[rkalla]

For anyone interested... the whole motivation of Google Fiber to motivate ISPs to stop gouging us does exactly what it is designed to do.

Cox, in Phoenix, miraculously doubled everyone's speeds > 100mbps last year because they were concerned with our general happiness levels and wanted to show their affection.

Nope... that's not it. Ran into two leads at Smash Burger in June of 2014 and asked them on the spot "When are we getting gigabit speed?" and their reply was "End of year, we gotta move before Google Fiber gets here."

None of that would have happened if G Fiber wasn't coming - CenturyLink and Cox were perfectly fine dabbling in 50mbps service for the rest of eternity without true competition.

Now in less than 12 months my 65mbps service was freely upgraded to 150mbps and we are suppose to have a 1Gbps option any month now (there are test neighborhoods live since last year around Scottsdale)

I have no illusions about how fortunate we are being in a well-wired/competitive environment, but damn am I happy and appreciative.

It actually has more impact on me and where I would want to live than I thought... the idea of going back to < 50mbps makes me sad.

[samelawrence]

Also worth noting that Google isn't doing this because:

1) They want to be an ISP

2) They feel bad for America and want us to enjoy faster internet.

They're doing it because they have plans for products which necessitate nationwide high speed internet. I don't know what those plans are... maybe making YouTube the everything-video-delivery-system, maybe massively collaborative work tools as they expand Google Docs et al... maybe something we haven't even heard about... but they've got something coming that they require Fiber for.

This is a business plan.

[bsder]

> This is a business plan.

It is, but not because they have a plan beyond it, though.

Cox/Time-Warner/etc. basically shook down Google for money a couple of years ago. Google backed down and the last-mile ISPs thought they won.

Google, of course, was extremely unhappy to painfully discover that there was insufficient competition if the ISP's decided to play dirty and block their ads. So, Google now looks at the ISP's as a pure, existential threat that they must neutralize.

So, even if the ISP's upgrade or get really cheap, Google doesn't care. This is about making sure that no company ever has the ability to cut off Google's flow of ads to the consumer ever again.

Google will roll out fiber even if it's somewhat unprofitable just to slowly squeeze the ISP's into obeisance.

[aquadrop]

If that's the case, it would be more effective to settle on something cheaper, let's say program '100mbit/s to every home' and cover larger area faster. I also think that it has something to do with making major ISPs less aggressive, but there's probably something else, why Google needs 1 Gb/s

[mahyarm]

I think as far as last mile costs goes, 100mbit or 1gbit, it isn't much different in price. It's running the wire in the first place.

And 1gbit is impressive like gmail was. It blows everyone out of the water because their competitors stagnated.

[hkmurakami]

Think about this in terms of a startup vs incumbent problem. The newcomer often needs to be 10x better than the incumbent in order to change the customer's habits.

Fiber is just that.

[mkr-hn]

I learned a new word today.

[daniel-cussen]

Yeah me too.

obeisance: noun: deferential respect.

[Jgrubb]

He, me three. I thought they mistyped obedience.

[jksmith]

Apparently you guys haven't heard enough church sermons in your lives.

[bsder]

Glad to provide a valuable public service. :)

[diminoten]

But it is profitable, isn't it? Google keeps telling everyone that they're not going into the fiber business to lose money.

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.

[sushirain]

Vertical integration is a powerful business strategy.

[rayiner]

> Google will roll out fiber even if it's somewhat unprofitable just to slowly squeeze the ISP's into obeisance.

Anti-competitive conduct is good when Google does it?

[bsder]

No, but I'm also being generous in my engineering estimates to put Google in the least-flattering light. And the ISP's started this fight by blackmailing Google--don't bring a knife to a gunfight springs to mind.

Google won't take too much of a loss, if any. Once a fiber network is in place, it's almost maintenance-free for several years. In addition, Google built all their hardware from scratch to minimize cost.

Finally, you may find that Google Fiber turns the network over to the locality for anything too unprofitable. That's a win-win--the locality runs the network (and gains the profit of cable TV, etc.) and Google breaks the monopoly of the last mile.

[enjo]

Seems like the opposite of anti-competitive from my perspective.

