Google Fiber is Pressuring Rivals to Up Their Game

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
Joined
May 9, 2000
Messages
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Maybe the very best feature of Google Fiber will prove to be that it really grabs the attention of other Internet Service Providers. All of this intimidation is causing the companies to run just a little scared and provoking them to get off of their dead ….er uh centers to increase their own speeds to remain competitive even before Google sets a foot into town.

Akamai’s data shows that in the fourth quarter of 2012, average Internet speeds in Kansas climbed faster than any other state in America. Average speeds in the midwestern state grew by 86% compared to Q4 2011.
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Really i care more about the BANDWITH CAPS which are artificial and put in place as a Money Grab. Speeds means nothing if you cant use it. Eliminate the Caps before increasing the speeds.
 
Unfortunately the only areas these companies are increasing speeds is where Google Fiber is setting up shop. The other 99.99% of the population still has to pay an obscene amount of money to get bent over by these corporations without even getting a complementary reach around. :S
 
Yes, what's the point in a 100Mb connection if it has a data cap? The only purpose is to get you to the cap and into the surcharges faster... which changes it from being a good service into being nothing more than a good racket.


Which is why even though all major ISPs and telcos suck on service, certain ones like Google, Verizon and Frontier offer unlimited transfer and solid up/down speeds for a decent price.

I'm sure we use more than 300GB every month. Never a word from our ISP. We are paying for mid-tier service and they just happily take our money.

This is the way every ISP has to go eventually or we will never have universal high quality content delivery that will entice developers and studios to go online-only. The only other option is to regress our internet service and willingly give up technological advance which long term would be suicidal to our nation's growth.
 
Fiber is a very long term, upgradeable investment. What don't these companies get about that?
 
Bandwidth caps are a bigger problem, I think. Most people will never hit a cap, but it does hurt heavy users. Then again, why should people who check their e-mail and surf the web a few minutes a week have to soak up the cost of home theather people who try to stream HD video for 6 hours a day because they refuse to go outside to get mugged like the rest of us?
 
You can thank the very stupid laws that exist in many of the US states for the lack of growth and innovation. There are billions of dollars worth of dark fibre just sitting there because the local city / muni / county will get sued by the cable & telco's if they dare offer their own residents a home grown option. This is what google is using, and every other company out there could offer the same thing if they truly wanted to advance the internet access, but all they care about is whoring as much money as possible with the least investment that they happen to have a monopoly on.
 
We need Google Fibre here in Canada in the worst way. Our internet oligopoly has just killed our business infrastructure and our broadband costs are completely mental.
 
I am with ya'll on bandwidth caps. We have two choices in my area, 50Mbps cable with a 100gb cap($.50 for every gb over the cap) and 6Mbps dsl with no cap. I would love to have the increased speed but I would hit that cap in no time, so I grudgingly poke along with my dsl. I have given up on the possibility of having unfettered high speed internet, at this point I'd dance a jig if I could just get 24/2 uncapped dsl here.
 
The point of the article is that other areas that are not Kansas City are starting to pick things up.

Of course there data limits on some plans right now, but if a Google service came into your area, they wouldn't have any, thus making the other companies totally useless. Hence the article :p

They should be, and are, scared of falling behind.
 
Thing about it is, this all just seems like common sense for Google to try and push something like this. If they have the funds to back this sort of initiative they can take advantage of all the other providers just sitting on their asses. If not Google than some other company with the resources would have eventually done the same thing. All we can hope is that Google chooses to maintain at least a somewhat ethical approach to their gain in power.
 
SparkedFire said:
Fiber is a very long term, upgradeable investment. What don't these companies get about that?
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Well, it is and it isn't. Nanoscience's are producing very interesting materials for both optical and electrical transfer. Just think about the bandwidth you could get with a material with 1000 times the conductivity as copper. Improvements to fiber are being made as well both to speed and bandwidth. Its a matter of time until they're commercially viable.

