Just seems the locations aren't exactly tech hubs so I'm trying to get a better idea of how the expansion works.

It's staggering how much FUD there is on these issues. This is stuff you can just Google to inform yourself about.

A friend and I did a big trip to Southeast Asia and he begged his friends on email not to Include his email in their responses to save space on the server.

I honestly don't know how much work it is to add to the buried cable. If you have to go dig up each piece of conduit, that would royally freaking suck. Maybe there are access tunnels where they can use strings or something to yank the cable through. I would love to hear more about this.

And honestly, fibre to my cul-de-sac would probably be good enough for me.

10 minutes north of Durham, ya, I'm sure Time Warner will feel the need to 'fight' there, let alone all the neighborhoods in Durham that won't get Google Fiber.

If you put a 1gbps service in Cincinnati, that forces Cleveland to have to compete with the economic gravity that generates. And they will either respond through attempting to build their own muni broadband or enticing eg Google fiber, or they will suffer and Cincinnati will draw people, capital and talent away from Cleveland.

I agree with your data cap comment. Although it's not just the southeast. Any cornered internet market seems to have them. They're pretty widespread in Canada.

Cox probably cares about Chandler even less now it has competition to deal with, we'll be last to get 1Gbps Gigablast that suddenly was announced when Google Fiber picked Phoenix.

EDIT North Scottsdale is generally first because that is where most of the company execs live.

Not for Verizon, maybe -- but Google never struck me as a bunch of chumps or wild philanthropists. I'm betting they're getting more eyeballs in front of Adsense and YouTube ads...

There's no money in building dumb electric lines or dumb sewer lines or dumb phones lines either, so the solution there was to guarantee customers in return for regulating the service.

This would create a common platform upon which video service providers could compete equally. As it stands now, integrated companies like Comcast have no incentive to make sure Netflix, Hulu, HBO Go, Sling TV, etc. work well for their customers. Quite the opposite, actually.

Here is some actual relevant information related to the Google Fiber concessions, mainly in that they don't have to build out infrastructure to the entire city (unlike Comcast etc), and other breaks not given to previous providers:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/09/how-kansas-city-t...

> Google received stunning regulatory concessions and incentives from local governments, including free access to virtually everything the city owns or controls: rights of way, central office space, power, interconnections with anchor institutions, marketing and direct mail, and office space for Google employees. City officials also expedited the permitting process and assigned staff specifically to help Google. One county even offered to allow Google to hang its wires on parts of utility poles—for free—that are usually off-limits to communications companies.

Politics/Bureaucrats -- what laws are in place to prevent you from deploying in X fashion? Can you bury fiber? Do you have to string across utility poles? If so, who owns the poles? (It'll either be the city or a utility company) What are their rates? What are the requirements to get quotes for their rates? (CenturyLink requires you to be a part of an NDA/Non-Compete Agreement program if you are reselling competitive services)

Business -- how many people are you looking to service? What's the absolute max you could potentially service? (usually subdivisions are zoned with a specific max amount of households) How many would you like to service? What is an acceptable cost? (I found $100 is the sweet spot for gigabit fiber) What kind of customers will you be servicing? (mostly soccor moms who will browse the internet from 11a-3p, young families who embrace video streaming from 8p-11p, retirees who only care about email and facebook from 9a-12p, etc.)

Technical -- how much bandwidth do you really need? Chances are you can actually service 100 or so residential customers with just a single gigabit ethernet connection. How much fiber will you need to run to everyone? The easiest thing to do is run single-mode fiber connected to a media converter in their house. Depending on how you can do "huts" (as google has dubbed them) you will probably do single cisco ToR switch with 48 spf+ ports for 40 customers. You will dedicate 4 ports for uplink connectivity via LACP and have 4 stand-by ports should one be bad. Scale this out as needed.

This will also be specific to your area -- but expect $10k/mile to run conduit to a hut with an additional $2k/mile for different fiber pulls. You would usually run conduit and some kind of fiber at the same time -- probably 96 strand single-mode. But that's up to you.

