The future of Fiber(fiber.google.com) |
The future of Fiber(fiber.google.com) |
Howdy neighbor: I live in NYC too. A lot of NYC already does have fiber in the form of FiOS. I'll also observe that NYC's overall Internet situation appears to be much better than many places; right now I'm paying $50 a month for 50 Mbs down / 5 Mbs up through RCN. In Tucson, where I used to live, I was paying $70 for 12 down / 1 or 2 up.
Google is presumably targeting the places with the crappiest service and the most amenable local governments; NYC's service isn't terrible and its government isn't exactly known for being responsive.
And I'm paying $54 for 20 Mbs/down on Time Warner, which is already a "discounted rate". (I'm in Manhattan).
The building next door to me has FiOS, but my landlord has no incentive to let them wire my building too.
I agree that New York City isn't the best target for Google Fiber, but the Internet situation here varies very heavily based on where in the city you live (not just the neighborhood, but which physical building and management company).
i feel so violated.. at some point i even asked how those questions are relevant to checking Fios availability, to which i was told "these are just part of standard questions i ask everyone"
if you call Verizon, refuse to answer any questions until they tell you if Fios is available at your address.
A crappy anti-muni broadband law was passed at the state level a couple of years ago (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/cable-backed-anti...), so apparently the network has to be run by a private company?
There is joint initiative by local municipalities and universities to bring in a private company to run fiber (http://ncngn.net). It's not clear to me how this will be affected by the Google announcement. (They released a rather vague statement about it.)
Most of the cities they listed are in very sketchy areas that probably dont even know the difference between their regular connection and a faster fiber connection.
Avondale Estates - not so nice Brookhaven - will probably benefit College Park - crime area, could care less about fiber Decatur - some areas will benefit East Point - crime area Hapeville - crime area Sandy Springs - will benefit, lots of Apartment Complexes Smyrna - will benefit in some areas
If the cities they choose dont have an interest then what is the point?
Who said anything about white people?
That hurts. We're looking for a new place to live and I have been asking landlords if their buildings get FiOS service. It doesn't seem to be an uncommon question, and the ones without it seem somewhat unhappy about the situation.
Is your building rent controlled?
If not, I suspect your landlord is short sighted. I am curious to see whether property values will start to diverge based on quality of internet access. With more people wanting to work from home, I think availability, speed, cost, and quality of Internet access will have an impact on property values.
(Of course, you're in Manhattan, which means landlords can do almost anything and still charge insane rents, so this may not apply to you. Sorry.)
> I think availability, speed, cost, and quality of Internet access will have an impact on property values.
In New York, that's vastly dwarfed by the many other factors that affect property values. As much as you and I think Internet access is important, most NYC tenants care more about location, bedbug history, sunlight, etc.
We also have a national broadband network that most people will never see due to the politics played by the current government.
The National Broadband Network is the one policy that had reasonably bi-partisan voter support, but the new conservative government has seen fit to abandon the admittedly more expensive, but more future-proof 'Fiber to the Premises' in exchange for what was going to be 'Fiber to the Node' but is now 'Multi-Technology Mix' or more appropriately 'Massive Telecommunications Mistake'...
The cost per consumer for "last mile" connections can be an order of magnitude more than those used in the core network because of the economies of scale at play. [1]
Most of the UK is currently being set up with FTTC, representing a dramatic increase in the country's average broadband speed over the past few years. [2] [1] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/fiber-its-not-all... [2] http://media.ofcom.org.uk/2013/03/14/average-uk-broadband-sp...
FTTC is just delaying FTTH.
EDIT: Yes, these are part of the "The San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA Metropolitan Statistical Area comprising Santa Clara and San Benito counties".
Should have an interesting effect on the top-down mentality of price setting.
FCC also needs to rule ISPs as common carriers.
- announce which cities are chosen by the end of 2014? or those cities that will have fiber in them by the end of 2014?
Seriously though. Why are most of us still in the bandwidth dark ages?
