My story in NC:
Aug 2015: Google Fiber sent me a T-shirt promising Fiber would be available soon!
Jan 2017: AT&T Fiber available to my address. $70/month for 1 Gbps.
Aug 2023: Google Fiber finally available at my address. $70/mo for 1 Gbps, $100/mo for 2 Gbps.
So yeah, Google got AT&T to get off their butts, but it took Google 8 years to get to my address. Meanwhile, AT&T is still $70/mo, includes HBO (er, Max), and is reliable, so I don't really have any reason to switch.
That said, I'm considering having GF installed anyway as long as they're in the neighborhood and running dual-WAN for a while. I can always cancel it and then my home is setup for both ISPs.
This model works -really- well. ISPs compete on price, and service. Fibre folks do the physical stuff. Fibre companies are incentivised to get rolled out in an area first. ISPs can scale up without having to raise huge capital. And the roadside only gets dug up once (mostly the fibre is buried, although some makes use of existing pole infrastructure. )
It's one of those (rare?) cases where good regulation, and a free market collide, and the result us that everyone has fibre.
I say this not to gloat, but rather to show that it can be beneficial to separate access from service for best customer service.
[1] my first ISP went under. I switched to a new ISP within an hour after the cause of the outage was understood.
[2] a couple of outages have been ascribed to the fibre provider, the ISP escalates those for me, and have been rectified within the hour.
Who knew competition could lead to such good customer service...
Physically, they’re negotiating the dig with the appropriate government body and then doing it all at once. Cables are buried by roads. The ISPs connect the network to the individual homes when the home signs up. Large apartments and office buildings have the dig done in advance and are usually restricted to one ISP tenant that the network operator chooses to service those locations/accounts.
Both the fiber operators and the ISPs are raising money to expand faster, in addition to the public money available, because the capital risk of this model is low, as you said.
> It's one of those (rare?) cases where good regulation, and a free market collide, and the result us that everyone has fibre.
I’d argue that good (and certainly not nonexistent) regulation is a necessity of a well-functioning, efficient market.
Man it took some work to get the model up and running though didn't it? Great idea from one party, totally politically destroyed soon afterwards when the other party got into power, and then slowly, over the course of a decade and a half, has almost reached the original vision.
Inspired this book: https://www.amazon.com.au/Frustrated-State-terrible-deterrin...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_car...
https://www.bandwidth.com/glossary/competitive-local-exchang...
But once you could get voice & data from either the telco or the cable company, this all went out the window.
Free markets can’t exist without regulation. Otherwise, literal warlords take over, and if not that, monopolies and oligopolies and anticompetitive behaviour and externalities
Europe as a whole has a fuck ton of congestion and reliability problems because ISPs don't want to build out fiber and these fiber companies are very slow to roll out and increase capacity, because they don't have an incentive to be fast or build fiber to the same places multiple times like in the US. If anyone remembers the Hetzner-DTAG fiasco you'll know what congestion I'm talking about where unless you are directly peering with someone on an internet exchange you can forget about having a good experience.
In Europe outside of the incumbent carriers, most ISPs build a local network and just peer at an exchange while buying the crappiest and slowest IP transit link they can get, meaning most Europeans reading this could just run a speed test to a network not directly connected to your ISP and see how bad their network speeds really are to most of the internet (you also probably don't have IPv6 either). Big ISPs also have zero incentive to peer with anyone because all of those small ISPs can usually only buy Transit from them (transport is out of the question for most small ISPs in most of the continent), unlike in the US where even Comcast has to appease their customers somewhat as there's a lot of competition these days from TMO and VZ.
In the US ISPs build their own transit and transport networks, meaning large ISPs have an incentive to build fast and reliable networks with lots of capacity and redundancy so they can sell access to said networks. This doesn't happen in places like Europe where there might be a single transport network for an entire geographic area. It also means that unless you are as big as Netflix, you can pretty much assume everyone in the lower 48 will have a good experience connecting to your server since congestion is only a hyper-local thing out here, but in Europe congestion is such a big problem the EU had to step in and ask American tech companies to voluntarily lower bandwidth usage so they could keep up.
That's also why you see so much shit from those same telecoms who cry about having to upgrade their network because of said big tech companies, when in reality it was those same telecoms who sat on their asses not building fiber and not upgrading capacity.
When the pandemic hit and ISPs realized they were resting on their laurels, a lot of fiber building companies were unable to handle the request for more capacity because every other ISP in Europe is asking for the same thing, and most ISPs can't build their own fiber as they never invested in their own equipment and training as, again, the government gave that job to someone else.
