Google Fiber coming to Charlotte?

[elrodvt]

11 hours ago, kermit said:

Much to my surprise, Google fiber appears to have expanded a little in Carborro (in September) and Des Moines (in July) using microtrenching (which does not inspire much confidence about its reliability but gigabit competition is a good thing)

https://chapelboro.com/news/development/carrboro-mayor-google-fiber-construction-progressing-in-community

https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/07/07/google-fiber-comes-to-a-new-city-after-long-expansion-hiatus/

No evidence of any Charlotte activity since 2016

They're working in my South Charlotte zip, 28210, now.

Edited October 14, 2020 by elrodvt

[CLT>]

1 hour ago, kermit said:

No evidence of any Charlotte activity since 2016

Google Fiber is actually expanding in SouthEnd, Optimist Park, and NoDa. I think they’re focusing on getting more multi family developments and commercial customers online in those neighborhoods to build critical mass more quickly. They still are very bullish on Charlotte with fiber. 

[urbanlover568]

I just can't wait for Starlink, They are public beta testing very soon! 

[elrodvt]

Starlink is not meant for Metro areas.

[davidclt]

It appears that Google Fiber has jumped South Blvd. into east SouthEnd (aka Dilworth). My condo is fibered ("wired" didn't seem appropriate) but currently dark. I've been mercilessly taunted by this on my wall for a few years now:

Got the following word today, "Now that we are more in the South End area we are ready to get everything lit up. Before we can [light up the fiber] we will need to conduct another site survey to make sure our old design plans are up to date. " Progress!

[CLT>]

On 10/13/2020 at 10:57 PM, elrodvt said:

They're working in my South Charlotte zip, 28210, now.

They just finished laying fiber down  Gleneagles Road last week. 

[KJHburg]

is that why we are getting half page ads on UrbanPlanet right now???

[sclark]

17 hours ago, CLT> said:

They just finished laying fiber down  Gleneagles Road last week. 

I think that was AT&T, but I could be wrong. 

[kermit]

On 2/4/2021 at 1:30 PM, davidclt said:

It appears that Google Fiber has jumped South Blvd. into east SouthEnd (aka Dilworth). My condo is fibered ("wired" didn't seem appropriate) but currently dark. I've been mercilessly taunted by this on my wall for a few years now:

Lots of fiber going into the ground at Euclid and East today. I choose to believe it was Google Fiber (the contractors had no clear labels). Fingers crossed.

[elrodvt]

Sometimes they seem to have no plan. They tore up a portion of our suburbia last fall. After working 3 weeks or more they never came back and no one was connected that I know of. So, don't get excited - it's impossible to discerne what their plan is.

[turbocraig]

From my personal experience, I don't think anyone is missing anything, other than a torn up lawn for no reason.   We had it installed downtown where we are going on 2 yrs ago and we immediately switched to GF.  There was no appreciable difference to the AT&T U-Verse speeds we had before at the device level - maybe slightly faster.   Nothing approaching what we were promised.  I ended up doing a bundle with Spectrum when I upgraded my last iPhone and I think their speed clocks in at what GF did or maybe even better.  It was disappointing.

Edited March 27, 2021 by turbocraig

[davidclt]

17 hours ago, kermit said:

Lots of fiber going into the ground at Euclid and East today. I choose to believe it was Google Fiber (the contractors had no clear labels). Fingers crossed.

According to the contractors I talked to, it is Google Fiber.

I know that others have said it's just as good as AT&T but AT&T has constantly been unfulfilled promises, contracts, traffic shaping and bandwidth caps (I don't care if the cap is 1,000 TB much less 1 TB, any cap is a cap and it's what it says about how AT&T feels about their customers, they're also vociferously fighting efforts on net neutrality). Spectrum's quality has dropped in the past year and their customer service has always been crap and I feel like a play roulette for pricing but generally speaking they have fewer asterisks, no bandwidth caps and no traffic shaping. Give me a pipe with lots of bandwidth, no caps and preferable no traffic shaping.