On a side note, If you haven't been to KC's Startup Village, the climate is electric! It feels like something really real is going on there. It is just awesome to see someone with a coding question, you can walk literally a few doors down to a different house to ask one of the startups there. When you walk inside, you see rooms that should be living rooms with hackers on laptops and would-be dining rooms with iMacs setup on tables. Meanwhile a sleepy hacker is waking up and making breakfast in the kitchen. The climate is wonderful.
Sun Tsu would flunk you out of strategy class. Why should Google engage with an evil, bribery-based, rent-seeking competitor, and their bought politicians, until they run out of relatively easier conquests, and have the revenue from those conquests funding further expansion, and their relationships with independent content creators at a much higher value from a larger customer base?
Particularly when those competitors are not seeking to confront Google, and are preferring to play rent-seeking games with anti-neutrality in their networks, thus making their end game even more brittle?
Depends on the audience. Joe Random Voter, seeing his cousin's internet being super fast, will carry that knowledge back to his hometown. He doesn't care how easy it was for Google, only that it's possible.
Well actually no they don't. They're going to prove their model is replicable and profitable, while not deploying to politically hostile environments.
...really? It sounds more to me like that hacker in the kitchen is being overworked and feels compelled to not even go home at night. Going straight from the bed to the computer (or vice versa) is an unhealthy, unsustainable lifestyle.
I don't think you're following. This isn't the company that has had a Series A and Series B.
The guy in that example lives there. There was another place that was hacking away with no air conditioning; It was just a bunch of passionate 18-year-olds with their baby of an idea. This isn't a W2-health-insurance-401k lifestyle, it is a Jobs-and-Woz-in-a-garage-we're-broke lifestyle—and that is one of the huge reasons it is exciting!!!
I implore you to visit. You can't walk away from a tour not feeling energized by everyone involved.
Arizona - Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe California - San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto Georgia - Atlanta, Avondale Estates, Brookhaven, College Park, Decatur, East Point, Hapeville, Sandy Springs, Smyrna North Carolina - Charlotte, Carrboro, Cary, Chapel Hill, Durham, Garner, Morrisville, Raleigh Oregon - Portland, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Gresham, Lake Oswego, Tigard Tennessee - Nashville-Davidson Texas - San Antonio Utah - Salt Lake City
Arizona - Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe
California - San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto
Georgia - Atlanta, Avondale Estates, Brookhaven, College Park, Decatur, East Point, Hapeville, Sandy Springs, Smyrna
North Carolina - Charlotte, Carrboro, Cary, Chapel Hill, Durham, Garner, Morrisville, Raleigh
Oregon - Portland, Beaverton, Hillsboro, Gresham, Lake Oswego, Tigard
Tennessee - Nashville-Davidson
Texas - San Antonio
Utah - Salt Lake City
Arizona Phoenix
Scottsdale
Tempe
California San Jose
Santa Clara
Sunnyvale
Mountain View
Palo Alto
Georgia Atlanta
Avondale Estates
Brookhaven
College Park
Decatur
East Point
Hapeville
Sandy Springs
Smyrna
North Carolina Charlotte
Carrboro
Cary
Chapel Hill
Durham
Garner
Morrisville
Raleigh
Oregon Portland
Beaverton
Hillsboro
Gresham
Lake Oswego
Tigard
Tennessee Nashville-Davidson
Texas San Antonio
Utah Salt Lake City
cat jader \
| sed 's/ - /\t/g; s/, /\n\t/g' \
| awk -F'\t' '{ printf "%-18s%s\n", $1, $2 }'This article comes to mind, I recently, through normal work, started hitting Cox's 250GB max, I work on games and can easily send 4-8GB per day in assets/code to remote repos. Cringley from 2011...
http://www.cringely.com/2011/07/28/bandwidth-caps-are-rate-h...
This isn’t about capping ISP losses, but are about increasing ISP profits. The caps are a built-in revenue bump that will kick-in 2-3 years from now, circumventing any existing regulatory structure for setting rates. The regulators just haven’t realized it yet. By the time they do it may be too late.
Most U. S. broadband customers don’t get anywhere near that 250 gigabyte cap. The few who do hit those limits are big gamers or file downloaders for the most part. Maybe they do take unfair advantage of the system, but the question is whether this is the proper way to control their consumption? I don’t think it is.
