[Davisgig] Bill Broadley's Comments

[Bill Broadley]

On 01/06/2015 10:49 AM, Shneor Sherman wrote:
> Bill, I appreciate your response. However, it does not address the question:
> Where is the direct benefit to homeowners? An extra $5000 value to a
> half-million dollar home is inconsequential.

Well it was than $5,200 for a $300k house.  The thought of adding $5k or more
(the majority of Davis homes are worth more than $300k) to the value of ones
home is a great incentive for registered voters to sign a petition or vote for
the initiative.

For the City of Davis that means more tax revenue per home, and more demand for
Davis homes (assuming surrounding cities don't get GigE networking).

> How many homeowners want to be
> content providers or maintain a website on their own?

Approximately zero.  People who are in the Google fiber cities are quite
enthusiastic about the service.  The vast majority of the stories I've heard as
just the normal fast internet is great type.  Netflix streams at high quality,
youtube videos start instantly, Amazon prime works great, ability to stream
video while not impacting phone calls or video conferences etc.

Also the freedom to buy the channels they want instead of expensive bundles and
the freedom from the pain of:
* buying/maintaining/replacing DVR/VCRs
* watching whatever they want, whenever they want, even switching between
  devices
* ability to watch a season of a favorite show as quickly as they want to.

> I suspect very few. If
> we are talking about schools and libraries, it's far cheaper to provide lines
> only to those entities.

Certainly, I was just mentioning that hugely improved network infrastructure
could lead to improvements in educational opportunities at Davis Schools and
Libraries.  Not that these improvements would justify the costs all by themselves.

Generally the higher end users would get very fast network connections (Google
does GigE for $70 or so), the most cost conscious would get cheaper/slower
connections (Google does 5 mbit for 7 years for $200), and those without paying
anything might get better cell coverage (via shared wifi) or be able to use a
wifi device in more areas than they do now.

> I'm pretty sure that this will require an initiative, though the City Council
> could act on its own. To get votes, voters will have to see direct benefits.
> What might those be?

1) not dealing with hated companies like comcast (typically #1 or #2 hated)
2) not being restricted by bandwidth caps (comcast is 250GB last I checked)
3) improved network performance

Households with multiple people using laptops, TVs, and phones are pretty
common.  I run up against my comcast 250GB cap despite having a pretty low end
TV (720P, not 1080p let alone 4K) and not having a particularly TV centric
household.  We also do minimal music streaming.

So a typical household with a few kids/parents around who like tv and/or music:
* 3 hours a day of music from pandora/spotify = 6.5GB
* 1 hour a day of news/talk shows on standard definition TV = 30.4 GB
* 1.5 hours a day of Movie on a nicer HD tv = 136 GB
* 2 hours a week of Ultra HD/4k = 50 GB

So that adds up to 220GB which is pretty close to the 250GB cap.  A bit of web
surfing, youtube, email (especially large attachments) could easily consume the
rest.  Especially since audio/video streams are getting more data intensive over
time.

The above might sound like more than you'd expect, but keep in mind that might
be spread over several users.  Even appliances these days can use a fair amount
of bandwidth.  My stereo for instance (a fairly standard Denon receiver)
consumers a fair amount of data for firmware updates periodically.  Spending a
day hiking and taking pictures can take a fair amount of bandwidth to upload
photos.  Things like movies or games can easily be over 1GB, and cloud based
usage that's today means that the same movie might be downloaded more than once
just to allow time shifting for 2 users to watch at different times.

So sure 250GB is plenty for a single person under common use cases, but add some
roommates/kids, video hangouts with grandparents, some phone calls or VOIP over
wifi, and you can easily exceed 250GB.  I'm a very technical user with a wide
variety of uses for my home internet connection, but my 10 year old daughter
uses a roku (easy to use streaming widget for audio/video) and tablet that
results in consuming WAY more data than I do.  My point being that even Joe
Average Davis resident with roommates or kids could easily consumer more than
comcast's data cap.