9 ms·

Google Fiber plans 5-state growth spurt, biggest since 2015

109 points by alphabetting 4y ago

cowmix 4y ago
Years ago Google announced that Phoenix would be a market for Fiber but then (like Google does) bailed. As soon as Google announced, CenturyLink and Cox both put the gas on their fiber rollout here in the PHX metro area. When Google finally cancelled the rollout about two years later, CenturyLink/Cox noticeably decelerated their fiber plans.
- onepointsixC 4y ago
  Competition leads to excellence and results, while monopolization leads to stagnation.
- Grazester 4y ago
  Well look at that. Google gave you fiber without even giving you fiber.
- bla3 4y ago
  Fast internet is a complement to Google's services. It's in Google's interest to commoditize fast internet. They're not interested in offering Fiber, they're interested in making the internet faster and cheaper, since that helps there core business. So their Fiber investment was the lowest they could get away with to still make other players believe that they just might be serious about it in 2015.
  - newaccount2021 4y ago
- alberth 4y ago
  Google never wanted to be in the fiber business. But they do want push ISP to increase speeds since that does benefit Google (e.g. Youtube, etc). So from their perspective, they succeeded in PHX.
buildbot 4y ago
I honestly thought Google fiber was ending? This may actually be one of Google’s longest running non-core projects now.
- thomassmith65 4y ago
  Google is unlikely to abandon an opportunity to surveil users 100% of the time.
  - buildbot 4y ago
    Not sure not much worse that is than any other ISP to be honest, unless they can decrypt packets. They do have to support https://ndcac.fbi.gov/calea/lawful-intercept-standards https://ndcac.fbi.gov/calea/lawful-intercept-standards
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
jakebasile 4y ago
Google Fiber has been "available and growing" in Austin for close to a decade now and it's still not available at my Austin address. I'm not going to hold my breath.
- wing-_-nuts 4y ago
  Same in ATL. They run fiber to a building 200m from my condo, but haven't done jack to expand further.
  - wil421 4y ago
    That was my experience in Brookhaven. Google wired up new buildings but didn’t build out to other homes. AT&T did attach fiber to the pole by my house and I managed to convince them to install fiber. Moved to Roswell and my neighborhood is wired up with AT&T fiber except my street. Had to get Xfinity and my upload speed is crap.
- next_xibalba 4y ago
  This is not entirely Google's fault. As I recall*, the incumbents were doing their damnedest to deny Google access to existing infra (utility poles, buried, etc.), which significantly slowed the roll out (while also increasing the cost). I did eventually get Google Fiber at my home and it was amazing. 1Gb for $70 with no contract and I don't remember having a single outage. *I bought a new build in 2016 in South Austin and had to wait some time before Google Fiber became available
  - debug-desperado 4y ago
    I waited over two years after signup, but they finally delivered in 2021.
- humanistbot 4y ago
  Same, but in a different city that has allegedly had it since 2015.
- pram 4y ago
qmarchi 4y ago
I work pretty close (other side of the office) from some of the Fiber folks, and there's notable enthusiasm from their bubble about expansion into the new and existing metros. (Disc: Googler in Global Networking, not Fiber)
mastax 4y ago
Strange to do this now, after cost of capital has gone up.
- acdha 4y ago
  They were broken out into a subsidiary in 2015, which means their management will be seeing pressure to show growth. I’d imagine they’ve probably hit about as much as they can hope for on their existing markets and are especially looking at the number of people now working remotely for the long-term.
mabbo 4y ago
I want to criticize Google Fiber, but I will give them this: they proved gigabit internet was completely possible to offer to consumers directly to the home, inexpensively. They proved there was demand for it, that there was a potential business here. Yesterday, I had a 1.5Gbps fiber internet installed in my home- not by Google, of course, but by someone who copied their model. I think that was the point all along. Move everyone forward on this. Force every other ISP to stop resting on their laurels and get to work pushing the boundaries. Unrelated: the bottleneck on my bandwidth is, for the first time in my life, between my computer and the modem rather than between my modem and the internet. It's 30,000 times faster than my 56k dial-up was in the 90s. This is pretty neat.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  Did they prove that? Even demand did they actually prove customers will pay *more* for fiber? What it proved is that if cable companies offer lower prices than google, and offer 'good enough' speeds. That people will not switch over. Fiber is fast but so is DOSICS4.0. What it showed was that fiber to the house was not a revenue or profit winning strategy, with instead the ISPs using the existing copper coupled with fiber close to the home. ATT and others recently made a push for fiber to the home, but their DSL was falling behind coax/cable and they were forced to make the switch. Personally, look at T-Mobile home internet & starlink's growth. We might see cellular internet to the home take over in the next 10 years. My 5G cellular speed is already nearing that of what an 802.11ac wifi network can deliver. Most people are currently fine with 50Mibps, which is well within 5G's capabilities.