In time we will all bump into these caps and our Internet bills will suddenly double as a result, circumventing competition and ending a 15 year downward broadband price trend.
ISPs win, we lose.
Unless there is competition. Bandwidth is as needed as roads, shipping, airplanes, etc to business and economies. This is an anti-competitive hostage situation we are in in the US. This is also anti-small business as many are run from home offices and co-location etc.
Google Fiber was announced almost four years ago and has only a few tens of thousands of subscribers. While it's fun to get excited about what Google Fiber could be, it will be years before any material percentage of the country has the opportunity to use Google Fiber.
Google is still building out small neighborhoods in Kansas City [1]
[0]https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Q-sGUEiuT9VN__VPsFeo... [1]https://fiber.google.com/cities/kansascity/#zone=Kansas+City...
Google can only move so fast with this given the stranglehold Comcast has on the market right now and the regulatory obstacles. There is a killing to be made by undercutting the monopolistic pricing and terrible service Comcast provides right now (not to mention the ways ownership of distribution might benefit Google's content).
TL;DR This is the next step in Google's big, slow play to become a major ISP.
I'm sure they're both nightmares to deal with permitting processes for. Is that it? Or is there something else that makes mid-tier, more spread-out cities more attractive?
On another note, I wonder if this will have any impact on the Comcast/Time Warner merger. Comcast has specifically called out Google Fiber as a source of legitimate competition in defending the merger[1]. With the announcement that Google could increase the number of Fiber cities 10-fold, that claim might have a little more weight.
1. http://gigaom.com/2014/02/13/comcast-cites-competition-from-...
Edit: Otherwise, why would they announce this at this stage? They've only announced other cities when they were certain.
Drum up local interest and support to help with any local political roadblocks.
Chicago, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh are all major cities that are at least "on the map" as far as tech is concerned. I know for a fact that the local authorities in Detroit, Cincinnati and Cleveland would bend over backwards for any project that has even the slightest whiff of economic development.
I can understand NYC being a special case that they don't want to deal with, but there are plenty of other cities in the region.
All I can think of is: Google's doing this to put pressure on other cities. Is it working? (Not living in Denver anymore, or I'd just ask around :) )
Seriously, with all of the technology workers working in RTP, and all the university students in the area, as well as the emerging startup hub(s) in Durham and Raleigh, the area could really put Google Fiber to great use.
http://fiber.usinternet.com/coverage-areas/
Barely though to be honest. >.<
San Francisco, NYC and Boston because they are big tech hubs where a lot of Googlers live and Washington D.C. because it is the seat of politics in this country and the best way to show what good can happen when we have broadband connectivity.
In fact, rolling out Google Fiber in the capital cities of each state makes the most sense in general. You lobby the political class by giving their home base (state capitals) excellent broadband.
Much like Provo, I think google saw that utopia already had some infrastructure in place and wanted to swoop it up.
So while people are asking, why not this x,y,z city perhaps it's due to infrastructure not already being in place.
This is probably my favorite part. They're not just trying to get special privileges for themselves, they are trying to level the barriers to entry so that there is actual competition in this space.
Hard as it might be for Americans to believe the ISP scene in Canada is in danger of falling behind even them.
I'll keep dreaming :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber#Technical_specifi...
Its faster than Comcast's two lower tier internet packages. I've heard North Portland isn't as lucky but its certainly worth checking out.
Also various complexes around town are already offering FiOS.
I remember a Comcast exec a few years ago made the point that it was hard to do deals with Hollywood execs because the execs all lived in places in California that didn't have Comcast service, and couldn't really see the innovations Comcast was talking about.
As someone who lives in the Philadelphia suburbs, I'm not sure if Comcast has the stranglehold in our area that you think it does. I only know one person that has Comcast and the only reason that person has it is because they don't have access to Verizon FIOS.
FIOS is faster, more stable and generally cheaper than Comcast Internet. Comcast constantly advertises how their Xfinity is faster for wireless, but they're basing that on the fact that Verizon gives you an 802.11g router while Comcast gives you an 802.11n router.