[rayiner]

Dumping a product on the market at below-cost in order to force your competitors out of business is classic anti-competitive conduct.

[Gimpei]

Not really... Anticompetitive would be if: 1) The entrenched players were selling at "zero profit" or price equal to marginal cost. (I find this dubious, they are monopolies after all. internet services are a fraction of the US price in many European countries) 2) Google were doing this with the intention of raising prices once all of its competitors go out of business. Since they are behemoths in their own rights, I just don't see Google having the desire to push a price war to this point.

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?

[snowwrestler]

Google could not force major ISPs out of business even if they wanted to. They just don't have enough money. Verizon and Comcast combined have more than 3x Google's revenue.

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.

[hristov]

They aren't dumping it below cost. I believe the post above was incorrect on that. Google management have said that they profit from fiber.

[bitwarrior]

It's called having a loss leader, and there are hundreds of products/companies that do it. You commonly purchase products sold as a loss leader. Hell, steaks at most restaurants are sold at a loss with the hopes you'll order a drink.

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.

[ericd]

Downvotes seem unwarranted, this is the definition of "predatory pricing", which is just a company using the profits from one business to undercut in another with the intent of forcing competitors out of business.

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.

[Dylan16807]

But those companies do the same thing to competition. If all sides are below-cost then it goes back to being fair competition, and it weakens monopoly power.

[kar2014]

Okay that is anti-competitive, than what shall we call dumping a useless service onto consumers that they have to overpay for? Also these ISP's keep their competitors at bay, so consumers do not have a choice but to pay them high fees for useless service.

[nickik]

Thats the kind of idiotic arguments that were put forth during the early progressivist movment. It used to be that anti-competitive meant actually doing something bad, the progressiv transformed it to 'companys who might do something bad in the future'.

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.

[mabbo]

And you know what? I'm fine with that. If Google wants to go and improve my internet experience as a part of some master plan where they do make a boatload of money, I'm perfectly happy to go along with that plan.

[cheald]

It's almost like mutually-beneficial exchange is the backbone of our economy or something!

[blueskin_]

Steal even more of your personal data, I'm sure.

[CapitalistCartr]

That's what happened when GMail offered 2 GB inboxes. The competition got serious.

[Florin_Andrei]

> The competition got serious.

It's interesting how pure competition and "rational self-interest" got us the likes of Comcast and Cox and Verizon and all these other awful, awful companies. They quickly locked up the market, injected their own lobbyists into Washington, and then were content to provide a poor service for a lot of money.

What is shaking them out of their complacency now is not "the market" or "competition" as it's usually understood. It's a very large company, with tons of cash, led by someone (Larry Page) with goals beyond pure financial gains and rock-bottom self-interest.

Perhaps it's time to go back to the drawing board, and figure out what's wrong with these purely mechanistic models of society and the markets. It seems like it's time to ask ourselves if a dose of self-less-ness is perhaps required to make the whole system work better. Not a very large dose, mind you, but just a little bit; anything over the current level of zero, really.

[cheald]

You don't think that the core of the issue is regulatory capture, rather than a failing of "the market"?

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.

[rayiner]

People trot out "regulatory capture" but can never give a straight answer about what is being captured and how that leads to a lack of competition.

Verizon wants to wire up the yuppie neighborhoods here in Baltimore with FiOS. That'd be major competition for Comcast, because those yuppies subscribing to triple play are where all the money comes form. The city won't let them do it, because they demand Verizon wire up all the poor neighborhoods too (which cost just as much to service but won't turn a profit).

Is the theory that Comcast has regulatory-captured the Baltimore city government, forcing them to impose this requirement? Because I've seen absolutely zero evidence for that proposition.

When Google goes into cities, they demand exemption from regulation. The regulations they get exemption from are not ones that give benefits to incumbents. They are liberal public policy choices: you have to wire up poor neighborhoods if you want to wire up rich ones, you have to kick in money to support public access TV, you have to get permits and your fiber cabinets can't be too big, etc.

[daniel-cussen]

This is too true. It's more regulatory moats than regulatory capture. At any rate, it's not profitable after, probably, the first time.

It's strange how cities force companies to wire this way. It's as if they forced a luxury brand, Hermès, say, to open a store in the most shit-hole, criminal part of town in order to gain the right to open a store in the yuppie part of town.