Increasing bandwidth for existing infrastructure and decreasing data needs through advances in codecs could be enough for the time being. How many people could make use of more than 50/10 anyways?
 
SparkedFire said:
Fiber is a very long term, upgradeable investment. What don't these companies get about that?
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Because they go by the motto of "we're going to ride this mother fucker until the wheels fall off". I'm sure they've run cost analysis on the whole situation, the fact that they're clinging to copper and coax says a couple of things, first they can still make money off it so why bother, and second they may have hit a peak of profit making.

Think about it, they can charge you $70/month for 20-50Mbps (finding the true cost of cable internet is a bitch) service that they can push through coax that's already existing, or $70/month for 1Gbps service and pay the infrastructure required to build it off... if they can get people to pay for $70/month, without huge losses why would they even bother with fiber?
 
DarkStryke said:
You can thank the very stupid laws that exist in many of the US states for the lack of growth and innovation. There are billions of dollars worth of dark fibre just sitting there because the local city / muni / county will get sued by the cable & telco's if they dare offer their own residents a home grown option. This is what google is using, and every other company out there could offer the same thing if they truly wanted to advance the internet access, but all they care about is whoring as much money as possible with the least investment that they happen to have a monopoly on.
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The local city / muni / county governments are the reason they have a monopoly.
 
We lived in Falls City, Nebraska which ironically was one of the first places in Nebraska to have fiber optic internet. Paid $90 a month for 15mbit uncapped connection that had incredible latency all over the US.

When we heard about Google Fiber a few years ago and how it was coming to Kansas City, we decided to move to Kansas City ( 2 1/2 hour move from Falls City, NE ) after my GF's sister started college. After she shipped out, we moved to KC.

We are in Edison School District #58 or http:///10M8tKT

My friend across town already has it and we've been playing with his connection as well as his new Asus AC wireless router.

With 70 concurrent usenet connections we can hit between 600 and 900mbit depending on time of day. Or, 60 - 90MB a second. That's a 9GB file in less than 2 mins. No data caps.

If you can move, crap job, no real family, high bills, etc .. consider moving. Or you can slowly die in your small town with shit internet over the next 10 - 20 years until most of the US should be 1Gbit or so I would assume.
 
incredibly low latency that is. 10 - 20ms.

Oh and forgot to mention, here in Kansas City, because of Google Fiber, Time Warner doubled everyone's speed. We went from 50mbit to 100mbit ( 13.5 MB a second ) so yeah, they are feeling the pressure. Some ISP's that is.
 
Marcdaddy said:
Really i care more about the BANDWITH CAPS which are artificial and put in place as a Money Grab. Speeds means nothing if you cant use it. Eliminate the Caps before increasing the speeds.
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Agree 100%. I'm glad mine is not capped, but it seems caps are everywhere else now so I fear the day my ISP decides to implement some too. I really think 10/10mbps should be the standard uncapped internet. That's good enough for most people, but 100/100 and 1g/1g should be options too. If they want to cap it, they should just throttle when you reach the cap, instead of charging extra, or it should be the customer's choice. But the caps are 100% artificial anyway so I say get rid of em.
 
Marcdaddy said:
Really i care more about the BANDWITH CAPS which are artificial and put in place as a Money Grab. Speeds means nothing if you cant use it. Eliminate the Caps before increasing the speeds.
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I'll run this up the chain.
 
Sturmangriff said:
I am with ya'll on bandwidth caps. We have two choices in my area, 50Mbps cable with a 100gb cap($.50 for every gb over the cap) and 6Mbps dsl with no cap. I would love to have the increased speed but I would hit that cap in no time, so I grudgingly poke along with my dsl. I have given up on the possibility of having unfettered high speed internet, at this point I'd dance a jig if I could just get 24/2 uncapped dsl here.
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Jesus fuckin christ man! Where do you live?
 
