Merry Christmas boys and girls, I brought you all pics from inside the G-lair.
Today I ventured through KC's Hipster-town to visit the Google "Fiber Space" open house. I had to set up an appointment time online, and even when I got there, I had to park down the street from the event and ride the shuttle bus up to the first building... Which was just a nice place to stand in line before your party is escorted on foot to the second building... Which is kinda like an Apple store that doesn't sell shit.
First things first, here's a pic of one of the trucks that will be installing all of the GFiber. No windows like a uhaul. Chris would like. :thumbsup: They said that they aren't going to be contracting out and of this fiber install for this whole city at all, and the runs go from them all the way to the box on your desk.
Here's the layout of the place, first you go into the bottom building, then they walk over groups to the top building:
Inside the waiting building:
Inside there, as we stood in a line that felt very much like a line to a disneyworld ride, they passed out awesome sugar-cookie-ice-cream sandwiches with strawberry fillings, and started the indoctrination.
These guys clearly don't give a shit if they earn any customers today... No, they were very adamant about turning us into their EVANGILISTS.
Google wants their first customers (all of KC) to be such a smashing success that I honestly think they'd turn away customers that don't sound enthusiastic about it all. Here's what their brochure said:
(Yes, that bunny is EVERYWHERE around there. I grabbed a bunch of red-rumped bunny stickers like that one....)
Anway, there were no pressure pitches and we walked about freely, and in fact I think the only way you can sign up there is on one of their chromebooks, online. (We didn't, I live outside the initial test area.)
Anyway, see the guy in the Blue & white shirt above on the right talking to us? He was on a potent mix of adderall and crack. I saw him skipping. Twice. He made it his business to make sure everyone knew that his personal passion was making sure every school and library is wired with Gfiber, for free... But the only way he could see to that is that if there is enough interest in the area, and that's where we come in, natch. We gotta get our neihbors excited and make all the blue areas on this map turn green:
I put a red arrow there showing where my part of town is, and the Sprint World HQ too, so we can't get it soon... Hmm. Curious that... Anyway, for all of the blue parts of the map, those are test markets they'd like to roll out, but haven't seen enough interest yet. The green has had enough signups, and the yellow are inbetween.
The first installs will happen NEXT MONTH in one of those green parts of town, and they'll roll out steadily until every part of town they got green by then is done. Then the testing goes on until they are happy, sometime in 2013-2014. THEN my part of town can have it, and possibly the rest of the country too. Possibly. Oy.
So when my line was done, ~25 minutes, we went to the other building and found lots more blue-shirts (KC employees of Google, the Cali employees weren't in uniform) and they put us in front of chromebooks to show us how fast these things are and answer all questions with wandering blue-shirts. It WAS fast as you could imagine, a whole page of walmart.com came up in about 2 seconds, even with 50 products on the page. Naturally I had them do a speedtest on it too, because I wanted to know the upstream pipe size...
That's Google's own speedtest, because speedtest.net can't do fiber. (I tried, it struggled and then told me 1 MB DL speed!) Wow, look at that upload pipe!
That should make moving large files, both ways, effortless. Hope google is ready for all the file sharing...
Anyway, there were tons of units around, even big-screen units, like this one:
The top box is the modem, but they call it the "TV Box." The middle one is your new home router, which handles the full gigabit speed to devices... And the bottom one is an optional DVR with 1 or 2 Terrabytes of storage in it... It also acts as a NAS too, so your home can save files to it from computers and slates and stuff.
Now here's the part that didn't really hit me until later:
See this unit? The glassy thing in this pic on the right is the only remote control in the entire building... And it's a NEXUS SLATE!
That's right, apple and microsoft, you have both been put on high alert! Google fiber now offers G an edge over the tablet market, because these tablets will be INCLUDED FOR FREE with all plans! -I think this is going to make remote controls go the way of the do-do... We'll all be using phones and slates from now on to change the channel.
One other awesome thing I saw there was the gaming rig:
The soccer game they played in front of me looked extremely real, and that controller was awesome, high-quality stuff... At first I thought it was just a console like a new Playstation until a blueshirt came up and told me that there won't be a console anymore... All the Processing is done on the gaming company's server now!
That's right, both Multi-user AND Individual games, all with extreme, top-teir graphics will be processed at Google or elsewhere, and you're just playing the terminal locally. The magic of a fat pipe revealed! Consoles, buh-bye.
I bet that'll open up some new pricing models for gaming companies... Can you imagine: "1 hour of COD for only .99 cents."
After looking around I tried their hippy foods & some great ginger-mint tea by the huge map...
It was kinda sad for us who live in the lower-left corner of the map... The room seemed full of us.
Oh well, it's best not to be Google's guinnea pigs anyway, right? Who knows what kind of privacy issues are going to pop up with these systems becoming widepread...