[elrodvt]

1 hour ago, turbocraig said:

From my personal experience, I don't think anyone is missing anything, other than a torn up lawn for no reason.   We had it installed downtown where we are going on 2 yrs ago and we immediately switched to GF.  There was no appreciable difference to the AT&T U-Verse speeds we had before at the device level - maybe slightly faster.   Nothing approaching what we were promised.  I ended up doing a bundle with Spectrum when I upgraded my last iPhone and I think their speed clocks in at what GF did or maybe even better.  It was disappointing.

Depends on your use. It's far superior, especially in upload speed and latency, to a non fiber solution. That's important it you're working from home and using client server or cloud based team software. Now I agree there is little difference between AT&T fiber and GF but I for one appreciate the lower cost! And none of the bullcrap fees. If you just use it for email, streaming tv or web surfingi agree there is little difference. One other point is neighborhood congestion can be a big problem with cable. I've never experienced that with fiber.

You say it didn't meet what you were promised. What were you promised? What did you get? How did you measure it? Did you contact google for a remedy?

With AT&T I get what I was promised at mid 900 mbs symmetrical. That's what the speed test providers show google doing as well.

[elrodvt]

35 minutes ago, davidclt said:

According to the contractors I talked to, it is Google Fiber.

I know that others have said it's just as good as AT&T but AT&T has constantly been unfulfilled promises, contracts, traffic shaping and bandwidth caps (I don't care if the cap is 1,000 TB much less 1 TB, any cap is a cap and it's what it says about how AT&T feels about their customers, they're also vociferously fighting efforts on net neutrality). Spectrum's quality has dropped in the past year and their customer service has always been crap and I feel like a play roulette for pricing but generally speaking they have fewer asterisks, no bandwidth caps and no traffic shaping. Give me a pipe with lots of bandwidth, no caps and preferable no traffic shaping.

I don't have a cap with AT&T that I'm aware of. When did you sign up? I agree that's totally unacceptable. I've never experienced any noticable traffic shaping either. When I first got AT&T fiber 3? Years ago I wrote a speed test app that would fill the pipe at various times of day and record the mbs up and down along with latency. I disabled it because it was rock steady at around 975 mbs. I forget the latency but it was consistent.

I also agree AT&T and Spectrum are evil companies and I'll leave AT&T in a flash once GF shows up. If ever...

I was really glad to leave Spectrum. They're the least reliable and most evil of them all!

[davidclt]

23 hours ago, elrodvt said:

I don't have a cap with AT&T that I'm aware of. When did you sign up? I agree that's totally unacceptable. I've never experienced any noticable traffic shaping either. When I first got AT&T fiber 3? Years ago I wrote a speed test app that would fill the pipe at various times of day and record the mbs up and down along with latency. I disabled it because it was rock steady at around 975 mbs. I forget the latency but it was consistent.

I also agree AT&T and Spectrum are evil companies and I'll leave AT&T in a flash once GF shows up. If ever...

I was really glad to leave Spectrum. They're the least reliable and most evil of them all!

AT&T says for their 1 gigabit service there is no 1TB bandwidth cap but there is on their 100 megabit service. Rest assured use enough on any plan on AT&T and the nastygrams will start. At my old house, I had a router that let me monitor traffic down to the megabyte. One month we had almost 2TB of traffic for the month (don't ask me how). I'm confident for AT&T we would have received notice for our traffic for the month. Also, I do know AT&T will sometimes deprioritize streaming traffic on their UVerse copperline service and that's all the can provision currently at my location (75 Mbit service). At my old house AT&T could only provision 5 Mbit service and it dropped every time it rained. Spectrum has been mostly not awful in spite of rate roulette and their stability has been spotty since January.

Edited March 28, 2021 by davidclt

[turbocraig]

17 minutes ago, elrodvt said:

Depends on your use. It's far superior, especially in upload speed and latency, to a non fiber solution. That's important it you're working from home and using client server or cloud based team software. Now I agree there is little difference between AT&T fiber and GF but I for one appreciate the lower cost! And none of the bullcrap fees. If you just use it for email, streaming tv or web surfingi agree there is little difference. One other point is neighborhood congestion can be a big problem with cable. I've never experienced that with fiber.

