Google Fiber Is Coming to Salt Lake City

http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/google-fiber-is-coming-to-salt-lake-city.html

by Moral_ • 11 years ago

204 93 11 years ago

googlefiberblog.blogspot.com

I know that Google bought a fiber build in Provo. Did they also/just now buy an existing one for SLC? When I was at Neumont, I was sad that the fiber in Sandy didn't come across I-15 to South Jordan.

Someone1234• 11 years ago

If they are I haven't read about it.

I'm also not sure what network they could even buy in SLC, since as far as I know there is no iProvo-like network there (most fiber is owned by telephone/cable companies who aren't leaving).

What they should do is buy Utopia from Layton city (north of SLC). It is essentially iProvo all over again, and they're even looking to sell it (an Australian company is interested).

So if Google stepped in and purchased Utopia, and built out their SLC network, they would already own a massive swath of northern Utah.

batbomb2• 11 years ago

I'm assuming this is a new installation potentially piggy backing off of some dark fiber. I'm wondering if they are partnering with XMission.

ironsides• 11 years ago

Hopefully Maddox is involved. He always served the best pages in the universe.

McKayDavis2• 11 years ago

I'm wondering if they are partnering with XMission.

Very unlikely, as Pete Ashdown (founder/owner) was recently discussing XMission investigating rolling their own fiber until wind of Google Fiber came up:

http://www.reddit.com/r/SaltLakeCity/comments/2yl51u/does_xm...

austenallred• 11 years ago

It looks like they're planning on building out an entirely new one. From https://fiber.google.com/cities/saltlakecity/:

Every mile of this super-fast network has to be planned – we can’t just put it anywhere. We use the data shared with us to create a map of where we can build (based on existing utility poles and water, gas, and electricity lines).
With our plan in place, we start the hard work of stringing and laying thousands of miles of brand new, state-of-the-art fiber optic cable. We will lay enough new fiber in the area to reach from here to Canada and back, and you will see our engineers and crews in the streets for a long time.

So this is definitely a new construction/infrastructure laying project, unlike Provo where it was mostly a purchase of the existing fiber network.

cookiecaper• 11 years ago

I don't think there was any consumer fiber in Sandy. Sandy wasn't a UTOPIA city, though some of its neighbors like Midvale were.

josefresco• 11 years ago

Lots of network infrastructure in Provo - like bringing gold to a golden city.

wldcordeiro• 11 years ago

This is awesome! Great to see it coming to my city. I hope I fall under their area.

Osiris• 11 years ago

Does this have anything to do with the existing Utopia network or will it be a completely separate build-out?

I was in college when iProvo was building out, but it didn't live up to the hype. Over 10 years later and the dream of fiber in the front range is finally coming to fruition.

mightykan• 11 years ago

I wouldn't think so since, as far as I know, the Utopia network was never built out in SLC. Provo had their own and it was a very simple handover for them, but Google's apparently[1] going to build one out, either using dark fiber that's already there or laying out new fiber.

This is good news in that, at the very least, it'll light a fire under Comcast's business. Qwest/Century link were never a serious competitor anyway.

[1] https://fiber.google.com/cities/saltlakecity/

elliotec• 11 years ago

Completely separate. Pete Ashdown of Xmission (Utopia) has expressed annoyance[1] that SLC approved Google but not Xmission, which has been providing services to the city since its birth. I tend to agree with him, but any news like this is good news, and maybe it will introduce more competition.

[1] https://xmission.com/blog/2014/02/19/google-fiber-in-salt-la...

McKayDavis2• 11 years ago

Pete's post today says he'll be getting Google Fiber to his house (and encrypting everything through Xmission):

https://xmission.com/blog/2015/03/24/google-fiber-in-salt-la...

adorton• 11 years ago

I wonder what this means for the metro Provo/Salt Lake Area. I live in between the two cities and would love to have access. Has Google expanded to the metro areas of other Google Fiber cities?

drawkbox• 11 years ago

It means lots of competitors will be upping their Mbps sometimes double while they get their own Gb services in. Cox here in Phoenix doubled speeds and since Google Fiber announced Phoenix, Scottsdale and Tempe they all are the focus for Cox's new Gigablast service.