  - filoleg 4y ago
    > did they actually prove customers will pay more for fiber? Who said fiber will inherently cost more? That assumption only makes sense if you think that ISPs charge people at a reasonable consistent margin, and arent't just jacking up the prices up to the maximum they can get away with. From my personal experience, finer didn't end up costing more in most cases. I am paying about $60/mo for a symmetric 1Gbps fiber from Google Fiber in a high cost of living city in the US. No data caps, no random fees, easy billing, easy to work with customer service. I paused the service once because i was out of state for about a month, and then resumed it again. It was as easy as calling their customer service and spending less than a minute on it (not counting the little time at the start of the call where I had to verify my account information). Transferring service to a new address (within the same apt building) was extremely easy. No lock-ins, month by month, so I can easily cancel any time and then sign up later. No "installation" fees or any other bs. Just paying the agreed upon monthly cost, plain and simple. Just before that, i used to live in another large city with a cheaper cost of living (Atlanta). I was paying about $20-30 more per month for a locked contract with Xfinity. It was a nightmare. Data caps, them adding "by mistake" equipment rental fee to my bill about half a year into it (despite me using my own modem + router, and me giving them their equipment back on day 1), as well as me wasting hours to get it resolved, only for the fee to get added back to the bill a few months later. And I got lucky that me and my roommate at the time spotted that fee getting added sneakily both times. And don't get me started spending over 4-5 hours on the phone trying to get the service canceled a couple years after living there (because i was moving across the country). I legitimately ended up having to lie to them that I am moving overseas, otherwise they kept insisting they could just transfer the service to my new address, no matter how many times I told them that I wasn't interesting. An interesting development came shortly after. After I moved out of Atlanta, Google Fiber finally arrived into the city. In the areas of metro ATL where Google Fiber entered, Xfinity dropped prices significantly, but they barely matched Google in cost (but still had tons of random bs fees and costs that made the price higher), still was a locked contract, and the speeds/service was much worse, it was closer to 100Mbps (it wasn't fiber, it was DOCSIS). Guess what happened in the metro ATL areas that were just right outside of Google Fiber coverage? Instead of dropping the price, Xfinity jacked up prices there for the same old crappy service. As soon as I initially heard that Google Fiber was coming into ATL area, I was excited for my mother finally getting a cheaper and more reliable internet provider that wouldn't sneakily add random fees or "deals" that force her to deal with it. At worst, I expected that Google Fiber won't expand to her house (just a 30 min drive up north from ATL midtown), but with Xfinity at least giving a cheaper rate, given the competition was encroaching. Except the exact opposite ended up happening. Oh, and to make things better, that apartment building I lived in back then didn't get Google Fiber for years since it became available in the city, despite being squarely in the coverage area. Guess why? The apartment building management made a 5-year exclusivity contract with Xfinity (aka Xfinity paid them off) to be the sole ISP offered to the apartment building. So even if I wanted to switch, and Google Fiber was available in my area, then too bad.
emuneee 4y ago
Google Fiber has steadily been expanding it's footprint in my area of North Carolina (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill). I've been a customer for a little over two years so it's good to see there's still momentum to expand into new areas.
- bsagdiyev 4y ago
  That depends on where you are. We're in a Ting area, no signs of Google Fiber here. Ting is still a bit out since our development isn't completely sold yet, so we're stuck with Spectrum until then.
- sterwill 4y ago
  About 6 years ago, Google Fiber buried fiber along several streets that surround my South Durham neighborhood, but I couldn't order it until this year. I had it installed in April and it's been excellent. The day before my installation appointment, Google Fiber called me to let me know there was a problem with the fiber on my street. They said they'd have to reschedule my installation. I was really disappointed about the delay, expecting I'd have to wait until they fixed the problem on the street to even pick a new date, and that it might be several weeks away. But right there on the call they said it should only take a day to fix, and they could do the installation the day after the original date. I was impressed that they would commit to such a quick fix and reschedule right then. The installation went smoothly. The equipment installer arrived exactly on time, and finished in the one hour that was scheduled. With Spectrum, I was often given a 3-4 hour window for service, and sometimes they were later than that. Makes you block off a half a day just in case. The speed and latency are always great. The reliability beats Spectrum, which would go down for minutes to hours when power flickered during storms. I don't think my Google Fiber service has been down for a single second.
johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