Today I ventured through KC's Hipster-town to visit the Google "Fiber Space" open house. I had to set up an appointment time online, and even when I got there, I had to park down the street from the event and ride the shuttle bus up to the first building... Which was just a nice place to stand in line before your party is escorted on foot to the second building... Which is kinda like an Apple store that doesn't sell shit.
First things first, here's a pic of one of the trucks that will be installing all of the GFiber. No windows like a uhaul. Chris would like. :thumbsup: They said that they aren't going to be contracting out and of this fiber install for this whole city at all, and the runs go from them all the way to the box on your desk.
Here's the layout of the place, first you go into the bottom building, then they walk over groups to the top building:
Inside the waiting building:
Inside there, as we stood in a line that felt very much like a line to a disneyworld ride, they passed out awesome sugar-cookie-ice-cream sandwiches with strawberry fillings, and started the indoctrination.
These guys clearly don't give a shit if they earn any customers today... No, they were very adamant about turning us into their EVANGILISTS.
Google wants their first customers (all of KC) to be such a smashing success that I honestly think they'd turn away customers that don't sound enthusiastic about it all. Here's what their brochure said:
(Yes, that bunny is EVERYWHERE around there. I grabbed a bunch of red-rumped bunny stickers like that one....)
Anway, there were no pressure pitches and we walked about freely, and in fact I think the only way you can sign up there is on one of their chromebooks, online. (We didn't, I live outside the initial test area.)
Anyway, see the guy in the Blue & white shirt above on the right talking to us? He was on a potent mix of adderall and crack. I saw him skipping. Twice. He made it his business to make sure everyone knew that his personal passion was making sure every school and library is wired with Gfiber, for free... But the only way he could see to that is that if there is enough interest in the area, and that's where we come in, natch. We gotta get our neihbors excited and make all the blue areas on this map turn green:
I put a red arrow there showing where my part of town is, and the Sprint World HQ too, so we can't get it soon... Hmm. Curious that... Anyway, for all of the blue parts of the map, those are test markets they'd like to roll out, but haven't seen enough interest yet. The green has had enough signups, and the yellow are inbetween.
The first installs will happen NEXT MONTH in one of those green parts of town, and they'll roll out steadily until every part of town they got green by then is done. Then the testing goes on until they are happy, sometime in 2013-2014. THEN my part of town can have it, and possibly the rest of the country too. Possibly. Oy.
So when my line was done, ~25 minutes, we went to the other building and found lots more blue-shirts (KC employees of Google, the Cali employees weren't in uniform) and they put us in front of chromebooks to show us how fast these things are and answer all questions with wandering blue-shirts. It WAS fast as you could imagine, a whole page of walmart.com came up in about 2 seconds, even with 50 products on the page. Naturally I had them do a speedtest on it too, because I wanted to know the upstream pipe size...
That's Google's own speedtest, because speedtest.net can't do fiber. (I tried, it struggled and then told me 1 MB DL speed!) Wow, look at that upload pipe!
That should make moving large files, both ways, effortless. Hope google is ready for all the file sharing...
Anyway, there were tons of units around, even big-screen units, like this one:
The top box is the modem, but they call it the "TV Box." The middle one is your new home router, which handles the full gigabit speed to devices... And the bottom one is an optional DVR with 1 or 2 Terrabytes of storage in it... It also acts as a NAS too, so your home can save files to it from computers and slates and stuff.
Now here's the part that didn't really hit me until later:
See this unit? The glassy thing in this pic on the right is the only remote control in the entire building... And it's a NEXUS SLATE!
That's right, apple and microsoft, you have both been put on high alert! Google fiber now offers G an edge over the tablet market, because these tablets will be INCLUDED FOR FREE with all plans! -I think this is going to make remote controls go the way of the do-do... We'll all be using phones and slates from now on to change the channel.
One other awesome thing I saw there was the gaming rig:
The soccer game they played in front of me looked extremely real, and that controller was awesome, high-quality stuff... At first I thought it was just a console like a new Playstation until a blueshirt came up and told me that there won't be a console anymore... All the Processing is done on the gaming company's server now!
That's right, both Multi-user AND Individual games, all with extreme, top-teir graphics will be processed at Google or elsewhere, and you're just playing the terminal locally. The magic of a fat pipe revealed! Consoles, buh-bye.
I bet that'll open up some new pricing models for gaming companies... Can you imagine: "1 hour of COD for only .99 cents."
After looking around I tried their hippy foods & some great ginger-mint tea by the huge map...
It was kinda sad for us who live in the lower-left corner of the map... The room seemed full of us.
Oh well, it's best not to be Google's guinnea pigs anyway, right? Who knows what kind of privacy issues are going to pop up with these systems becoming widepread...
