Pretty cool stuff! I'm glad McGinn's original plan, the bid to get Google Fiber, failed. Google forces municipalities to give up all regulatory power. That we maintain some control over this Gigabit stuff is a huge advantage. Here's some great stuff from the Harper's blog by Whitney Terrell, who did a fantastic cover story on Google Fiber a bit ago. http://harpers.org/blog/2013/03/network-…
Being stuck in the jerkwater known as Leschi, our only options were Wave, CenturyLink, or ClearWire, all of them shitty. Well, technically I still have my old Megapath employee connection, but that's over CenturyLink copper. And now I'm going to be able to get speeds comparable to an ISP or Seoul, SK? wahooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Awwww, south Beacon Hill really is part of the coverage area!? But it ends two blocks north of me! Somehow that's even more frustrating than if they weren't in the south end at all.
I've been waiting for this for a long, long time as someone stranded in the Central Cable TV Hinterlands. I'm just a touch sad that my house is considered Beacon Hill rather than Central Area.
And for you all complaining about just being out of zone, go to the Gigabit Squared web page and sign up as a potential subscriber. The boundaries aren't set in stone.
Can we force them to operate as common carriers? Take the fee, shovel the bits, and ignore the patterns? If I run a Tor exit node will they stand by DMCA safe harbor provisions and tell the MPAA scammers to take a hike? When NSA comes knocking, will they say, "come back with a warrant"?
The network is only as fast as the slowest link. The city might have a gigabit feeder network, and for a price its crony contractor will give subscribers access to it, but that's only a small part of the speed the user sees.
In the end, it's not about raw speed. It's about what you do. Once you leave the metropolitan area, your packets go through a series of routers until they hit a particular server that hosts the website you use. There are typically all kinds of bottlenecks along the way. Gigabit broadband doesn't mean much if you use it to access a server that takes five seconds to respond to your request, and then sends the information back at less than a megabit per second, as is more often the case than people realize.
And those prices for high-speed access are the same as, or more than, what Comcast charges. And it's not city wide. There's much, much less to this than McGinn and his butt-buddies are saying.
I'm so excited for Gigabit Seattle I may stay in my current rental house longer than planned :D
The alternative is to leave the fiber dark, and continue to pay top dollar for crappy service to Comcast and CenturyLink.
Still too expensive, compared to First World nations pricing.
Dang it sucks to be in a backwater like the US.
The internet gods giveth, the internet gods taketh away.
Their original promise was that service was to begin this fall, but now they are saying it will instead be first quarter 2014. Why the delay?
And just now much is Gigabit paying the City to use taxpayers' dark fiber? Inquiring minds want to know.
There's a lot more to this story than the rah-rah over speed. Start digging, news media.
Please mark NSFW.
And for you all complaining about just being out of zone, go to the Gigabit Squared web page and sign up as a potential subscriber. The boundaries aren't set in stone.
In the end, it's not about raw speed. It's about what you do. Once you leave the metropolitan area, your packets go through a series of routers until they hit a particular server that hosts the website you use. There are typically all kinds of bottlenecks along the way. Gigabit broadband doesn't mean much if you use it to access a server that takes five seconds to respond to your request, and then sends the information back at less than a megabit per second, as is more often the case than people realize.
And those prices for high-speed access are the same as, or more than, what Comcast charges. And it's not city wide. There's much, much less to this than McGinn and his butt-buddies are saying.