No, thanks. I don't want my internet provider close my connection without any notice or shut down their whole service.
- memco 4y ago
  As others mentioned this could be helpful by forcing other ISPs to improve their products. I’m in the Seattle suburbs: we have two ISPs one has data caps and the other has a max of 100Mbps. There’s one fiber company that’s expanding in WA but mostly only outside of the Seattle area. It’ll be a long time before there’s any significant improvement even though there’s lots of people and tech here unless pressure increases from competition.
skunkworker 4y ago
I remember being one of the first units to get google fiber in Provo, UT back in 2014. Up until that point there was other fiber providers but they had no competition. Once google fiber came in suddenly Comcast tripled their offering speeds for no additional cost, and units and homes that had google fiber were more desirable.
karmicthreat 4y ago
Metronet has been rolling out to many places across the midwest also. Here in Grand Rapids they were the cheapest fiber choice. Verizon, Comcast all wanted very ridiculous prices and had no competing products.
mariojv 4y ago
I'm very happy with Google Fiber here in San Antonio, even though I had AT&T gigabit fiber before. I've never had an outage, we have IPv6, and the internet's so fast that the bottleneck is my home router rather than the actual connection. Plus, the connection is dug in through the ground instead of run from a telephone pole like AT&T's was, so it's less prone to interference by trees and squirrels I'm honestly surprised that our city is so well wired up that I have the choice of two gigabit providers. We aren't a tech hub or anything like that. I wonder why this location seems to be such a competitive market for ISPs. We have other big ones like Spectrum, but there's even a local provider (although, I guess they were acquired recently, so not quite local anymore): https://www.astound.com/texas/ https://www.astound.com/texas/
- cityofdelusion 4y ago
  I only have a single choice in S.A., Spectrum (or DSL with AT&T). Google is barely rolled out in the city and most of the rest of the city is heavily segmented to either favor AT&T or Spectrum. Grande is cool but serves a tiny piece of the city. Its basically the same as any other city unless you live in a few specific spots.
  - mariojv 4y ago
    Interesting. They just rolled out in both my neighborhood and my parents' neighborhood. From my experience it seems like more single family homes are getting fiber installed than apartment complexes. I think some complexes may have a deal with certain ISPs to be serviced only by them, but I'm not really sure.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    I must be in a magical spot since I have Spectrum and Grande for cable and ATT and Google (seems to be part of this push) for fiber.
- jeffwask 4y ago
  I still only have Gigafiber in Dellview/Shearer Hills but it's been great.
- 4y ago
bearjaws 4y ago
My building now has ATT fiber and Century Link, our HOA negotiated for $30 (included in HOA fee) a month for 500/500 with $30 a month to upgrade to 1000/1000. Good times. ATT is now offering 2.5 and 5gbps plans as well. Century Link fiber has been incredibly stable, the only outage we had was ironically when ATT was running the connection into the building they cut the Century Link connection... I worry that Google really missed an opportunity to roll out an expansive network that consumers were eager to adopt. ATT has been adding in fiber everywhere in Central Florida. Every new development has ATT FttH. If Google rolled in now nobody would really care unless the price was dramatically cheaper.
- hylaride 4y ago
  I live in Canada and our condominium negotiated for CAD$40/month (included in our strata fees) with Bell (essentially a Canadian Verizon) 1.5GB fibre internet, the full traditional cable TV package, as well as Crave streaming (which is licensed in Canada for HBO and Paramount programming). Regular consumer pricing for all this would have been near $200 (though our building wasn't wired for fibre and the deal included them installing the infrastructure). I know they probably come out ahead because it includes a lot of units that would go with a competitor (Rogers, which is our version of Comcast), but it really puts things into perspective.
- EricE 4y ago
  I have unsubsidized Century Link fiber for $65 a month for gigabit symmetrical and it is indeed very good. Considering Century Link was birthed from US West, the company that we fondly coined "US Worst" back in the day, I've been pleasantly surprised by (and thankful for!) their current competence.
jeffwask 4y ago
When I moved to Austin in 2013, I was told I would be in a fiberhood within a year. Almost a decade later, still no fiber in that area. I'm not holding my breath on Google Fiber expansions.
antonymy 4y ago
Completely forgot about Google Fiber, just assumed they'd abandoned it like so many other Google projects. I was so excited for it back when it was announced. Anything to disrupt the corrupt local monopoly I have to deal with here. Then they scrapped any plans to come to my city and I lost interest.
adamc 4y ago
Google fiber isn't even available everywhere in Austin, a town they "came to" long ago. So... color me skeptical about the significance of this.
jerlam 4y ago
I guess that's where my Webpass (owned by Google Fiber) money was going. They increased rates in 2020 and 2021, first time since the acquisition. It finally got me to look for alternatives, and turns out they're all competitive (or better) now.

