Why Google Fiber will never come to Seattle (2014)
crosscut.com
crosscut.com
1) Process: "Can you imagine the Seattle City Council keeping a secret like this and then acting on it in just one day? Of course not. We’d need to have endless community meetings and hearings and public floggings of Google Executives."
2) Pole Attachments: "At these rates, building a network on 100,000 poles to serve every home and business would cost Google up to $2.8 million just to rent the pole space."
3) Permits: "Attaching fiber cable to a pole in Seattle may require a pole attachment permit, a street use permit, and land use and environmental permits, among others."
4) Build-out requirements: "But the company has to agree to build out and serve every premise in that area. This is a lofty goal because it means all neighborhoods, rich and poor, get served, although it increases the overall cost because the company builds cable on streets with few customers."
None of these are unique to Google Fiber. These are hurdles ISPs, including incumbents like Comcast, face in nearly every large city. Google is just the 800-lb gorilla that refuses to play along. They'll only install fiber in cities desperate enough to sign a contract with Google without extensive public proceedings, who will allow bypassing permit requirements that apply to everyone else.
What the article really highlights is the real reasons for the lack of ISP competition. People imagine shadowy cabals conspiring to keep out competitors, but in most cities, it's the result of rules that aren't facially unreasonable. Rules like build-out requirements, which apply to incumbents and competitors alike, make deploying fiber economically unattractive, sometimes even for the incumbent.
Contrast the telecom industry with say the cell phone industry. It'd be illegal for an ISP to do what Apple did with its first iPhone: target rich buyers, then trickle down the technology to everyone else as it recouped capital costs. The rule is deploy to everyone, or don't deploy at all. Unsurprisingly, companies usually choose the latter. Except Google, which has the clout to demand exceptions to the rules, and the luxury of not actually being in the ISP business and only deploying in smaller municipalities willing to bend-over.
I think you mean municipalities with the foresight to realize that their residents would never get fiber under any other circumstance? iPhones for rich people and for everyone else a few years later is much better than flip phones for everyone.
If things were regulated like last mile Internet like you want, the smartphone/mobile boom would never have happened. Requiring deployment to a big portion of the market that doesn't want something is idiotic.
That's one spin on it, but at the end of the day, it's a decision borne out of a lack of other options. Incidentally, it's also one reason countries like South Korea and places in eastern Europe lead the way in fiber deployment. They were/are underdogs, looking for ways to make themselves more economically competitive. Places like New York or San Francisco don't think the same way. They're prosperous enough to be able to fight over things like how ugly the fiber cabinets are.
> If things were regulated like last mile Internet like you want, the smartphone/mobile boom would never have happened.
I don't think we should regulate last mile internet, for precisely that reason.
The author seems to really hate citizen participation. I'm sure people don't understand fiber very well and there are a lot of opinions and concerns out there which aren't necessarily valid, but that's going to be true of anything new.
Cutting the public out of the debate about innovations doesn't seem like a good path to take. The solution is to provide a more effective forum for this debate to happen, not to put a stop to it.
However, not once have MS done anything to actually improve the US internet speed or infrastructure since. Its like MS sold me on the vision of a future, but came back to tell me that they don't actually have a plan to make the vision possible.
Sure, it only serves a few neighborhoods, but it's progress, and more importantly, not Comcast.
Kansas City is desperate. If Google comes calling, they will sign a contract, whether or not it's actually good for the city, they'll figure "Hey, Google's coming and asking, it's Google, we won't say no!"
This is not really a good thing. This particular contract may be great for KC, but it's not because you can just always trust Google and sign whatever they put in front of you. But many desparate cities will.
Kansas City, Kansas agreed to Google fiber (possibly to due its benefits possibly due to lack of competition) and put up with Google's requirements.
Kansas City, Missouri refused. Once the announcement was made it was a big ruckus and looked like a black eye for the city and they rushed to do anything they could to get in on it because every citizen was interested. The last thing they want is to be seen as falling behind the Kansas side and losing more jobs and businesses.
