Cisco bought Scientific Atlanta about seven years ago. It’s one of the two big manufacturers of cable TV set-top boxes (the other is part of the Motorola business that Google acquired). Meanwhile, Microsoft has its Xbox products. So basically, these companies are all competing to see who will “own the living room.” I think this is important, as our home entertainment systems and our computers converge.
OK, I’m at the Google Fiber store at the moment.
The cable TV interface is very rudimentary at the moment, with a channel/time grid like on a cable box. But the people demoing are young and enthusiastic (think Apple store people with different t-shirts) and they know that it is rudimentary.
The actual HD streaming quality is good, but not as good as I see on a DVB Ku network stream.
The TV box is interesting, with an HDMI IN as well as out. The boxes have coax interfaces so the existing coax in your home can be used as a distribution network like U-Verse.
The Nuxus interface is not the only choice, they have a Bluetooth remote included.
More later.
OK, I’ve been wandering around here for a bit and am ready to leave. Basically generated more questions than got answered, but that is normal for a new tech.
A couple of people did ask for my contact information, and we’ll see if they respond. I’ve had good luck with Google before, so we’ll see.
From what I understand, they have hooked up KU medical center and five local businesses. The goal is to have everyone who wants to be hooked up in their designated areas hooked up within one year from the September 9 launch date.
The grid interface on the Nexus tablet is, as I said, disappointing. The Google engineers really need to look at Plex to see what a good TV based interface looks like, and adapt it to their platform rather than re-inventing the wheel.
When you drill down, it indeed becomes Google Play with the same rows of side-scrolling images. Not an amazing interface, but it will do for a start.
They are showing their speed tests to their own speed test site and it gets gig up and gig down as expected. But when I tested it on a few servers around the country, I got nowhere near that speed. Sprint’s Chicago server maxed out at 256 mb down, 26 mb up. But that’s OK, as 99% of my large files are to YouTube.
They don’t know what additional TV boxes are going to cost.
They are in “negotiations” with other TV providers, but I can’t imagine Time-Warner or Comcast will ever sell them channels without an actual court order. Plex or some similar tool will give them cover so they can put all these IP virtual channels into their grid without having to buy them as cable TV channels. For instance, there is a “The Daily Show” video plug-in for Plex that would allow them to make a “The Daily Show” channel without having to pay for the full Comedy Central channel.
They have a pile of Samsung Chromebooks around. I’ll have to put some of my HD videos on a USB key and see if they’ll let me upload to YouTube from one.
Sadly, I missed all the Google engineers who were here this weekend. As I said, the place is staffed by the same demographic as the Apple store down on the Plaza - I suspect there is some amount of overlap. Or maybe I’m just and old fart and all these young people just look too young.
I’m curious, do you have more details on this? I bring it up because I found out last week that the public utility in my city, a suburb of Madison, has been planning for a city-wide fiber rollout for some time, but the city council hasn’t made a decision yet on whether or not to fund it. My city council reps say it would cost around $30 million to get it to every house and business in a city of 30,000. I also talked with the guy from the utility company, who said that they don’t have pricing and plans set as of yet, but that 1 Gb would be available and the other tiers would be competitive with existing options.
The local telco is Frontier, which is the company Verizon spun off all their POTS services to, and they’ve been pretty hostile to the idea of expanding FiOS or even supporting the existing FiOS services in the markets they took over. Our cable service is offered by Charter, and I don’t see them moving to upgrade their services in the city anytime soon.
I sent the city council reps a link to the Chattanooga Fiber site – right now, Chattanooga is the only city in the country offering 1 Gb service to every home and business, although it’s much more expensive for the 1 Gb tier than what Google is offering in KC.
I don’t have any firsthand knowlege as I live on the other side of the metro, but here’s the article. StarTribune has a paywall but here’s the link:
Also of note, the city of Minneapolis wifi network is doing less well than expected. They expected people to flock to cheaper internet and use all their notebooks and tablets and stuff on the network. Problem is if you want something cheaper than Comcast there’s already DSL. And while it’s neat to take your notebook to the park and have it work, most people user 3G for their gadgets since it’ll work anywhere, not just in city limits.
I’m getting annoyed at Google’s planning. They’ve divided Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri into neighborhoods (or “Fiberhoods” in their cutesy term), with a competition between them determining which will get service first. My place is in the area dubbed “Tower Homes North”.
The problem? One fifth of the addresses in “Tower Homes North” are not being served! I have been putting in random addresses, and a huge chunk of the area (which is defined as Wornall Road on the West, Troost on the East, Gregory Blvd on the North and 74th Street on the South) is not served. I sampled random addresses on 71st terrace between Troost and Oak, and all received either “Fiber is not available in your area” or “Sorry… we couldn’t find that address.” Same thing on McGee street between Gregory and 71st Terrace, as well as Grand, Walnut, Main and Baltimore. And most annoying for me, the street I’m on is in the “Can’t find” category.