I don't really understand how a 2" deep nano trench is meant to last any serious amount of time (compared to a regular conduit fully buried under the road), given how asphalt roads (particularly in a city where there is a fixed-height curb, and resurfacing works will regularly be ripping up a layer of the asphalt to be replaced.
Google Fiber, on the other hand, has been clean and clear.
And while that spurred the AT&T fiber sales critters to come out of the woodwork, that didn't inspire much in the way of actual fiber investment from AT&T.
The sales critters came to our neighborhood several times, but ultimately stopped. I think I may have had some influence there, because I kept asking them if they could actually deliver fiber to our house, and they kept failing to be able to answer the question. I kept showing them the AT&T website on my iPad and to show me where they could actually provide service, and they just walked away.
Still no AT&T fiber here.
But Spectrum was happy to walk around the neighborhood recently, offering their same sub-1Gbps cable modem service that they've had for years and years.
Sadly, when Time Warner Cable was here, they could do symmetric 1Gbps connections, at least if you signed up for business class service. Not so much with Spectrum. They can give you 1Gbps down, but nowhere near that for upstream -- not even with business class.
Sigh....
Aug 2015: Free T-shirt
May 2017: ATT dug up my yard (Everyone was hopping it was google)
Nov 2017: ATT fiber Installed (At least it’s not spectrum cable anymore)
Dec 2021: Google Fiber dug up my yard.
May 2022: Google Fiber installed.
It’s a shame they re-trenched everything 4 years after ATT did.
I'm guessing Google's presence is also what keeps your AT&T bill at $70/mo.
I'm paying $7 / month for 0.5 Gbps. I'd say it's worth the tradeoff.
I now have Chattanooga's public utility fiber, provided by the local electricity provider (EPBfiber, part of the electric fiber board) to EVERY SINGLE ADDRESS SERVICED BY THE POWER COMPANY.
The latter scenario is SO MUCH BETTER that the state of Tennessee effectively has banned [still cat-and-mouse] other cities from implementing Chattanooga's beloved solution to broadband infrastructure AS A RIGHT. I do not even know why Comcast/AT&T/etc. even send out advertisements when nobody in their right mind would choose anything other than the city-provided publicly-subsidized internet.
<3 from Not Your Electrician
It's bleakly hilarious that politicians of a certain stripe fall over themselves to pass laws against policies that deliver value to the public.
Google paid the city $3.8M to the city, for the city to clean up the mess themselves.
I'm curious if anyone knows why there is a GF dead zone in Austin downtown except for the Google offices and a few other buildings. It's bounded by N Lamar to the west, W 30th to the north, I-35 to the east, and the Colorado to the south. Taxes? Permit $? Laziness?
2 Gbps GF ATX customer here. It takes under a week to activate. They have 5 Gbps now but I don't see the point. $70 1 G, $100 2 G, and $125 5 G.
If GF goes under, there's always Spectrum who sends me 5 junkmail ads a week for their overpriced offering.
Vancouver BC has an extensive microtrenched fiber network in the busy downtown core, crossing many roads, and it's relatively trouble free.
I've seen proper trenching with a 30" diamond saw the last bit from a telephone pole to a commercial building. The fiber ran as far as it could using public right-of-way to save installation labor costs.
I don't understand why people are scared of using services that have relatively low switching barriers, because they may be shut down one day.
I've used so many services over the years - big tech and from start ups that I've since moved form because they closed down or remained stagnant over better alternatives, and I never had to give it a second thought.
This suggests there's alternative services available anyway, so why take the risk on Google at all?
So if one service has significant advantages, I'll switch. Even if it might not last a long time.
Apple stuff is useless because it only works on Apple devices, and doesn't let me share with friends who don't have Apple devices, and generally isn't friendly to ad-blocking.
“It is such a shame to think that we wouldn’t be having any of this conversation if they would have dug their little holes two inches deeper,” Coan said.
Alphabet the Clown compagny!
Sigh....
They bought out TW and then proceeded to make the service even worse.
https://www.deseret.com/2014/5/20/20541836/wi-fi-available-a...
This logic doesn’t make sense. I only have Apple devices and it’s quite awesome. Android is buggy as hell and not integrated at all. My Apple devices are completely integrated with the entire Apple ecosystem. Spoken as an android fanboy from the G1 until the pixel 3xl.
