Google rolls out fastest Internet in the world

[MikeOKC]

"Download speeds on the network were up to 300 Mbps, with an upload speed of 150 Mbps. Compare those speeds to Comcast, where Do reports download speeds of 13Mbps, or about 1/20th the speed of Google Fiber."

This is in a neighborhood south of Stanford. They are also using Kansas City, KS (not Missouri) as the test market for this fiber Internet.

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/201...near-stanford/

[Thunder]

This is something that Apple will not be able to do. :-D

[MikeOKC]

This is something that Apple will not be able to do. :-D

Because they don't want to. If they did want to - they certainly could and would.

[Thunder]

Because they don't want to. If they did want to - they certainly could and would.

I hope they don't. We see what happened with COX. It'll be much worse with Apple. Hopefully we will see Google roll it out completely nationwide quickly. I wonder if COX would sue Google if they invade the market?

[venture]

Most cities have franchise rights that they sell to cable operators and such to handle various services. Of course that seems more clouded now since AT&T also provides TV service and cable offers phone - granted it is off their own respective networks. Either way, shouldn't be an issue with Google come in except for cost. Town of 200,000 households will cost around $1.5+ billion to roll out - since they would need to do their own wired/fiber network to each house.

[MikeOKC]

By the way, I was just reading the Google Fiber Internet blog and they have now included KCMO in the rollout.

[Thunder]

Venture, when Google roll them out, how thick are the lines? What placement on the poles will they be at? Will they just do the network or will they also include the lines to each house (also enter each house to set up outlets)? Or will the house portions only be when a household orders service?

[MikeOKC]

Thunder, This is an experimental program available in only two places: a small neighborhood near Stanford and the Kansas City area which was selected after a long application process. The cost can be up to almost $10,000 per house. The speeds are 1gbs - almost 100 times faster than a Cox PREMIUM connection. You could download a typical HD movie in about one second.

[jn1780]

Google didn't invent anything new. Its just a marketing gimmick. "Hey look at us, we completely wired two small neighborhoods with a long proven but expensive technology called fiber optics". Fiber to home to be more specific.

[MikeOKC]

Google didn't invent anything new. Its just a marketing gimmick. "Hey look at us, we completely wired two small neighborhoods with a long proven but expensive technology called fiber optics". Fiber to home to be more specific.

It's not just a marketing gimmick as they're projecting big losses for the KC project. They feel that watching the use of the network, with app development for gigabit speeds, etc. will provide them with profitable ideas. It's the specificity of the FFTH (to the home) that makes it very expensive. uVerse is Fiber to the Node and the speeds are very good - but nowhere close to gigabit speeds.

[bluedogok]

I think Verizon FiOS is fiber to the home but you only get fiber if you order FiOS, otherwise it just goes down the street like cable does and bypasses your home. I know some who have it and love it for internet and like the TV portion and others who love the internet but hate the TV portion. In the City of Austin proper we only have Time Warner Cable and AT&T uVerse options, I think AT&T was allowed because they already had a franchise agreement with the city for telephone service. I know that many of the burbs around Austin have many more options than we do like Verizon FiOS, Grande Communications cable, etc. and they also have options for electricity whereas we are a municipal power city and those were excluded from the "deregulation" of electricity in Texas.

[MikeOKC]

I think Verizon FiOS is fiber to the home but you only get fiber if you order FiOS, otherwise it just goes down the street like cable does and bypasses your home. I know some who have it and love it for internet and like the TV portion and others who love the internet but hate the TV portion. In the City of Austin proper we only have Time Warner Cable and AT&T uVerse options, I think AT&T was allowed because they already had a franchise agreement with the city for telephone service. I know that many of the burbs around Austin have many more options than we do like Verizon FiOS, Grande Communications cable, etc. and they also have options for electricity whereas we are a municipal power city and those were excluded from the "deregulation" of electricity in Texas.

All I know about the FiOS version of FTTH is they are like the couple of European fiber optic networks - they use splitters to a neighborhood. Slows it way down - but FAR less expensive than the Google "experiment."