Google Fiber not only brings Gbps broadband they are encouraging it elsewhere in those cities and surrounding areas. I just wish Chandler was in the announcement as we were one of the first 4 cities to get cable broadband in the 90's largely due to Intel. The cities that Google Fiber picks are getting better internet just by being announced from Google and competitors alike.

Broadband cable during inception in the 90's was such a big leap it was almost magic from 56k to up to 6mb down when you were new on a node. It was unreal and the cable companies were heroes. They could have kept going, there are still only a small percentage of channels used for data/broadband. They can compete now but haven't, all that wasted on channels noone watches.

Now it feels like cities are winning the Google Fiber bandwidth lottery because broadband providers have been throttling in their extract phase for so long with no competition. Google Fiber is spreading competition and better internet almost as magically as the cable companies did with broadband in the 90s.

eco3• 11 years ago

Comcast doubled their speeds throughout the Salt Lake metro area a few months back (around the same time Google announced Salt Lake City as a potential Google Fiber location). I'm on a 100 Mbps download now. It's a nice consolation prize for those of us between Salt Lake and Provo because while we aren't on the Google Fiber roadmap we still (seemingly) reap some of the competitive benefits of it being nearby.

whyaduck• 11 years ago

I can toss a rock over my back yard fence into Tempe from my home in Chandler - no fiber for me!

eco3• 11 years ago

The announcement stated that Google Fiber will be limited to the Salt Lake City-proper boundaries. There are only a couple hundred thousand people living in SLC itself though, and only a hundred thousand in Provo. The area between Salt Lake and Provo has close to 1.5 million people and is very close to being just one big contiguous sprawl. I can't imagine them not expanding into those areas unless the city councils make it too difficult.

codingdave• 11 years ago

I can't speak for every town, but Spanish Fork is upgrading its municipal network to have fiber to the homes... which I think is pretty good for a small town of 35K.

I think with SLC, Provo, and at least one of the small towns in the area all having fiber available, the rest of the front will follow suit... but it will not happen overnight.

agumonkey• 11 years ago

2014 potential cities map http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7PjU-KYQDWo/UwToJwZHrAI/AAAAAAAAOD... for evolution.

shmerl10• 11 years ago

When is it coming to NYC?

rayiner5• 11 years ago

So far, every single Fiber city is in a red state: GA, TX, NC, KS, TN, UT. My guess is you'll be waiting a long time.

yefim• 11 years ago

Pretty sure Google Fiber doesn't have much to do with politics. Correlation does not imply causation. However, I do agree that it will be a while until NYC gets Google Fiber.

shmerl10• 11 years ago

I'm not sure how it's related. If anything, many "red" officials today seem to pretend they hate stronger ISP competition and like monopolistic stagnation.

JoshTriplett3• 11 years ago

Interestingly, Oregon is a blue state consisting of a blue city (Portland) surrounded by red (everywhere else), and all the non-Portland areas are ready and raring to go, with only Portland as the hold-up...

tnuc• 11 years ago

The amount of regulations involved in NYC to do anything makes it extremely unlikely that Google fiber will ever make it to New York unless the laws change.

shmerl10• 11 years ago

Wasn't it the problem for some areas where Google Fiber was proposed too? They removed some bureaucracy from the way. Why can't NYC do the same?

0xFFC3• 11 years ago

Right now I am living in third world country, So believe it or not , Imagining internet speed more than 2 mbps is kinda hard for me , So I have question from those have Google fiber or any internet connection with speed more than 100 mbps , Can you download file from torrent ? how much your speed is ? How about ordinary web server's,Do they support download speed more than 30,40 mbps ?

snippyhollow• 11 years ago

I have 300/100mbps down/up fiber in Paris. As important as the bandwidth is the latency. Basically it means I do most of my work SSHed (mosh'ed actually) to a cluster and don't notice I'm working from home or the company's network. Streaming plots or even videos for debugging is seamless.

0xFFC3• 11 years ago

Is there any scientific way for measuring latency ? ping'ing seems kind of stupid for measuring right latency of connection.(Maybe I am wrong and ping is reliable way) .

higherpurpose• 11 years ago

I usually get 8-9 MB/s file downloads with a 100Mbps connection. I think the speed is actually limited by the laptop's slow HDD.

hwatson• 11 years ago

Considering that 100Mbit/s is 12.5MByte/s, the speeds you're seeing aren't horribly distant from your "up to" speed.