With FIOS, I pay $74.99 per month for 75 Mbps downstream, 35 Mbps upstream Internet with their Prime TV package and unlimited landline phone (need for alarm system). It's rock- of-gibraltar stable, I consistently get the same exact speed on speed tests that is faster than what I pay for, and it's cheap as hell.
With Comcast, it was ridiculously expensive, the speed was hit or miss and I generally had to reset the router and/or cable modem about once every few days.
So it would be great to have Google Fiber as an option and I hope it happens in the Philly area but there are places that are hurting for good options far more than we are.
But my point wasn't that Philadelphia isn't a competitive market. My point was that, as a Comcast executive, seeing Google fiber trucks all over your neighborhood and coffee shops is a bit of psychological warfare so to speak. Furthermore, you know Comcast has all sorts deals in place that help them maintain their monopoly. Google would bump into each of those head-on and make hay out of it in the local press and online. At a time when Philly is trying to increase its image in the national tech scene, this would be a very interesting place to shine some light.
Also, Verizon just rolled out some FIoS infrastructure in south philly, maybe 2-3 months ago. It was really cool walking around and seeing unfinished junction boxes with these cables running into them with huge "FIBER OPTIC CABLES" orange warnings on them.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climax%2C_North_Carolina
no, I'm not from Climax...but it's an awesome name for a...settlement?
I work from home, and can't afford any degradation of service, so I've been doing the restore piecemeal and checking https://myaccount.cox.net/internettools/datausage/usage.cox every day. It's annoying but doable.
What happens to you when you hit the cap?
Sadly the next two tiers (yep we are there) only add 50GB (300) and 150GB (400 total), with the speeds of 25Mbps and up to 50Mbps but if you have higher speeds you will download more and be on HD more, get more files, backup more and always go over.
Comcast charges 20 cents per gigabyte in 50GB chunks over 300 after you use up your three "courtesy" overage months. There's a little monthly report in the billing site. The price is thousands of times the actual cost to Comcast, but at least I know the limits and the cost of going over them.
My understanding is that Comcast Business has no caps.
I have a 12/2 package through Cox and routinely go over the 250GB cap. Other than an automated email saying I'm over the cap, nothing happens.
A year ago, I used 750GB in a month after setting up online backup on a computer. Nary a word.
[1] http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-ns...
[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/09/30...
Everything you need to know is written in a very nice book, recently published:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu#The_Master_Switch
... you could have predicted well in advance that google would go this route.
Technical information collected from the use of Google Fiber Internet for network management, security or maintenance may be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, but such information associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber will not be used by other Google properties without your consent. Other information from the use of Google Fiber Internet (such as URLs of websites visited or content of communications) will not be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, except with your consent or to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request.
https://fiber.google.com/legal/privacy.html
(Google Fiber TV, not so much)
The short answer is: it's much easier to build in a greenfield environment where there is a "helpful" local government, ready access to rights-of-way, and underserved population, easy construction costs, access to labor, favorable tax climate, and a host of other reasons that come before "lots of people who want gigabit speeds".
The economics of building (or overbuilding) a gigabit fiber network drive you towards areas where you can get a high degree of penetration for your investment. That's not going to happen in a place like NYC or SF. The construction costs (directional boring) and tax regime (network cables are "property" for property tax purposes) mean that SF and NYC are probably going to be the LAST places to get Google Fiber.
I see this as a huge step in the right direction and cannot wait to see how it turns out.
Here's a interesting story of what happened when an electrician found a 250VDC feed that was supposed to be abandoned decades ago: http://www.electriciantalk.com/f5/fixture-tails-44009/#post8...
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/97/nyunderground/
I am angry. We need to break this franchises.
> The company also appears to be blaming landlords for any hold ups in deployments
Yeah. Excuse. I haven't heard any landlord in my neighborhood ever complain about this. A lot of my neighbor landlords (they don't actually live there, just for rent), when they come by we would have conversation about these things (because they know I do some computer stuff and they would come and ask for advice when TW goes down), they say they'd make more rent if FiOS was here.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Verizon-Accused-of-Laggin...
At least in NYC most of the buildings are older buildings that have already been wired for copper and are very tough to rewire. It's a much bigger task to rewire a building than to run a drop to a house. So then you end up having no idea whether fiber is available in any specific building. Plus many buildings have signed exclusivity agreements. FiOS has the exact same problems and so is generally just available in newer buildings.
