Google Fiber is coming to Las Vegas

A lot of people lately are complaining about a lack of price stability, it seems like a good angle.

Also as an SF resident with no realistic alternative to Comcast cable, I'd appreciate a provider who didn't try to sneak price increases onto my bill a couple of times a year.

In a healthy market I wouldn't expect big margins for sellers, but honestly if someone's making insane profits by selling me a product or service that's excellent and better than my non-empty set of alternatives I'm not going to complain.

In RTP NC, GFiber's $70 pricing beats equivalent speed plans from the other two symmetric fiber providers in the area, AT&T and Spectrum (if you live on the right streets). It's not _dirt_ cheap, but it's the cheapest we can get.

(Oh, also if you request a /48 IPv6 prefix, you'll get it. Never had that work on AT&T's $90.75-after-fees plan.)

It's still pretty hard to find fiber in the bay for decent prices. I have 1gb symmetric in SF, but that's pretty uncommon. The 10gb sonic is only in some neighborhoods. I lived in Palo Alto for a long time and the options there were awful. 1gb down 35mbps up Comcast was the best option and it was well over $100/mo - there may have been a 2gb option for $300/mo and a 2yr commitment.

Meanwhile, I'm paying 120/month for 150MB down, 75 up to my rural telco-op, and compared to the satellite internet I had before, I'm happy to be paying it.

Just for a global comparison. Fibre is pretty ubiquitous in the UK but very little over 1G, and not usually symmetrical.

Most top end packages are 1G and go for between $45-70 depending on the reseller. But you can get it pretty much anywhere that qualifies as a decent sized town.

(We do have close-to a monopoly on the backbone, which is good for coverage but bad for speeds, looks like they are finally starting to role out full 1G/1G this year https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2024/08/openreach-reve... )

> The author of the press release is under the mistaken belief that unchanged broadband pricing is a good thing.

You say that like it (edit to clarify: "it" = "unchanged broadband pricing") is a bad thing, though. Sure, it'd be nice if we had 1 Gb internet for <$30 like Denmark or wherever. But I will gladly sing praises to GFiber's speeds and stable prices given the hellhole of Comcast and CenturyLink I was previously living with.

I can't get Sonic because apparently they don't have permits to operate in the underground conduits in my neighborhood. For some reason, AT&T has that. It's frustrating to say the least.

For what it’s worth it’s not even remotely a factor of price/bandwidth. The capex of laying the fiber and doing the last-mile construction is huge and highly variable depending on existing fiber, construction costs, regulatory requirements, etc. What bandwidth they can provide is also due to these requirements, and if they’re profitable as well.

Once they actually get the service in place the final price-per-gbps is more a factor of physics than of corporate greed.

> In 2017, basically all the Google Fiber software teams went on hiatus (mine included).

What does a hiatus entail in this case? Did these teams all just stop working on Fiber stuff and sit around all day hoping they would be given something to do?

$15 for 1gpbs is insane. That was costing me $120+ over on Vancouver Island. If you want a good deal wait for BF / CM / Boxing Week. I upgraded to 3gbps fibre for $75/mo from Telus over boxing week. Almost as good a deal as your Internet in Ukraine.

I'm forced to conclude that it's actually making money, else they would have killed it by now.

I have it - signed up the day it was available at my house. One of the few Google things I'm pretty sure will continue to exist.

It does align pretty closely to their mission statement "to organize the world's information and make it accessible and useful for everyone", so it might be easier to make a case for its continued existence.

It also is another branch of Alphabet so not directly in the Google mgmt chain.

Though it looks like Alphabet is looking to sell it off, according to a reuters article Feb 5th, 2024.

They basically did at some point about a decade or so ago maybe. Wimax and LTE were taking off at that time. Then about 2 years ago, Google woke up and started pushing fiber again.

It's clear now that high speed fiber is the future. Cable companies aren't upgrading their networks anymore. It's unclear if the wireless companies will be able to support 10gig service. And the single mode fiber laid into the ground a decade or more ago has only increased in value.

They did in my area 7 years ago almost as soon as it was announced. They wired new condos and apartments but nothing else. Luckily AT&T installed it on the pole by my house. I moved and lost fiber but have 1.2 down over coax but only 200 up.

That's the problem. I'd be afraid that if I signed up for it they'd just cancel it a year or two later.

Or maybe leadership has, and that’s why it’s still alive.

It was basically dead for a while, apparently it's being resurrected.

I can think of two reasons why it wouldn't

(benign) peak-to-average problem - I'll go ahead and just assume that defcon attendees use a lot more internet bandwidth than the average Vegas-goer, so during defcon the network is overwhelmed, but the rest of the year the capacity is adequate. Upgrading the links to satisfy the peak (defcon) traffic load costs the casinos significant money, but gives minuscule benefit since the rest of the year they only need to support the much lower average load.

(malign) the casinos don't actually want you to have good internet because they don't want you staying in your room internetting - they want you down on the floor gambling. Other non-gambling amenities (shows, restaurants, etc.) are mostly time limited - you only spend so much time eating, and shows are only a couple hours each - and can be a differentiator that draws people to a specific casino (because of specific food/entertainment preferences). Those people then spend the rest of the day gambling at that casino.

"Better" internet it's actually a negative differentiator - people who want to spend all their time infinite-scrolling will gamble less, so casinos don't want to attract them in the first place.

The largest hotels around, like Caesars Palace, might have 4000 rooms.

So if they had, for example, a 10 Gbps link for the building - that's only 2.5 Mbps per room if everyone wants to use it. Fine when 98% of guests don't want to use it, totally inadequate if all your guests want to use it.

And as I understand things, if someone's offering you a 10 gigabit link for $150 they're relying on you only using it a tiny % of the time. So if you put your 4000 room hotel on a Google Fiber link you'll probably run into the secret download limits after a day or two. And the price for a non-oversold 10-gigabit link seems to be "call our enterprise sales team for pricing"

I'm guessing that's mostly wifi congestion.

A recent LTT video attributes it to hotels colluding so that one's Wi-Fi isn't too much better than the others.

https://youtu.be/sYXh0AdBw-I?t=879

Got fiber here in Memphis last year (CSpire), don't lose hope!