Well, it is April Fool’s Day, so this is pretty funny on Google’s splash page today:
Here is the map of all the applicants. Each large, orange dot represents an area that had over 1,000 residential submissions.
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Tags: About Google Fiber
I received word from City of Clinton, IT Manager, Melanie Pienkofer that the City had completed and submitted its request for information.
Thanks to everyone for all your help and support. Please do one last thing for us: Go to our Facebook page and leave us a comment whether or not you submitted a nomination for Clinton. Please state whether you made one for your self or for your organization and the name of the organization.
Fingers crossed!
Tags: About Google Fiber
If you tried to reach this website between Saturday afternoon and Sunday mid-morning 3/20-21, there was a regional outage with Iowa Telecom that cut our server off from the Internet. Sorry.
In the Sunday New York Times on March 21, there is a fine editorial that broadly and simply states why initiatives like Google’s are important.
Fewer than 27 out of every 100 Americans have broadband service, compared with 33 in South Korea and 38 in the Netherlands. The average advertised download speed is 8 megabits per second; in France, it is 51. And according to a study by the F.C.C., the average download in the United States occurs at about half the advertised speed. Meanwhile, the poor, the elderly and other vulnerable groups remain cut off from broadband technology, and therefore from such things as online government services, medical advice and jobs.
The F.C.C.’s blueprint offers a feasible path to address these lacunae, unleash investment in the broadband network and foster competition among service providers. The core goal is to bring broadband to 100 million homes at download speeds of at least 100 megabits per second by 2020, and to vastly expand broadband over the airwaves.
The ambitious plan is likely to attract hostility from corporations — like TV broadcasters and telecommunications companies. They have legitimate concerns, but, in general, Congress should provide all the assistance the F.C.C. needs to achieve its goals.
Tags: G4C Media
Online technology magazine, Ars Technica has a big, detailed article on what it took to install a municipal, open-access fiber optic network of the sort Google is proposing. If you think wiring an American city is a challenge, think about old, crowded European cities. No room for wiring cabinets in the streets, gobs of historical architecture not allowed to run cable in the air on poles (they don’t exist and aren’t allowed) and so on.
The article is kind of tech-heavy but its still a good read to get a handle on the organizational challenges. One of the biggest ones is, what to do when you get the fiber to the house? That’s actually the start of a whole nest of different problems.
Tags: City Networks
When you submit an application for an individual or organization for the Google Fiber for Communities initiative they ask you what your Internet speed is. Well, what if you don’t know? Or more to the point, what is what your Internet Service Provider TELLS you your speed is is different than the ACTUAL speed.
The FCC launched a consumer broadband test on their blog, broadband.gov, yesterday. Internet speeds in the US are often 50% to 80% lower than advertised and its vital consumers have reliable information on the actual performance of their connections. One of the two tools the FCC is using is the Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT), an open source tool hosted on MeasurementLab.net (M-Lab). The validity of NDT can be independently verified, and all data is publicly released. M-Lab hosts other test as wells, such as a test to see if bit torrent is being throttled, or how much bandwidth is available.
So use this bad-boy before filling out your application. Bookmark it and use it to keep your ISP honest.
H/T BoingBoing
Tags: About Google Fiber, The Internet
Ugh. I totally spaced out that the City Council meets tonight. Nonetheless, I have delivered packets to the council members and will be discussing the project at council tonight during public hearing at 7 p.m.
Tags: G4C Media
Per the last post on the History of the Internet, the BBC has this nifty infographic on the growth of the Internet from 1998 to 2009. In 1998 only a handful of countries had more than 5% of the population online.
Tags: The Internet
One of the big questions people are asking me about the Google Fiber project is, “Why do we need it?” This is often followed by a grudging acceptance that their current service is, “ok,” and concerns about cost. In the next two posts I’ll try to explain why commercial, “broadband Internet” in the United States is pretty darn poor.
But before we can talk about where we are and where we are going we need to understand where we’ve been. So this first post will be: A Brief History of the Internet.
The Internet was born from the Defense Department’s need to have a reliable way to maintain command, control and communications over its continental-sized nuclear weapons forces. It was found in the late 1970’s that Ma Bell’s (remember, THE Phone Company?) telecommunications infrastructure was not very robust. If Chicago, for example, was vaporized it would cut the nation in two communications-wise.
Thus was born the idea of breaking communications into little chunks, called packets. Each packet would be like taking a very long letter and cutting it up, putting parts of the letter in separate, numbered envelopes. The envelopes would then be put in the mail. All envelopes/packets would find their own way to the destination and be re-assembled in the proper order once received. Ideally, they would use the shortest, most efficient route. However, if some part of the network was a glowing hole in the ground (vis. Chicago) a network of routers of packets for a message originating in Washington, DC destined for the ballistic submarine pens in Washington State could find an alternative route, say through St. Louis or Dallas and eventually all the packets/envelopes would reach their destination.
Tags: The Internet