Based Googleoptics.

[Yugl]

They still don't beat $120/mo for tv+internet, unless you get shit tier packages.

$109 for TV+Internet+Phone 35/35 (In reality, 42/35). Also, $114 for 50/25.

[Clash Perez]

Ideally, I'd live in Denver, and we'll all die there when Yellowstone erupts. So in the end, seeking good tubes is still the priority. XD

Visiting Denver at the moment, and it seems awfully bland. What am I missing?

On topic: I'm not sure what I'd do with 1 gb intarnets, but I'd sure be willing to find out. Doesn't seem like they'll be in the Bay Area any time soon, unfortunately.

[Yugl]

He probably means the outlets/no tax benefits?

[Roranora]

Denver? Well about anywhere but Grand Junction is close enough to the action for me, so just say Colorado. But yep, CO is my home, and it's calling me. Strokes, folks, the world, etc.

But for me..
I have a snowboard and a mountain bike, and I want to use them both more.

Also, $160 per ounce of nice weed legally.. vs $350 per ounce (same weed) through illegal channels. Also, yoga is srs biz. Also, elevation; I'm not sure why, but I love it 5000 ft to like 10000 ft. The air feels better to me, sooo nice. It's not until like 12,000 ft (we trudged to Union/Copper peaks on Copper Mtn) that I feel the effect and struggle to breathe a little. Also, I have a ton of friends, colleagues, and former classmates in the area. Also, women (though this is true in any city; I'm not in a city now--I'm more stuck in between feedlots and seemingly endless 2-lane rural TX highways)

Aaand mountains.

I guess if the area isn't just immediately beautiful and gorgeous to you, it probably won't suck you in. But yeah, look to the horizon to the west: I love that.



Peyton Manning? pff, he's no Aaron Rodgers

Edit: on-topic.. but KC will have better tubes for the time being~
not sure what i'd do with 1gbit tubes, but this is a problem we should've had years ago. what really excites me about this--and the first area doesn't really matter--is that the collective infrastructure is inexcusably poor in this country. And Google seems to want to tackle that more than any other provider

[Melena]

The silicon valley not having fiber yet is a travesty

Fixed because it's bullshit out here.

[Yugl]

NVM.

[Julian]

I get around 20/5 (actual speeds) for $55 which I find pretty decent, except for the 200gb/month cap :/, trying to change isp but there isn't much "choice" here, I can supposedly get 50 down/idkup for $25.... trying to get it >.>

[Jakson]

Saw googleoptics and immediately thought of the googlegoggles

[Roranora]

I get 0.3 meg up and 7-8 meg down tops, $55.31 / mo. CableOne, coaxial junk tubes.

I'll take a bigger bill for the insane jump I'd see in connection quality.. never minding the frequent local disconnects

[6souls]

Google has begun to connect US homes in Kansas City to super-fast broadband, offering residents speeds of up to 1Gbps (gigabit per second).

People living in the "fibrehood" area of Hanover Heights are among the first to use the service.

They are reporting speeds of about 700Mbps (megabits per second).

The product poses a challenge to established cable companies which typically charge more money with slower connections.

Google says it hopes its package will persuade people to spend longer on the web and try out new services.

However, it will need to convince consumers that they would benefit from access to such fast speeds.

In a blog post, Google Fiber's director of service delivery Alana Karen promised a "great service" for residents in Kansas City - which straddles the border between the states of Kansas and Missouri.

Google is able to make the foray into broadband installation because it has been buying up so-called dark fibre from telecoms firms in the US in order to link up its data centres which are dotted around the US.

It has also been investing in cheap fibre that has been laid by companies that have subsequently gone bankrupt before completing rollouts.

The service offers Fibre to the Home (FTTH) and is delivered via overhead cables on the poles that also bring power to homes.

Most analysts agree that the service has been competitively priced. The gigabit service is being offered at $70 (£44) per month with no installation charge. This package also comes with 1TB (terabyte) of storage on Google Drive.

Alternatively subscribers can opt for a broadband plus TV service at a price of $120 (£75).

The third option is to pay a one-off $300 (£189) installation fee in return for free broadband at speeds of 5Mbps.

"One could be unkind and suggest that the TV side of Google Fiber shows that TV over broadband is the rather mundane killer app, when for over decade we have had IPTV in the UK," said Andrew Ferguson, founder of news site ThinkBroadband.

As well as offering residents fast speeds, Google is also hoping to score points for excellent customer service.

"We'll show up when we're supposed to... we'll clean up any mess; each installer carries a vacuum clean. And we'll answer your questions and teach you about your devices - don't be afraid to ask us questions, or ask us to explain something again in simple language," said Ms Karen, in a blog post.

