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Comment by georgemcbay | Hacker News Reader

I'm usually pretty sympathetic to these stories of people getting screwed on "unlimited" data with, say, 5 gig or whatever caps, but in this case... cry me a river, man.

I'm stuck in an area where my two options are Time Warner Cable, which I refuse to use due to terrible experiences with them in the past, and AT&T DSL (old school DSL, not U-Verse), which works fine but is slow and has 50 gigabyte caps (you can go over the caps but they will bill you for extra usage).

I really wish Google would put more pressure on the US ISP market (maybe partnering with Netflix and others who stand to lose on the current sorry state of ISPs here), because clearly these companies need a lot more pressure put upon them, but 77 terabytes a month is by any measure a huge outlier and I don't fault Verizon for getting involved in this particular case.

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> I really wish Google would put more pressure on the US ISP market

You want to know what Google's biggest issue is getting fiber out?

Quote:

In California in particular, environmental regulations prevent companies from improving the telecommunications infrastructure, Medin said.

“Google is a big believer in protecting the environment for future generations, but certain types of state and local environmental rules make investment very difficult,” he explained. ” Laws like the California Environmental Quality Act can make it prohibitively expensive for companies to invest in new projects, such as our fiber project, within California.

“Many fine California city proposals for the Google Fiber project were ultimately passed over in part because of the regulatory complexity here brought about by CEQA and other rules. Other states have equivalent processes in place to protect the environment without causing such harm to business processes, and therefore create incentives for new services to be deployed there instead.”

http://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseackerman/2012/08/04/how-kan...

Lots of things are difficult to accomplish in meat space when you have a one party state governed by career politicians.

I don't doubt that there are overbearing regulations in place in California (and I say this as someone who is pretty liberal and generally in favor of government regulation where it makes sense, but recognizes that they can go overboard), but I don't buy that Google's primary limitation is regulation, because there are many cities outside of California that would bend over backward for Google Fiber and yet they are still rolling it out at what I would consider a snail's pace.

The article I linked discusses some of that, how navigating the politics of even cities that welcome Google with open arms is troublesome.

Google is never going to expand nationwide that is not their intent. Right now they cherry picked areas that are not nuts with regulation and have low cost of buildout while having high enough density for a good subscriber base. If the whole country was like that it would be easy.

Google is doing this to get people to complain to their ISP that they are not getting as good a deal as people on Google Fiber. They get into businesses to disrupt things that could potentially hurt their core business but they do not REALLY want to be in that business. A similar thing was when they were going to bid for the 700MHZ frequency auction and managed to get many provisions put in there that were beneficial to them and then did not buy the frequency.

"Google is doing this to get people to complain to their ISP that they are not getting as good a deal as people on Google Fiber."

That plan only has a chance of working if they increase coverage by a lot to put real pressure on ISPs across many local regions. What does the local duopoly of ISPs where 99.99% of us live care if we know that Google Fiber is much better and cheaper when our only option of getting it is to move to KC, Austin or Provo? They won't give a shit until Google is actually competing in their backyard.

FWIW, Google's half-baked plans for the spectrum failed as well, Verizon never did shit to open the upper band of 700MHz up for open access after buying it and after their recent court victory, it is virtually certain they never will.

And all they did was ask him to switch over to their business plans, so he'd pay $300/month for the ability to transfer 77TB in a month rather than the $200/month he currently pays. No big deal.

To be fair, the guy clearly doesn't think it's a big deal either. From the article: "I don't mind upgrading to business if that's really all the problem is," houkouonchi told me. "It just surprises me they would bother going after people just to get them to pay a little bit more per month."

I've been a FiOS customer for about a year and I still wonder what's going on with it to make it so good. By all rights, nothing sold by Verizon should be this easy, high-quality, and free of problems. Yet here we are.

> I've been a FiOS customer for about a year and I still wonder what's going on with it to make it so good. By all rights, nothing sold by Verizon should be this easy, high-quality, and free of problems. Yet here we are.

What makes it so good is that it is only available in a couple of dozen cities in 16 states (almost all coastal states), within any city focuses on wiring up affluent areas first,[1] is a premium product that starts at $60/month (averaged over 2 years), and is relatively unregulated compared to POTS or cellular.