Sturmangriff said:
I am with ya'll on bandwidth caps. We have two choices in my area, 50Mbps cable with a 100gb cap($.50 for every gb over the cap) and 6Mbps dsl with no cap. I would love to have the increased speed but I would hit that cap in no time, so I grudgingly poke along with my dsl. I have given up on the possibility of having unfettered high speed internet, at this point I'd dance a jig if I could just get 24/2 uncapped dsl here.
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i dont mind if the datacaps are in line with usage, i.e comcast* has a 20meg service with a 250GB data cap. I ran the numbers and if I averaged a download at 18 meg a sec for every second of a 30 day month I would just hit under the cap. It's the caps that take usage away that get me physically irate.

*I hate caps of all kinds but I guess some you can live with if you must. I do.
 
gigatexal said:
i dont mind if the datacaps are in line with usage, i.e comcast* has a 20meg service with a 250GB data cap. I ran the numbers and if I averaged a download at 18 meg a sec for every second of a 30 day month I would just hit under the cap. It's the caps that take usage away that get me physically irate.

*I hate caps of all kinds but I guess some you can live with if you must. I do.
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I think you're off a bit with your caps measurements. You have 30 days x 24 Hours x 60 Min x 60 seconds = 2,592,000 seconds in 30 days and there are .125 Megabytes in a Megabit so 18 meg is 2.25 MB/s.

So you have 2592000 seconds x 2.25 MB/s all divided by 1024 to convert Megabytes to gigabytes and you get 5695.3125 GB. So no, you can easily meet the cap downloading all day if you want. Divide by 3 to get a the same except with only 8 hours a day for 30 days and you still have caps that are really low.

Regardless, caps are meaningless, just a way to get more money out of people and to avoid upgrading infrastructure. Even the little guys have access to data transfer deals between each other generally. A really high user uses about 500GB/month and the cost to serve that data is minuscule.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Bandwidth caps are a bigger problem, I think. Most people will never hit a cap, but it does hurt heavy users. Then again, why should people who check their e-mail and surf the web a few minutes a week have to soak up the cost of home theather people who try to stream HD video for 6 hours a day because they refuse to go outside to get mugged like the rest of us?
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A valid point, but the answer is that those people should be paying $10-15 a month for a small data cap that AUTOMATICALLY TURNS OFF when you hit it. Or it could be a 512k/1Mb connect with no limit. But you notice none of them do that...

That would be in line with what dialup service used to cost for the couple of decades it was popular. You simply couldn't transmit all that much data on it.

But if you remember, same crap different decade. The phone companies were pissed at people who tied up a phone line 24/7 because of modems.
 
pewter77 said:
I think you're off a bit with your caps measurements. You have 30 days x 24 Hours x 60 Min x 60 seconds = 2,592,000 seconds in 30 days and there are .125 Megabytes in a Megabit so 18 meg is 2.25 MB/s.

So you have 2592000 seconds x 2.25 MB/s all divided by 1024 to convert Megabytes to gigabytes and you get 5695.3125 GB. So no, you can easily meet the cap downloading all day if you want. Divide by 3 to get a the same except with only 8 hours a day for 30 days and you still have caps that are really low.

Regardless, caps are meaningless, just a way to get more money out of people and to avoid upgrading infrastructure. Even the little guys have access to data transfer deals between each other generally. A really high user uses about 500GB/month and the cost to serve that data is minuscule.
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oh crap yeah theyre way off
 
Soon the problem will be, not how fast your internet connection is, but how fast your hardrives are, because a 100mbit line will max out a traditional hardrive give or take.

So those who are getting 1 gigabit connects wont be even to use it all because your hardrives including ssds will become the bottleneck.

I can see alot of complaints coming from people only being able to download at roughly the 100mbit mark on google fibre, not realising that its because their hardrives are holding them back.
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
Soon the problem will be, not how fast your internet connection is, but how fast your hardrives are, because a 100mbit line will max out a traditional hardrive give or take.

So those who are getting 1 gigabit connects wont be even to use it all because your hardrives including ssds will become the bottleneck.