In many if not most areas in the United States DSL (digital subscriber loop) based Internet access was originally delivered over PVCs established through a layer 2 ATM network. There were interesting problems with that so PPP or PPP over Ethernet is more common these days, even when the telco no longer really lets anyone compete with them in the provision of broadband Internet access services at layer 3 over the network they maintain thanks to a rather convenient federal court decision.
Layer 2 mostly Ethernet access over VLANs (virtual local area networks) to a chosen provider does live on in certain mostly municipally owned multi-provider networks though, and in some countries that is normal, although usually with the incumbent telco or ILEC (incumbent local exchange company) installing and maintaining the last mile to homes and businesses rather than a municipal operator as in some parts of the United States. Either way more than one provider can provide layer 3 Internet service on the same physical facilities that way, with layer 2 (e.g. switched Ethernet) virtual lans or virtual circuits operated by one company or municipality.
In my setup I don't think the ISP has any local hardware - they're all national, and run on the hardware provided by the fibre guys.
I bypass the AT&T router: https://github.com/jaysoffian/eap_proxy
(I'm a crazy person so I also relocated their ONT to inside my home to keep it out of the summer temperatures.)
* 500/500 for $60, can go up 5gbps symmetrical if I wanted
* While not advertised as static, I've had the same IPv4 IP since I checked a year ago
* No significant downtime
* The provided router has a single 2.5gbps port and has 802.11ax
Disatisfied:
* The ONT and gateway is a Nokia BGW320 provided by AT&T that I must have. I cannot provide my own. There are some work-arounds with pfsense [1] and bridging 802.1X traffic.
* The Nokia ONT/Gateway kinda sucks and it's ARP tables fill up and the general networking of it are fairly basic and what you'd expect for some $30 TP-Link.
* I'm fairly confidant that AT&T uses CGNAT. I haven't been able to get Plex remote access to work correctly.
OpenReach (which was "split off" from BT) puts the infrastructure in place, and OFCOM (our telecoms regulator) defines the price they can charge to ISP's for a connection - so you have a raft of ISP's who compete on price or service.
There are other infra providers though, Virgin Media (DOCSIS Cable) cover some of the country, CityFibre are doing a massive expansion (I now have all three available at my property), Hyperoptic (mostly focuses on apartments).
And then there's Hull ... which is a special case that never became amalgamated to BT back in the day and instead is served by Kingston Communications.
For the most part it works well, but heavy regulations is anethema to some over the US side of the pond and therefore YMMV.
It worked well for independent ISPs for a while.
But nowadays nobody questions it when that cost accounting went all Hollywood. Now incumbent’s subsidiaries run at a “loss” and sell never ending promo packages for less than they lease the lines out at. That’s just good competition, right? Nothing bad can happen.
Now most of the independent providers have been gobbled up by incumbents (sometimes selling service in other incumbents’ territory so we have the options of Satan-North, satan-west, satan-east and Satan-south). Yay?
It seems like a lot of these companies' revenue relies on people being too lazy or ill-informed to do this so you end up paying way more than you need to be.
It literally takes two minutes on the phone sometimes.
It fails basic civil engineering on so many levels.
From the article:
> “If anyone understood road technology or tire technology, [they] would know it’s going to be a problem,” said Jim Hayes, president of the Fiber Optics Association and a decades-long veteran of the industry.
> “They bid out the work to replace the sealant with asphalt,” Simrall said. But before the work started, Google Fiber saw customers lose service when the process of repaving roads damaged fiber lines. “So they shifted their attention to addressing that,” she said.
Apparently, they did not in fact put any thought into it, besides "how can we cut costs".
> Is cold weather bad for fiber?
Both the Frost Line wikipedia page I included and the Frost Heaving page that has been also posted paint a picture, but if you really want a lay description, here's a rough one:
The frost line is about how far down groundwater seeps into the soil (and even most types of asphalt) and generally remains there in some proportion throughout the year. One way to think of it is that the ground can be considered some form of "moist" at and above that line at just about all times of year. That hugely comes into play in cold weather which is why it is called the "frost line": water expands as it freezes, it takes up more space in the ground and in the asphalt. This expansions causes "frost heaving", the expansion of cold water causes things in the ground to sometimes not stay in the ground, chunks of asphalt don't stay concreted to the rest of the road (potholes), etc.
So the frost line is something of the line of "if you want a thing to stay buried, you must bury at least this below the frost line". That includes buildings as the frost line even determines some of the safety requirements for the foundations of buildings as they too can get frost heaved out of the ground in worst cases.
