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Comment by bri3d | Hacker News Reader

What innovations are enabled by founders possessing gigabit fiber to the home? Is there any evidence from other houses of this nature suggesting that fast to-the-home internet enables some sort of workflow or product development that's not possible with conventional ~20mbit cable internet?

It seems to me like most bandwidth-critical businesses also require a datacenter anyway, and while fast to-the-home internet may enable the delivery of innovative technology (like high-definition gaming in the cloud) a fast connection to the home isn't necessary for the creation.

With that being said I do appreciate the concept: if building high-speed fiber can attract entrepreneurs (regardless of if it actually helps them), the incentive for municipalities to encourage high-speed buildout grows.

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Its a lot cheaper to buy the fastest consumer cpu + 32gb ram + ssds and have it in the home office than it is to rent that same server in a good data center.

Having a 1gbps network would let you run more of your hardware at home where it's cheaper. This makes sense for certain specific cases.

For startups that need this power, hosting at home can save money. Also you can't beat the security of having physical access and control of your hardware.

For my app streamjoy.tv I run all the intensive tasks on a core i7 at home and then just push the rendered results to a $5 a month digital ocean vps.

For the kind of computation that I am doing it is much less expensive and faster to use my local hardware and push static pages to my nginx server at digital ocean.

If I had a 1gbps connection I would run even more of my setup at home. Its not that important for the features I have coded so far but in the future it would be helpful.

While this is a valid point. I assume you are probably violating the ToS laid out by your ISP. In general a "home" or "personal" account is not allowed to run a webserver. There is usually strict language in the ToS regarding this.

Can anybody comment on whether or not this any different with Google Fiber? Are they fine with you running whatever you want on that connection?

"Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection"

http://support.google.com/fiber/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answ...

(Whether they will enforce this remains to be seen.)

I am not talking about hosting the web server locally, and I don't for my setup. In my opinion however ToS that prohibit running local web servers are an outrage. The ISP should be a dumb pipe, and this betrays the spirit of net neutrality.

> For startups that need this power, hosting at home can save money. Also you can't beat the security of having physical access and control of your hardware.

Really? You can't beat the security of hosting servers in your basement with a top-tier datacenter with armed guards, mantraps, insurance, fire suppression, redundant power and internet, etc.?

My AWS instances are likely orders of magnitude more secure than a server sitting in my house.

In addition to physical security there's hardware longevity as datacenters tend to be both more efficiently cooled and cleaner than the average home, efficient network interconnect rather than consumer-grade hardware on consumer-oriented last-mile infrastructure, redundant power... the list goes on and on.

It seems like the grandparent poster really should rent part of a co-located rack instead.

I don't think there's much sense in hosting locally in a home environment with Google Fiber for almost any use case regardless of their ToS or the service's quality: for a system serving user requests a home doesn't deliver reliability or redundancy, for a lightly-utilized offline processing system a cloud provider is almost universally cheaper, and for a heavily-utilized offline processing system power and cooling costs become competitive with a datacenter relatively quickly (not to mention the cost of downtime - if you're at high utilization, downtime will cause your job queue to build rapidly and possibly insurmountably when you can't supply burst capacity).

> It seems like the grandparent poster really should rent part of a co-located rack instead.

For my use I need the fastest CPU + ram + IO I can get for as little as possible. The network does not need to be the best because this is not serving user requests.

I do not want to take the time to make my code run in parallel. An Intel Core i7 3770k with SSDs is the cheapest scaling I can get.

I use the same machine as a workstation for coding.

This setup saves me $180 a month at the cheapest dedicated host I could find + I have a blazing fast work station.

> Really? You can't beat the security of hosting servers in your basement with a top-tier datacenter with armed guards, mantraps, insurance, fire suppression, redundant power and internet, etc.?

Yes, a data center has armed guards. Those armed guards are not loyal to you and they are not observable to you.

If you are a startup with a trade secret written in code that is incredibly valuable and absolutely can not get out, self hosting gives you a kind of physical security that is hard to get running your code on rented machines.

I am not saying that this is my case, but I could see a case where it would apply.

Lets say you have developed extremely profitable algo trading strategies. If they are the kind of strategies where millisecond execution is paramount, of course you have to co-locate.

If your strategy is not under that kind of time constraint I would want my algos on machines only I could access.

If it's valuable enough to bribe datacenter guards, it's probably valuable enough to break into your office/home.

So use your vastly profitable strategy to build or acquire a dedicated facility and hire or build a security system loyal to the company, not put machines in a random basement in Kansas City.

Production servers really don't belong in houses for many reasons besides connectivity and Google Fiber sure doesn't change that.

