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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

This is the brilliance of what Google is doing. They are making cities compete for Google Fiber. You compete by making it easier, faster, and cheaper to lay fiber.

It seems to be working. Seattle's new mayor recently talked about how the city needs to make it easier to build out internet infrastructure.

http://murray.seattle.gov/murray-seattle-must-be-a-national-...

> Another possible solution includes granting internet companies access to utility poles at little or no charge, so that building more infrastructure is not cost prohibitive.

> We are considering [changing policies] which make it nearly impossible for internet providers to expand existing services without an unusually high super majority of support from neighbors.

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GFiber is the antidote to these parasitic bastards. They have the cash to push last-mile FTTH to every metro area in the country. I think they own the dark fiber backbone to do it too.

Here's hoping that G thoroughly topples every last one of them.

Seconded, both comments. Google has a real chance to become a dominant ISP without becoming a despicable one.

Five years ago I might have agreed with you. There's no reason to trust that google (another giant private company that disabled my ability to comment on youtube or rate android apps because I dared not to want to join g+) won't pull some crap once they're in a dominant position in the ISP market. Like with many other things google saw the writing on the wall regarding how they at the behest of the ISP and looked for ways to be at least minimally prepared for the worst.

At the risk of a trite response, it's the evil you know versus the evil you don't, and frankly getting rid of the evil I know (pretty consistent 5-10% packet loss across the board, spiking during bad weather, repeatedly tracked to terrible work in the outdoor cable boxes, but that I get charged 40$ a pop to temporarily have them fix) is worth a gamble in my books.

Being coerced into joining a free social network that no one uses is nothing compared to the horrors offered by Comcast.

But is it a good use of their cash? Fiber isn't a high return business, especially in a regulated environment with build out requirements.

It's not the Fiber that's the fee earner. By having more people connected with faster, more stable connections they can continue pushing the envelope with things like higher definition on YouTube and suchlike but this is the razzle-dazzle that people will see without noting the true purpose; you're accessing the net through their service so they can now pin all of your surfing habits to a physical person driving more benefit to their primary Ad business.

Just imagine what end-users can do with gigabit upload speeds. If you think streaming is big now, just wait until Google Fiber kicks the gigabit market into high gear. This is one of the best things Google is doing right now, and I can't wait to see how it changes the Internet.

> GFiber is the antidote to these parasitic bastards.

Google Fiber is a contended service, just like every other retail ISP. They're not doing anything particularly different.

Here's the average transfer rate on their 1 Gbps headline product:

http://www.speedtest.net/isp/google-fiber

Yes, 190 Mbps. Fast, but still contended.

Is it possible that's more to do with people testing over WiFi than with the speed of Google Fiber itself? It's hard to tell a lot about the data, since they only provide averages.

I think that average includes the free tier of Google Fiber which if I remember correctly is 5 mbps.

I've heard that Google Fiber has inspired other ISPs in its service areas to initiate high-speed service. I wanted to see this contention though so I clicked around in speedtest.net a bit. Can you point out some contention, because I didn't actually find it [http://www.speedtest.net/local/kansas-city-mo].

This is the best thing about what Google is doing. 90% of the blame for this situation belongs on municipalities. They're the ones that created these franchises in the first place. They're the ones that imposed huild-out requirements and regulated rates. They're the ones that have made it impossible to build new infrastructure even after Congress made exclusive franchises illegal in 1992.

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