Why Is Google Fiber the Country’s Only Super-Speed Internet?

Shaming won't work when so many places in the USA only have one viable cable provider. Here in my area of San Diego I'm stuck with Time Warner. Even ignoring the relatively slow speeds, I'd be happy just to not have my connection randomly disappear for about 5 minutes 2 or 3 times a day.<p>I'd switch to a competitor in a second except there aren't any.<p>The ISPs have no shame, unless you're willing to force real competition with them nothing will change for those in areas with defacto monopoly ISPs.

Everyone here is saying the word monopoly, but realistically ISPs are natural monopolies (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly</a>). We don't see competition because startups (even incredibly well funded ones) just don't have the funds to start pulling fiber all across cities. This is also why most high-speed internet today is based on some new utilization of older technology: DSL utilizes phone lines and cable utilizes, well, cable — it's even too expensive (and in terms of business, not worth it given their natural monopoly status) for existing companies. This situation will persist for a while, until either Google starts pulling fiber through tunnels in major cities and the threat forces other ISPs to improve. The only other alternative is fast wireless, as then infrastructure investments decrease drastically.

What would you do with more bandwidth?[1]<p>I've discussed this with several of my friends. In our area, we have multiple providers and can get up to 100MB down/ 30 up with residential service. (You can get all you want if you pay business prices, I work at a company that sells that).<p>30/5 is the standard. So what would we do with more bandwidth?<p>Netflix streams in high def. Games from Steam download quickly. My Voip phone works well.<p>In the future, I'm assuming we will find a use for more bandwidth, but right now, I cannot justify paying for a higher bandwidth connection. (I wouldn't complain if they upgraded our speed for the same price.)<p>What am I missing? What _could_ I be doing with more bandwidth (besides pirating the entire output of Hollywood and the music and gaming industry)?<p>By extension then, what argument do we use to force/persuade ISPs and the government (who pays for a lot of infrastructure [2], especially in rural areas) to increase speeds to end users, while maintaining an affordable price structure?<p>I'm looking for honest answers, I'm not trolling, I promise :-)<p>[1] Assuming that you already have a relatively fast, stable connection now (somewhere in the 30mb download and 5mb upload range).<p>[2] BTOP <a href="http://www2.ntia.doc.gov/" rel="nofollow">http://www2.ntia.doc.gov/</a> My father lives on a farm 18 miles from the nearest town. He has fiber.

There are a whole host of reasons:<p>1) Verizon isn't peddling a lucrative side business to multiply their return on network capital expenditures. Google Fiber is not only making money on the connection fees, but also making money when you use your newly-found bandwidth to put your documents on Google Drive where they mine it and sell your information.<p>2) The major network providers in the U.S. are the legacy of the telecom utility monopolies. They have enormous networks that are the result of mandates to serve not just Kansas City, but suburban and exurban and rural Kansas. Google has the advantage of starting fresh.<p>3) ISP's don't have a lot of incentive to do capital investments because they are natural monopolies (in addition to being the legacy of utility monopolies). So you need government involvement to introduce competition in one way or another. However, there are no votes for such involvement. As a practical matter, super speed internet is something that only makes economic sense right now to build out in urban areas. But districts in the U.S. are heavily gerry-mandered to the point where rural votes count for much more than urban votes. At the governmental level, if you want to bring super speed internet to Kansas City, the whole debate will get bogged down in "but what about rural Kansas?"<p>We look enviously at South Korea's high speed internet, but nobody ever points out that more than half of the country lives in Seoul If everyone in the U.S. lived in NYC we'd probably have awesome internet here.

FiOS is already at the point where the bottleneck is usually the wifi network not the internet connection. The market for "tethered to your desk" home internet is probably not that big.

In the US it's often really hard to establish any kind of cabling network due to right of way laws. This appears to be the worse in metro areas with the richest NIMBYs such as San Francisco or Palo Alto despite having the large populations interested in super-speed internet.

I have Comcast Business 50/10 at home -- it's pretty decent, but there is some crazy Comcast routing going on, so sometimes services like Netflix fail badly. With a VPN to a local server, it's pretty decent, especially since I pay around $60/mo due to a legacy discount (otherwise $200+/mo)<p>What I really want is fast, reliable, dumb-pipe bandwidth from various locations to my datacenter, so I can do things like back up at ~100MB/sec to a SAN in the colo, move VMs around, etc. The only way that seems likely to happen is if I live immediately adjacent and run fiber, or find someplace in the downtown core of Palo Alto with metro fiber and get on there.

It's not actually, but ...<p>I work at Penn State (one of the Internet2 participants) and have blazing fast internet at work. I've clocked it as high as 485MBps. When I go home (to a small village 4 miles from the campus), I have to suffer with Verizon DSL, Comcast cable modem service or a similarly rated line of sight radio service.<p>Verizon planned to install FiOS in central PA, but the FiOS roll-out has been cancelled. Why can't I have high-speed and affordable Internet at home? Because the ISPs don't want me to get used to it. Nor do they want me to know how much they've been overcharging me the last 15 years.

At least the US isn't as bad as Canada where you can pay $225 a month for 250mbit down and up.<p><a href="http://www.rogers.com/web/link/hispeedBrowseFlowDefaultPlans" rel="nofollow">http://www.rogers.com/web/link/hispeedBrowseFlowDefaultPlans</a><p>edit: a bit of searching shows that FIOS has a similar price for their top plan. On the other hand, we have a 500GB data cap. Smaller plans have caps that are lower than 100GB.

I have 100Mb/100Mb for $45/month which is pretty decent I think. It's not 1Gb, but still beats the pants off everything else in the area.

I think maybe the ISPs don't care. My u-verse modem is running something like 5mbps up, but they won't sell me more than 1.5. They have the infrastructure in place, at an existing customer and they cant be bothered to take my money.<p>I just had to install a cable line to get 4mbps up for a project.

<a href="http://www.webpass.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.webpass.net/</a>

<a href="http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/13/sonic-net-starts-trial-of-1gbps-fiber-to-the-home-internet-in-ca/" rel="nofollow">http://www.engadget.com/2011/06/13/sonic-net-starts-trial-of...</a>

All those veritable mountains of wireless routers spread across every city but can we build an easy to use open source mesh network? &#60;samuelljackson&#62; Hell no! &#60;/samuelljackson&#62;

From the article: &#62;Computers &#38; Tele-Comm, Inc. (CTC) has been offering a 1 gigabit wireless service in Kansas City since before Google Fiber<p>Why Kansas City is getting all the love?

Monopolies.

tl;dr: Money.

It's not. Burlington Vermont's City owned "Burlington Telecom" offers gigabit symmetrical.<p><a href="http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/Residential/Internet/Broadband-Internet" rel="nofollow">http://www.burlingtontelecom.net/Residential/Internet/Broadb...</a>

tl; dr: Google wins.