.

savagepagan said:
"In addition to being home to several cities ready to bend over backward for better broadband choices, it has been a key location in the battlefield over municipal broadband. Time Warner Cable, AT&T and Centurylink wrote and lobbied to pass a law hindering community broadband back in 2011 after three previous attempts." That is why there is zero competition here in NC. TWC actually told these lawmakers here in NC that once passed, the law killing municipal broadband would actually increase competition and the fool lawmakers believed it and passed it!!!
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To a degree they are correct. If the city doesn't do fiber itself that leaves it open to everyone else to come in and build fiber. The fact that nobody else wants to spend money on it is a different story.
 
sfsuphysics said:
And once again because the thread that is 99% gripe about how they made a poor choice, why don't you come to <city x>, and/or same tired story about one's personal woes with over priced internet.

That said, I'll add my 2 cents to the last one. I know for a fact Google fiber will never come to San Francisco, first Google fiber is mostly lighting up dark fiber not so much laying the infrastructure, and second the supervisors of this city is so god damn incompetent when it comes to anything that requires a permit and they're getting into a pissing match with AT&T over the Uverse boxes thinking they can win.
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Portland is ON the list. That's why i'm griping.
 
Woot!
Raleigh at #1 and Charlotte at #5...good choices. I live in Charlotte, so here's hoping to a fiber-full future that's sooner rather than later! Raleigh and Durham are pretty much the same metro market if I'm not mistaken, so those 2 going as a package deal isn't a surprise.
 
Megalith said:
What do those rednecks need Internet for.
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North Carolina isn't that far south. I think they at least have some benefit of being positively influenced by their much superior northern neighbors. Lots of them don't speak with that weird accent where they call people ya'll and constantly worry about whether or not the belt buckle they just purchased is large enough to cover their belly button and their entire crotch.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
North Carolina isn't that far south. I think they at least have some benefit of being positively influenced by their much superior northern neighbors. Lots of them don't speak with that weird accent where they call people ya'll and constantly worry about whether or not the belt buckle they just purchased is large enough to cover their belly button and their entire crotch.
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this. its warm, but not trash.
 
I lived in Charlotte most of my life and watched it grow up to be one of the biggest metro areas in the country. It's deceptively large, but doesn't actually feel that way mainly because it's a conglomeration of sections that blended together over the years. Native Charlotteans know where one stops and the other begins. It got so large that I finally had to get out of there. There's Charlotte and then there's the rest of North Carolina. ;)
 
Google Fiber probably isn't going anywhere, at least not any time soon. Google doesn't appear serious about becoming a national ISP. They bluffed the ISPs, the ISPs called them on it by not responding in kind with fiber deployments of their own, and Google looks ready to fold.
 
Terpfen said:
Google Fiber probably isn't going anywhere, at least not any time soon. Google doesn't appear serious about becoming a national ISP. They bluffed the ISPs, the ISPs called them on it by not responding in kind with fiber deployments of their own, and Google looks ready to fold.
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I don't know, supposedly AT&T has their GigaPower service in the Raleigh-Durham area already, the fact that Google is trying to move in on somewhere where it already exists might be telling.
 
Terpfen said:
Google Fiber probably isn't going anywhere, at least not any time soon. Google doesn't appear serious about becoming a national ISP. They bluffed the ISPs, the ISPs called them on it by not responding in kind with fiber deployments of their own, and Google looks ready to fold.
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Agreed, they have lots of cities in their list but they are really doing much. As you said it is all a bluff. Which soon the ISPs are going to catch onto and start putting off upgrading their own stuff to just watch to see if Google actually does anything
 
Exavior said:
Agreed, they have lots of cities in their list but they are really doing much. As you said it is all a bluff. Which soon the ISPs are going to catch onto and start putting off upgrading their own stuff to just watch to see if Google actually does anything
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Is that really a bad thing? I don't care if google runs fiber to my house, as long as someone does at a decent rate...
 