[jpatokal]

Access to the Internet is increasingly viewed as a right and/or an essential service. Access to overpriced handbags, not so much.

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

[snowwrestler]

Regulatory capture doesn't have to mean literal corruption. It can cover situations where governments acting on their own and in good faith, assume the status quo and grandfather incumbents. It might not even be on purpose, but rather the logical consequence of a distaste for laws and regulations with retroactive effects. But the end result is the same: legal obligations that impact new players more than old.

So the question is whether Comcast has to meet the same standard of building out their network in poor neighborhoods as Verizon does.

[rayiner]

The "capture" part of the phrase necessarily means corruption. It's where incumbents control the regulatory process to keep competitors out. Unintended consequences from regulation is not "capture."

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.

[xenadu02]

It's horribly inefficient to lay new fiber for every ISP that wants to enter the market. At some point the economies of scale are such that it becomes impossible to even enter the market; many thought two entrants was the limit, Google is proving that the market can support three.

This is a classic case where government should be laying fiber to cover the last mile and selling access at cost to any ISP that wants it. The equipment on either end can be the ISP's equipment, a fiber is a fiber. Except for cuts, there's nearly no maintenance required.

[nickik]

If three fiber nets are not enougth to creat a good market, why not lay another? If all the ones that are there are really shit there are costumers to be had.

And just by the fact that there are three horrible equally sized companys there we allready know that they are not able to change because if they could, they would allready be winning over market share there.

Also its easy for one of these providers to sell of there own fibers to many providers on top of itself so they dont have to figure out all the costumer managment and things like that.

There are many, many option outthere but the are currenly very hard to take (because of old and new regulation).

Everything from a truly huge company building a huge new net for the hole country in order to provit from economy of scale to small local companys that take offer specialised communitys and then spread from there.

In principle letting government lay down the fiber sound like a fine idea that can work, but juging by other technical project governemnt do I have my doutes.

[michaelt]

It's not just "regulatory capture" stopping competition in the broadband market.

Let's say I launch a startup fiber ISP that serves a small area, planning to use the profit from that area to expand to cover the entire country, and to show investors there's money to be made so they'll loan me money for the expansion. I invest a bunch of cash digging up the roads to lay new cables.

All the national incumbents have to do is drop their prices and increase their performance - which they can easily subsidize with profits from the vast majority of the country where my startup isn't operating, and economies of scale.

Now I've spent a load of money digging up the roads to launch a service that is lower performance and more expensive than my subsidized competitors. My planned expansion never goes ahead, and my initial investors lose their capital.

Far better to spend my time on a photo sharing app, where you only need nine employees to start a company you can sell to facebook for a billion dollars :)

[nickik]

The reality is that arguments of this kind are always made by people who dont have any fantasy on there own. This mechanical story you layed out is devoid fantasy.

In the real market people take advantage of oppertunities, large companies are not always so flexible and dynamic for example, companies can survive in small market, more companies may join.Maybe for some other reason all the streets have to be opened and you can somehow get your cable in for cheap. Maybe you have a groupes of special costumers that require special networks and you can give them a discount because you wanted to do that anyway.

The are for example universtiy networks in some country that are connected by glass outside of the internet. Now if you can find a costumer like that you can lay some internet glass as well.

Or how about a big company that did something diffrent joining the game (google in this case), they will not be underpriced so easly.

A small company could survive in a single place or town, and if they can do it other might be able to do it as well.

There are a millions of possible ways that your mechanical view does not take into account, and that why we have markets. Im not smart enougth to figure out a good solution, you are not smart enougth but somebody might come up with something. There were many great and powerful countrys that crashed in a suprisingly short time because of these sorts of things.

If we can get away from "regulatory capture" we have change to see these effects. For what is worth in Switzerland a new company is laying down massiv amount of fiber right now and the competition has yet to dynamiclly rearange themself to this new challange. Also even if it fails, its not at all clear that once prices went down, they will go up again. Just because the new competition is gone, does not mean a company wants to take the marketing hit of rising the price again. People might switch to the equally bad competition just because they are angrey at a company raising prices on them.