You say it didn't meet what you were promised. What were you promised? What did you get? How did you measure it? Did you contact google for a remedy?

With AT&T I get what I was promised at mid 900 mbs symmetrical. That's what the speed test providers show google doing as well.

I honestly don't remember a lot of the details, other than GF was supposed to be 1000MB and it didn't come close to that.  We had buffering issues with streaming (which was our issue with U-Verse to begin with) and our internet didn't seem appreciably faster.  Granted we don't have any hardwired devices so I know my laptop isn't going to get that, but you think you'd see some noticeable difference.  I called Google probably twice about it and they had me do speed testing on their site and they said at the device, whatever we were getting was within the acceptable window.  And I want to say it was way off.  Like mid-upper 300s maybe.  If that's a normal differential vs. something cabled then Ok, but we didn't notice an improvement on our stuff.  I'm not techie in any way - we're not using Cray supercomputers here or anything like that, just regular TV and internetting, so maybe for other applications it's better, but for our basic needs, I wasn't wowed.  Maybe we're some weird anomaly and it's great everywhere else.

[elrodvt]

Wireless is hard to pin down. When evaluating the ISP performance you really need an all wire path.  There are a lot of good how to on improving wireless. You might want to look into that as regardless of the ISP a bad wifi path isn't going to make you happy...  Btw, there are mesh routers which have ethernet plugs on the mesh client. I heard good luck with that.

[turbocraig]

38 minutes ago, elrodvt said:

Wireless is hard to pin down. When evaluating the ISP performance you really need an all wire path.  There are a lot of good how to on improving wireless. You might want to look into that as regardless of the ISP a bad wifi path isn't going to make you happy...  Btw, there are mesh routers which have ethernet plugs on the mesh client. I heard good luck with that.

Was that for me?  If so, thanks!  Our tv doesn’t buffer and our internet is as fast as anything else, which was already acceptable, so I’m fine.  And the bundled price for Spectrums service was even lower than GF’s already low $50/mo.  Whatever has changed is the best performing set up we seem to have had and meets our needs.  But thanks for the info.  I feel like a child in this conversation.  

[CLT>]

Google Fiber is getting rid of their TV Service in Charlotte (they already have in other parts of the country) so beginning in September it's just a straight internet service.

 

[elrodvt]

2 hours ago, CLT> said:

Google Fiber is getting rid of their TV Service in Charlotte (they already have in other parts of the country) so beginning in September it's just a straight internet service.

 

True but YouTube.tv is a fine replacement. We've had it over a year with no issues. In our case we have to use att fiber for the pipe but that's been reliable despite their antiquated equipment. Still hoping we get Google fiber this summer.

[jednc]

YouTube TV is great. Have had it since it came to Charlotte. No reason for them to offer redundant services.

[KJHburg]

coming to Concord!  the 10th largest city in NC! 

City of Concord NC > Services > Community > News

[Norm2]

4 hours ago, KJHburg said:

coming to Concord!  the 10th largest city in NC! 

City of Concord NC > Services > Community > News

They haven't finished providing fiber to Charlotte and they are expanding to Concord? Interesting.....

[rancenc]

16 hours ago, norm21499 said:

They haven't finished providing fiber to Charlotte and they are expanding to Concord? Interesting.....

Yes, it does look like Google is crossing the county line into Cabarrus!

https://independenttribune.com/news/local/google-fiber-coming-to-concord/article_e7f308ea-0101-11ec-833a-2335b98dec15.html

[Skyybutter]

On 8/20/2021 at 7:07 AM, rancenc said:

Yes, it does look like Google is crossing the county line into Cabarrus!

https://independenttribune.com/news/local/google-fiber-coming-to-concord/article_e7f308ea-0101-11ec-833a-2335b98dec15.html

This is a pretty big deal. I heard they were already working in the Christenbury/Cox Mill Rd areas in Cabarrus. Can anyone explain how google fiber will compete with Spectrum and Kinetic internet services? I'm honestly not very read up on it...just enough to know it's an awesome announcement... thx