SticKx911 said:
Is that really a bad thing? I don't care if google runs fiber to my house, as long as someone does at a decent rate...
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yes, you can only call wolf so many times before people stop caring. Right now Google says we are going to do fiber to every home by (today plus 2 or 3 years) and so everyone there quickly upgrades to get done before the 2 or 3 years comes up. However after awhile these places will realize that google isn't coming in X number of years but instead it will be twice as far out if not worse. Austin was supposed to start having customers installed this time last year and they are just now getting close to doing any customers, I think they are planning on this summer to start on the south side of the city. However by now TWC, Grande and AT&T have all 3 boosted their speeds so there is not going to be as much demand for Google fiber from everyone since they already have higher speeds in many cases. TWC, AT&T and other national chains will start to notice however that they are giving away faster speeds faster than they need to, so instead they will start to slow down and wait longer so if Google says today that they are doing something 2018 instead of the big guys in those areas rushing to get done by 2016 they instead will put off till mid 2017 or later as they know that Google really isn't going to be there by 2018 like they said. They currently have a lot more projects in planning stages that what the public is told. However they also haven't been actively working on as many of the publicly known ones at the pace they have said they were going to.


As for the other part there, what you might consider decent and what is realistic are two different things. I won't disagree that the big guys get a shit ton of money and are allowed to make a lot of profit and should be able to put some back into equipment and fiber and make less profit while being nice to customers. That won't happen as profits is the only thing that matters, but I still won't disagree that they is money there for them to spend. That said fiber isn't cheap to put in, so what many places charge for fiber isn't really as crazy as what most people want to think. When a company has to spend a few million to do a few square miles of fiber they aren't going to want to wait around 10+ years to get their money back. they are going to want to try to get it back as soon as possible. And that is all avoiding whether or not the company is an ILEC or CLEC which changes things to a massive degree.
 
I think Google is doing this the smart way - building infrastructure and trying to keep a low radar on this, where cable companies won't try to compete too hard with them or toss a major fit.

Build up enough territories where you have the infrastructure in place, and then when the time is right, then you go to war and pull the rug right out from under the cable media conglomerates.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Isn't Google just using existing infrastructure, fiber that is already laid, just not completely connected.
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Depends on where. They lease or re-use existing infrastructure if at all possible, which is the wise choice to do.

They have laid a shit ton of fiber here in Kansas City in the residential areas. Then again, there wasn't much there to begin with only mediocre speed DSL or Cable. The only places that had fiber already were business areas, or from the ISP's to DSLAM's where the last mile to the houses was cable or DSL.

I'm very grateful for what Google has done here in KC. Before, it was TWC, Comcast, ATT, and SureWest, depending on the part of town you lived in. FWIW, as shitty as TWC is, they were still the best in town with no data caps and 30mb/s internet. Even though I couldn't get Google Fiber because I live in apartments (they have to sign up every apartment in the complex or nothing), Google's pressure has resulted in some sweet deals from TWC. I seriously get offers for free movies through their on-demand service, lowered rates, and speeds that are skyrocketing quickly as if they were capable of it the whole time. This last year, they sent me a special offer to get their 100mb/s internet at the same rate as their lowest tier for 2 years, with a guaranteed upgrade to 300mb/s speeds in 1 year. Whether they hold true to the upgrade, who knows, but I've got stupid fast internet cheap until the Comcast merger at which point I will cancel service.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Isn't Google just using existing infrastructure, fiber that is already laid, just not completely connected.
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They might do that between cities or something like that, but most cities aren't going to have fiber to every home just sitting there. They are still going to have to put in a lot of fiber on their own.
 
Exavior said:
They might do that between cities or something like that, but most cities aren't going to have fiber to every home just sitting there. They are still going to have to put in a lot of fiber on their own.
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Fiber to homes, no, but the backbones in the city yes. I know there's hundreds of miles of dark fiber in San Francisco, but that ship sailed a long time ago.
 
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