I always thought this was their plan. I used to work for one of the cable companies when this came out. Most of us in the Operations space saw this as an obvious play to bully the big telecom companies to increase speeds and latency to benefit the tech companies. However the execs freaked out and treated them as an existential threat, which is exactly what Google wanted.
They never had any desire to run an Internet company, it costs a ton of money to build out. So they cherry picked relatively dense middle and upper class neighborhoods that would have a good return in a way that the regulated telecoms would not be allowed to. They normalized high speed internet nationally and now they can sell off the business to recoup some of the cost.
I’m not a fan of Google, but as an internet customer, I appreciate the result of this strategy.
Yeah some (formerly) local fiber companies started out as a way to get decent Internet in places the big ISPs wouldn’t touch. Some are still around, but many are getting sold off to the big telcos
Makes sense but since ISPs are essentially a monopoly in fiber, they get to charge whatever they want, despite the fact that I know AT&T’s break even cost for 5G fiber is $10 a month per line.
This will enshittivize profit over quality of service.
@cantankerous_cashew add to the list of heinous stuff the #epsteinclass is using this window of opportunity to get away with. Imagine pretending to be a force for modernization and good, get grants from cities to build infra, then sell said infra to the same scumbag ISPs who already got grants from city/state/local & federal to create monopolies in the first place…truly, fuck you #google. Fuck you.
There are essentially only three major cable providers in the United States. They have blocked Google Fiber at nearly every turn. I have been unable to get Google Fiber at any address I’ve lived at since it launched.
It is oddly entertaining to watch monopolies that the federal government failed to break up, largely due to their own lobbying, fight each other in an attempt to prevent the others from becoming even more monopolized.
I don’t have any experience with Google Fiber, but I was bummed when Google Domains got sold off, I forgot to whom. Google Domains was so simple. No nonsense.
They sold Google Domains to Squarespace.
which just to happens to be today’s sponsor!
I’ll be sure to subscribe while connected to my NordVPN account.
I’ve been using NameCheap since well before 2009, but since 2009, it’ll take me a lot to switch away after they helped protect me from Glenn Beck. heh.
They are pretty free from bullshit and pretty straightforward.
route 53 in AWS is even easier.
I always thought the 1Gbps was awesome and perhaps a good incentive for other companies to upgrade (probably more the reason since they’re Google and their ad bucks). Recently saw a reason to switch for 2.5, did it then was told by the installer they don’t even have cable that does it. Mean. I did it myself and my stream downloads are quite fast, but it’d have been nice if my provider mentioned that in the first place so I knew who had to run the wires. It was only through some holes, behind the sink / dishwasher so not awful but you td have been nice to understand 2.5 was higher than their techs supported.Also needed a switch / router upgrade. Which was actually quite fun to do and minimal cost now can get a mesh wifi going.
Still if your techs can’t provide what is needed in cables for your upper end least tell the customer first.
Yeah fuck everything Google.
Add another to the graveyard
For those who’ve haven’t seen it:
299 entries… That makes it 300! Congratulations!!
νίκη!
E: too esoteric, sorry. Translation: “we did it R*****!” but with reference to the heavily romanticized legend of Thermopylae which commonly include the messenger/runner dramatically shouting “victory” (nikē) before collapsing as the 300th casualty of the battle.
What
lol dude I acknowledged it was too obscure and paid the due explanation. They’ll refund your ticket at the door.
Meanwhile SpaceX spends billions launching thousands of satellites into space and wreck the environment just so people can doomscroll their slop. When all we need are governments building some basic infrastructure like fiber internet for a fraction of the money.
My prior city ran a survey on whether they should build out fiber to the homes around the city, since they were building their own fiber infrastructure anyway. Despite the city saying it would be cheaper and faster than the existing 0 or 1 options people had, my fellow residents cried communism and the city government scrapped the idea. Infuriating.
“We’re too stupid to have better things,” cried Society.
Americans are too stupid to vote in a lot of cases. why even hold a vote on something like this at all? just get it done. why bother asking permission from people who will answer without understanding the question
Look up easement abuse in the US on YouTube, Lehto’s Law or Institute for Justice
From rail, to cable providers, to city municipalities, easements in the US have been utilized maliciously to destroy and seize peoples properties
Why bother asking permission?
In the States, enough people have proven uncivilized enough and willing enough to face the consequences that come with utilizing tools easily and cheaply available at their disposal so that trespassers and even politicians think twice before sending people to mess with other people’s land without asking permission
“ran a survey”, this was the only clue I needed to realize that they never planned to do it in the first place. Surveys are so easy to manipulate that if someone tells you they made a decision based on a survey, that you can immediately assume that what they are really saying is that they made a decision that they knew would be unpopular, obviously biased, or otherwise disastrous, but they wanted to blame the decision on “other people”.
Don’t worry, even if they welcomed it international telecom companies would sue to block it anyway.