How can you have a fair competition if one fifth of one competitor is not in the running?
I am so envious. I am also paying $50/month for about 2 of these megabit things on average (maxes out at 3.6, goes down to 0.15 when it’s in a bad mood) on AT&T DSL. And I am paying $120 to time warner for cable TV. I never watch ESPN. I’d love to switch to this type. Or to Uverse.
Now, if I understand correctly, won’t this also lower ping times because there will be a faster transit? Because that’s what I think is more important than the actual bandwidth–I can watch HD now on two computers using my 6mbps connection. But reducing lag in gaming will probably set off the whole cloud gaming concept.
I can’t imagine it won’t. They are starting from scratch with state of the art hardware, and no need for legacy compatibility. I’ve not recieved an answer yet, but I think they’ll probably build the whole system IPv6, with IPv4 compatibility only in the router for the home computers.
The Google Fiber space has a section about gaming. I don’t do games at all, so I pretty much ignored it. They were using some system that downloaded the game into a small networked player.
They just updated their list of channels, adding Showtime and Starz as $10 additional options, and a Hispanic tier for $5.
To follow up myself, I sent all the data I collected to a contact I made at the Google Fiber Store and the problem has been resolved.
Have other Dopers in Kansas City noticed that the only banner ad they get any more is one for Google Fiber?
Maybe I missed it but I don’t see TruTV on their list.
I saw a crew stringing fiberin this neighborhood - on a Saturday.
It’ll be interesting to see how things evolve.
Despite flat screen TVs coming with ethernet ports for Netflix and computers coming with blu-ray drives, I see them as fundimentally different products, even if you just use your computer to consume content. I have a front projection setup with a motorized screen, 5.1 surround with tube amps. I have no PC connection to it and even if I did I’m not going to fire it up to watch a 1 minute Youtube video of a cat falling off a TV. Nor am I going to watch the Hunger Games blu-ray on my 15" laptop screen.
And right now it’s a mess trying to find content. Some is only available on the TV side and some is only available on the computer side. Even trying to find content strictly on the computer side is a mess. If you want to watch the Hunger Games or Cat Falling of TV or TruTV security cam footage it could be on Youtube in 1080P, it could be on Youtube in 240P in 5 parts uploaded by a jackass who pointed his camera at a TV screen. It could be on Hulu. It could require a Netflix subscription. It could be on a network website which requires that you verify that you could watch it on TV before letting you watch it on your computer, then it stutters and stops and crashes when it tries to come back from a commercial break. It could not be available at all.
I really don’t believe Google wants to show Comcast how it’s done because anyone as smart as Google knows Comcast doesn’t give a shit that we’re all using coax cable until it starts to affect it’s bottom dollar. I just wonder if Google is trying to converge and revolutionize entertainment or is just trying to see if it can make a buck for its investors selling a (so far sparse) selection of cable channels combined with really fast internet.
Bump this to mention that Google Fiber gets ever closer to me.
Right now, they are replacing a couple of utility poles behind my home because they are not straight or tall enough to handle the additional load of another set of wires.
My “Fiberhood” is #9 on the Missouri side, and I’m promised I will have it by “Summer”.
I live south of KC because I wanted acreage but used to live in Olathe which is getting Google fiber next… /sadface
How is it that they’re able to give away for “free” something equivalent to their competitors product and not run into any kind of antitrust law problems? (I don’t know much about these laws, but I thought giving away free stuff to drive your competitors out of business was a no-no.)
“Free” in this case requires a payment of $300 to cover the cost of the installation and equipment.
I’m not sure how anti-trust would apply here. There are three sources of “high speed” Internet connectivity in the metropolitan Kansas City area - Time-Warner cable, Surewest cable and AT&T DSL/U-Verse (there may be others in some areas).
Google obviously is not actually going to lose money connecting the poor and those who do not feel they need higher speed than 5 Mb down/1 Mb up. Like everything else they do, they’ll get a huge treasure trove of consumer data that they’ll use to sell advertising. And of course once they have the fiber hooked to a home, they may be able to convert some percentage of those homes to their higher speed service and to their TV service.
It’s not Google’s fault that they have built a better business model than Time-Warner, Surewest and AT&T.
ETA: Oh, and Google Fiber’s 5 mb service is not equivalent to AT&T DSL - it blows it away. DSL is “up to” 5. Google Fiber, because it is being delivered by an infrastructure meant for gigabit speeds means you will always get 5 down 1 up.
I guess this is the key point. They wouldn’t be allowed to just operate at a loss to try to drive their competitors out (I assume), but if they can provide a service for much cheaper and still make a profit, it’s all good.
Good point.