Most algo traders try to be as physically close as possible to the exchange. NASDAQ OMX even runs colo in the same datacenter as the nordic exchanges that traders can hire into.

There is no downside to having super fast internet in your home/office. So I think this is more about an arbitrary rallying flag for the Kanas City tech community. It gets people excited about working on tech in general in KC, hopefully enough that it can "spark" and people can go super deep on their projects / companies.

The meme of entrepreneurs moving to KC just to get gigabit seems overblown though.

I definitely don't think there will be a stampede out to KC.

But I think the idea of "arbitrary rallying flag" is a good one. This could be a really great way to evolve the KC tech community. They now have some validation (both Google and Brad Feld have invested there), and there is some excitement.

I think it's a good thing, and I'm excited to see what happens

I just relocated my team to KC from Boston after living in the Home for Hackers house for 3 months.

Very few entrepreneurs are moving here exclusively for Fiber, the real attraction is the super inclusive community and the extensive resources available to startup founders. Every single person I have met here is so unbelievably welcoming and will go out of their way to help you out. The Fiber is just icing on the cake.

Another huge reason people have been moving here is cost. My team just moved into a 1800sqft house for $1100/month and fiber ($79/month) gets installed in a few weeks. So much cheaper than Boston..

Oh yeah, and the Kansas Angel Investor Tax Credits [http://www.ksrevenue.org/taxcredits-angel.html] are great.

I would guess it's similar, but I know people back home in mid MO (not quite KC) that pay less in rent than long term parking I see advertised in Boston.

Grew up in St. Louis. A good friend of mine was a MO State Rep a few years ago, and he rented a 2-bedroom apartment near the capitol in Jefferson City for $275/month. It's insane.

I live in Lawrence, and have lived there for ~7 years now. I just moved into a brand-new (first person in the building) two-bedroom apartment with fiber to the building, very nice appliances, granite countertops, etc.

And I am paying less in rent than my friends in DC would pay for a broom closet.

We don't really know.That is the idea, they have to discover it.

Is not a qualitative change, but is a really important quantitative change. New applications that today we don't really know about will be made possible.

Living in that environment will make them able to "see the future" and design something for where the "puck is going to be."

As an example, Mr Steve Jobs "saw the future" with the network system of Apple, and Microsoft used a supercomputer to simulate their future programs when computer power were ready.

Living in what environment? Immersing oneself in the Google Fiber content experience (i.e. Google Fiber TV) isn't seeing the future; it's living in Google's research lab and still following the puck Google has already shot.

As for the network speed, plenty of colleges and research institutions have hundreds-of-megabits and higher Internet connections straight to the terminal, not to mention datacenters, Korea, and Scandinavia: I'm pretty sure we know what's possible over a gigabit network and have been able to imagine the "what if everyone had this at home" scenario for a long time.

To your analogy, it's like Microsoft using a supercomputer to imagine a future when consumers own powerful computers, except the supercomputer is a $50 gigabit Ethernet switch that's been available at your local Best Buy for years.

I don't dispute that this is a productive idea for entrepreneurs, that revitalizing the KC tech scene is a great idea, or that Brad Feld's hacker-house offering is really neat, but I still can't see how moving to an environment that's already existed in other niche areas and is very trivially simulated is going to create revolutionary ideas.

I hear you, and your distinction between creation and delivery definitely makes sense.

That said, the hope is that this new, fat internet pipe will yield creativity and new services/technologies that we just can't predict yet. We have to push these technical boundaries first, because that stretch yields new products and groundbreaking thinking.

History would seem to suggest that that's one way to help lay the groundwork for new and powerful inventions. There are literally innumerable products and technologies we use every day that are many iterations away from the enabling-technology, but would have never been discovered or applied without the initial technical push.

Agreed. If they develop something that needs that much bandwidth they can dogfood it from their couch!

Which then nobody else in America can even attempt to use?

I was thinking the same thing while reading. I like the overall idea put forth of giving hackers/entrepreneurs a free place to live and work on their projects, that's obviously a very generous offering and should be appreciated. It's also great that it is around other people who are doing similar things, as being in an entrepreneurial environment with lots of other entrepreneurs around can make all the difference.

However, I don't see why making it in KC and having Google Fiber makes any difference? Will I be able to do anything I previously couldn't with my 50/25 FiOS connection?

The most obvious advantage is cheap offsite backups and or web hosting. But, also if you have 5 people there then you still have ridiculously fast internet access where a 20mbit line will start to bog down.

I'm not sure, and I'm wondering the same thing. Same with regards to people who think the spread of high speed fiber will result in a telecommuting revolution. I don't think a jump from 20 to 100mbits is going to revolutionize anything.

I do know that hosting a server is prohibited by Google Fiber TOS, so I'm not sure how this is going to work.

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