I don't really have a problem with engaging the democratic process. Bringing fiber to Seattle is a long term infrastructure project that will last for many decades. In the grand scheme of things, expediting the permit process hardly makes a difference.
The author seems to really hate citizen participation. I'm sure people don't understand fiber very well and there are a lot of opinions and concerns out there which aren't necessarily valid, but that's going to be true of anything new.
Cutting the public out of the debate about innovations doesn't seem like a good path to take. The solution is to provide a more effective forum for this debate to happen, not to put a stop to it.
I wonder if they could at least bring it to the east side, where their Kirkland office and Microsoft in general is located. I bet there are lots of high tech workers who would be more than happy to dump Comcast for Google Fiber over there.
A tiny isp (USI) in Minneapolis has been laying buried fttp for years. They just announced 100gbps (synchronous) service too. Google, feh!
Sure, it only serves a few neighborhoods, but it's progress, and more importantly, not Comcast.
> When Google announced its launch city for Google Fiber – Kansas City – it was a sensation. And the very next day the Kansas City Council authorized a contract with Google for the service.
Kansas City is desperate. If Google comes calling, they will sign a contract, whether or not it's actually good for the city, they'll figure "Hey, Google's coming and asking, it's Google, we won't say no!"
This is not really a good thing. This particular contract may be great for KC, but it's not because you can just always trust Google and sign whatever they put in front of you. But many desparate cities will.
"Overland Park, Kansas, apparently has its own version of the Seattle process. It spent nine months arguing the Google Fiber contract..."
Overland Park's haggling likely had more to do with the fact that Sprint is headquartered there.
Frustrating as this might be, CondoInternet is going building to building to provide gigabit Internet to apartment dwellers and even building neighborhood-scale fiber service to Eastlake, while CenturyLink is laying gigabit service to other neighborhoods, one by one. Even if we were on Google's shortlist, by the time they came to town they'd have competitors. Competitors who don't have a business model of monitoring people's web usage so they can target ads at them.
Faced with those kind of problems with poles, can't they dig?
Verizon's FIOS fiber hasn't been profitable, and they've stopped building it out. Google would run into the same problem if they actually built enough that it had to make money, instead of only doing cherry-picked demo projects.
Technically, you don't need fiber to the home to get gigabit rates. Coax from the end user to the DOCSIS node at the pole is more than enough. Within 100 meters, such as in apartment buildings, CAT 5 is enough. The fiber connection to the DOCSIS node at the pole, the DOCSIS node, and the back end have to have more bandwidth.
The cable industry has a plan for slow migration to gigabit services:
http://www.cedmagazine.com/articles/2012/07/an-evolutionary-...
One unit at a time, in the chain from head end to end user, equipment can be swapped out for faster, but backwards-compatible, units.
Of course, in the end it's still Comcast.
... because it would help Microsoft too much!?
This was published in March 2014 so we put "2014" in the title.
Here in Seattle there seems to be this fear that not getting Google to install Google Fiberâ„¢ means we'll just have the crappy offerings from Comcast and CenturyLink for the next 50 years.
In reality, I believe not selling ourselves to a provider immediately will allow a better market to develop where we get real competition and the possibility of a city run fiber network. It may take a few more years than having Google build out the whole thing at once, but I think the alternative will be better and other municipalities will have wished they had waited too.
"an you imagine the Seattle City Council keeping a secret like this and then acting on it in just one day? Of course not. We’d need to have endless community meetings and hearings and public floggings of Google Executives. Every citizen in a tinfoil hat who thinks fiber is just another cereal ingredient would have their three minutes in front of the Council. "
Ah, I see - democracy is a bug, according to the author.
Actually, reading further, it appears that anything short of kneeling and begging at the feet of corporations is somehow supposed to be terrible...
Seriously - here's the conclusion:
"Could we simply agree to pay for all the pole replacements and permitting as a city, and hire a few extra employees to expedite the process? Couldn’t we just hand over title to a few strands of the 500 mile fiber cable network we’ve built to Google Fiber?"
Translation: "Couldn't we just spend taxpayer dollars to subsidize profits for one of the world's largest corporations?"
To summarize, the article mentions four roadblocks:
1) Process: "Can you imagine the Seattle City Council keeping a secret like this and then acting on it in just one day? Of course not. We’d need to have endless community meetings and hearings and public floggings of Google Executives."
2) Pole Attachments: "At these rates, building a network on 100,000 poles to serve every home and business would cost Google up to $2.8 million just to rent the pole space."
3) Permits: "Attaching fiber cable to a pole in Seattle may require a pole attachment permit, a street use permit, and land use and environmental permits, among others."
4) Build-out requirements: "But the company has to agree to build out and serve every premise in that area. This is a lofty goal because it means all neighborhoods, rich and poor, get served, although it increases the overall cost because the company builds cable on streets with few customers."
None of these are unique to Google Fiber. These are hurdles ISPs, including incumbents like Comcast, face in nearly every large city. Google is just the 800-lb gorilla that refuses to play along. They'll only install fiber in cities desperate enough to sign a contract with Google without extensive public proceedings, who will allow bypassing permit requirements that apply to everyone else.
What the article really highlights is the real reasons for the lack of ISP competition. People imagine shadowy cabals conspiring to keep out competitors, but in most cities, it's the result of rules that aren't facially unreasonable. Rules like build-out requirements, which apply to incumbents and competitors alike, make deploying fiber economically unattractive, sometimes even for the incumbent.
Contrast the telecom industry with say the cell phone industry. It'd be illegal for an ISP to do what Apple did with its first iPhone: target rich buyers, then trickle down the technology to everyone else as it recouped capital costs. The rule is deploy to everyone, or don't deploy at all. Unsurprisingly, companies usually choose the latter. Except Google, which has the clout to demand exceptions to the rules, and the luxury of not actually being in the ISP business and only deploying in smaller municipalities willing to bend-over.