[Florin_Andrei]

Regulatory capture is definitely involved, yes. Except it's not the originator of the woes, it's merely an instrument.

It's not the bullet that kills the victim, it's the assassin that pulls the trigger.

[cheald]

We have empirical evidence that competition has an immediate effect on improving the marketplace. Competition is hindered because of regulatory capture. It would seem to follow that competition is the cure, and impediment of regulation bought through corruption is the disease.

[jimktrains2]

> Perhaps it's time to go back to the drawing board, and figure out what's wrong with these purely mechanistic models of society and the market

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.

[throwaway90999]

"with goals beyond pure financial gains and rock-bottom self-interest."

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.

[Florin_Andrei]

> This is a competitive play, and a very good one at that.

Absolutely it is, yes. You're just not looking beyond that level.

[oldmanjay]

And you're ascribing purity of motivation based on nothing more than apparent religious belief in your savior Larry. Hardly a more convincing argument.

[r_edwards]

but I would argue a bigger hedge against net neutrality -> not banking on defeating what increasingly looks like regulatory capture.

[jmilloy]

I tend to think that it's just really easy to look at things on too-small a timescale.

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".

[chrismcb]

While I agree that Page has more goals than pure financial gain, I don't see how those other goals really play into fiber. More bandwidth to Americans means more potential money for Google. No one else was increasing the bandwidth, so google is trying to jump start the process. But they are doing it purely for financial gain. It is just a bonus that it also benefits consumers. But isn't that how free markets are supposed to work?

[javert]

> locked up the market, injected their own lobbyists into Washington

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.

[hellbanner]

Have you read 23 Things they Don't tell you about Capitalism, by chance? I think you would enjoy it.

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

[jpatokal]

> pure competition ... injected their own lobbyists into Washington

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

[Retric]

A soft cap on corporate size seems like the simplest solution.

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?

[xeromal]

I completely forgot about that. I remember having some POS 100Mb account with hotmail and upgrading to Gmail was a godsend. I think I bought an invite on ebay.

[wanderingstan]

100mb?! I remember hotmail slowly reducing the mailbox capacity to like 20mb by the time gmail appeared.

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.

[vertex-four]

Of course, most competition also died. In terms of free email, there's now... I think Outlook.com is the only one I see semi-regularly? Yahoo's email service is utterly dreadful and I seem to remember a lot of kerfuffle regarding them and mailing lists.

[yahoooooo]

No one I'm friends with uses yahoo, but out of a class I taught of 160 university students, I'd say about 20% of those who actually emailed me were using yahoo.com.

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!

[avar]

Most of the competition deserved to die. At the time 10-50MB mailboxes were normal, and Google came out with 1GB (and counting!) from day one, along with a much better UI than everyone else, and kick-ass spam filters.

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

[adventured]

What meaningful competition was there before? What high quality, amazing service did GMail smash?

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

[vertex-four]

I'm not suggesting that there was meaningful competition before - just that there's no meaningful competition now, contrary to the comment I was replying to which asserted that "the competition got serious".

[msh]

hmm outlook.com and fastmail looks meaningful to me.

[nickik]

I never understood why people are hating on big companys that produce great effects and big market share. I can understanding people hatin horrible IE6, but gmail was and is fantastic and most people love it. Noting is stopping them from leaving to other provider (and there are still many other) but they are happy.

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.

[vertex-four]

I'm not getting mad at anything. I'm responding to "the competition got serious" - no it didn't, that's an outright lie. The competition died.

In any case, it's bad because it means that if I don't want to agree to Google's terms of service for whatever reason or just don't want to interact with them as a company (perhaps I disagree with some corporate policy of theirs), then I have to either deal with a worse experience, self-host, or pay money to a company like FastMail. If there were reasonable competition, I and many others could use them, and Google would have to convince us not to switch.

[nickik]

Are you really claming that there is not a single accaptable email hoster, even for money anywhere on the internet?

Even if there is no good one, there CLEAR are still many, many others that you can use.

Edit: Competiton is not defined as same service at same price. All email services compete with each other, gmail did not kill the competition or the market they just offered the best system on one price range. You are basiclly complaining that others that have diffrent privacy policy are not as good or cheap as gmail.