[For reference's sake, 8MByte/s is 64Mbit/s and 9MByte/s is 72Mbit/s

0xFFC3• 11 years ago

SSD's are not too expensive these days.

witty_username2• 11 years ago

8-9 MB/s write speed for a HDD is horribly slow.

csomar• 11 years ago

Right now I am living in third world country, So believe it or not , Imagining internet speed more than 2 mbps is kinda hard for me

Being a third-world country is not a handicap to have high internet speed. Fiber is not heavy infrastructure. I live in a messy third-world and we have 100mbs fiber at around $80/month.

user_0001• 11 years ago

It usually is.

throwaway344• 11 years ago

For reference the parent is from Tunisia, which is really only third-world in the Cold War sense.

The HDI is 0.72, ranked globally in the "high human development" tier. It is just above China, and slightly below Thailand.

witty_username2• 11 years ago

That's true. But it's also true that lot of third world people use about 2 Mbps internet or even less. Mainly they (we?) aren't used to paying a lot for internet and relative to income, it is costlier than in developed countries (due to PPP differences.)

cdr• 11 years ago

You don't have to live in a 3rd world country to get 2 mbps. Plenty of places in the US get that kind of speed, where the only non-wireless ISP is liable to be the phone company providing DSL straight out of the 90s.

mbillie12• 11 years ago

Living in SLC, this is super exciting. I cannot wait to ditch Comcast (who has raised my rates for the same service every 6 months over the past 2 years) as soon as conceivably possible.

ploxiln• 11 years ago

Cable pricing is odd... it constantly rises, but is reset to a promotional price whenever something changes (or threatens convincingly to change). It's common to call, and say you want to cancel because the price went up, that you're switching to satellite or something. That usually works.

I'm on Time Warner, and I just happened to move apartments, and I got the price reset without really asking for it. Some sort of "new service" treatment even though I only moved to a new address in roughly the same city.

yzh• 11 years ago

I wonder what are the considerations when Google decides the next city for Google Fiber? Some people mentioned NYC's bureaucracy, I guess the existing infrastructure is also another factor, Google would of course want to make larger impact. Now it seems that they are targeting middle-level cities (especially southern ones).

DubiousPusher• 11 years ago

It's gotta be legal and infrastructural challenges. Don't know if you've been to SLC but aside from its downtown it's a very very spread out city. I don't know the numbers but I imagine the ppl/m^2 is less than 2,000 maybe even under 1,500.

SoftwareMaven• 11 years ago

It sucks. I live right in between Provo and Salt Lake City, and I can't get it. sigh

pc2g4d• 11 years ago

Ironic given the concentration of tech companies in the in-between zone. (Adobe, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.)

SQL2219• 11 years ago

Real world speed, hard wired. http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4084419705

https://instagram.com/p/oRf3z3hgzW/ https://instagram.com/p/wBzu2SBgxW/

vegardx3• 11 years ago

You can't really call it real world speeds when latency is less than a millisecond, then you've hardly even exited the internal backbone of your ISP. Generally when accessing things abroad or somewhat far away the throughput will drop to 150-500Mb/s. So, not bad at all, but don't expect those speeds everywhere.

On a side note, my current ISP just started rolling out 10Gb/s here. The geek in me really wants to get it, but I'm having a real hard time even making up excuses for the added cost, around $700, compared to $40 for gigabit.

blubblub• 11 years ago

Generally when accessing things abroad or somewhat far away the throughput will drop to 150-500Mb/s.

Isn't that usually caused by TCP and bandwith-delay product and not the connection itself?

gonzo• 11 years ago

You can't really call it real world speeds when latency is less than a millisecond

I have a Grande 1Gbps connection here in Austin (Google has not yet built out my neighborhood), and it's around 3.5ms RTT to work over the IPsec VPN (pfSense on both ends). 9 hops in-between, and yes, I leave one ISP and enter another.

batbomb2• 11 years ago

of course, it could be rounding up if the server is more than 50 miles away. 1ms is about 100 miles at 68% the speed of light.

