“Free internet at today’s average speeds” just seems to be a kind of lackluster way to get their foot in the door. Obviously, the money is in getting to pay for more than the basic, but still…
Ooh! It all looks just about drop-in compatible to replace my Uverse equipment, and $120 for GB service and cable TV compares very well against Uverse. (Add me to the “No ESPN? No problem” group)
That $300 install and free thereafter for basic 5 meg DSL is a crazy good deal too, compared to what the local phone company is going to charge for installation. When I had DSL with AT&T, they hit me up for $120 for the equipment and $35 a month for 6 meg service.
fml, double post
Kansas City first? Weird. Hopefully they grow toward Chicago first! 
Some questions: What does the construction fee include, exactly? Is that just what they’re calling the fee for the box and setup? They should really call it something else (especially once all the major lines are constructed), but it’s no skin off my ass.
Assuming that every new customer will have to pay the “construction” fee regardless, are they willing to amortize the fee for customers in non-permanent housing–like an apartment building? I know lots of people who could afford $30 per month for 10 months, but not all of them could afford a $300 expenditure tomorrow.
On that note, can existing customers carry over their free service to a new address after paying it the first time? Does it depends how far you move? Being charged $300 for “free” internet every time I move seems fairly nightmarish.
The proliferation of wireless & internet enabled devices makes getting by on a 5gb service much harder if you don’t live alone. I live with my parents and between the three of us we have:
- 3 desktops
- 2 laptops
- 1 xbox 360
- 2 kindle fires
- 1 iPod Touch
- 1 wireless headset
We also have the following, which could access the internet except I don’t have them connected to our network at the moment:
- 3 phones
- Nintendo Wii
- 2 regular Kindles
Additionally, my Mom and I both play MMOs. And we have family visitors who connect to our network when they come over.
We just moved to a 10 Mbps roadrunner connection from a 3 Mbps DSL connection and I’ve been luxuriating - and it’s costing us about the same as we’d pay for that 1000 Mbps connection. We are going to be all over this Google thing when it gets here.
Yeah, but I’d still be paying Time Warner for TV, so probably not worth it.
They’ve also got a chromebook on offer
I don’t think it is. Point is FiOS or any other fiber is simply not available in Kansas City (and most of the middle of the country) nor is it likely to be, so Google fiber easily beats out the non-fiber alternatives available.
At 1 gigabit, won’t my wifi router become the bottleneck?
No ESPN might be a dealbreaker for me.
Just put on a couple of large rings, prepare for a backhand and yell, “Gimme my bandwidth bitch!”
A violation that’s in reality, undetectable.
2/3rds of that $300 construction fee is going towards the $200 tablet they give you for free.
“Enormously expensive”? Are you fucking kidding me? Including taxes and B.S. fees, I’m paying roughly $70/month for my “super fast” cable internet connection from AT&T that gets about 25 Mbps down / 3 Mbps up. This is 40 times faster than that for the same price. It’s the bargain of the fucking century.
It’s much, much, much faster than anything else currently available.
Yes, at least for wireless. Higher-end routers and computers should have gigabit ethernet capability. However, it’s probably better to just think of gigabit as unlimited bandwidth. In theory, at least, that’s enough to stream about 30 Blu-Ray movies simultaneously.
FREE is too expensive for you? (Ok, not free…$300 up front…still, not bad, it averages out to less than $15 per month over the 2-year contract period.)
But that’s only 5 down, 1 up…faster than most DSL, but slower than FiOS. Ok, so let’s compare the FAST plan from Google (and hoo-BOY is it fast)
FIrst of all, FiOS is only 15Mb/s down, 5 up. A far cry from a gigabit down AND up. If all you get is internet, it’s the same price for the two ($70 a month.) FiOS prices go up from there, and their top package is over $200 a month, and still only 300 Mb/s down.
FiOS is cheaper if you bundle internet and TV, I’ll admit that, but again, slower speeds…though the bundled TV+internet from Google seems cheaper than the average Time Warner or Comcast TV+internet package.
All the packages include a Gigibit router with four ports. I suspect the whole system is pure IPV6, with an IPV4 interface in the router for backwards compatibility.
As for why Kansas City? Google was looking for a town where this capability could significantly impact. 1100 communities made their case, and Kansas City, KANSAS won. The town is really economically depressed. The Mayor of Kansas City, MISSOURI convinced them to expand to Missouri as well. KCMO is better off, but the city core has been drained by sprawl. There are companies moving to Kansas City specifically to get this speed.
Google insists that they don’t want to get into the ISP business. They want to show this is possible, and to shame the phone and cable companies into improving their shitty service. That, and they want to find out what new businesses will be invented when people have super high speed (and to own the advertising on those new businesses.)
It is fiber. They have to litterally pull a fiber cable to the drop point in your house.
Why? I haven’t had “TV” since the free-air stuff went digital. You can subscribe for $8/mo to many services to see weekly shows, news, etc. Hulu.com is an example. I think there are at least a couple more out there.
It would be interesting to see how much federal support they’re getting in this experiment. I’m in the middle of no where and, while it is nice for Kansas to get this upgrade, I wish they would have chosen to help the people who are stuck in rural areas with NO OPTIONS. They could cable in clusters with WiMAX back haul lines.
Really, really bad idea for the neighbor.
The person whose name is on the ISP bill is responsible for everything downloaded thru their connection. Pirated movies and music, how to blow up stuff, child porn, etc.
No person in their right mind would agree to this.
But if the person who rented my new apartment/house previously already had the cable laid down, why should I have to pay for that again? You see the issue I have with calling it a construction fee? Some renters are going to get screwed, having to pay for new cable to be laid every time, and some renters are going to get lucky, because the last tenant already paid that fee (and now that dwelling has free internet for life).
I know they just announced this, but some clarification for renters would be nice.
So what’s not evident from the announcement is that Google hasn’t laid down a mile of fibre yet within KC. Their plan is to have individual neighborhoods within KC to compete on participation rate and then lay down fibre based on participation rate. That way, they can lay down a huge chunk of fibre at once and save a ton of money doing so. Presumably, the construction fee is a one time cost and once your neighborhood is wired up, you’ll just have to pay a much cheaper (or even free) access fee to get your personal port connected. They’re using QR codes on all their boxes to try and automate the setup process as much as possible so, in theory, you shouldn’t even need a technician to set it up.