You offered this as a response to somebody saying that google was good for the market, but they clearly were. You get better free email in most aspects and you still have tons of other options including the old shitty free email providers.

These post feel like a bad accuse to find a reason to hate on google, or maybe im misunderstanding you.

[tatterdemalion]

That is explicitly not what the parent poster was claiming.

[delucain]

In Austin AT&T and Grande (Local ISP) both started offering Gigabit shortly after the time Google announced Austin as a fiber city. It's working.

[jsabo]

And TWC upgraded most of the city while keeping prices the same (for now at least, since at least on my bill they credit the difference in plan prices). They started the same process in San Antonio around the same time SA started wooing Google Fiber as well. Definite win for consumers at east.

[saryant]

At least parts of SA had competition, since there were neighborhoods served by both TWC and Grande. Long before Google Fiber I remember actually getting better speeds than I paid for on Grande. I think I was paying $25/25mbps and seeing 30-35 on a regular basis.

[aesthetics1]

Saw the same thing from Comcast in a very rural area - doubled speeds for free with higher tiers available. Went from 50 to 100. I think we are finally seeing some change.

[rkalla]

Funny you mention 'rural area' -- my in-laws all live in the wooded section of Troy, IL... total population is like 1,000 people.

Anyway, they have Charter cable over there - and for the last decade they have been asking me about 'Getting Netflix' - but with a maximum download speed of 3mbps I kept telling them "It's just not going to work well for you..."

2 months ago Charter bumped them from 3mbps to 50mbps.

My first thought was "well, looks like another cable company is moving into the area..."

[janesvilleseo]

My thoughts too. However, I live in a Charter serviced area and when doing my research when switching from ATT, I noticed they only offer 1 speed. There are no tiers. 1 speed, 1 price

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.

[rkalla]

100?! That's phenomenal... I'll give them a call tonight and ask them to check with Charter and see what is available (for a decent price/a price they are OK with).

Thanks for the heads up!

[janesvilleseo]

I just checked mine too and they doubled it. It was 30 and now it's 60. Not as great. They said it was already upgraded and I didn't need to call, but my speed tests were 30 before I called and 60 after I called....hmm.

[MertsA]

what was the uptime on the modem? It might have just needed to be reset to pull in the new config. They can reset the modem remotely and they pretty much always do for support so I wouldn't read too much into your speed doubling.

[bradfa]

To put 'Getting Netflix' into perspective for you, my home connection is 2 Mbps down, 1 Mbps up and I have no issue watching Netflix steams with good enough quality to be enjoyable. We choose to get this slow connection due to the cost ($15/mo) and see no reason to pay for higher tiers of speed from Time Warner.

[rkalla]

Really surprising - I would have thought that would be a "total no-go" environment. Thanks for the data point!

[philsnow]

Netflix and YouTube do a decent job of adjusting to the speed your connection is capable of (even if that changes during playback).

[sliverstorm]

I'm sure I don't have access to your specific provider, but what kind of service is that? I've been looking to go cheap, all I really need is decent latency.

[bradfa]

I have Time Warner Cable's "Everyday Low Price" package. Hopefully this link will work to show you their standard plans: http://www.timewarnercable.com/en/plans-packages/internet/in...

I'm not sure what you count as decent latency, but I don't believe there's any difference in latency between different TWC internet plans.

[bitbckt]

I find the AppleTV (iTunes) experience particularly irritating, in light of how pleasant Netflix adaptive streaming is over the same connection.

[benwaffle]

TWC also has upgrades planned under their maxx program. My plan was 20/2 and is now 100/10.

[jsz0]

Over the last 5 years the cable industry has mostly completed their own analog-to-digital transition and now have a decent amount of spectrum to throw at faster data speeds.

[aesthetics1]

That's a huge jump. Any idea what they were (or are) paying?

[rkalla]

I think it was $59-69/mo -- I know it wasn't > 70 and not cheaper than 50 from the conversations I'm trying to recall in my brain.

[chaud]

Charter's lowest tier has been 30 or 60 down (depending on your market) for a long time now. Were you on some old plan or something?

