Google Fiber

[Mark Suszko]

Well, the existing internet providers, who have stubbornly told you as recently as 24 hours ago, that the pitiful bandwidth you pay in blood for and they can’t possibly upgrade, will overnight, by magic, now be upgraded to parity with Google Fiber speeds.

That’s happened everywhere Google fiber has come or even just threatened to come.

Beware the upcoming “loyalty programs” from your existing providers telling you they will match Google speed and price, or that you get the next highest tier for the same price – most of these have small-print caveats that the improvement or cost reduction is only temporary on their part.

A level playing field and real competition is good for the capitalist market system.

[Todd Terry]

That’s interesting. Competition would be a very good thing… although I haven’t heard any of the ISPs here boasting (or promising) anything that even approaches the 1 Gbit/s up/down speeds that Google says we’ll be getting here.

Right now we have two different ISPs at our company, the primary one is cable (through Knology or WOW or whatever they are calling themselves this week)… it has static IPs and is the pipe that goes straight to the servers (and then to all the other computers). We also have AT&T as a secondary ISP which we can use on occasion if the pipes are getting choked, or in the event that the cable has an interruption (which does happen on occasion). I will say the AT&T pipe is slow as molasses compared to cable.

I do remember fielding a cold-call phone call at home from an AT&T salesman hawking their service (I have the same cable ISP at home). The AT&T guy kept harping on the fact that their speeds are constant, whereas the cable speeds fluctuate a fair bit, depending on area usage. My response to him was that, yes, it fluctuates, but even at it’s slowest speed it’s still multiple times faster than AT&T. “Yes,” he said, “But our speed is constant.” I tried to explain to him that being able to drive anywhere from 50 to 75mph was better than a guaranteed 10mph… but he didn’t seem to get it. Seems like a tough sell to me, I wouldn’t want his job.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Bill Davis]

Google was looking at my town Scottsdale AZ – but didn’t end up playing.
Oddly, some months later, our ISP, Cox – announced Fiber availability. Came in a couple of months ago.
The biggest difference has been sudden parity with upload speeds – they were suddenly equal to the download speeds I’ve always had.
As to everything suddenly being “instant access” as I imagined, nope. Downloads appear to throttle at times. Basically, I feel like my extra monthly is really paying for the upload improvement – which as a content creator, makes a huge difference to me and well justifies the cost bump. (I do a lot of Vimeo Pro uploads for client review)
So better. But not magic. YMMV.

New signature under construction and coming soon. Please stand by…

[Todd Terry]

Good to know. We’re in the same boat, almost all of our “big” traffic is going out, not coming in.

Mostly broadcast commercials here, so that means FTP’ing scads of spots to TV stations. Some days there are none, but there are often a few… and have been instances of a couple hundred uploads in a day, or more. We’re fine with the reasonably fast download speeds we have, but if we could get the outgoing stuff to scoot along a little (or a lot) faster that would help. Not life changing… but helpful.

Fingers crossed, there’s time to anticipate, though. Google Fiber isn’t set to launch here until early next year.

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com

[Richard Herd]

[Mark Suszko] “A level playing field and real competition is good for the capitalist market system.”

The standard rebuttal is that because increased competition creates lower returns, the competition causes asset bubbles. (See also “the coercive laws of competition” 😉