Comcast, Time Warner boost net speeds in Google Fiber city – COINCIDENCE?

Comcast and Time Warner pulled this at the same time?

I smell a rat. Just too much to be a coincidence. Seems to belie what they've been saying about not throttling, etc. If Google turned off the fiber, I wonder how fast their speeds would drop back?

They had legislated competition away

Now it takes a company the size and weight of Google to force them to compete on speed and value.

BTW, Grant county in Washington state has had gigabit fiber to the home for 14 years through their power utility. They are very rural. In Seattle's King County though, you are out of luck.

Probably coincidence

Guys, the original article says the cable companies are only increasing speeds from 25-50 to 50-105 mbps, nothing close to Google's 1gbps. Seems to be typical for urban areas. I live in a semi-rural town of 30,000... last year Comcast upgraded service to 25-50 mbps, for real, pretty consistently. They serve a decent chunk of the surrounding rural towns too.

Problem is the lack of competition, unserved rural areas, and apparently inadequate infrastructure in some cities. State/municipal broadband gradually rolling out though... maybe that's what's keeping the cable companies on their toes.

Cable/Telco companies are LIARS.....

and Thieves.

The real problem has been underprovisioning from the start. If the cable ISP's wanted to turn up the speeds, they could do so at a drop of a hat. Bandwidth costs money that the cable companies and Telcos don't want to part with.

Cable companies and phone companies do not have higher speeds because they bought a specific amount of bandwidth from a 1st tier backbone supplier and they do not want to pay for any more or build out nodes for more users.

Digital television of any kind is actually a form of "streaming" and a certain amount of your overall user bandwidth is apportioned to the TV signals and another part is apportioned to the Internet signal. They will apportion the overall bandwidth based on how many users there are. There is little to no headroom for too many simultaneous users but this happens all the time. Obviously, the more channels you buy and the more subscribers there are, the less the available overall internet speed.

If the area being served has less bandwidth than it requires, the TV stations will get "blocky" or the sound will cutout. Changing between stations will take much longer and stay "black" or go full white noise while the system multiplexes to the new channel. Conversley, your internet connection will slow down significantly if your TV signal stays viewable. Sometimes both will happen.

All of these issues are due to far too many subscribers on a node for the available bandwidth.

This should be a simple case of "Theft of Services" if our politicians listened to US instead of the Cable/Telco lobbyists.

As far as I can tell, Comcast, Time Warner, and all the other telecom companies periodically raise their internet speeds.

Google has an advantage as they are sitting on a big pile of money and don't have the need of upgrading old infrastructure.

We'll see what happens in a few years. I know that Comcast has shown that it's possible to pull 4gbs down over coax and Google has a bad habit of getting involved in something and then abandoning it.

Cities conceded that they could and should do a better job

Among the concessions offered by cities that agree to the Google Fiber Checklist: 1) accurately map where underground gas lines, etc. exist 2) let Google pull cable through city owned fiber conduit 3) make building permits fast and easy to get (and the opportunity for holdups or graft non existent) 4) get telephone poles on city easements to accept fiber lines from multiple companies.