Google Announces Plans, Pricing For Kansas City Fiber Network 263
Kiyyik writes "Google just announced the details behind their inaugural fiber optic service in Kansas City. They're doing a set of packages including $120/month for tv plus internet, $75/month for internet alone, and regular 'conventional' internet for a one time $300 fee. Rollouts are starting in the central areas and will work their way out on a demand basis: at least ten percent of a neighborhood must sign up for the service before Google will come in and start hanging fiber." Update: 07/26 22:04 GMT by T : Nick Kolakowski points out at GeekNet's Slash Cloud that this Google will probably hinge future developments on how well the Kansas City push works.
Re:Unusual Pricing (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Unusual Pricing (Score:5, Insightful)
What I really want is a good competitor to bring some pain to the existing providers who overcharge, underserve, and have no incentive to lower prices. And that includes content makers like Viacom. I hope Google succeeds.
Re:Unusual Pricing (Score:2, Insightful)
$75 --> 7.5 cents/Megabit
Comcast: $50 for 30Mb I believe? --> $1.77/Megabit
Re:Unusual Pricing (Score:5, Insightful)
Where exactly have you seen prices for 1Gbps Internet access that make $70/month seem high?
Re:For some reason (Score:4, Insightful)
it's unlikely to make much difference unless you're planning to host a reasonably heavy server
For bandwidth, yes, but there's a big advantage in having such a surplus: you don't have to do aggressive QOS to prevent latency spikes and loss. Wanna game while someone else watches Netflix? No problem.
How is this really helping the world? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if it were 100Mb for $25 that would be more news worthy in my opinion.
Re:For some reason (Score:4, Insightful)
Would your grandmother/parents/other non-techie friends pay $9/month for internet if it was a 3 year agreement paid up front from a fairly reputable (as in not likely going under) company?
My grandfather paid $15/month for dial up, I'll wager Google is giving these $300 customers more then 56Kbps even if they throttle them..
I pay over $50 a month for FiOS and I don't even get over 30 Mbps.. If i wanted gigabit speeds I could not even request it from FiOS... and their plans hit $300/month without hitting *half* this service... I'd say the pricing is great
I think right now servers & computers will be the bottleneck... Unless you're writing your download to a SSD or RAID array... you barely can handle a 1 Gbps write (quick math, 1Gbps = ~125MB/s)
Re:How is this really helping the world? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:For some reason (Score:5, Insightful)
QoS, for example, ensures my SSH packets are delivered on a timely basis and that it doesn't wund up waiting behind the packets of my neighbor's torrents. In theory, my neighbor still gets his bandwidth, but his packet latency will be slightly higher; which is still perfectly acceptable for that type of traffic.
This is a valid correction, but the GP's point holds regardless. Given sufficient bandwidth, QoS is as unnecessary as traffic shaping. Your SSH packet -- or, more importantly, my VOIP packet -- may end up waiting behind the neighbor's torrent packet, but since his 1500-byte torrent packet only blocks ours for 15 microseconds, who cares?
Re:EVIL-TOS: Not allowed to host any type of serve (Score:5, Insightful)
Isn't this pretty much a universal condition for residential internet?
Re:For some reason (Score:4, Insightful)
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates, 1981
No matter how much space or bandwidth we have we will find a way to need more.
Re:Needs more service/pricing tiers (Score:5, Insightful)
The hole point of Google's experiment is to show people that 20MB, 30MB or even 50MB is not enough, we all grew complacent with our current slow internet speeds and, given the option, would chose slow internet, Google is trying to break that. What we have now is a race to the bottom where entrepreneurs don't create services which require fast internet because no-one has a fast internet, and no-one buys fast internet because there are no sites/services to use it. Google's idea is to foster a new generation of web services where bandwidth is simply not an issue.
What they are doing is the internet equivalent of the Apolo program, and you are saying "I don't want a rocket, why don't they build cars?". I don't even live in the USA and I don't have ANY hope that Google will open an ISP here, but I'm happy and hope they succeed because their work will show the whole world that we can/should have more.
Re:EVIL-TOS: Not allowed to host any type of serve (Score:4, Insightful)
It makes no sense for a company to offer this to residential clients. They can charge a premium for a business plan which offers official support for servers, and generally grants an unfiltered connection with a static IP. Why cut yourself out of that mark up?
Sucks, but makes sense.
Re:For some reason (Score:4, Insightful)
5Mbs/1Mbs asymmetric access at a one-time $300 connection fee (lump-sum or paid as $25/mo over 12 months) and $0/month service is a sharp discount compared to similar low-end broadband offerings, but the actual pitch wasn't to get broadband "free" or "cheaper" than existing broadband, it was gigabit/s broadband at prices that were competitive with the prices at which existing (much slower) broadband services were being offered. Which Google's pricing for its symmetric gigabit/s tiers (being fairly comparable in price to what other providers are offering for plans offering "up to" speeds in the tens of megabits/s) certainly would seem to be.
Re:EVIL-TOS: Not allowed to host any type of serve (Score:5, Insightful)
Google's objective isn't to become an auto-manufacturer or to become a supplier to them. Their objective isn't to directly make money on this at all.
Their objective is to free up the billions of eyeball-hours spent on driving so they can be used for something else....