Seattle Will Bid for Google Broadband Trial

Awesome!

Comcast rates just went up, that should motivate citizens to take an interest in an alternative to the monopoli.

I was going to share this on facebook but it was going to post an ad, NFW am I going to post advertisements for Cleanscrapes for Publicola.

I think all you have to do to post w/out the ad is un-click thumbnail.

I love that they're applying but I'm hoping they're having more discussions than just an application. Google said 50k to 500k people and Seattle (600k?) is larger than that. And that assumes Google only wants a single large test and not multiple smaller ones.

If they can pull it off, I would love to see the whole city. But I think they might need to focus more on smaller areas with the highest need.

I hope the application points out the terrible state of broadband deployment in certain areas of Seattle as you've written about, Glenn.

We don't need wires for broadband.

Clear wimax already services the entire area.

I just watched the latest episode of lost via their streaming internet site — all through Clear wimax broadband. No wires. Wimax modem to Wimax tower … right to my apartment. Don't need cables. Don't need fibers. This sounds like yet another Google smoke and mirrors deal.

Google has an office in Seattle, so it's already at the top of their list.

McGinn just wants the credit even though he has nothing to do with whether they build it here. Lame.

If you want 3 to 6 Mbps downstream with 15 Mbps peaks from a single firm. Google's plan is to build a vendor-neutral network that run at 1 Gbps (hundreds of times faster) to every home, allowing multiple ISPs to offer service (like Click! in Tacoma), and compete on pricing with current broadband offerings from Comcast et al.

Google has a few hundred employees in the area, but the vast majority of its workers are elsewhere, mostly in California. Having a few offices here (Seattle, Kirkland) won't make a difference.

Wimax 2 can match that. Coming in 2011. And no wires. No messy “infrastructure”. Just set up a few towers.

Clear is a local company run by Craig McCaw. I don't know why McGinn would favor a Californian company over a Washington company.

Do you work for Clear?

At it's peak Wimax 2 will be 10x slower than fiber downstream, 20x slower upstream. And you're stuck with one provider. Not that it doesn't have benefits, or that we really need that much speed, but wireless has its issues.

We need wires for fast speeds apparently. Especially for more than the current 1 Mbps upload which is the biggest drawback in my opinion…

EDIT: I do understand it can get faster than that eventually but it's still going to be a lot slower as mentioned below.

Way to go McGinn! Another check in the good column!

You're just throwing out terms, aren't you?

WiMax2 (802.11m) has been ratified, but won't be in equipment for a while. Clearwire publicly stated that it won't be looking at commercial deployment until 2012 at the earliest.

The 120 Mbps/60 Mbps speed requires new antenna and base station gear, and 20 MHz of spectrum versus the 10 MHz Clearwire uses today. It's a shared medium, and interference and range come into play, so it's likely an end user would be guaranteed 10 to 15 Mbps with 30 Mbps bursts.

Google is talking about 1 Gbps, which is the real rate, because that 1 Gbps specifically to each home on a separate connection with no shared media, unlike wireless.

Wireless will always have far lower speeds than wired connections, but be vastly cheaper to install and useful for the many times you need reasonable speeds and mobility, or an inexpensive way to add a data connection to a device where a wired connection would simply cost more than the speed differential is worse.

I can't seem to reply to the next comment, but Clear is not a “local” company. Sprint Nextel merged assets of its 4G/WiMax division with Clearwire in 2008, leading to a new venture, also called Clearwire, that is 51-percent owned by Sprint, a Kansas-headquartered firm.

It's even worse. Because WiMax2 is wireless and a shared medium, individual users will get more like 10 to 20 Mbps of a 120 Mbps with higher peaks; the fiber is not shared, and thus will be able to deliver 50 to 100 times more.

Yeah, you're probably right. Most successful companies put their own self interest way down on their list of priorities. Let's hope our genius mayor can show them the light.

@Jabailo, you're selling Wimax pretty hard. What's your connection to them?

And watching Lost (as amazing as that is) via your Internet connection is by far not what we're talking about here. Google is hoping to implement speeds that allow us to do completely new things with the Internet. Things no one has even thought of yet. Imagine real-time satellite feeds on Google Maps, or being able to transmit 3D images through the net, or who knows. The goal is to expand creativity by offering us amazing new levels of speed.

To make this even more “clear” than the below comments: a few megabits of WiMAX, DSL, or Cable are okay for today. Streaming Lost is so 2000s. Gigabit (1000M) via fiber from the city and/or Google are an investment for future emerging applications.

Clearly another McGinn fail. Once again he goes off half-cocked, didn't clear this with Burgess, Conlin, that waiter fellow from West Seattle, the Strategic Advisors or any of his other uncounted betters.

Reply to “joshuadf”:

Wires will always be constrained. You put the cables in the ground, and you hamstrung the city for the next 100 years.

Wimax and wireless are the limited only by the air. You can invent new ways to increase wireless bandwidth and are never locked in by having to dig the old technology out of sewers.

Mike McGinn wants to hamstrung the region to 20th century wire technology from California.

When Puget Sound now has 21st Century Wimax technology being developed here at home.

Once McGinn and California-based Google put the wires in the ground, the Puget Sound is forever locked into 20th century retrograde technology.

Clear Wimax is forever unlimited, mobile and low cost, accessible to all people. Marginal costs of adding new customers, like television, are nil.

Wimax and wireless technology are a dawning industry that can be a future position for the region to develop and be the leader in.

Just putting in wires from a San Jose company is short sighted at best.

Dude, next time I want a science lesson, I'll go to the museum.

Wimax and its descendents will best any wired technology easily year over year.

Wireless is unlimted. Wired is constrained.

It's a bad deal. Admit it.

Frequency bands of the radio spectrum capable of supporting WiFi/WiMax applications with a balance between distance and bandwidth are very limited from the perspective of availability. “Real estate” of the spectrum is extremely limited. I can reference recent articles for the basic consumer or I can provide you with a scientific education about how radio waves work.

The fact is this: wireless is NOT unlimited. I agree that the technology can likely support high speeds but finding space for it in the spectrum is a much bigger, if not impossible challenge.

The Google plan would be fiber to the house not wires. Fiber has an incredible information capacity and just like wireless, what is really important is what is on each end that sets the transmission speed. The plus for fiber is dedicated transport from the home to the provider, pairing point or hub. Another plus for fiber over wireless- VOIP. Any real-time two way with zero or almost zero delay is difficult using Wimax. Seattle is sorely lacking in internet infrastructure. It would be nice to get another option for subscribers.

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