109 points by alphabetting 4y ago

Years ago Google announced that Phoenix would be a market for Fiber but then (like Google does) bailed. As soon as Google announced, CenturyLink and Cox both put the gas on their fiber rollout here in the PHX metro area. When Google finally cancelled the rollout about two years later, CenturyLink/Cox noticeably decelerated their fiber plans.

onepointsixC 4y ago
Competition leads to excellence and results, while monopolization leads to stagnation.
Grazester 4y ago
Well look at that. Google gave you fiber without even giving you fiber.
bla3 4y ago
Fast internet is a complement to Google's services. It's in Google's interest to commoditize fast internet. They're not interested in offering Fiber, they're interested in making the internet faster and cheaper, since that helps there core business. So their Fiber investment was the lowest they could get away with to still make other players believe that they just might be serious about it in 2015.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
alberth 4y ago
Google never wanted to be in the fiber business. But they do want push ISP to increase speeds since that does benefit Google (e.g. Youtube, etc). So from their perspective, they succeeded in PHX.

buildbot 4y ago

I honestly thought Google fiber was ending? This may actually be one of Google’s longest running non-core projects now.

thomassmith65 4y ago
Google is unlikely to abandon an opportunity to surveil users 100% of the time.
- buildbot 4y ago
  Not sure not much worse that is than any other ISP to be honest, unless they can decrypt packets. They do have to support https://ndcac.fbi.gov/calea/lawful-intercept-standards https://ndcac.fbi.gov/calea/lawful-intercept-standards
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

jakebasile 4y ago

Google Fiber has been "available and growing" in Austin for close to a decade now and it's still not available at my Austin address. I'm not going to hold my breath.