I can see alot of complaints coming from people only being able to download at roughly the 100mbit mark on google fibre, not realising that its because their hardrives are holding them back.
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Not everything ends up getting written to HDD.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Not everything ends up getting written to HDD.
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Granted, but most does especially large downloads which is what this will mainly affect e.g hd movies whether its streaming or not.

Maybe it wont be so bad, as newer larger ssds and hybrid hdds will be out and will probably help out alot ?
 
Shit, its 4am here and re-reading my posts i got my sums wrong, but still, the jist of what i said still applies, just that traditional hdds wont be maxed out by a 100mbit line.

Tired, thats what i will blame that mistake on. ;)
 
There are two separate isps offering gigabit Internet in my state but both of them are not offering it where I live. One is charging $35 allegedly and the other is asking $150. I'd love to get gigabit to my apartment but I don't see it happening soon.
 
I find it hilarious how naive you guys can be, how is it possible such tech savvy people here seem to be as dim as the average voter? Really none of you notice a painfully obvious pattern? Slower speeds = higher or no caps, it even works in the cell phone industry. Yet half of you come in here and say we need to get rid of caps. Don't you guys get it? The unlimited data IS THE FREAKING REASON WE HAVE SLOW SPEEDS. When ever you get your head put on strait and start being willing to pay for what you use or get we can all move on. There always have been and always will be some way to limit the so called unlimited plans. Unlimited plans are a fraud, they always have been they always will be, do you get good food if you go to a buffet? NO, do you get a good web server if you go to one of those unlimited hosts? NO, do you get fast internet and coverage if you goto unlimited sprint? NO, and what do we know here we have people also talking about unlimited DSL vs limited cable that is faster.

If we had been paying / GB reasonable rates the ISPs would have constantly been giving us more speed, because the faster we can do stuff the more we will pay. And the best part is, they would let us do anything we wanted with our connections, they wouldn't care if we bittorrent, they wouldn't care if we ran a game server, they wouldn't care if we ran a webserver. None of it would matter to them, no throttling nothing. People would self regulate and use what they enjoy using and are willing to pay for. Instead you guys opt for crappy frozen shrimp at the buffet.
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
Shit, its 4am here and re-reading my posts i got my sums wrong, but still, the jist of what i said still applies, just that traditional hdds wont be maxed out by a 100mbit line.

Tired, thats what i will blame that mistake on. ;)
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They wouldn't even bottleneck a 1Gb line. Modern mechanical drives can sustain 100-150MB/s. A 1Gb connection can only transfer 80-90MB/s after accounting for network overhead and delays.
 
Marcdaddy said:
Really i care more about the BANDWITH CAPS which are artificial and put in place as a Money Grab. Speeds means nothing if you cant use it. Eliminate the Caps before increasing the speeds.
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this. Caps are retarded. I have even expressed my views to my cable company a few times now. Doubt it will do anything, visit doesn't hurt to try.
 
rudy said:
I find it hilarious how naive you guys can be, how is it possible such tech savvy people here seem to be as dim as the average voter? Really none of you notice a painfully obvious pattern? Slower speeds = higher or no caps, it even works in the cell phone industry. Yet half of you come in here and say we need to get rid of caps. Don't you guys get it? The unlimited data IS THE FREAKING REASON WE HAVE SLOW SPEEDS. When ever you get your head put on strait and start being willing to pay for what you use or get we can all move on. There always have been and always will be some way to limit the so called unlimited plans. Unlimited plans are a fraud, they always have been they always will be, do you get good food if you go to a buffet? NO, do you get a good web server if you go to one of those unlimited hosts? NO, do you get fast internet and coverage if you goto unlimited sprint? NO, and what do we know here we have people also talking about unlimited DSL vs limited cable that is faster.