There's never a case where "nano-trenching" 2" into roads makes sense when 2" (or more) potholes are common naturally in cold weather. That's why civil engineers have used terms like "frost line" for centuries at this point. Just one pothole and the wire is at the very least exposed to the elements. At that point it is running through the middle of a pothole in the middle of a road so you should be able to guess what the most likely next outcome is, even in the best case that the wire survived the frost heaving.
(This is also before you add in the fact that burying under 2" of asphalt wasn't even their first attempt, but their second. Their first attempt was burying under 2" of epoxy or as more commonly named: glue. Their terrible epoxy melted in warm weather, creating warm weather potholes in the streets. Their terrible epoxy mixed worse with water and turned city streets into nothing but potholes in the cold weather.)
On its own, it's really hard to give Google any credit for forethought in their rollout because potholes in cold weather is such common sense, no shit, Sherlock it shouldn't have ever needed to be said up front.
That said, I'm sure it was said up front a lot that the city was "untrenchable". Most of the city, especially the urban core and several major neighborhoods, isn't a good candidate for any sort of trenching. Not just because the city has a low frost line (which it does), but also because the city is in the middle of what is referred to as "karst country". The city is on top of giant limestone deposits which are full of caves both man-made and natural. Dig too deep (which is not far below the frost line of the city) in many neighborhoods and you risk sinkholes and cave-ins and worse.
A civil engineer I'm not allowed to name because they were under NDA at the time and Google would sue them said to me once, and I paraphrase because there was a lot more cursing and foul language over beers "What part of untrenchable did those idiots not understand?"
Isn't it just that traditional trenching would have been too expensive for Google to justify?
Google apparently didn't even want to spend the expense running it on utility poles, which frankly, I would naively think would be the cheapest option.
- the government doesn’t use any tax revenue to do this nor impose any debt on the government
- the government doesn’t get any special privileges for access to lay fiber
Then it’s no different than a regular competitor. This is often not the case though and it makes it very difficult for anyone to compete.
Where is the initial capital investment supposed to come from? And what is the purpose of collecting taxes other than to provide services to the citizens? What's different between garbage collection, water, power and internet?
"Privatize profits
"Socialize losses"
—Reagan, probably.
Instead I am a cash-paying blue-collar degenerate. It works for me because I am too damn stubborn to give even cents to the disgrace we Americants call "public healthcare" — and with no children/wife to support, I can be as wreckless as society damnwell chooses for me to behave.
"Acting rationally in an irrational environment IS IRRATIONAL."
I know people who have Google Fiber, and love it - super fast Internet at reasonable prices. If it got turned off, they would just go with someone else. What exactly do you think the downside is? As a municipality, sure, as the article explains. But as an end consumer, what's the problem?
Where I am, if you relinquish your DSL, you might not be able to get it back, because the telco only has a limited number of ports on their equipment and between new construction and equipment wear and tear, you might not have a port available to serve you. Some places, servicable copper pairs are in short supply too --- my parents have to get switched to a new pair every year or two.
If many people switched away, but then had to switch back, it'd be a mess, and I wouldn't expect to be able to get the same quality dual pair service that I have now.
For another, Google has a ridiculous reputation for customer service. Even saying that is being generous, because most Google services just don't have customer service, at all.
I keep hearing "just go with someone else if they shut down" - so there clearly are alternative services available, presumably ones for whom providing a fibre service to customers is actually a core part of their business and revenue, rather than a side-gig of questionable long-term value to the corporation.
"For another, Google has a ridiculous reputation for customer service." Uhh, yeah, because Comcast and AT&T are famous for their stellar customer service.
Give it a rest, man. I get annoyed as much as anyone with Google's "shiny object" penchants, but this isn't one of those cases.
Have you tried Comcast customer service? It's shit. I've had better support with paid Google services (both Pixel and Workspace) than Comcast.
Google has bad customer service reputation only for its free products, which is not unexpected. If someone values good support, then a different paid service is an obvious alternative over a free Google service.
Isn't that for people to decide for themselves? Few reasons I can think of: preference, trust, integrations, better features, don't want to support Comcast, etc.