wing-_-nuts 4y ago
Same in ATL. They run fiber to a building 200m from my condo, but haven't done jack to expand further.
- wil421 4y ago
  That was my experience in Brookhaven. Google wired up new buildings but didn’t build out to other homes. AT&T did attach fiber to the pole by my house and I managed to convince them to install fiber. Moved to Roswell and my neighborhood is wired up with AT&T fiber except my street. Had to get Xfinity and my upload speed is crap.
next_xibalba 4y ago
This is not entirely Google's fault. As I recall*, the incumbents were doing their damnedest to deny Google access to existing infra (utility poles, buried, etc.), which significantly slowed the roll out (while also increasing the cost). I did eventually get Google Fiber at my home and it was amazing. 1Gb for $70 with no contract and I don't remember having a single outage. *I bought a new build in 2016 in South Austin and had to wait some time before Google Fiber became available
- debug-desperado 4y ago
  I waited over two years after signup, but they finally delivered in 2021.
humanistbot 4y ago
Same, but in a different city that has allegedly had it since 2015.
pram 4y ago

qmarchi 4y ago

I work pretty close (other side of the office) from some of the Fiber folks, and there's notable enthusiasm from their bubble about expansion into the new and existing metros. (Disc: Googler in Global Networking, not Fiber)

mastax 4y ago

Strange to do this now, after cost of capital has gone up.

acdha 4y ago
They were broken out into a subsidiary in 2015, which means their management will be seeing pressure to show growth. I’d imagine they’ve probably hit about as much as they can hope for on their existing markets and are especially looking at the number of people now working remotely for the long-term.

mabbo 4y ago

I want to criticize Google Fiber, but I will give them this: they proved gigabit internet was completely possible to offer to consumers directly to the home, inexpensively. They proved there was demand for it, that there was a potential business here. Yesterday, I had a 1.5Gbps fiber internet installed in my home- not by Google, of course, but by someone who copied their model. I think that was the point all along. Move everyone forward on this. Force every other ISP to stop resting on their laurels and get to work pushing the boundaries. Unrelated: the bottleneck on my bandwidth is, for the first time in my life, between my computer and the modem rather than between my modem and the internet. It's 30,000 times faster than my 56k dial-up was in the 90s. This is pretty neat.

bushbaba 4y ago
Did they prove that? Even demand did they actually prove customers will pay *more* for fiber? What it proved is that if cable companies offer lower prices than google, and offer 'good enough' speeds. That people will not switch over. Fiber is fast but so is DOSICS4.0. What it showed was that fiber to the house was not a revenue or profit winning strategy, with instead the ISPs using the existing copper coupled with fiber close to the home. ATT and others recently made a push for fiber to the home, but their DSL was falling behind coax/cable and they were forced to make the switch. Personally, look at T-Mobile home internet & starlink's growth. We might see cellular internet to the home take over in the next 10 years. My 5G cellular speed is already nearing that of what an 802.11ac wifi network can deliver. Most people are currently fine with 50Mibps, which is well within 5G's capabilities.
- filoleg 4y ago
  > did they actually prove customers will pay more for fiber? Who said fiber will inherently cost more? That assumption only makes sense if you think that ISPs charge people at a reasonable consistent margin, and arent't just jacking up the prices up to the maximum they can get away with. From my personal experience, finer didn't end up costing more in most cases. I am paying about $60/mo for a symmetric 1Gbps fiber from Google Fiber in a high cost of living city in the US. No data caps, no random fees, easy billing, easy to work with customer service. I paused the service once because i was out of state for about a month, and then resumed it again. It was as easy as calling their customer service and spending less than a minute on it (not counting the little time at the start of the call where I had to verify my account information). Transferring service to a new address (within the same apt building) was extremely easy. No lock-ins, month by month, so I can easily cancel any time and then sign up later. No "installation" fees or any other bs. Just paying the agreed upon monthly cost, plain and simple. Just before that, i used to live in another large city with a cheaper cost of living (Atlanta). I was paying about $20-30 more per month for a locked contract with Xfinity. It was a nightmare. Data caps, them adding "by mistake" equipment rental fee to my bill about half a year into it (despite me using my own modem + router, and me giving them their equipment back on day 1), as well as me wasting hours to get it resolved, only for the fee to get added back to the bill a few months later. And I got lucky that me and my roommate at the time spotted that fee getting added sneakily both times. And don't get me started spending over 4-5 hours on the phone trying to get the service canceled a couple years after living there (because i was moving across the country). I legitimately ended up having to lie to them that I am moving overseas, otherwise they kept insisting they could just transfer the service to my new address, no matter how many times I told them that I wasn't interesting. An interesting development came shortly after. After I moved out of Atlanta, Google Fiber finally arrived into the city. In the areas of metro ATL where Google Fiber entered, Xfinity dropped prices significantly, but they barely matched Google in cost (but still had tons of random bs fees and costs that made the price higher), still was a locked contract, and the speeds/service was much worse, it was closer to 100Mbps (it wasn't fiber, it was DOCSIS). Guess what happened in the metro ATL areas that were just right outside of Google Fiber coverage? Instead of dropping the price, Xfinity jacked up prices there for the same old crappy service. As soon as I initially heard that Google Fiber was coming into ATL area, I was excited for my mother finally getting a cheaper and more reliable internet provider that wouldn't sneakily add random fees or "deals" that force her to deal with it. At worst, I expected that Google Fiber won't expand to her house (just a 30 min drive up north from ATL midtown), but with Xfinity at least giving a cheaper rate, given the competition was encroaching. Except the exact opposite ended up happening. Oh, and to make things better, that apartment building I lived in back then didn't get Google Fiber for years since it became available in the city, despite being squarely in the coverage area. Guess why? The apartment building management made a 5-year exclusivity contract with Xfinity (aka Xfinity paid them off) to be the sole ISP offered to the apartment building. So even if I wanted to switch, and Google Fiber was available in my area, then too bad.