Not sure what else you need to know. That should be a good starting ground. The bulk of our capital was for fluid insurance bonds. About 80% of our working capital was going to be tied into those while we laid the fiber.

And for older folk, I still see plenty of @aol and @<serviceprovider> addresses.

Don't mistake what youre friends are doing for what the world as a whole is doing!

Nobody's done much more than reach parity with GMail since then, so there's been no big incentive to switch back.

Yahoo Mail and Hotmail were terrible then, and they're still mostly terrible now.

So why is everything that has big market shares bad?

How about we switch to a model where we gat bad at companys that are actually selling us shitty products instead.

I think what's more important is that they're willing to spend money on fiber that they could spend elsewhere to get better returns. Returns on being an ISP probably aren't as good as returns on other kinds of infrastructure, at least up front.

Anti-competitive conduct is good when Google does it?

It takes a lot of money to break into a captured market, which is why it takes a large company to do it. Google entering the ISP market has done more to shake up and spur on the incumbents in the past couple of years than anything regulators have done. And furthermore, you can be assured that their doing so is absolutely self-interested; Google isn't building fiber for the betterment of humanity, they're building it to improve the delivery of their services which make them money.

I've always had the impression that it's more a matter of timescales. Places do what's best for them in the next year, not the next 50yrs. If companies thought further ahead and building long term plans and potential would be a reason to spend capital, then I think we'd see a very different market, in many markets.

This doesn't paint an accurate picture. Google isn't deploying Fiber out of any notion of selflessness. This is a competitive play, and a very good one at that.

You say selfless ideals, I say this is exactly how "the market" and "competition" are commonly understood to function -- in the absence of corruption, regulatory capture and state granted monopolies.

Consider the extreme: in a single second, there aren't any discernible market pressures in the ISP industry, and it would be weird to expect it.

Which is mainly to say that it is important to talk about how quickly you want competition and market forces to come into play (not just that you want them to) when talking about why and how to change "the system".

Ergo, it was not a free market and it was not laissez-faire capitalism.

In a free market, i.e. laissez-faire capitalism, anybody is free to do whatever they want as long as they don't initiate the use of force, including the government, so you could not get into the situation you describe in the first place.

http://www.amazon.com/Things-They-Dont-About-Capitalism/dp/1...

It's either pure competition, or they're injecting lobbyists to tilt the table in their favor, but not both.

EX: 20,000 employs and or contractors and companies can’t own shares of other companies without being included in that cap. Outsourcing seems like the obvious loophole, but hardly an insurmountable barrier.

Though, increasing tax load as companies scale is probably a much better option. Not that there is a realistic chance of this passing any time soon, but large companies are harmful to both democracy and free markets so it's likely to be tried by someone.

PS: The only real counter argument I can think of is global completion.

Edit: (3 downvotes no responces.) How odd, looks like I hit one of those things you can't say. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html I wonder why?

Also, I just looked up a price quote for Troy (near city hall) and noticed they indicate their speeds start at 100Mbps for 39.99. Granted you said they live out farther, but they may be able to get more.

My wife's internet at her studio was recently doubled, but only after we called. They said they needed to see if her modem was "too old". It wasn't and they doubled it on the spot. She has a business account for that one.

"If I have a mesurably worse Ice Cream Delivery Guy, and Ice Cream is a central my marketing stratigy, then I am not able to compet as well as those who have measurably better Ice Cream Delivery guys."

What you take issue with is simple that you happen to not like on aspect of a service and your complaining about it. Your critic is basiclly a critc on markets as such, if that is what you are doing then say so, if not stop repeating that the world is unfair, nobody said it was.

In general "dumping" is hard to establish since no one is going to reveal their cost structure. In my experience it is normally an accusation flung by incumbents because that other guys stuff is too cheap.

If it breaks the back of the ISP monopolies and forces them into the role of unprofitable utility, all the better. That's the whole point of market forces, right?

And if Google Fiber is indeed a loss leader, then each successive deployment will be more difficult to finance. And they've only deployed a few small communities.

But that's not Google's goal. Their goal is just to make sure that consumers have a broadband alternative in the markets where they currently do not. That's much more modest, and to me it seems competitive rather than anti-competitive. I certainly hope they come to my town, where Comcast is the only option if I want more than 5 Mbps.

