back to article ISP roundup: Google mulls fiber-less Fiber, America goes Wow, Comcast still terrible

A flurry of news from internet service providers (ISPs) in the US has picked up what is normally a slow summer season. According to a report from the San Jose Mercury News, Google's planned rollout of its Fiber broadband service in the Bay Area has hit a snag, as the Chocolate Factory is considering a change of course. The …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    We have WOW

    We have WOW triple play and it is fine and generally functional. They are pretty competitive to the huge guys, managing to keep AT&T and Comcast honest which gets them a fair amount of business.

    Their equipment looks like it was dug out of Comcast's dumpster - ancient Motorola or General Instrument cable boxes with criminally bad DVRs. When we got ours reinstalled (after a miserable month with Uverse) it seemed as if the installer had a pile of set-top boxes in his truck and he had to try a few before he found one that worked. We switched to a Tivo and I think we got the cablecard for free. When we complained about the cable modem resetting they eventually upgraded us to something that was not as far from EOL (years past EOL, instead of decades).

    So this Gigabit internet stuff could just be them refreshing their network about 10-15 years behind the curve.

    1. My other car is a Stryker LAV

      Re: We [don't] have WOW

      Wow needs to stop worrying about tech. If providing GbE is all about growing the company, why can't I get them in Macomb Township, Michigan, 10 years after buying a house and first asking them?

      Thankfully I've had nothing but good** with U-verse and probably wouldn't change anyway, unless we move.

      ** Except I'm not paying ungodly amounts for download speeds I don't need just to get faster uploads for sharing the family photo albums. I understand network architectures are laid out & optimized for the expected traffic patterns (mass downloads) but is it really so hard to get anything higher than 1.5 Mbps upstream?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Google is looking for a cheaper solution

    Because AT&T is front running them with gigabit fiber before they get new markets like San Jose off the ground, and Comcast is upgrading their HFC network with DOCSIS 3 and is able to offer gigabit speeds as well (kind of expensive for now, when they go DOCSIS 3.1 they will be able to offer gigabit at competitive prices)

    Not that there is any point to having gigabit in the home, versus say 150 Mbps, but like 10 core phones sometimes marketing wins over need.

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    sorry, thought i was on a .co.uk website

    Oh wait, I am!

    Why the US news presented without relevance/comparison to the UK? If this is relevant, why aren't we hearing more about other countries' ISPs minor shenanigans?

    It's as bad as the BBC, yesterday on the admittedly dire Newsbeat on the generally-dire Radio 1, the first two articles were domestic US news articles of vanishingly small relevance to a UK listener (some people got shot, a person was missing or something)

    1. ThomH

      Re: sorry, thought i was on a .co.uk website

      As I understand it, it's a .co.uk and a .com, with staff on both continents.

      In sharp contrast to Radio 1.

  4. joemostowey

    Still nothing in King and Queen VA. Cable covers about 2 miles of a 40 mile long 8 mile wide county.

    We do have a 2mps wireless in some parts but coverage and service is spotty.

    No hope for an upgrade, and companies like Google don't even see us. We are 50 miles from the state capitol and 80 miles from D.C.

    So we can only imagine what the rest of the country looks like electronically.

    I'll be long dead before faster service comes to this part of the world....

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