emuneee 4y ago

Google Fiber has steadily been expanding it's footprint in my area of North Carolina (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill). I've been a customer for a little over two years so it's good to see there's still momentum to expand into new areas.

bsagdiyev 4y ago
That depends on where you are. We're in a Ting area, no signs of Google Fiber here. Ting is still a bit out since our development isn't completely sold yet, so we're stuck with Spectrum until then.
sterwill 4y ago
About 6 years ago, Google Fiber buried fiber along several streets that surround my South Durham neighborhood, but I couldn't order it until this year. I had it installed in April and it's been excellent. The day before my installation appointment, Google Fiber called me to let me know there was a problem with the fiber on my street. They said they'd have to reschedule my installation. I was really disappointed about the delay, expecting I'd have to wait until they fixed the problem on the street to even pick a new date, and that it might be several weeks away. But right there on the call they said it should only take a day to fix, and they could do the installation the day after the original date. I was impressed that they would commit to such a quick fix and reschedule right then. The installation went smoothly. The equipment installer arrived exactly on time, and finished in the one hour that was scheduled. With Spectrum, I was often given a 3-4 hour window for service, and sometimes they were later than that. Makes you block off a half a day just in case. The speed and latency are always great. The reliability beats Spectrum, which would go down for minutes to hours when power flickered during storms. I don't think my Google Fiber service has been down for a single second.

johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago

No, thanks. I don't want my internet provider close my connection without any notice or shut down their whole service.

memco 4y ago
As others mentioned this could be helpful by forcing other ISPs to improve their products. I’m in the Seattle suburbs: we have two ISPs one has data caps and the other has a max of 100Mbps. There’s one fiber company that’s expanding in WA but mostly only outside of the Seattle area. It’ll be a long time before there’s any significant improvement even though there’s lots of people and tech here unless pressure increases from competition.

skunkworker 4y ago

I remember being one of the first units to get google fiber in Provo, UT back in 2014. Up until that point there was other fiber providers but they had no competition. Once google fiber came in suddenly Comcast tripled their offering speeds for no additional cost, and units and homes that had google fiber were more desirable.