In this hypothetical situation, Google uses its internet access as a loss leader to sell hypothetical services which require high speed broadband. Traditional ISPs will use internet access as a loss leader to other services, such as phone and television.

Though I don't know that it really applies here - they're unlikely to drive TWC-Comcast out of business by pricing low in just a few areas. It's more of a concern when it's a large monopolistic company doing it to regional competitors to maintain their monopoly.

How about we use common sence and let competition work its way until we actually OBSERVE bad effects instead of condemming a company because they might do something bad at some point in the future. Is this not one of the major advances that was made law in the last 200 years?

Most of the historical example of these laws in practice are so absured that you can only laught about them. Companys not allowed to unite because they would togheter have 8% of a market.

This law, since it has been on the books has served as block for competition WAY more often then it has helped. I encourage everybody to look at this history of this law and not JUST the 2-3 partial success story that seam to be the only once that are ever talked about.

Providing health care to the destitute isn't profitable either; doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing it.

In every city I've studied, incumbents are bound by the same requirement to build-out their network as potential competitors. I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but the only one that comes to mind is Google Fiber: they get a pass on build-out requirements. These requirements curtail the most obvious route to competition: deploying in dense, rich neighborhoods where the incumbents generate most of their profits.

That is in free market capitalism, where the initiation of force by the government or companies against other companies is barred.

For instance, in free market capitalism, telecom companies are not granted local monopolies, so the only way for a telecom company to hurt its competition is to beat its competition on price or service, since anyone is free to build telecom infrastructure. (Obviously, this is not the system we have in the US, where telecom monopolies are rampant, but we should.)

---> Since when is "feeling like an equal" a basic right?

Since always, because large groups of people not feeling like equals inevitably leads to instability and uprising.

---> Everyone in my high-school had a car and designer clothing. Should the public subsidize that stuff for poor kids?

Yes, in the form of basic income sufficient to feed, clothe, and transport oneself and one's family.

---> Note that clothes are a much bigger part of "feeling like an equal" to a typical kid than anything to do with computers.

We're not just talking about kids, but even kids deserve the basic dignity of not being terrified to walk the halls of their school because they don't have reasonable clothing. The distraction of being strongly disliked by other students can have a profound effect on a kid's outlook for the future and motivation to improve.

---> Games are not socially valuable, they're a diversion.

Games are every bit as socially valuable as any other form of art or entertainment. As just one example of an artistic game, see Braid.

---> Backup software--it's much cheaper to give everyone a USB drive than build fiber out to them.

Give someone a USB drive you back up their files for a day, but give them fiber and you back up their files for a lifetime. Once built, the fiber is good for a very long time and many other uses.

---> Finally, the failure of rich media in the educational setting has been profound.

That's because people who call things "rich media" didn't know what they were doing or how to measure it. They were just jumping onto a buzzword. As a counterexample, Encarta on CD-ROM was quite useful as a tool for education and inspiration.

---> Text (and static diagrams) is the most efficient and precise way to convey information.

It depends on the information. What sound does a penguin make, in text? What does it look like to fly over an island rain forest?

If this is true, why do we still have classrooms at all? Why was video or telephone invented?

---> In the 1990's, it was about getting "multimedia" into classrooms, and it was a colossal waste of time and money.

I'll repeat my earlier mention of buzzwords, and add the benefit of a generation of students having early experience with computers, allowing them to perform better in a modern workplace.

---> The value of online courseware is the lecture notes and exams, which have limited bandwidth demands.

Strongly disagree. I took the very first edX course, MITx 6.002x. 95% of the value was in the excellent lecture videos by Prof. Agarwal, which I could speed up or slow down as needed to maximize understanding. The remaining value came from interactive circuit simulations. It's not just the medium, it's the quality of execution. Excellent videos and interactive software are invaluable and can't be replaced by lecture notes and exams.

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Cities already have to provide water, electricity, gas, and sewer services, so the roads will be dug up and the labor expended whether fiber is added to the mix or not.