The huge customers in cities on the coasts would give them every reason to fight tooth and nail. Going for small potatoes first represents a larger financial risk for Google, but it gives them a better chance to work out the kinks in their product in relative peace.
However if you consider the cost of deployment, it's much cheaper to do it in a rural area than in the middle of the dense city. I.e. cost per meter of deployed cable can differ a lot.
Their rollout to Kansas City was impressively fast. Had it taken years it would have done terrible things for their campaign.
First, AT&T is already in the process of rolling out fiber to the home, or in some cases, fiber to the node with last mile copper. They have faced nothing but problems trying to do this from people in the city: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Groups-sue-S-F-trying-...
Density can be a nice benefit, but lack of space makes it hard to place the equipment necessary to serve fiber.
Second, a local provider Sonic.net is also rolling out fiber by taking the approach of starting in the closest thing San Francisco has to a less dense suburb (the Sunset). They've faced exactly the same issue (battles over placing Utility boxes).
But the Mayor thinks that WiFi is good enough. :-(
ATT's last-mile copper solution will barely be better than their current "Uverse".
The City (SF) has tons of fiber running all over the City. With some infrastructure investment, it would not be hard to use that as a backbone for municipal fiber. Residents can then sign up with any of the 3rd parties to jump on to the Internet.
SF High Speed options:
Comcast. Max out at 100/10.
Sonic offers fiber in certain blocks of the Sunset, but are deploying painfully slow.
I have an ATT U-Verse box permitted to install on my block but it hasn't happened yet, and I'm not thrilled with ATT.
Monkeybrains requires LoS to Sutro tower, and permission from the building landlord.
Webpass requires at least 20 units in a building.
Google remains the only hope; build it, TAKE MY MONEY.
[1] http://www.fcc.gov/guides/over-air-reception-devices-rule
But the dominating factor of what determines where people live in the suburbs seems to be schools more so than internet. Google fiber here would be more of a novelty.
Their goal is to change politically hostile environments by deploying in friendly cities. Then, residents of the hostile cities will start asking, "Why are we paying extortionate rates for shitty service?" Even if Google Fiber never gets to deploy there, the threat of it will hopefully be enough to get cable companies to act more fairly.
That said, I'd definitely be happy to 'cut the cable' with Google Fiber in Palo Alto. There's already a bunch of dark fiber spanning the city, Google Fiber is already active in adjacent Stanford property, the residents are (in general) willing to pay for quality service, and the city is not so large as to make the project untenable.
Of course, Palo Alto has a long history of community / municipal connectivity projects with mixed success, and a notoriously-fractious decision making process, so nobody here is holding their breath...
See http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/think-big-with-g... http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Many-Realizing-Google-Fib... for Google's motivations.
WUT.
In TX, colo providers have had to send business property tax bills to people who locate their servers in those centers. Sometimes those bills are quite shocking.
In CT, the local phone companies started putting DSLAMs on poles because it got them off the ground and saved them millions on property taxes because there was a rate differential between property that was pole attached and property that was on the ground.
Never underestimate the effect that taxes can have on the deployment, operation, and maintenance of business property. You can explain great deals of financial shenanigans to the real savings associated with avoiding taxes.
And who gets screwed? Anyone who doesn't have the scale or size to make avoiding that tax worthwhile. e.g. the small-business owner.
http://www.noevalleyvoice.com/2013/May/Att.htm
The challenge to ATT's plans was manifold:
1) ATT refused to put their equipment underground. SF's sidewalks don't need more cabinets.
2) U-Verse is DSL service. Sonic.net already offers 40mbps DSL service in SF, so U-Verse is not that much faster. Why does SF need more cabinets to get pretty much the same data service from the incumbent telco?
3) ATT is putting cabinets on the sidewalks, and running fiber to those cabinets to serve ~45mbps connections to folks ~800 feet away. If ATT had planned to run fiber from those new cabinets into residences ~800 feet away and provide 100mbps or 1gbps service, folks would have welcomed their project.