I am not a civil engineer, I only drink with them occasionally. I'd imagine there are some big differences between heavy pipes in various states of liquid internal pressure above the frost line and bundles of relatively lightweight cables, but I'm very much just guessing at that point. I do know that there are lot of processes in place to plan that sort of work and it can get very expensive. (I see some of my sewer bills. Though the city is also unfortunately in the middle of several huge combined-sewer-overflow rework projects.) So yes, cost would be a big factor, but I think the cost is partly such a big factor because of the physics of all of it and planning it in safe ways that don't damage the neighborhoods, at least that is my very lay understanding of it.
> Google apparently didn't even want to spend the expense running it on utility poles, which frankly, I would naively think would be the cheapest option.
That's the part that still most boggles my mind. That was by far the cheapest option than a bizarre R&D for "exotic new epoxies" and all the money spent in digging up and then replacing asphalt. At one point (after the epoxies failed) they pawned a lot of that cost of the replacement part off on the city by picking up the city's normal pothole/repavement maintenance plans and dredging their nano-trenches just before, which was "smart" cost cutting in an evil sort of way.
Not only was using the utility poles the cheapest option, it was the planned option for years. It was the option that the city spent millions of tax dollars litigating for free for Google's part to make it even cheaper, about as cheap as it could possibly legally be. Google didn't pay a dime for those legal challenges. The city won those court cases! They had the go ahead to Google to do "just about whatever they wanted" with city utility poles and Google decided to do "Plan B" at the 11th hour after the go ahead.
I guess some impatience comes in to play, because it did take years to get that "go ahead" and I guess Google thought a "productive" use of those years was to experiment with silly glues and then they accidentally sunk cost themselves with R&D money into going with that Incompetent Plan B even though Plan A was still on the table and extremely viable and cheap. It's still hard not to also call that impatience its own form of incompetence, though, because that R&D didn't seem to take much reality into account. (Glues? In streets? Streets that experience weather? Streets that Americans drive heavy cars, trucks, and SUVs on? Really? They wasted how much money on that?)
British Telecom own Open Reach who provide infrastructure for the country.
There is cable, for a second option in cities, and there are some regional fibre networks that provide a second infrastructure option, but for the most part Open Reach is the only option.
I had massive issues with my line, I had engineers come out and we were able to test the cables and show that there was a fault between my house and the exchange. I don't have a relationship with Open Reach so I had to rely on my ISP opening tickets and it disappearing into a black hole.
After 6 months of basically not being able to use it I had to switch to BT and magically I was able to get an engineer come out and it's all good.
Fuck BT, and the conflict of interest system where the infrastructure is managed by someone who also provides the service.
Luckily an Alt Network is laying fibre outside and should hopefully be able to supply service in the next 6 months and I'll be dropping BT infrastructure as soon as possible.
I don't care whether the system is multiple infrastructure options, or one infrastructure and multiple services over the top but in that case my infrastructure provider should be separate from my service provider.
It doesn't matter at all if you get fibre as that only goes wrong due to physical breaks (I know this is only 99% true but it's basically true), but both Sky and BT invested a lot of money in being able to resolve copper faults so have a good capability to both identify what's needed and get appropriate action from Openreach, I don't think anyone else does.
Anyway - the Openreach infrastructure really is separately managed. BT Consumer is just another ISP now.
Bullshit.
I had Zen, and we had identified exactly what the issue was quite quickly.
> the Openreach infrastructure really is separately managed. BT Consumer is just another ISP now.
Then split it off. BT cannot be trusted to be impartial, regardless of how many "former BT employees" tell us otherwise.
Line sharing in the US extended to DSL served from COs, but faster DSL came from remote terminals that were closer to users and didn't have space for CLEC equipment.
Under the US Telecominications Act of 1996, the FCC likely could have mandated more line sharing arrangements for cable and DSL from remote terminals, which isn't the same as fully separating wiring from service, but gets some things good enough so people have at least a chance at having an option for getting better routing or getting a static IP or ...
Good luck friend.
(Assuming internet is a set and forget thing once it’s up and running)
The article is literally about them abandoning it in a given city because an idea that doesn't pass the sniff test worked out terribly. This is very much Google abandoning a shiny object just because.
Look, we all know, Google abandoning shit is a meme at this point. But there are literally no downsides to the consumer of going with the better product of Google Fiber even if they do abandon it. It's like you and other people want to be mad at Google just because at this point.
Sure, if your time is worth nothing, then there are no downsides.
If you value your time and end up in a scenario like the article describes, you're looking at (a) service interruptions because they wanted to cheap out on the installation, followed by (b) service cancellation because they couldn't be bothered to rectify the problem they caused by cheaping out.