Physics is a bitch.

sliverstorm3• 11 years ago

Ok, I had been thinking I had little use for 1Gbit fiber (I have a 3mbit connection and it works for me) but those latency numbers have me excited.

MichaelApproved• 11 years ago

a fiber Internet connection is different. 3mb is fine for browsing but fiber opens up the possibility of using the Internet for things like offsite backups.

whitecat• 11 years ago

I think the LDS church leaders helped this along. They have a lot of people around the world logging on to LDS.org to stream church videos.

jordanbaucke• 11 years ago

Mormon mafia?

uxp• 11 years ago

I'd have to disagree. I don't have any insight into the church office building's internal network, but I do know that they already have massive lines going into the church office building and the surrounding Temple Square area. The church itself has no need for more fiber. Even if they did, they showed no desire to help UTOPIA along (they even have the capabilities of becoming a private leaser), so what makes you think they would want to pipe their traffic through a third party advertising agency?

Secondly, Salt Lake City proper, where I live and where this announcement is declaring the buildout initiative, is very much not-mormon. The number of people logging on to their site to stream videos is minuscule compared to the number of people in the surrounding suburban sprawl. Google Fiber isn't coming to Salt Lake Valley, it's coming to the City. This won't help them.

percyb• 11 years ago

The LDS church doesn't host its own video content. It appears to all come through Brightcove.

joshdance• 11 years ago

They LDS Church is pretty advanced technically, and like any large tech organization they have many hosting sites, mirrors, and data centers. That is like saying Tim Cook would help get Google Fiber in Cupertino because lots of people around the world download apps. Sure, but not really.

ams61103• 11 years ago

I'd certainly run everything over a VPN or proxy to keep google's snooping to a minimum.

Animats• 11 years ago

Google announced this back in 2013.[1] And in 2014. We went through this with Verizon FIOS, which got a lot further than Google has before Verizon gave up expanding it. Google has only a few little projects. Verizon FIOS covers 12% of the US population.

Sonic.net is bringing gigabit fiber to San Francisco.[2] Construction is underway in the Sunset District. Next, Bernal Heights and the Castro. Also, Berkeley. Already operational in Sebastopol, Brentwood, and Santa Rosa. Sonic may have more actual users than Google does.

[1] http://anewdomain.net/2013/04/07/how-does-google-fiber-work-...

[2] https://www.sonic.com/gigabit-fiber-internet

JoshTriplett3• 11 years ago

Sonic.net is bringing gigabit fiber to San Francisco.[2] Construction is underway in the Sunset District. Next, Bernal Heights and the Castro. Also, Berkeley. Already operational in Sebastopol, Brentwood, and Santa Rosa. Sonic may have more actual users than Google does.

All of them in California. Those of us outside Silicon Valley would like fiber too, thanks.

sliverstorm3• 11 years ago

Looking to the future, what is being done about in-home distribution? Ten years from now, are we going to find ourselves with 1Gb/s fiber lines to our houses, and still dependent on oversaturated 54Mbps WiFi to get to it?

What I'm getting at is, have we had any related push to wire up more homes with cat6a (or something of that nature)? It isn't quite as future proof as fiber, but it's cheap and 10Gb/s should keep up for a long time.

NickNameNick• 11 years ago

You can get up to 6.77Gbps with an 8 antenna 802.11ac system

SG-• 11 years ago

You know 802.11g released in 2003 offered maximum theoretical speeds of 54Mbit. It's been 12 years now and Wifi has evolved quite a bit since and will continue to evolve.

802.11ac can currently do a maximum of 1300Mbit.

sliverstorm3• 11 years ago

The unfortunate key here is "theoretical". 802.11g is old, and it's true I don't have any g-only devices left. But I do have a lot of wireless-N devices that max out at 72Mbit, and interference is a frequent problem.

WiFi has evolved, yes. But my 900Mbps router paired with a 450Mbps wireless adapter still underperformed my 10Mbps powerline network for network drives & filesharing, and interference frequently drops WiFi speeds to a tenth of their intended speed.

It has a valuable place, but so do hard lines.

trueballer• 11 years ago

With the ridiculous caps on upload and download speeds, this certainly sounds like a gift from Santa.

Google Fiber Is Coming to Salt Lake City

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