[adventured]

There does appear to be significant momentum in leaping forward in fixed broadband speeds. It helps that there is now an immense, growing amount of political pressure coming down on Comcast, AT&T and Verizon. I don't see that pressure letting up.

[daigoba66]

In my market (Atlanta) it's not even really about the speed. Granted Comcast is far more expensive per mbps than Google Fiber. It is "fast enough" except that Comcast will cap data usage to about 300 GB per month before charging fees.

[res0nat0r]

I have 105Mb Comcast internet service with no caps. I don't think the cap applies everywhere.

[pconner]

Atlanta was one of the "test markets" for AT&T's data cap (which is expected to be applied to other parts of the country soon). It might be the same for Comcast.

[mitchty]

God I hope not, I just looked at my usage and one month (November) I had 800G of transfer.

I backed up a lot that month, been making a lot of videos lately.

[mbreese]

Maybe they are targeting area that have data caps? Perhaps that's one reason why Google hasn't announced anything in the Bay Area.

[mrgriscom]

Google said that any fiber project in CA is basically a non-starter due to all the hoops they'd have to jump through to comply with CA's environmental impact assessment laws.

[pconner]

They are considering the south Bay, though. It's close to home for them.

[evo_9]

Given that reality one wonder why the incumbents don't raise all their speeds to dissuade google from entering there various markets. Perhaps the shear magnitude of their collective greed obscures their reasoning?

[rkalla]

Others have stated it well - and I understand the point you are making - but they are at the mercy of the market and their stock price... if they spend $10mm upgrading city infrastructure for an area they have a total monopoly in (that no one could leave them anyway) at a high level, that wouldn't be money "well spent"

-- as opposed to winning 1,000s of subscribers in a highly competitive city through marketing and new product/speed offerings.

I'm not TOTALLY discarding the 'all cable companies are evil' element here, just that if I was sitting at the head of that table and my stock price was all that mattered to my board and the exec team, I'd probably make very similar decisions to ignore monopolized markets unless I absolutely had to (i.e. bad publicity)

[nolok]

Because you're talking about a few cities affected, while the incumbents have a very large number of them in their markets. Waiting to get the names, and changing only those, allow them to keep milking cities where google fiber is not coming (which is most of their market).

[adventured]

Google doesn't need to add its service to every city. If you nail the top ~50 cities, then the rest must compete regardless. It adds massive pressure at a national level when you're talking about tens of millions of people having access to 1gbps, it becomes a cultural talking point, average people start applying pressure to politicians over it.

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.

[rayiner]

There's no money in building "dumb pipes" to the internet. Verizon's wireline margin over the last couple of quarters has been under 5% (http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/verizon-nears-the-en...). Note Google has never revealed how much profit Fiber actually makes.

The existing networks are fast enough to service what makes the money: video services. The cable companies will only upgrade the pipes to the extent that it threatens usage of their video service.

[adventured]

Walmart has 3% net income margins; Costco has 2% net income margins; Target has 3% net income margins; BestBuy in its best days had 4% net income margins. By that premise, nobody should have ever built grocery stores or most retail outlets.

[rayiner]

Retail is far less capital intensive. WalMart generates almost 6x the revenue per dollar of invested capital as Verizon.

[danesparza]

"There's no money in building "dumb pipes" to the internet."

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...

[snowwrestler]

Which is why I'm attracted to the idea of municipal systems or regulated monopolies.

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.

[ghaff]

And, for most purposes, modest (e.g. 25 Mbps) is all that most people have any need for. Admittedly, I don't have a house full of people using high bandwidth services, but my home 25 Mbps and my work connection are subjectively pretty much equivalent. Maybe if I'm loading big files from somewhere that isn't throttling me, but I'm certainly unconvinced I should pay Comcast more for something faster than my current connection (which I could if I wanted to).

[rayiner]

In my building we have FiOS and Comcast. In Baltimore, Verizon doesn't have a video license, just internet. But it's 50/15 for $50/month, and I always get 50/20.

One day, the ONT on my floor went out and nobody noticed but me. Apparently, I was the only person on the floor (of dozens of apartments) to subscribe since the building was built 5 years ago. People on HN like to believe that what the market really wants is a fast dumb pipe for watching Netflix/Youtube, but it's a fantasy world.