[1] Check out the FIOS map for Baltimore (within 15 miles of 21217): http://fios.verizon.com/fios-coverage.html. That reverse-S shape is more or less a map of the higher-income corridor of the city. The pinned addresses are generally luxury apartment buildings. Also check out the coverage map of Philadelphia (within 20 miles of 19106). Zoom in note good coverage in Center City, particularly in Rittenhouse Square, no coverage in North Philly, South Philly, or West Philly, but decent coverage in the wealthier western suburbs. Follow Lancaster Ave westward from poor West Philly; note the lack of any coverage until you get to Lower Merion Township, one of the historically wealthy suburbs.

It's not really a premium product from what I've seen. I paid Comcast more for service at my last place than better FiOS service costs here. $60/month is not a whole lot in the world of broadband internet or cable TV, regardless of who your provider is.

They certainly are targeting big cities and the wealthier areas thereof, but I don't see why that would make it better than services from other providers in the same place.

> $60/month is not a whole lot in the world of broadband internet or cable TV, regardless of who your provider is.

A $60 minimum subscription price is definitely premium compared to the $15-$20 minimum service price typical for a cable provider. Remember, it costs more or less the same to wire up a customer whether or not they buy the more expensive packages, and cable companies are often required to offer very cheap basic service at a regulated rate (e.g. $13.50 for basic cable where I live).

> They certainly are targeting big cities and the wealthier areas thereof, but I don't see why that would make it better than services from other providers in the same place.

If a company is allowed to focus on dense, wealthy areas, it can concentrate infrastructure spend on customers who can pay premium prices for premium service. That's what Verizon can do with FIOS. But cable companies usually do not have that freedom. Their agreements with municipalities require them to wire up a much broader cross-section of the population, which means their infrastructure dollars are spread thinner.

But surely e.g. Comcast could offer equivalently good service in equivalently wealthy areas (while continuing to offer bad service elsewhere) and get just as much money as Verizon gets.

Comcast does offer fiber up to 500 mbps in a number of northeast cities (D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, etc). Companies don't have unlimited capital. If Comcast were freed from the requirement to run coax to a whole bunch of people who can only afford $13.50/month, they could spend the capital they freed up on other parts of their network. This is the basic cross-subsidization arrangement at the heart of cable and telecom regulation all over the country.

I've had FIOS for 8 years and it is the greatest service I have ever experienced. Currently I pay $74.95 per month for:

1. Prime TV lineup

2. Unlimited landline phone service

3. 75 M/bps downstream and 35 M/bps upstream Internet

Whenever I run a speedtest, the amount I always get more than the speed I'm promised. Typically see a floor of 80 M/bps downsteam and 40 M/bps upstream.

It is rock-solid reliable, my IP address never changes unless I unplug my router for more than a day and it is completely unfiltered Internet - they don't physically stop you from running servers.

I probably transfer 500 GB per month every month and I would consider myself a "heavy user" of bandwidth. As you said, 77 TB of bandwidth in one month is outside of normal use patterns to an insane degree.

I agree with that all as a FIOS customer but one thing that is burning me up is their refusal to CDN with YouTube and Netflix. There are times where YouTube is unusable even with 50Mbit connection. They also are fighting hard in court to have this behavior by filing lawsuits against net neutrality.

The internet is great from them but when the 2 biggest bandwidth sites on the internet are slow it is a big deal. You cannot get HD Netflix from them but they offer a competing service which they CDN with and give you HD which is a conflict of interest.

I find you can get better results depending on what device you are streaming from. If I stream Netflix from my PC I get terrible quality, but if I use my PS3 I get 1080P Super HD pretty consistently.

I am guessing they route to different locations and some are less congested.

No crying needed, no one is faulting Verizon. From the article, he switched from business connection to FiOS to save some money, and didn't mind switching back to business class after they notified him that a rack of servers in his home violated their ToS.

This article isn't "bah caps" complaining, rather "how did someone use 77TB in a month?" curiosity.

I'm usually pretty sympathetic to these stories of people getting screwed on "unlimited" data with, say, 5 gig or whatever caps, but in this case... cry me a river, man.

Data caps aside, this is like saturating a quarter-gigabit connection nearly full-time. I can't even get a connection like that at home to begin with.

Comcast cap doesn't seem to be a hard limit, or wasn't in the past. I managed 4tb in a month before they finally kept calling me and telling me I had a "virus". I'm not even sure how you could transfer 77tb in a month.

Comcast's cap is moving to metering. When it is implemented in your area you'll get about 300 gigs per month with your plan and they will than charge you $10 for each additional 10gigs. So its not really going to be a cap anymore.

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