Google Fiber Back From The Dead, Unveils 20 Gbps Fiber
from the still-kicking dept
When Google Fiber launched back in 2010, it was heralded as a game changer for the broadband industry. Google Fiber, we were told, would revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and disrupting the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive U.S. telecom sector.
Initially, things worked out well; cities tripped over themselves offering all manner of perks to the company in the hopes of breaking free from the broadband duopoly logjam. Google got endless free press for doing something truly disruptive. And in markets where Google Fiber was deployed, prices dropped thanks to this added competition (fancy that!).
The fun didn’t last.
In 2016, a new era of Alphabet execs began getting cold feet about the high costs and slow returns of the project, and effectively mothballed the entire thing — without admitting that’s what they were doing. The company blew through several CEOs in just a few months, laid off hundreds of employees, froze any real expansion, and cancelled countless installations for users who had been waiting years.
But recently, things have started to shift once again, with Google Fiber (now named “GFiber”) pushing a bunch of new (but still modest) expansion plans across Iowa, Arizona, Utah, and several other states. And the company recently announced it would also be bringing a new 20 Gbps fiber tier to market, albeit in limited areas:
“We’ll be sharing more details on this new product offering over the next few months. As a GFiber Labs project, this service will initially be available as an early access offering to a small group of GFiber customers in select areas.”
On one hand, a 20 Gbps service tier few people can actually get remains more marketing than substance. That said, it’s still a welcome pivot for a disruptive player in the broadband space that, like so many competitors in U.S. telecom, seemed on the verge of collapse not that long ago.
Filed Under: 20 gbps, broadband, competition, gfiber, google fiber, high speed internet, telecom
Companies: google
Comments on “Google Fiber Back From The Dead, Unveils 20 Gbps Fiber”
I was shocked when I got a request to apply for GFibre to work. I get them from time to time when new jobs open at Google.
Google: Not the most reliable when it comes to sticking to things...
Now the only question that matters: Will they stick to it this time or putz about for a few months before bailing again when it’s not as immediately profitable as they want it to be?
Re:
Does it matter that much in this case? A lot of people have been screwed by Google canceling various products, but were Google Fiber subscribers among those? Unlike web services, these networks are real physical assets that will presumably be sold when Google gets bored.
(Okay, I guess we don’t want them to be bought by Comcast or the like. But if they became the open-access networks Google originally promised, that’d be fine.)
Re: Google: Not the most reliable when it comes to sticking to things...
I’m waiting for the battery in one Nest smoke alarm to die. After that I’ll be rid of the entire Google ecosystem in my home for good.
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Google is the typical IT person, closet ADD/ADHD.
It won’t last, again.
Google’s probably looking for good PR after some backlash for being cozy with the feds’ insatiable desire for collecting user information.
Not only can few people get it, few of the people who get it will be able to use it. 20 Gbps is well beyond what 802.11ax “Wi-Fi 6E” can do, and 802.11be “Wi-FI 7” can probably only do it under unreasonably ideal conditions. The most realistic setup to use this is probably routing via a PC with at least 3 network connections: SFP28 for the internet link, plus one or two 10 Gbit/s ethernet ports and Wi-Fi for local networking. (Most routers available in stores will struggle to route 1 Gbit/s. Some more expensive ones come with 2.5 Gbit/s ethernet and might be able to route at that speed.)
If you’re wiring a home today, use fiber everywhere. Twisted-pair connections can technically support 40 Gbit/s speeds, but that requires Cat 8 and the maximum distance is 30 metres (it was 100 for 10 Gbit/s and lower, and gigabit ethernet worked over Cat 5). And that might be about as fast as twisted-pair gets; faster ethernet standards only support copper via twin-axial cables, but fiber seems to their focus.
Still, I’d love to have a connection so fast that it’s technologically difficult to fully utilize. We’ve gotten way too used to the opposite.
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Most households will have multiple wired connections if they go that way, but I agree, normal households wont reach that need combined. I would, but I am not a normal user. The house I live in has a 4 physical servers and 12 virtual along with IoTs and such. 6 IT people working from home does that.
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Suggesting that everyone should install fiber everywhere in a house is more than a bit overkill. Fiber is more expensive for the cable, the networking hardware is substantially more expensive, and basically nothing but the highest end pieces of equipment support fiber transceivers so everywhere you have a jack you’d need to have a media converter. Not to mention the bend radius concerns, connector fragility, the tools and skills needed for terminating it, the loss of POE for things like cameras, etc. There area few cases that probably make sense, either outside runs, incredibly long distances, or some substantial home networking that’s on par with enterprise users. While a SSD can saturate even 10GB at times, almost nobody has a home use that is limited by that.
If you want to be future proof, install smurftube, and just pull in what you need now. Which realistically is plain jane CAT5, as it supports upto 5GBASE-T at 100M. But, if you’re really horny, CAT6A will do 10Gb.