Australia almost did this right with the National Broadband Network.
Unfortunately, it was then sabotaged by the government after an election changed the majority party.
It seems to be back on track after wasting an extraordinary amount of time and money by installing copper lines, just to completely replace them with the fiber lines that were in the original plan.
Jesus copper is more expensive & time consuming, why!?
Oz exports/produces copper? So maybe just a backwards mining subsidy?
Maybe but like from a networking perspectice it is harder to getndistance on, requires largwrs ducts, shorted cable drumming. There is no economy in which it makes sense, even the actual product would need heavy… yeah maybe a government would do tat if they were backwards.
Seriously Man, more junk in orbit
and also help rig elections
I agree fiber is better but starlink isn’t bad for the environment, it’s bad for astronomy though sadly.
starlink isn’t bad for the environment
Umm, yes it is.
https://www.science.org/content/article/burned-satellites-are-polluting-atmosphere
In 2023, Murphy and colleagues reported the first direct evidence of how satellite re-entries are changing the composition of the stratosphere, based on data from a NASA WB-57 aircraft that flew from Alaska to altitudes of 19 kilometers. Using an onboard laser mass spectrometer, they found tiny droplets of sulfuric acid containing 20 different elements that likely came from satellites and rockets, as they were present in ratios that matched those of spacecraft alloys. The amounts of lithium, aluminum, copper, and lead all exceeded the estimated contributions from meteors.
Those satellites are designed for a 5 year lifespan before they deorbit and burn up all those metals in our atmosphere… it’s not great
Ugh.
The service has been quite good for ten years.
Guess it was good while it lasted.
That tends to be the general way things go with all Google products.
It hasn’t hyperscaled to a billion users, so it’s not “Google scale” enough for Google. Wait… The US doesn’t have a billion people… 🤔
Removed by mod
Another one for the Google graveyard.
Locally community owned nonprofit isps are the future. Of you live in an area with that, switch over now. Isps in the next year or so are going to sign Ai data scrapping contracts and allow federal censorship like China’s great firewall. You heard it here first.
I gladly pay more for my local fiber connection than it would cost for Xfinity. Fuck these greedy corporate shithead monopolies with their shitty service. I’ll pay whatever it costs to support a local company instead.
how would a community owned ISP deny federal censorship?
It’ll be the same way the try to force broadcasters from airing late night hosts. Wave money and power in front of Comcast/Spectrum/Google executives and just watch. Any content seen as not favorable to Christian Nationalism will be screened. This administration is too lazy and too dumb to do a full blackout. But many Americans agree to lazy to fight for freedoms so a lot of people will ultimately be unable to access censored content. They could also achieve this by going after access point hardware manufacturers as well. It’s all in project 2025 my dude.
Of you live in an area with that, switch over now.
hahaha lol lol lol you’re hilarious
When do no evil finally turns to do evil always. I think this leaves the Woz as the only remnant of when tech was the good guy.
Linus: Am I a joke to you?
I wonder if Linus and woz would be friends
Probably more of a “Highlander” scenario
Good point. Though even when Woz was involved, he was overruled by one of the model tech narcissists, Jobs. But at least he was in the room.
I think we’ve just created an unregulated system that almost perfectly incentivizes and reinforces evil, so eventually evil is what we get.
Free market capitalism can only serve good with a tight collar and very short leash held by healthy democracy. Maybe it was a bad idea spending 40 years removing and making all leashes and collars for capitalism illegal, and handing the collar and leash to capitalism to put on democracy. But what do I know.
Checks and balances?
Do you mean check marks on my balance sheet for each billion dollar row?
I’m shocked. Totally shocked.
Private equity means rising *prices and dropping quality until it’s useless at which point it will be sold off piece by piece. Consumers aren’t part of the process except as wallets.
They just finished laying Google Fiber in my neighborhood and I was looking at switching. Guess I’m holding on that.
I’m on former Centurylink fiber which was similarly sold off to private equity. Other than the name changes and wonkiness with accessing my account in their system, its been…fine actually? The connection is more stable than it ever was under Centurylink for one thing, and my bill hasn’t changed at all in the years since
I haven’t used RCN/Astound since COVID, but they were pretty decent before then. Far better than Comcast.
Dodged a bullit today. Pretty lucky
Every ISP is pretty shit to be fair. Doubt whoever they sell to is worse than the other options.
(fuck spectrum)
Yeah, the good ones get bought out. (RIP Armstrong, Adelphia)
For real. Last year we finally got some competition against Spectrum and their customer service is actually worse than Spectrum. I didn’t imagine that was possible
All I do is bitch at Spectrum on the phone once a year and they barely increase my bill.
It will take at least a year for full on enshitifcation to ramp up, so you could always just switch once it goes to shit.
Everything Google touches turns to ash.
Then gets sold to satan.
