fiber optics – SomeGadgetGuy

December 12, 2013December 12, 2013

AT&T lighting up “Giga-Power” U-Verse in Austin

It’s happening!

See, a little outside competition IS a good thing for us lowly consumers. AT&T is flipping the switch on a 300Mbps consumer plan for $70 a month. While currently that is about a third the potential maximum speed of Google Fiber, AT&T will automatically upgrade customers on that plan to full Gigabit broadband when it’s made available early next year.

Ordering a Double or Triple Play package with TV and Home Phone will net you HBO GO free for 36 months and a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1. Customers opting for this package who are AT&T wireless subscribers will also receive 50GB of free cloud storage.

Unlike Google Fiber, which remains focused on home internet packages, AT&T will be rolling out plans supporting businesses in the Austin area as well. For more info: www.att.com/gigapower

Full PR after the jump.

Continue reading “AT&T lighting up “Giga-Power” U-Verse in Austin”

November 7, 2013

Can Los Angeles light up Fiber for the whole city? Free broadband internet for all?

Damn I hope this can work.

LA City Council officials are working on a Request for Proposals. They want companies to offer bids on an extremely ambitious project, namely lighting up fiber optic broadband internet for every business and residential area in the Los Angeles city limits. No piecemeal, staged, “testing” of the viability for the potential, to maybe, some day, consider, trying a starter market in one corner of a McMansion in Beverly Hills. They want to go whole hog, all or nothing.

The plan for the proposal so far would be to offer up a baseline low level service for everyone for free. It could be ad supported to offset costs, and most likely speeds would top out around 2Mbps, yet it would be available for everyone. This could be a huge boon for those in lower income neighborhoods, areas not often well supported by current ISP’s, and tremendously helpful in an economy where many have to choose between home internet and low cost cell phone service to remain competitive in the job market.

For those who can afford it, higher tiers of service will be made available, most likely topping out at gigabit bandwidth, resembling services like Google Fiber. This backbone could also be used to power WiFi hotspots in public areas.

The implications of such a move could be remarkable. Continue reading “Can Los Angeles light up Fiber for the whole city? Free broadband internet for all?”

October 16, 2013

Google Fiber now explicitly allows home and home-based business servers

A nice little clarification for those ~~folks~~ lucky bastards who get to use Google Fiber. There was a touch of confusion recently as Google has pushed the talking points surrounding the improvement of residential internet offerings, and there aren’t any publicly discussed plans to offer up business grade solutions.

This caused a bit of a ruffle as many indie and start up folks headed out to Kansas City to utilize these incredibly affordable (and stupid fast) internet plans. After making a transition like that, it would be understandably frustrating to find out that utilizing Google Fiber in a commercial building would be a violation of the TOS.

Of course many of us utilize home solutions for doing business on the internet, and now Google has clarified that running servers out of a home office is A-OK, so those looking to incorporate fiber can do so without fear of Goog pulling the plug.

Still no word on business solutions for commercial spaces. Who knows, maybe traditional ISP’s might be motivated to improve their corporate offerings. It could happen.

More info on the Google Fiber Blog.

October 2, 2013October 2, 2013

Google Fiber Lights Up Provo This Month

How excited are people for faster internet access? They’re lit up enough to be producing their own commercials.

No seriously, we could be looking at the beginnings of some real groundswell awareness here. The numbers are so huge, they’re difficult to visualize. Throughout most of California, the fastest service we might have access to is 50Mbps download and 6Mbps uploading, but my sustained data rates are usually lower than that. Right now, people are sharing Google Fiber speed tests which crush the best I can get. It’s not even close. I’m seeing downloads more than 20 times faster, and uploads 180 times faster.

Think about it every time you upload a photo on social media, or a video to YouTube. Would you want a 5Mbps data rate or a 900Mbps data rate? Think about every time you fire up Netflix while everyone else in your house is using their own smartphone or tablet or game console. Would you want “50 megs innernet” or 900 megs to feed all those glowing rectangles?

See those numbers start to get big, so the people of Provo shot this handy little video to help you visualize the differences between the service you spend a lot of money on, and the service Google offers for pretty much the same price.