Some have questioned whether the project represents a serious commitment to broadband infrastructure.

"If Google Fiber has an ambition to roll out its fibre and TV services to more cities across the US then the project becomes much more than a curiosity, but with Google so far not connecting businesses it has the hallmarks of a grand experiment," said Mr Ferguson.

Steven Hartley, an analyst with research firm Ovum, thinks it is most likely that Google will use the city as a test-bed.

"This isn't the start of Google launching fibre networks all around the world. But it can use it to test how people use these networks," he said.

The project was first announced in 2010. Interest in the idea was huge with more than 1,000 towns and cities applying to be part of it.

Since Kansas City was selected, web and digital entrepreneur have moved into the city in the hope of benefiting from the new super-fast speeds.

"There are probably people who would sell their soul to be living in a neighbourhood of Kansas City that has access to the service, as they see fibre connectivity as part of the sci-fi future," said Mr Ferguson.

But whether such a project can be repeated in other cities around the globe remains to be seen.

"Fibre to the Home is certainly the gold-plated standard that to the best of our current knowledge is future proof, the problem being that unless every city in the world can find another 'Google' sitting on mountains of cash we will have to wait a few more years," he said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20324072
http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.co.n...-kick-off.html

I want this up in MN. I'm paying $73 (before taxes) for 30Mbps and now KC is getting more that three times that for less.

[hey]

I think you mean 30 times more.

[Kurokikaze]

700mpbs

I came... Sweet fuck how did Manhattan not get picked for this shit? lol ; ;

[6souls]

I can summarize my whirlwind 36 hours in Kansas City in two words: bandwidth and barbecue.

I spent all day Wednesday testing a Google fiber connection, attending startup events, seeing Google’s “fiber space,” meeting entrepreneurs, chatting with a realtor, and interviewing a city official. All of that was washed down, at the end of the day, with a generous helping of delicious burnt ends and ribs at Oklahoma Joe’s—and yes, I’m exhausted.

So how fast is Google Fiber? Really fast... and it may be far ahead of its time.

That said, I can’t say that I noticed a significant difference in terms of my day-to-day use of the Internet. Even the people in the Kansas City Startup Village (KCSV)—a small strip on the edge of Kansas City, Kansas that was among the first homes to have Google’s gigabit connection—agreed with me.

“Right now, we don’t do anything that requires fast Internet,” admitted Adam Arredondo of LocalRuckus, a new local startup, when I stopped by to learn about their experience.

As many Ars commenters have noted, the rest of the Internet is still really slow in comparison to a gigabit home broadband pipe; there are many other obstacles getting in the way of a full-bore Internet experience. After all, once my Web request leaves the fiber-connected house, makes its way out of the city, and starts talking to the rest of the Internet, there are all kinds of routers, switches, boxes, firewalls, and quality of service (traffic shaping) issues that make it so I can’t actually download an album from iTunes in the blink of an eye.

But my brief taste of what promised to be the craziest, fastest Internet for the lowest amount of money may not have been enough. I may have to stay longer next time to really appreciate it.

Another guy in the same work house as Arredondo, Andy Kallenbach (also known as Ars reader “Andreas_kc”) of FormZapper, said that what he really notices is the high upload speed.

“The best connections that I get personally are to several of our servers colocated in downtown [Kansas City],” he wrote in a comments thread, echoing what he told me in person. “It is just as good as walking into the data center and jacking in. Our nightly deployments take around 10 seconds now. [The only] bottleneck now being somewhat drive speed.”

Other Ars readers have suggested that I’d really start to appreciate it once I spent more time with the connection. Malor, who has a 250MB connection in Chattanooga, commented:

“This is something you need to live with, as opposed to just experience briefly, to start to understand how it matters. The biggest thing is that you never, ever have to think about what you are doing with your connection. It doesn't matter. No matter how crowded either direction is, with that kind of packet throughput, you don't really get latency issues. You don't have the problems with cable modems of saturating the upload link and then seeing your download link hosed. At least, I don't think you ever have that problem; I've never been able to completely saturate my upload, even when it was merely 100Mbps.”

Still, I would definitely throw down $70 a month for a 1Gbps connection, happily tossing aside the $30 basic Internet package (20Mbps) that I get from Comcast in Oakland. I think we can all agree that most Americans would definitely enjoy even a small speed bump on the order of 50Mbps to 100Mbps for around the same price as they’re paying now.