[Snowman]

I hope they don't. We see what happened with COX. It'll be much worse with Apple. Hopefully we will see Google roll it out completely nationwide quickly. I wonder if COX would sue Google if they invade the market?

Companies can not sue other companies for invading a market, in some states their are laws which companies can sue city governments which try to deploy one. As far as Apple, it would likely be more expensive but at least an option in an area so hardly seem all that bad and would be an incentive for cable to raise speed and AT&T/Verizon to be more customer friendly. However, if the margins are their for them to do so it just shows how bad ISPs are gouging customers if Apple prices were competitive.

Not sure what you mean see what happened with COX either (it seems to be negative), if it was not for the cable companies developing DOCSIS then phone companies would still have us going near dial up speeds at higher prices. Cox is generally better priced per bit than AT&T, has looser terms of service and compares well vs other large cable companies on service/price. Phone lines are generally at their limit for speed now without physical upgrade to last mile connections now due to cable's competition. New cable modems can go up to a theoretical 304 Mbit/s downstream and 108 Mbit/s upstream (about 10 times what DSL can do in it's current implementation, of course no one is currently selling consumer plans for that yet). If cable companies do a similar upgrade to get the maximum speed out of their last mile connections how the telephone operators did to make DSL reach it's current speeds and kept a similar upstream/downstream ratio on hardware they should be able to get roughly 3 Gbit/s downstream, 1 Gbit/s upstream because currently around 90% of the bandwidth of the cable wire is used to send all the content of every station they have over the wire all the time if you are watching it or not.

[Just the facts]

"Download speeds on the network were up to 300 Mbps, with an upload speed of 150 Mbps. Compare those speeds to Comcast, where Do reports download speeds of 13Mbps, or about 1/20th the speed of Google Fiber."

This is in a neighborhood south of Stanford. They are also using Kansas City, KS (not Missouri) as the test market for this fiber Internet.

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/201...near-stanford/

Let's just get one thing straight - the new Google internet is NOT the fastest internet in the world. It isn't even the fastest in the US. That honor goes to Chattanooga, TN which has 1 Gbps service.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/te...broadband.html

[MikeOKC]

Let's just get one thing straight - the new Google internet is NOT the fastest internet in the world. It isn't even the fastest in the US. That honor goes to Chattanooga, TN which has 1 Gbps service.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/te...broadband.html

It's actually the exact same thing. KC is 1gbs. I didn't know Chattanooga already had this - interesting. Thanks for the info. Do you just Google everything to see what contradictory information you can find? You seem to love that. In this case I found it interesting, I usually find it annoying. Just being honest.

[Just the facts]

It's actually the exact same thing. KC is 1gbs. I didn't know Chattanooga already had this - interesting. Thanks for the info. Do you just Google everything to see what contradictory information you can find? You seem to love that. In this case I found it interesting, I usually find it annoying. Just being honest.

LOL - no I didn't do that. I actually have a place in Chattanooga and used to spend a lot of time there. I don't get up there near as much as I used to but the wife and kids go there every year for a week. Also, my comment wasn't directed at you, you just had the quote from the story. My comment was directed at people in California that think they are the first ones to do anything and everything.

[MikeOKC]

LOL - no I didn't do that. I actually have a place in Chattanooga and used to spend a lot of time there. I don't get up there near as much as I used to but the wife and kids go there every year for a week. Also, my comment wasn't directed at you, you just had the quote from the story. My comment was directed at people in California that think they are the first ones to do anything and everything.

Isn't that the truth? New York is the same way. When I travel to those two places some just seem stunned to discover there's electricity outside of their bubbles.

[Just the facts]

Isn't that the truth? New York is the same way. When I travel to those two places some just seem stunned to discover there's electricity outside of their bubbles.

Don't get me started. It actually pisses me off. I lived in California for 20 years, I know how they think.

[bluedogok]

That's why we're considered flyover country in their minds. People think Oklahoma and Texas is nothing but the dusty wild west. Going out to West Texas is what they think this whole area is like, not the trees and rolling terrain of Eastern Oklahoma or the Hill Country, the piney wood forests in Southeastern Oklahoma and Northeast Texas of the beaches on the gulf. Some of the comments made by those on the coasts about the F1 race being here next year are beyond ridiculous. People can get locked in the own bubble world in Oklahoma but it seems that many of those in "more enlightened areas" are just as bad if not worse.