The reality is that there's little money in the dumb pipes. The money is in content: in Comcast's case video content, and in Google's case, web apps and ads. Existing cable networks are plenty fast enough for video, so Comcast doesn't bother upgrading. They're not fast enough to enable the future Google envisions, where you store all your content "in the cloud" (and they datamine it to sell you ads), so they're building fiber. It's that easy to understand.

[stonemetal]

Fighting back isn't free. They have to upgrade infrastructure, and send out new modems. This means they are only going to fight if they have to.

[mhurron]

And other than in a few neighborhoods, they don't have to.

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.

[stephengoodwin]

I have Time Warner here in Austin. Although Google Fiber is not yet available for my place, in the last 6 months, TWC has increased my speeds and sent out new modems/routers.

[jsz0]

The cable industry has been working on ramping up speeds for the last decade starting with DOCSIS 3 to compete with Verizon FIOS. The development of DOCSIS 3.1 for gigabit speeds over cable actually started before Google Fiber existed. It seems like people don't want to give Verizon credit for this because perhaps Google offers a more compelling story or maybe because it would suggest that competition in the telecom duopoly actually worked out pretty well. Even after Verizon scaled back / halted their build-out of FIOS they had dumped so much money into it that we suddenly had a competitive market for FTTH/G-PON equipment and trained contractors to build it. Google Fiber and muni FTTH projects couldn't have existed without Verizon basically seeding the market for it in the US.

[xenadu02]

Yeah, and Verizon couldn't exist without the government taking away the rights to my land and giving it to Verizon to run their cables without compensating me in the slightest. What's your point?

Verizon could be selling gigabit FIOS today but they don't because there is no competition in most markets. FIOS is profitable, just not as profitable as wireless.

Guess what Verizon uses to provide wireless? (Hint: public airwaves, most of which they got for free too)

[rayiner]

It's impossible to talk about this in general terms, but in most places, the utility poles are owned by the power company and Verizon pays to string fiber along them. It's unclear whether FiOS is profitable when taking into account the capital investment. They're running a small operating profit, but they have $23 billion to recoup. Almost all the traffic on Verizon's network runs on LTE, and that is spectrum Verizon bought the license to for billions of dollars in auctions.

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

[jusben1369]

I hear you. The problem is that the response is super local. ie I think Google hoped that just entering the space would spur activity on regional and national levels. So far though it seems to be only those specific cities that Google launches in then respond. I hope that changes but the bigger guys are calling Google's bluff and just matching it in the small cities (like mine wooo hooo!) that Google launches in.

[AndyNemmity]

My friend just got the gigabit service, first area to get it. So jealous. The price isn't even all that high.

[rkalla]

In Phoenix/Scottsdale? What are the major cross streets near him? How much?

I'm down near Tatum & Cactus.

[drawkbox]

In Chandler, which was the first city in AZ to get broadband in the 90s, we are very jealous of Tempe, Scottsdale and Phoenix getting both Google Fiber love and Cox love due to that competition.

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.

[skeeterbug]

Woah. I am at 40th st and Cactus. No gigabit here yet. Last time I had a tech out he was saying this area gets newer stuff quicker because we are so close to North Scottsdale.

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

[rkalla]

We are practically neighbors - crazy.

We are in this weird vortex of 'new stuff' - I grew up in PV where we got Cox Cable (5mb down, 5mb up) back in what must have been 1995 - the weird thing is that the sheer volume of customers in PV is so low (big/sprawling houses) that the quality of the infrastructure there is crappy - my parents are still there and have a Cable/Phone/Internet outage probably once a week.

Just north where we live, I think we are right in the middle of everything because even during that huge AZ/CO outage a few days ago - PV was blacked out and we had no impact.

I think we are in the bermuda triangle of broadband in Phoenix.

I don't question it, I just appreciate it and thank whichever god is in charge of these sorts of things.

[AndyNemmity]

I think he's officially in Phoenix, but he's on the other side of South Mountain. So Pecos.

[seanp2k2]

I love that in the Phoenix area, you can go across town and still be on something & Cactus.

[rkalla]

lol, 344th Ave and Cactus or 771st St and Cactus (West Texas) :)

[Caged]

Comcast also doubled speeds in Portland recently without raising prices. http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2014/11/c...