“We have a lot to do in Kansas City”

Spoiler: show

When I first arrived on Tuesday afternoon, I ran a test on Google’s own speed test page and got 460Mbps down. The two denizens of the Hacker Home (Mike Demarais and Andrew Evans) told me that such speeds were slow—I ran countless tests, ranging from BitTorrent, to multiple Hulu and YouTube streams, to traceroutes. I ran the tests provided by SpeedTest.net and Google fiber speed tool. But there wasn’t anything that could really, adequately test what such high speeds mean beyond clicking Google’s little “begin test” button.

Many commenters suggested things that I couldn’t do, like run a server. (Google’s terms of service forbid that.) Accessing Usenet proved a bit difficult, as I didn’t want to go to the trouble of setting up a new account and paying for it. I also tried running a Tor bridge relay—but even then my connection only tended to hit around 23.5KBps, far lower than what I would have expected. Later on Wednesday, Kallenbach helped me use Go2PC between two machines in different fiber-enabled houses to send a Linux ISO, and that only topped out at about 2MB per second.

The only real test that I could do on a single machine with minimal hassle was to run a script written by Ars’ own Lee Aylward that downloads an Ubuntu ISO from all US-based mirrors (45, in total) at once. When I ran that, I got the best performance I had so far—a whopping 50MB per second—but still far short of what Google should be serving me.

Another thing to keep in mind is that running Fiber over WiFi, of course, slows down the connection noticeably. Google techs who came to visit the Hacker Home Wednesday (we’ll get to that later) told me that they regularly see Wi-Fi speeds of around 100Mbps compared to wired speeds of around 800Mbps.

Other readers asked about the Google fiber service (a $120 package) with TV option (the basic option the house has is only $70 a month). The Hacker Home doesn’t have a TV and doesn’t have that option, so unfortunately I couldn’t test it. In fact, what may be a better test than the one I ran would be to record a bunch of TV shows and then run some of these higher-bandwidth and lower-latency tests (games, Skype calls) simultaneously across multiple machines to see how that stresses network performance.

Ben Estes, a local Google fiber technician who was over at the house Wednesday, estimated that “over half” of the approximately 300 homes in Kansas City, Kansas that have the gigabit installed already have gone for the $120-per-month TV option.

He and his colleague Brett Neal came to the Hacker Home to check out why our gigabit connection had fallen to about 40Mbps. After over an hour of inspections, he determined that the electrical power to the house wasn't sufficient and that once he replaced the fiber jack in the house, everything should be fine. (The Hacker Home hadn't been lived in in about two years, and had some issues with not being able to feed enough power to its new residents and all their devices, including the Google Fiber box. An electrician working at the house that same day expanded its capacity from 40 amps to 200 amps.) By the time Estes and Neal left, they were pulling down 900Mbps-plus speeds. Later Wednesday evening my tests were still resulting in speeds in the neighborhood of 400Mbps.

“Right now there’s only six of us [technicians],” he said, noting that he and his girlfriend were considering moving to this neighborhood just to get fiber access. “By six months, we should be over 100 [technicians]. We have a lot to do in Kansas City.”

Bright and early Wednesday morning, I drove Demarais and Evans over to the Kauffman Foundation offices, which hosts a weekly event called “One Million Cups.”

The foundation was created over a half-century ago by local hometown philanthropist and entrepreneur Ewing Kauffman. He made his millions in pharmaceuticals earlier in the 20th century and later as the owner of the Kansas City Royals baseball team. The group now holds an endowment of $2 billion and aims to “help individuals attain economic independence by advancing educational achievement and entrepreneurial success, consistent with the aspirations of our founder, Ewing Marion Kauffman.”

Among other things, Kauffman has been a major funding source of Startup Weekend, an event that organizes hackathons globally.

“One Million Cups” is an event where two startups are given an “opportunity to present their companies to a diverse audience of mentors, advisors, and entrepreneurs” in Kansas City. I came to see what takes place immediately after that: the breakout session of the Kansas City Startup Village (KCSV).

“We have three more startups that have joined the KCSV,” Matthew Marcus announced at the meeting Wednesday.

“Residential update: we’ve been talking with a few people who have the potential to secure some homes for more startups. We still need to iron out the details and figure out the logistics," Marcus continued. "That could really blow it up nicely. It gives people a chance to get on fiber with the residential play and live/work in the same space. I think when we get that we can almost go national and say, ‘Hey, come to KC, get on fiber and live where you work.’”

That seems to be the major selling point for the city's companies and officials. Although fiber isn’t yet delivering game-changing speed differences to most users, it’s still new enough and different enough that the two Kansas Cities, KCSV, and local residents are essentially using it as a way to draw in outsiders to help grow the small but proud tech community in the area.