karmicthreat 4y ago

Metronet has been rolling out to many places across the midwest also. Here in Grand Rapids they were the cheapest fiber choice. Verizon, Comcast all wanted very ridiculous prices and had no competing products.

mariojv 4y ago

I'm very happy with Google Fiber here in San Antonio, even though I had AT&T gigabit fiber before. I've never had an outage, we have IPv6, and the internet's so fast that the bottleneck is my home router rather than the actual connection. Plus, the connection is dug in through the ground instead of run from a telephone pole like AT&T's was, so it's less prone to interference by trees and squirrels I'm honestly surprised that our city is so well wired up that I have the choice of two gigabit providers. We aren't a tech hub or anything like that. I wonder why this location seems to be such a competitive market for ISPs. We have other big ones like Spectrum, but there's even a local provider (although, I guess they were acquired recently, so not quite local anymore): https://www.astound.com/texas/ https://www.astound.com/texas/

cityofdelusion 4y ago
I only have a single choice in S.A., Spectrum (or DSL with AT&T). Google is barely rolled out in the city and most of the rest of the city is heavily segmented to either favor AT&T or Spectrum. Grande is cool but serves a tiny piece of the city. Its basically the same as any other city unless you live in a few specific spots.
- mariojv 4y ago
  Interesting. They just rolled out in both my neighborhood and my parents' neighborhood. From my experience it seems like more single family homes are getting fiber installed than apartment complexes. I think some complexes may have a deal with certain ISPs to be serviced only by them, but I'm not really sure.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I must be in a magical spot since I have Spectrum and Grande for cable and ATT and Google (seems to be part of this push) for fiber.
jeffwask 4y ago
I still only have Gigafiber in Dellview/Shearer Hills but it's been great.
4y ago

bearjaws 4y ago

My building now has ATT fiber and Century Link, our HOA negotiated for $30 (included in HOA fee) a month for 500/500 with $30 a month to upgrade to 1000/1000. Good times. ATT is now offering 2.5 and 5gbps plans as well. Century Link fiber has been incredibly stable, the only outage we had was ironically when ATT was running the connection into the building they cut the Century Link connection... I worry that Google really missed an opportunity to roll out an expansive network that consumers were eager to adopt. ATT has been adding in fiber everywhere in Central Florida. Every new development has ATT FttH. If Google rolled in now nobody would really care unless the price was dramatically cheaper.

hylaride 4y ago
I live in Canada and our condominium negotiated for CAD$40/month (included in our strata fees) with Bell (essentially a Canadian Verizon) 1.5GB fibre internet, the full traditional cable TV package, as well as Crave streaming (which is licensed in Canada for HBO and Paramount programming). Regular consumer pricing for all this would have been near $200 (though our building wasn't wired for fibre and the deal included them installing the infrastructure). I know they probably come out ahead because it includes a lot of units that would go with a competitor (Rogers, which is our version of Comcast), but it really puts things into perspective.
EricE 4y ago
I have unsubsidized Century Link fiber for $65 a month for gigabit symmetrical and it is indeed very good. Considering Century Link was birthed from US West, the company that we fondly coined "US Worst" back in the day, I've been pleasantly surprised by (and thankful for!) their current competence.

jeffwask 4y ago

When I moved to Austin in 2013, I was told I would be in a fiberhood within a year. Almost a decade later, still no fiber in that area. I'm not holding my breath on Google Fiber expansions.

antonymy 4y ago

Completely forgot about Google Fiber, just assumed they'd abandoned it like so many other Google projects. I was so excited for it back when it was announced. Anything to disrupt the corrupt local monopoly I have to deal with here. Then they scrapped any plans to come to my city and I lost interest.

adamc 4y ago

Google fiber isn't even available everywhere in Austin, a town they "came to" long ago. So... color me skeptical about the significance of this.

jerlam 4y ago

I guess that's where my Webpass (owned by Google Fiber) money was going. They increased rates in 2020 and 2021, first time since the acquisition. It finally got me to look for alternatives, and turns out they're all competitive (or better) now.