[rhino369]

Cables co's have been doing that across the country because of DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades and recouping spectrum by digitizing all their channels.

Docsis 3.1 will come out in the next year and you'll see really high rate plans, but I bet they will charge a lot.

[higherpurpose]

Even when they do that, you should still support Google Fiber by switching to it. If nobody switches then Google Fiber will die for lack of customers and revenue and the established players will go back to using their old attitude towards the customers, and never upgrade again.

[rkalla]

Certainly true... I have a 50' inflatable arrow on the top of my roof that says "I need Google Fiber" so I'm at least doing my part to get the message across...

[blhack]

Sorry for an unrelated comment (but it's rare seeing Phoenix tech people around here).

Do you (or other Phoenix people reading this) go to Coffee and Code in Mesa on Wednesdays? If not, you should!

It's an awesome coworking event at heatsync labs (a hackerspace I help run).

Okay, sorry again for offtopic comment.

[danielweber]

I'm in Charlotte and I have two ISPs, and neither of them gives me any data cap or any problem watching 2 Netflix streams.

My neighborhood has buried cable, so I don't know if the fiber will come to my house.

[ddoolin]

Does buried cable somehow mean we can't get fiber? We also have buried cable. I thought most of Charlotte had it.

[danielweber]

It's harder than just stringing up new wire to the poles.

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.

[_greim_]

> CenturyLink and Cox were perfectly fine dabbling in 50mbps service for the rest of eternity without true competition.

Why isn't there competition between those two?

[rkalla]

I am sure there is - but I don't think CL had the capacity to really 'push' Cox. They weren't rolling out anything better than what Cox had, just comparable, so both were just happily sitting there for years and years not really bothering each other.

Then GFib comes in and suddenly everyone has piles of internet laying around ;)

[IshKebab]

I don't live there, but I guess it is an oligopoly. They probably offer identical (or very similar) services at similar prices, both making a huge profit. Neither wants to rock the highly profitable boat.

[fideaux64]

> the idea of going back to < 50mbps makes me sad.

Sincere question. What are the specific functional improvements that you've seen at a much higher mbps? Better youtube performance? Faster p2p? Faster web page load times? More supportive of a multi-device household?

[arjunnarayan]

Here's a concrete instance. Last week I made the decision to buy the new Dragon Age game. I have 100mbit, and it downloaded in about 30-45 minutes. This was frustrating because my time is valuable, and of the 3 hours I had to play a game, I only got to play for 2 hours. If I had had the foresight to upgrade to gigabit, it would have downloaded in under 5 minutes. My excellent provider, CondoInternet.net provides 100mbit for $60, and gigabit for $80, but unfortunately I cheaped out. (Well, rather, I decided to first try 100mbit since it was such a huge upgrade over my previous Internet before spending more cash because I'm cheap like that).

Gigabit means you can make decisions on a whim, and not have to schedule down time days in advance. I mean I play video games when I'm physically and mentally exhausted (the couple hours post-gym, for instance).

[rkalla]

Really good question - for my household specifically, streaming 4k and HD at full quality to multiple TVs and still being able to game in real time without massive interruptions.

Also buying digital delivery games (steam or PSN) is awesome :)

[tortilla]

Yup, I got the postcards from Cox in my neighborhood (N. Scottsdale). Same thoughts as you.

[rkalla]

Did you get the 'GigLife' flyer? If you notice in the footnotes, "GigLife is 150mbps internet service" -- the Gigabit service is a different thing they are calling 'Gig Blast' or something like that.

So (intentionally) confusing :(

[mischanix]

I've experienced the opposite so far in my area; I've received a data cap from Comcast for which my monthly overage charges exceed $100, on top of the $50 base cost, for the same 50Mbps service.

[whatsgood]

in the meantime, here in baltimore, comcast still has it's monopoly which was initiated in 2004.

[mjs2600]

Knoxville is a Comcast test market, so we get data caps. You can buy a faster connection, it just means you hit the cap faster. Just a heads up on what Comcast is planning on doing to you next...

[ljk]

It' stories like these that's making me not sure if google is evil or not(i'm guessing the least evil of them all)