Google Fiber Expands To Olathe, Kansas 120
skade88 writes "If you are one of the lucky 125,000 people who live in Olathe, Kansas, the rest of us congratulate you on your new amazing $70.00/month, 1 GB Google fiber service. Google also announced they will be letting us know about further cities that will be wired up with Google Fiber service soon. This shows that Google Fiber is not just a sandbox they are going to keep in Kansas City, Google Fiber is a real business they will keep expanding. In other exciting news, the FCC wants to see at least one community in each state with 1 Gigabit home service by 2015."
Re:Wow, amazing (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the providers in South Korea and Japan have figured out that they have a market for the out of date networking equipment they are replacing.
Re:One community in each state (Score:4, Interesting)
Not only are they talking one community per state, they are counting each suburb as a different community, so it seems to me they are saying it will be years before it moves beyond the suburbs of capital cities. Which is a real shame because obviously this is a great ISP. Almost makes me wish I lived in Kansas City but... nah.
In 2002 they had residential 100mbit symmetrical connections for ~$50/month in Sweden. Still cant get anything near that in most of the US. But it's good to see google doing something about it, just a little frustrating that it's obviously going to be so long before this sort of thing is available where I live.
I find it interesting .... (Score:5, Interesting)
From Kansas City,
1500 miles to Google (Pacific ocean)
1000 miles to Atlantic ocean
660 miles to Canada
660 miles to Gulf of Mexico
And is uniquely situated, split between Kansas and Missouri.
Really does make for a great statement to grow the broadband infrastructure from the center out.
Re:How do they make profit ? (Score:3, Interesting)
In sweden i pay $9 for 100/100mbit fiber, so i'm pretty sure google is raking in a profit for $70 a month even if its for 1gbit/s.
Re:1 GB Google fiber service (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, there really is some ignorance towards basic computing terms out there.
If the service was 1 GB/s, then that'd be 8 Gb/s. Let alone that the fine summary says "1 GB Google fiber service", so is wrong twice over by using B and no '/s' or 'ps'.
All laughing aside, data transfer speed is rated in bits per second (bps or b/s), while data storage capacity is rated in Bytes (B), with a capitalised prefix T/era, G/iga, M/ega. There's a huge difference between B/b, and even major stores which sell lots of computer equipment get them mixed up. I'm sure I don't need to preach to the converted, as they say, but I've started so I'll finish..
I'm often annoyed by things like "portable 500 Gb drive" which if such an ad was correct should only have 62.5 GB of space. The same the other way around where Internet (capital I) service providers sometimes use B when advertising speeds. It doesn't help when the idiots who should know what they're on about say the wrong things for such simple matters.
Maybe it should've said "125 MB/s Google fiber service" (which I know is the wrong way to report data speed, unless you're trying to simplify how fast you can pillage the Internet with your download speed in an easy-to think of way), but then that would confuse the poor common IT-illiterate users into thinking that it was wasn't "big" and "fast".
Likewise, but on a tangent, years ago the memory in a computer wasn't a large selling factor, but now laptops are advertised with the memory size before the drive space. This can only help to confuse users when they see "Intel Pentium Dual Core 4GB 500GB 14" HD LED..." for sale. Previously the standard used to be drive space before memory size, and sometimes is still done that way today. No fixed standard. Does it have a 4 GB drive with 500 GB memory?! Of course not, but I'm sure some might still ask the question in bewilderment.
For the record, I've only got 30 Mb/s service here in the UK from Virgin.