4) Monkeybrains [0] and Sonic.net [1][2] have had (for several years) workable plans to eventually deliver 1gbps service to the whole city with (they say) far fewer aboveground boxes that ATT "requires" for U-Verse, and don't even need to dig up the street to lay the fiber. I'm not sure why they've been ignored by the Mayor's Office and the DPW.
[0] https://www.monkeybrains.net/DPW-MonkeyBrains-March-2011.pdf
[1] http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2010/07/14/micro-trenching-at-soni...
[2] http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/12/15/sonic-net-plans-gigabit...
If Sonic / Monkeybrains can deliver 1gbps, all the better.
On the other hand DC voltage, once a connection has been made, will continue to flow through that path to complete the circuit. You can think of it as the electrons on the hot wire want very badly to get back to the place where they were generated (the source transformer under that covered up manhole). If they find a path through your body, it will continue to flow through your blood vessels until either you or the wire burns up, or the upstream transform faults. You basically become a fuse. If you are part of the circuit, you'd better hope there is somebody nearby to hit you you with a pole, because otherwise you are pretty much stuck that way. Also, DC voltage is much better at sustaining an arc, even below 100 volts, so it can set off an explosion that can ignite whatever dust is lying around the equipment. Google "arc flash" to see what this looks like.
Ahh, that's what I was missing. I assume the "painted black" part was to insulate the box and mitigate this risk when the box was closed?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system
"At least 12 steam pipe explosions have occurred in New York City since 1987."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_New_York_City_steam_explos...
In Chicago, about 60 percent of the city is NOT owner-occupied. I'm sure New York is significantly higher. MDU runs are much more expensive, even with cooperative landlords.
Edit: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPoint_Communications and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Communications
Well, it's not like they were trying to get rid of fiber. Verizon sold off all its wireline operations in rural and non-core areas. Fiber simply went along for the ride.
What Verizon was trying to get rid of was the copper. No company would be willing to buy the copper from Verizon and then compete against FiOS. Thus, the only way that Verizon could get any buyers was to bundle the copper together with the fiber.
This would make it more difficult for Verizon to attempt a market entry at a later date, as it would have to start from a position of no infrastructure.
Imagine the tagline: "Even Hell has fiber, why don't we?"
Same in Sweden. Often you need to be on a waiting list for 2+ years to get an rental contract in a large city in Sweden (longer in Stockholm[0]). The impatient among us flit around on 6-month second hand rentals. Or you buy an apartment with an untenable loan and hope the bubble keeps inflating...
[0]The wait is currently on average 7 years in Stockholm municipality. 15 years if you want a centrally-located apartment. http://www.svd.se/nyheter/stockholm/lagenheten-ar-din-om-att...
I'm astounded at how anyone at VZ thinks this could be a good idea.
[0] http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Verizon-Again-Confirms-Fi...
You can't make the margins as a "dumb pipe" that Verizon needs to justify the capital investment in FiOS. That's the long and the short of it. They had dreams of selling pay-per-view movies, video chat, and a dozen other applications over their network for big $$$. Instead they're fighting with Comcast over the same $120 in cable and internet bills, while Netflix, Google, and Apple build their high-margin businesses on VZ's fiber.
Regardless of opinions on free market, political leanings, etc, the fact that this is standing in the way of progress is bad news for everyone.
On top of that, as was mentioned above, it's probably cheaper to update to LTE than it is to run fiber everywhere, and on top of that, it's probably worth more money to them on the $x/mo for LTE service since to add another customer in the area is trivial compared to FIOS.
Are they going to let my router able to get stable internet from LTE technology? I have desktop and laptops and I don't want to add wireless card to my desktop in particular. I rather serve things over my own router. How are they going to market to home users? FIOS has been said to be high speed, reliable, fiber-optic. Great. I am willing to add $20 to my monthly bill to get one.
And how can they drop the agreement like this?
Canada is definitely behind the US for internet access, it's even behind many (if not most) third world countries.