That's exactly what Google wants to hear. In its "fiber space" just up the road—on the Missouri side of State Line Road—the California company has set up a public showroom where people can come in and hear, on a one-to-one basis, why Google fiber matters.

On its website, Google has tried to explain what a gigabit connection will mean to those of us who don't speak the language of traceroutes and Tor:

Gigabit Internet makes everything you already do online up to 100x faster. No more waiting to buffer videos or upload photos. But gigabit Internet will also revolutionize the Web in new ways. Imagine chatting with your doctors or teachers via HD video conference, or collaborating on a work or school project with contributors across the globe in real time, without delays. Imagine new online billing applications that don't freeze. Imagine automatically saving all of your work to the cloud in a blink of an eye—and never having to worry about losing files to a computer crash again. A gigabit is the Internet experience of the future. And it starts in Kansas City.

After I left Kauffman, I walked up the road from the Hacker Home to the Google fiber space. Three Google officials showed me around an IKEA-style example of a living room where a Nexus 7 is used as a remote control as well as another setup for OnLive gaming (yep, it was pretty quick!). They were happy to extol the virtues of fiber, even as our connection at the Hacker Home didn't quite live up to the billing.

Homes for Hackers

Spoiler: show

I spent two nights at 4428 State Line Road in Kansas City, Kansas, the address of the first of the “Homes for Hackers.” This probably makes me the first Google fiber tourist at the house. The four-bedroom, one-bathroom house was recently acquired for $48,000 by a local Web developer as a way to help build up the startup scene in the city. So far there are two entrepreneurs living in the house, with a third (and the first female) on the way this weekend.

The house is simple but functional, with a fresh coat of paint both inside and out. Inside, there’s a large whiteboard-painted wall, an L-shaped green couch, and oddly, a near life-sized cardboard cutout of the property’s owner, Ben Barreth. He’s the one who lets the “hackers” stay in the house, rent- and utility-free (he lives about 20 minutes away, in Overland Park, Kansas) for three months. All they have to do is buy their own groceries and work on their startups while they’re residents of the house.

The narrow dining room has been converted into a long office area, with desks lining each side (the Google fiber box lives there). That, in turn, feeds into the kitchen, the house’s only bathroom, a laundry/storage area, and what has become the guest bedroom. That’s the room I slept in, replete with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sheets. (Cowabunga, dude!)

Around the other side of the living room (which also has a long desk on one side) is Mike Demarais’ (of Threed.ee fame) bedroom—which currently lacks a door. There’s a small upstairs area with two bedrooms as well, one of which is occupied by Andrew Evans of Gamer Talent. Behind the house is a small, patchy yard, a dilapidated back fence, and an adjacent dirt driveway that feeds into a dirt alley.

The Hacker Home, in addition to a few homes up the street that have been converted into offices, has become ground zero for the KCSV. It’s the only place so far where entrepreneurs have a “live-work” space. Barreth, in fact, is in the process of getting a special permit from the city so he can have five people run businesses from the house. (Entrepreneurs and city managers take note: Kansas City, MO doesn’t have this issue.)

Hanover Heights, as the area is known, was just described by local alt-weekly Ink as a “sleepy neighborhood known for antiques stores.” Up the street, just past the startups, is a small commercial district with shops like “Picasso Dog Groomery,” “Savart Gallery,” and “Knotty Rug Co.”

Demarais, 20, is the kid of the Village, having moved recently from Boston to work on his startup, Threedee—”the API of manufacturing.” He’s become somewhat famous amongst the KCSV set after the college dropout’s mug graced the cover of Ink’s latest issue for a cover story entitled “It takes a Google village to grow startups.”

But the de facto leader of the house (the one who cooked both dinner and breakfast while I was there) is Evans, an affable, bearded man who had lost his job at a San Francisco social gaming platform earlier this year. He moved down to the gulf coast of Costa Rica for a month, and later back home to Maryland, before relocating to Kansas City.

“Almost all of the Internet [in Costa Rica] was 3G dongles running with SIM cards,” he said. “Even most of the cafes and bars and restaurants were dongles that 10 people were splitting. I had to bike four miles into town to get a DSL connection.”

What is it like to have some of the cheapest, fastest, commercially available Internet access anywhere in the country?

“None of the projects I’ve been working on have been dependent on Google fiber,” he told Ars. “While Google is refusing to sell to businesses and sell to static IPs, it’s hard to do something that’s fiber-critical. The fiber is great and it’s great to have in a project like Hacker House because you can get 10 people watching HD movies or playing LAN games, but I don’t think I would have come here and paid rent just for fiber. I guess the free rent was what got me, and being there for an up-and-coming tech scene and meeting interesting people and getting to work on my stuff with no pressure.”