My thoughts on this come from my experience with an analagous case on a smaller level -- I have worked with a university that signed a contract with a vendor (not Google in this case) for digitization of some library content, because "the last thing they want[ed] is to be seen as falling behind" other universities that signed such contracts with that or other vendors (including Google). That any vendor was even interested was seen as an honor. In fact, the contract was terrible for the university, they got little benefit from it and had to expend university resources basically for the vendor's benefit. But for a year or two, it seemed exciting and made them appear not to be "falling behind".
Overland Park's haggling likely had more to do with the fact that Sprint is headquartered there.
The real fuck-up is Leawood, KS though; just next door. Google pulled out recently when they were told no "new" ISP lines could be run on existing poles. It had to be 100% buried, despite existing cable ISP on poles:
http://www.govexec.com/state-local/2014/11/google-fiber-leaw...
Not trusting Google but trusting some unknown competitor is strange to me.
We know for a fact that Google and Verizon track your Web usage. I would take an unknown company over the certainty of being tracked any day.
Stick with Verizon and Verizon recognise that they can do/track anything without consequence.
On the other hand, leave Verizon for a competitor who is not currently doing/tracking anything and this becomes a selling point for the competition.
Err, yeah. Fifty five miles away. So what?
As for Google monitoring web usage, you're saying it like it's unique for Google. All advertisers to that, and ISP is not the best place to do it anyway (content-side is more efficient and not confused by things like HTTPS/SSL/VPN). Moreover, targeting ads is by far not the most evil thing one might do - in fact, if the ads were as well-targeted as it has been rumored for decades now, I'd not have to install adblocker first thing I do on the new computer. Right now I have to because the ads shown to me are so annoying and irrelevant. I'd like to discuss our all-knowing perfectly-targeting advertising overlords, but we'd have to get some first. So far they are nowhere to be found, and in the meantime our internet connection sucks and costs an arm and a leg. Is it worth having sucky internet access so Google couldn't nefariously target their ads for me? Not for me.
Well, it is to Google.
> Is it worth having sucky internet access so Google couldn't nefariously target their ads for me?
No, but in Seattle you have other options: live somewhere where you can get good internet access from someone who isn't Google. That's what I do.
I don't know what I would do if I didn't have the modern options. Switch to DVD/reading books probably - that's what I did before I had DVR and online streaming.
I know that many sites rely on ads for their income stream. I do not feel an obligation to sacrifice my psychological well-being in order to make that model succeed. Fortunately, they seem to be doing just fine without me.
> CondoInternet is...building neighborhood-scale fiber service to Eastlake
http://www.muninetworks.org/tags/tags/dig-once
http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/san-francisco-seeks-t...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/06/14/execut...
Technically, you don't need fiber to the home to get gigabit rates. Coax from the end user to the DOCSIS node at the pole is more than enough. Within 100 meters, such as in apartment buildings, CAT 5 is enough. The fiber connection to the DOCSIS node at the pole, the DOCSIS node, and the back end have to have more bandwidth.
The cable industry has a plan for slow migration to gigabit services:
http://www.cedmagazine.com/articles/2012/07/an-evolutionary-...
One unit at a time, in the chain from head end to end user, equipment can be swapped out for faster, but backwards-compatible, units.
Of course, in the end it's still Comcast.
In reality, I believe not selling ourselves to a provider immediately will allow a better market to develop where we get real competition and the possibility of a city run fiber network. It may take a few more years than having Google build out the whole thing at once, but I think the alternative will be better and other municipalities will have wished they had waited too.
For example, one recent change: http://www.geekwire.com/2014/seattle-approves-bill-allows-fi...
Ah, I see - democracy is a bug, according to the author.
Actually, reading further, it appears that anything short of kneeling and begging at the feet of corporations is somehow supposed to be terrible...
Seriously - here's the conclusion:
"Could we simply agree to pay for all the pole replacements and permitting as a city, and hire a few extra employees to expedite the process? Couldn’t we just hand over title to a few strands of the 500 mile fiber cable network we’ve built to Google Fiber?"
Translation: "Couldn't we just spend taxpayer dollars to subsidize profits for one of the world's largest corporations?"