[Snowman]

Let's just get one thing straight - the new Google internet is NOT the fastest internet in the world. It isn't even the fastest in the US. That honor goes to Chattanooga, TN which has 1 Gbps service.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/13/te...broadband.html

The fastest internet service will never be residential grade for that you either need dedicated lines or colocation, the internet back bone has been running at 1 Gbps for over a decade, currently a lot are capable 40 Gbps on each strand of their fiber trunk and about start being be upgraded to 100 Gbit/s per strand.

[Swake2]

CIf cable companies do a similar upgrade to get the maximum speed out of their last mile connections how the telephone operators did to make DSL reach it's current speeds and kept a similar upstream/downstream ratio on hardware they should be able to get roughly 3 Gbit/s downstream, 1 Gbit/s upstream because currently around 90% of the bandwidth of the cable wire is used to send all the content of every station they have over the wire all the time if you are watching it or not.

This really isn't true anymore. Cable systems are rolling out Switched Digital Video which basically is a like Video on Demand service to your local cable node. Programming is only shipped to a node for channels that are currently being watched by someone on the node preserving a ton of bandwidth.

That and the rollout of DOCSIS 3.0 will bring speeds like what Google has and maybe higher.

[HewenttoJared]

This really isn't true anymore. Cable systems are rolling out Switched Digital Video which basically is a like Video on Demand service to your local cable node. Programming is only shipped to a node for channels that are currently being watched by someone on the node preserving a ton of bandwidth.

That and the rollout of DOCSIS 3.0 will bring speeds like what Google has and maybe higher.

It seems weird to me that it wasn't designed that way in the first place, but I've never really looked into television services that much.

[HewenttoJared]

Isn't that the truth? New York is the same way. When I travel to those two places some just seem stunned to discover there's electricity outside of their bubbles.

On a school trip to DC around '92 one of my classmates was asked if we had cars yet or if we were still horse/buggy.

[Snowman]

This really isn't true anymore. Cable systems are rolling out Switched Digital Video which basically is a like Video on Demand service to your local cable node. Programming is only shipped to a node for channels that are currently being watched by someone on the node preserving a ton of bandwidth.

That and the rollout of DOCSIS 3.0 will bring speeds like what Google has and maybe higher.

DOCSIS 3.0 only has up to 8 channels being bonded, most cables have at least 100, granted some modem manufactures may do more than what is specified, this is much lower than Google could do with fiber. The implementation of Switched Digital Video they are doing looks more like reliving congestion at the nodes in older networks (and is not as transparent when it is done vs docsis 3 having been rolled out), this is the cheaper/faster upgrade verses installing fiber to the nodes to get the most out of the last mile. Still a step in the right direction but at least one more to go before they can offer the 1 Gbps up or down that fiber can do today.

[Swake2]

DOCSIS 3.0 only has up to 8 channels being bonded, most cables have at least 100, granted some modem manufactures may do more than what is specified, this is much lower than Google could do with fiber. The implementation of Switched Digital Video they are doing looks more like reliving congestion at the nodes in older networks (and is not as transparent when it is done vs docsis 3 having been rolled out), this is the cheaper/faster upgrade verses installing fiber to the nodes to get the most out of the last mile. Still a step in the right direction but at least one more to go before they can offer the 1 Gbps up or down that fiber can do today.

DOCSIS 3.0 gets you to 300+mbs on those 8 channels, that's really fast. I'm not sure but I believe that Cox has already completed fiber to node in Oklahoma. AT&Ts U-Verse is being built as a fiber to node system as well but is still constrained by the twisted pair wire going to the home. Cox’s last mile being on Coax is a big advantage, it’s not as fast as fiber, but it can handle much more bandwidth than a twisted pair can. AT&T is making a mistake here. FIOS is fiber to home, but only in Verizon telco areas and will never be here.