Google Fiber Goes Live Near Stanford
by Jason Inofuentes on August 22, 2011 9:52 AM EST- Posted in
Google announced last October that they would be beta testing their Google Fiber initiative in a small residential neighborhood affiliated with Stanford University, and one lucky Redditor posted the results. The service is being provided free to the faculty and staff of Stanford that live just off campus and the speeds are mostly unheard of in this country. This beta test, of course, comes ahead of the roll-out of their Kansas City experiment in 1 Gbps fiber internet service. Speedtest results linked and pictured below for you to drool over.
Source: Reddit
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Wierdo - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
More than we do, but they get free healthcare (world's number one in quality) and college education (i hear they actually pay people to study in college) among other things.Exodite - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
To be fair Sweden's healthcare isn't very close to the top of the list anymore, it's still mostly government funded though.kmmatney - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
I was paid to get my Master's degree here in the USA (Materials Engineering at UCLA to be exact). My tuition was paid and I made about $20K a year on top of that...that was back in the mid 1990's. This is common in engineering, though. (and somehow we have a shortage of engineers).Wierdo - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
Well yes, we're talking bachelor degrees in this context.Masters is different, it brings in prestige to the schools in form of research, they'll happily pay for it. Undergrads don't get the same kinda treatment, with the exception of a handful of overachievers in some cases.
inplainview - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
What taxes got do with anything? Jealous much?Go get sick and see how much your taxes buy. You win. Dumbest post to date.
sigmatau - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
I thought the same. Only in America one can't praise their neighboor but instead have to minimize them to make them feel better of their shortcommings.The question that Americans should be asking is "how much do others save by not paying for private health insurance vs extra taxes in a single payer?" It kills me that these fools can scream about others's higher taxes but so conveniently forget they are being bent over by insurance companies.
Remember, Americans pay over 2x what the next country spends on health care. It doesn't matter if it comes from taxes or the lovely check you send to your robber barons.
Kristian Vättö - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
There is only one truthful answer: too muchHere in Finland, we have 23% VAT. Income tax is progressive but up to ~50% if you earn enough.
Exodite - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
More than almost everywhere else in the world.It's not a fair comparison though, considering what else those taxes pay for.
To mention a few things a higher tax burden gets you...
* A minimum of 5 weeks paid vacation. Paid higher than your work weeks at that.
* ~15-20 days worth of national holidays, also work-free and full paid.
* Tax-funded unemployment benefits.
* Tax funded retirement benefits.
* Free education, including higher education. You only get 6 years worth of funding for university studies but you don't have to pay for admission or attendance, only literature.
* State-funded healthcare, everything past 900 SEK a year in medical care and everything past 1800 SEK a year in medicine is free.
Basically the higher tax burden is very much true but it's not really applicable to the network infrastructure argument.
I believe the issue in the US is mostly due to the geographical monopolies, high price of admission and the inane need to build competing infrastructure for the same purpose.
To make a comparison to another much-maligned area - telephony. Every telecom carrier in Sweden use the same bands, both for 2G, 3G and presumably LTE as well as that network is slowly expanding.
That makes the market far more mobile, and by extension competitive.
inplainview - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
I've been getting 200 MB/s for about 3 years here in Finland, and like Maxim, I pay around €50.rc121 - Monday, August 22, 2011 - link
you guys in europe realize that Sweden is about the size of California and Finland is smaller than New Mexico, right? It seems like its a tad bit easier to cover those countries in fiber and make it affordable than blanketing the entire US.Not to say that I'm not jealous of the speeds, but its easy to understand why its going to take awhile to have access to those speeds in every US market.