[GRLUG] Google and Kansas City
Chase Bolen
chase.bolen at gmail.com
Wed Mar 30 23:07:31 EDT 2011
I'm one of those people who live in the boonies. We're maybe twenty
minutes from downtown GR. When we moved here, we were under the
impression that there WERE faster wires here, but it turned out that
"here" according to the ISPs was "in our zipcode".
We have satellite internet, and it's NOT a broadband replacement. Three
to six second round-trip packet times make anything media related either
unusable or nearly so (youtube, pandora, hulu). Sites using ajax barely
work, and often time out. Anything real time is pretty much out of the
question (Skype, online gaming). Even if those DID work, though, the
bandwidth caps would get hit pretty quickly. On top of this, the
service is way more expensive than most other "broadband" choices, and
wouldn't be an option for a lot of people.
I just heard a story about local governments posting notices on the web
instead of in newspapers, and I don't think this trend is going to slow
down in the near future. Commercial ISPs aren't going to willingly lose
money to wire sparsely populated rural areas. Just like electrification
in the 20th century, real broadband isn't going to reach the rest of us
without government intervention.
On Wed, 2011-03-30 at 21:54 -0400, Bob Kline wrote:
> That's basically it. More performance,
> in the most general sense, will cost more,
> but it's up to the individual to decide what
> they want to spend their money on. It's
> no different than how people decide what
> kind of car to drive, or how big a TV they
> have to have.
>
>
> For those in the boonies, some chose to
> live where it's not economic to run the
> faster wires. But there's still HughesNet.
>
>
> -- Bob
>
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 9:32 PM, Joseph McLaughlin <jwm8351 at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> Are you advocating Government involvement?
> Should the market place relegate this fair city to the bottom
> of the heap?
> And why do cows need high speed Internet?
>
> There is still a bug in the program must use RAID!
>
>
>
>
> ______________________________________________________________
> From: Michael Mol <mikemol at gmail.com>
> To: "Mailing List for LUG in greater Grand Rapids, MI area."
> <grlug at grlug.org>
> Sent: Wed, March 30, 2011 9:10:56 PM
> Subject: Re: [GRLUG] Google and Kansas City
>
>
> I have a real, genuine fear that we're going about this with a
> *severe* case of myopia.
>
> I had difficulty navigating the web in 2007 on dial-up, with
> image
> bugs, large banner ads, huge JavaScript loads, large CSS
> loads,
> fifteen 5k or so avatar images whenever you visit a forum
> thread--even
> auto-play video video advertisements...Imagine how bad it is
> now.
> There are places within twenty miles of here which can't get
> cable,
> DSL, or even a reliable cell signal.
>
> Those involved in designing web services purchase very
> high-end
> network connections, get accustomed to those connections, and
> then
> *design* for those connections. It's a really bad
> self-reinforcing
> loop. Much like how software got slower as computers got
> faster, but
> it's much harder to raise the median Internet connection speed
> than it
> is to raise the median computer speed.
>
> There is a not-insignificant fraction of the population in
> America
> itself which is still going to be completely out of reach of
> even
> 10Mb/s Internet commercial services in ten years, and people
> gripe
> that our municipality isn't acting like those which take out a
> 25-year
> mortgage on their own essential services infrastructure to
> "give" us
> access to gigabit broadband connections below cost.
>
> I can't be the only one who's noticing this. In order for a
> bound-to-the-Internet economy to be sustainable, Internet
> services
> need to be virtually ubiquitous, and essential activities need
> to be
> manageable on lower-end Internet connections.
>
> On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 9:46 PM, Bob Kline
> <bob.kline at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >
> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/google-bestows-1gbps-fiber-network-on-kansas-city-kansas.ars
> > This gives a good summary about
> > why Google is doing this. It thinks
> > it needs higher speeds to support
> > future projects. And it clearly sees
> > that the existing big providers are
> > digging in, not providing higher speeds,
> > and not above not letting others do
> > it either.
> > It will be interesting to see how this
> > plays out. Chattanooga, TN, already
> > has a 1Gbps system.
> > -- Bob
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>
>
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