If we had been paying / GB reasonable rates the ISPs would have constantly been giving us more speed, because the faster we can do stuff the more we will pay. And the best part is, they would let us do anything we wanted with our connections, they wouldn't care if we bittorrent, they wouldn't care if we ran a game server, they wouldn't care if we ran a webserver. None of it would matter to them, no throttling nothing. People would self regulate and use what they enjoy using and are willing to pay for. Instead you guys opt for crappy frozen shrimp at the buffet.
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what is the actual cost of transmitting data? the ISPs are trying to recoup capital intensive costs in laying the fiber, sure, and pay overhead, and make a profit, but what is the actual cost of transmitting data? nothing. But company A owns a line, and Company B owns another and charges company A rent on data going through it's line ... hence data caps. It's bullshit. If everyone had access to good internet and paid for it all the initial investment would be paid for regardless of the need for data caps.
 
rudy said:
I find it hilarious how naive you guys can be, how is it possible such tech savvy people here seem to be as dim as the average voter? Really none of you notice a painfully obvious pattern? Slower speeds = higher or no caps, it even works in the cell phone industry. Yet half of you come in here and say we need to get rid of caps. Don't you guys get it? The unlimited data IS THE FREAKING REASON WE HAVE SLOW SPEEDS. When ever you get your head put on strait and start being willing to pay for what you use or get we can all move on. There always have been and always will be some way to limit the so called unlimited plans. Unlimited plans are a fraud, they always have been they always will be, do you get good food if you go to a buffet? NO, do you get a good web server if you go to one of those unlimited hosts? NO, do you get fast internet and coverage if you goto unlimited sprint? NO, and what do we know here we have people also talking about unlimited DSL vs limited cable that is faster.

If we had been paying / GB reasonable rates the ISPs would have constantly been giving us more speed, because the faster we can do stuff the more we will pay. And the best part is, they would let us do anything we wanted with our connections, they wouldn't care if we bittorrent, they wouldn't care if we ran a game server, they wouldn't care if we ran a webserver. None of it would matter to them, no throttling nothing. People would self regulate and use what they enjoy using and are willing to pay for. Instead you guys opt for crappy frozen shrimp at the buffet.
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Last I checked, a burnt steak on a buffet is still the same today as it was 25 years ago. Networking equipment has advanced tremendously in 25 years. For consumer and business use, we've gone from 10Mbit network adapters costing hundreds of dollars to gigabit for less than $15. Hell, 10Gbe is almost doable for now. If there was so much cost involved in providing decent unlimited bandwidth, then ISPs wouldn't be feeling pressured to backtrack their data cap strategies. It was a money grab pure and simple.
 
EVIL-SCOTSMAN said:
Soon the problem will be, not how fast your internet connection is, but how fast your hardrives are, because a 100mbit line will max out a traditional hardrive give or take.

So those who are getting 1 gigabit connects wont be even to use it all because your hardrives including ssds will become the bottleneck.

I can see alot of complaints coming from people only being able to download at roughly the 100mbit mark on google fibre, not realising that its because their hardrives are holding them back.
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uh... seriously?

someone needs to read about bits vs bytes
 
ryan_975 said:
Last I checked, a burnt steak on a buffet is still the same today as it was 25 years ago. Networking equipment has advanced tremendously in 25 years. For consumer and business use, we've gone from 10Mbit network adapters costing hundreds of dollars to gigabit for less than $15. Hell, 10Gbe is almost doable for now. If there was so much cost involved in providing decent unlimited bandwidth, then ISPs wouldn't be feeling pressured to backtrack their data cap strategies. It was a money grab pure and simple.
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to make even worse
TCP/IP is self throttling there is no such thing as data congestion the TCP protocol corrects for that
and it cost the same to power the gear for 1 bit as it does if your sending a trillion bits
there are some bandwidth costs but most tier 1s have almost none do to peering they do
googles 1Gbps for 70bucks is about what it should cost and still make money
maybe a bit more even 100 bucks a month for 1Gbps would be ok
but caps are about two things
1. protecting TV ad revenue
2. getting people to use less to making the overselling of networks less noticeable
 
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