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.

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.

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

Fiber is just that.

obeisance: noun: deferential respect.

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?

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.

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.

Companies are supposed to do everything they can to beat their competition. That is simply called "being competitive."

It's kind of like the word "progressive" as in "the Progressive movement." It's a linguistic deception that started out as a kind of dishonest propoganda.

Companies are not supposed to do everything they can to beat their competition. That's closer to a description of organized crime.

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.)

Real competition is stabbing your competitors in the face and taking their stuff. We prohibit that because it rewards the wrong kinds of competitors. Prohibitions on anticompetitive conduct are rooted in the same principle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Clothes are seen as essentials in Western society. Luxury brands, not so much. Yet access to internet and access to cutting-edge broadband are treated similarly by regulators in the U.S. That's the asymmetry.

At the pace technology advances, there's not so much difference between the two. Since companies are still constantly pushing the limits of technology, the majority of the benefits of connectivity come at the higher end of the bandwidth spectrum.

Games are not socially valuable, they're a diversion. Backup software--it's much cheaper to give everyone a USB drive than build fiber out to them. Finally, the failure of rich media in the educational setting has been profound. Text (and static diagrams) is the most efficient and precise way to convey information.[1] In the 1990's, it was about getting "multimedia" into classrooms, and it was a colossal waste of time and money. The value of online courseware is the lecture notes and exams, which have limited bandwidth demands.

[1] I'll note that HN is about as plain text as you can get, and is a place for serious discussion.

---> 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.

  ------------------------------------

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.

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

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.

I guess it could be an argument about what corruption means, but I think that people underestimate how dysfunctional the legislative and regulatory processes can be even without any legal violations.

To put it another way: look at the regulations Google demands exemption from in return for building fiber: build-out requirements, slow permitting, etc. Did the incumbents lobby for these things? No. They arose out of municipal politics that have little to do with lobbying.

Even Wikipedia says:

Regulatory capture is a form of political corruption that occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or special concerns of interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.

I don't think I could say it better. Regulatory capture is different to lobbying because the regulatory agencies act in the interest of the company instead of the public. Lobbying is when the company puts forward its own interest.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Look. If I have a measurably worse email system, and email is a central part of workflow in my industry, then I am not able to compete as well as those who have measurably better email systems.

You could argue that there are equally good email systems, or that there's no possible reason that I could possibly want to not use Google's email system. That would be valid and constructive.

"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.

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..."

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.

Thanks for the heads up!

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.

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

-- 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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

I'm down near Tatum & Cactus.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Why isn't there competition between those two?

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

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?

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).

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

So (intentionally) confusing :(