Nope. We elect one group of corrupt assholes to run things, and then complain about them being corrupt assholes. We keep re-electing them till they do something so hugely scandalous that we elect the other group of corrupt assholes instead. And then keep re-electing them until they fuck up so badly that we switch back to electing the first group of corrupt assholes again. Our government is currently pushing for more restrictive drug laws, including for weed. They are pushing for mandatory minimum sentences for non violent crimes, and for privatized prisons. These things are almost universally opposed by Canadians. It simply doesn't matter, we re-elect them anyways.
> Canada is definitely behind the US for internet access, it's even behind many (if not most) third world countries.
I completely disagree with this. Cogeco kicks the pants off of the options available in downtown SF in my experience.
The way it works is pick any two of speed, capped usage or reasonable price, but then forget the last one because it doesn't exist anywhere.
I consider my, still expensive, 4G mobile way better value than the land line ISP, but I need the capacity for work. Frankly I think 4G is going to wipe out land lines in far more cases than people realise.
Even if it were consistently fast and reliable (which it is neither), at $40/month for half a gig of data? Not likely.
WTF!?! Is it that US is trying out National Healthcare, so now Canada is going to try out some of the worst American ideas? I don't know much about Canadian politics, but the things you listed are some of the worst policies United States ever implemented. Why on earth is Canada trying those things, I can assure you, private prisons and mandatory minimum sentences are NOT working here in US.
I would expect that the buildout could be funded by a municipal bond issue, with the repayment being handled via the revenue from the customer-facing companies that lease access to the infrastructure. I've heard of municipal networks like this being run profitably and being repaid in a reasonable timeframe (on the order of a decade or two), but unfortunately I don't know more than that.
Except where it did before the State stepped in to ensure Comcast/TWC didn't have competition.
But other than that it'll never happen.
Very concrete example: Delaware is one of the fastest states in the U.S., with average connection speeds in Akamai's study comparable to the top 5 countries in the global list. I live in the largest city in the state, a major rail hub, in the heart of downtown, and can't get fast internet because the area is so poor. But the suburbs right around us have fiber.
Per-city breakouts aren't in Akamai's most recent report, but here's one for Q4 '11: http://tumblr.thefjp.org/post/22270191498/the-worlds-fastest.... The fastest city in Sweden at 11.3 mbps wasn't that dramatically faster than the fastest in the U.S. at 8.4 mbps. Asia of course dominates, but that's because Japan and Korea have tons of very densely-built cities.
I would love to test all your hypotheses, I'm skeptical. My impression is that, even if you compare dense high-income areas (Manhattan, SFBay), many other countries are still coming out on top. For instance, Warsaw (!) metro area: 631.4/km2, Manhattan: 27,227.1/km2. I don't have the numbers but income is much higher in Manhattan.
Wikipedia tells me I can get 60mbit/s down for under 25 USD in Warsaw and I think that is uncapped. I don't believe any comparable deal exists for Manhattan. SFBay is similar.
I also don't think it would necessarily be used by a small subset of the constituents - it seems as though it could potentially be much cheaper than alternative high-speed arrangements, since the customer facing companies would actually have some competition. Once the initial construction debt was paid down, the govt. could likely reduce the access lease cost, which would be passed on by the competitive ISPs, further enabling access by poorer residents.
I think it would be great for the long-term economic prospects of those areas as it broadens access and makes heavy uses like remote work more viable.
Plus, a good internet connection is a much cheaper form of entertainment than many of the alternatives, including cable, so it could actually save many people money.
A municipality would issue bonds to fund the replacement of their water mains, which are breaking and pouring water into the streets every winter. It would issue bonds to renovate their elementary school, which has a leaking roof, asbestos insulation everywhere, and drinking fountains that dispense leaded water.
Municipalities have limited borrowing power, so muni fiber does have to compete against all those other priorities. And it's been a tough market for muni bonds lately.
What's more, muni fiber would be considered a non-essential revenue bond. These types of bonds carry higher interest rates than essential services bonds, or general obligation bonds.
I imagine that a fiber rollout would create entirely new revenue, though, where upgrading water mains and other existing infrastructure wouldn't, so it might be viewed by the govt as offsetting any difference in interest rates?
The problem is that a lot of municipalities aren't run all that well. Local politics can sometimes be very ugly. Muni fiber only really works when the municipal government works. Sadly, that's not as common as it ought to be.