Google Fiber Adds 14th City: Lee's Summit

symbolset writes "On Thursday night the Lee's Summit city council passed three resolutions to welcome Google Fiber to their community. This is the 12th community in the Kansas City Metro Area to welcome Google Fiber and the 14th city overall. The KC map now covers almost all of the KC metro area with parts in both Kansas and Missouri. 8 months into the rollout two fiberhoods have been completed, 30 more are underway and 50 more are to start by the end of summer. This covers most of the territory of both Kansas Citys ahead of schedule and completes before the end of winter so the timeline has been accelerated. As Google runs their fiber across town it appears they're putting backbones down the major thoroughfares to be trunks out to the wider communities. With Provo wired with fiber already, Austin to start next, it looks like Google Fiber's ambitions are not to deliver their symmetric gigabit uncapped, unfiltered, inexpensive fiber Internet to just a few privileged enclaves. They still have over 1,000 cities left to go who have already petitioned to be Google Fiber cities, so it's not like they're going to run out of work."

Re:Ulterior motives?

[dj245]

Its very possible the broadband itself is still profitable even if you have to string up all the lines yourself. I had absolutely 0 hassle negotiating my (not Google) 30/5 connection down to $35 a month. It made me wonder how much their costs really are if they don't bat an eye at cutting the price by 25%. Google's gigabit line (without TV) is ~$70 a month (construction fee waived). I find it completely reasonable that this is profitable- the bulk of costs are in the physical distribution infrastructure. It may even be wildly profitable. Google doesn't pay others for bandwidth. Google doesn't have national advertising campaigns with TV commercials and massive paper advertising*, which makes up a huge cost for Verizon, ATT, etc. Being an ISP will probably even help to balance their peering agreements a bit.

As for their free plans, if you are running fiber to a paying customer, running fiber to the non-paying customer 50 feet away isn't really adding that much cost over the long term- especially if you make them pay a $300 construction fee. Maybe that person decides the free plan isn't enough speed and becomes a paying customer. You can't look at internet advertising (Google's main business) if you don't have internet. It is like letting a car dealership test drive a car- obviously there are costs involved which you may not recoup, but overall it is something that helps your business more than it hurts. They could ratchet up the spying and data mining to ridiculous levels, any maybe they will, but I don't think they necessarily need to in order to make a decent profit.

When you ask "What's in it for them"?, the answer might just be "Being an ISP is profitable".

*Google might be spending a lot on advertising, but I haven't seen anything. If they have 1000 cities begging for them to come and compete, they probably don't need to advertise.

Remember

[The Second Horseman]

You can't spell "Kansas" without "NSA".