Re: Re:
Right, which is why I didn’t suggest it. I suggested “If you’re wiring a home today…” which is hardly something that “everyone” does. Most people are happy with Wi-Fi, but those are not the people ordering and trying to max out a 20 Gbit/s link.
No, you’d just need one at the jacks you want to use. If “everywhere you have a jack [you want to use]” is a large number, or you need power-over-ethernet everywhere, you might just be a networking geek. (“Run fiber everywhere” was a minor misstatement. What I meant was, run it to all internal areas of the home when you might want a computer or router and where cabling couldn’t be easily added in an esthetically-pleasing way. CAT5 is certainly fine for exterior camera-mounting locations, but who runs those in advance? Drill a hole from your basement, garage, or attic, and run exterior cable as necessary; takes 10 minutes.)
As for cost… well, your smurf-tube idea seems to be based on the assumption of a house that’s under construction (it’d be a lot harder than fiber to install in finished walls). And it’s a good suggestion, but if that’s what a person’s thinking of when building a house, aren’t they already a bit “horny” for computer networks compared to the average person? Were I buying a brand-new home, I’d want to plan for the long term. So, sure, I could run CAT5 now, then get frustrated with “only” 5 Gbit/s in a decade or two and buy the fiber then. In other words, I’d be paying twice (which could be cheaper overall, but probably not).
Re: Re: smurftube
Be careful if installing smurftube into a residence. Running it between floors may be illegal in some states (Massachusetts for instance). It requires a hole in the wall’s fire break (the horizontal 2x4s between floors) that are there to stop a fire from spreading to upper floors through the wall. I learned this the hard way when the building inspector failed my framing inspection.
GFiber
Had it since it hit my neighborhood, 2 years.
Stable as a brick Sh**house.
very quick.
2 repairs to cut cable, in less than 2 hours each time.
refunds for lost service due to contractor neighborhood cuts.
I like it..
Too late for me
Google had first-mover advantage. Fiber was hard to come by in cities when they first started this, and I was one of those desperate to get them to come to my city (to the point of talking with local politicians about how we might encourage them to).
Now I can get fiber at my house from multiple providers, and have no need for Google.
The market that Google could have cornered to the tune of billions of lifetime dollars is too crowded for them to really cash in on. Nice work, management.
(Of course, maybe it’s different in other cities.)
Google Fiber didn't "effectively mothballed the entire thing"
They just delayed more rollouts until a couple years later, mostly utilizing existing open fiber networks going forward. I have it in KC and it was never ‘mothballed’. Very reliable and solid performance even to servers in Europe and Asia, which other fiber players may struggle with.
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Completely agree. I’ve never quite understood the narrative that Google got out of the fiber market. They are still the best, most stable option in the KC area, and their customer service is by far the best I’ve ever experienced with any cable/internet company. It’s very un-Google-like, but I’d say they’ve been more engaged and attentive to Fiber than the vast majority of their projects.
I guess when we live in a society where continuous growth is the only measure of success, you can argue Google gave up. But the reality is that they just slowed down, waited for other markets and regulations to catch up, and focused on maintaining, improving, and expanding the markets they’d already established.
Google Fiber Back From The Dead
Prove it.
I live in a city Google Fiber “expanded” to over a decade ago. It is still most notable by the complete inability to get it anywhere in town. They even closed their little fiber store. I guess it made them sad to tell everyone who walked through the door that they couldn’t have it.
Google Fiber is and always has been fiber to the press release, not to the home.
Fiber to the router, primary PC, wifi everywhere else...
The router’s need to be made– if you create a market for it.. fiber (40 – 100gig throughput) using wifi 7 or 6e along with 10 gigabit Ethernet ports using cat 7 or 8 cabling will suffice. Time for companies like VERIZON to get off their ass and move beyond 2 gigabit! The number of companies moving beyond 2 gigabit is piling up while the silence from Verizon speaks volumes. Wifi 6e can go 5.4 gigabit and multiple Ethernet runs can collectively saturate 20 gigabit. BTW, most people buy internet service based upon what the collective of devices can use– not just ONE device. Let’s assume a minimum of 4 to 5 devices pulling (or pushing) about 5 gigabits each potentially AT THE SAME TIME. Of course I understand that parts of the internet will saturate much lower based on where data goes, or the hops between countries, etc– so NO you will not get 20 gig to every destination… it was unreasonable when 10 megabit connections hit the internet and now when 20gigabit does. This kind of speed when you can hit those levels gets into SSD level reads/writes and would be obsolete for HDD use outside of raid array as a source for data transmitted.
Also, cart before the horse, make at multi gigabit (2+) connections affordable too (under $50)! 20 is for consumers with money to burn AND a niche use (as it would cost $200+/month along with tech/wiring upgrades potentially). Hey, I’ll take it for $50 a month too, if were on offer, lol but not reality yet.