State Line Road, more than just a street

Spoiler: show

The first thing I learned when I got to the house is that while it may seem like a mere curious geographical oddity to an outsider like me, it's no accident that all of the KCSV locales are all on the Kansas side of State Line Road.

Remember, Google committed to building out on the Kansas side (known around these parts as “KCK,” as opposed to “KCMO”) first. That means that the houses across the street in Kansas City, Missouri are simply out of luck for the time being.

On Wednesday, I met Louis Aloi, a firefighter paramedic who had just moved to the Missouri side of town, right across the street from the Hacker Home. He had a Time Warner Cable truck parked in his driveway to get his Internet hooked up when I walked up to chat with him. He had never heard of the KCSV, nor the Hacker Home.

“I saw a sign [about Google Fiber], and so I googled it,” he told Ars. “It wasn’t available, so that sucks. Now I’m going to get taken advantage of by Time Warner Cable. [Google says my side] won’t become available until fall 2013. This is my luck.”

Google’s maps of KCK and KCMO show a total of around 220 “fiberhoods,” or neighborhoods where the company has defined a fiber-qualified region. But Google likely has already deployed the fiber—either on aerial power lines, or in underground conduits—throughout these regions. (Hanover Heights just happens to be the first one, based on demand, where the fiber was turned on.)

That means that Aloi, who has aerial fiber strung across his backyard at this very moment, has to wait longer, not only because of an arbitrary state and city boundary, but also because, as Google Field Marketing Manager Carlos Casas told me, “We’re committed to building out in KCK first.”

If it wanted to, Google could sign Aloi up for service today. The company told me it would take a few hours to “drop” the line to his house and then perhaps another hour for the install itself.

"Basically we drew fiberhoods based on existing neighborhoods," Google spokesperson Jenna Wandres told me. "We didn't think it was fair for us to determine where we build first.

"Through this preregistration process, communities determined the order in which we build and we're going to stick to that order. We're going to follow that to a 'T,'" she continued. "You can't just build out fiber quickly. It takes time."

Aloi seemed amenable to signing up for the service once it's available to him—even if he didn’t know until Wednesday that he lives in the KCSV.

“I’m a skeptic,” Aloi admitted. “I’d have to look at the benefits and costs savings. The Internet is pretty screaming fast to me anyway. Still, I couldn’t believe that [Google fiber] wasn’t available.”

Hacker House owner Barreth isn’t the only one who has managed to get a first taste of Google fiber. His realtor said he has seen a noticeable uptick in real estate interest in Hanover Heights.

“That area never used to sell very quickly,” David Davis told Ars, saying that the properties he’s sold recently had been on the market for as long as 18 months. “Four properties sold at the same time. That can’t all be coincidence.”

Davis added that he expected the houses to sell for even more by the springtime as demand starts to ramp up.

“[Ben can get] people from out of town,” Davis noted. “They’re going to take that info and they’re going to see what’s going on in the area and take it back to their communities and then you’re going to see the big push.”

And that may be the bottom line: Google Fiber is bait. Every region around the world that wants to try to create its own Silicon Valley has several challenges. Few regions are as well-established, financially well-off, full of success stories as northern California is. But the hope is that this corner of “Silicon Prairie” can set things ablaze—although for now, there have yet to be any real breakout success stories in Kansas City’s tech sector.

“I think fiber kicked it off and gave that underground community some national attention,” Evans added. “It is giving people like Mike and me a reason to come out here and it’s giving people like Ben Barreth a really good selling point to say that this isn’t just any startup community. This isn’t Silicon Alley or downtown Chicago, this is KC. We have Google fiber.”

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012...-google-fiber/

[6souls]

Updated Google Fiber plans

https://fiber.google.com/cities/

[Aidin]

Well.. Looks like I'll be reconsidering that move to Portland.

[Omniyoji]

San Jose.... of course. Portland seems nice, swastika attack thingy aside

[Prothescar]

living in Charlotte finally pays off

[Elizara]

I hope it does show up in Atlanta; I'd be so all over that...

[Deadgye]

Spoiler: show

Updated Google Fiber plans

https://fiber.google.com/cities/

Looks like I need to get those resumes into amd/nvidia/texasinstruments/etc on the double. Also need to find out if actually living in Austin, Texas counteracts the awesomeness of super fast internets.

[Madeline]

Why god, WHY DO I HAVE TO BE IN KNOXVILLE INSTEAD OF NASHVILLE.

So many sads right now.