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Google Fiber Eliminates 100Mbps Plan For New Customers (venturebeat.com) 52

Posted by msmash from the psa dept.
Google Fiber, the division of Google parent company Alphabet that provides fiber-to-the-premises service in the U.S., will no longer sell 100Mbps broadband plans to new customers. From a report: In a blog post this morning, Fiber announced that it'll only offer gigabit (1,000Mbps) plans going forward in all 18 regions where it's launched to date. The gigabit plan's pricing -- $70 per month -- won't change, nor will its terms. (There's no data cap or throttle to speak of.) And starting tomorrow, Fiber will roll out a partnership with YouTube that'll let customers sign up for YouTube TV at the same time they sign up for Google Fiber. Google Fiber acknowledges that it's a somewhat self-serving transition.
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Google Fiber Eliminates 100Mbps Plan For New Customers More

Google Fiber Eliminates 100Mbps Plan For New Customers

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  • So it costs $10 a month less (Score:5, Interesting)

    by waspleg ( 316038 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @05:33PM (#59485528) Journal

    than what I pay, but I get 1/10th the speed. Thanks Comcast.

    • Comcast has raised my download speed a couple times but has never raised the upload speed. I just did a speedof.me and I got 131.2 Mbps down and 6.51Mbps up. Come on Comcast, give me some more upload speed.

      Chicago area. My last bill was $69.95. I get internet only.
    • I have a house in a small town in Texas where ATT is the only wired provider and I can't get LOS service due to trees. I pay $20 less per month, but my service is 1/200th the speed (5 Mbps).

      I think i have it worse than you as I'm lucky to get Tidal masters to come over the wire without interruption.

  • They just eliminated it for existing users too.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by A_Cowardly_Anon ( 6434952 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @05:46PM (#59485554)
    Just got an email: At Google Fiber, we're committed to providing you with fast and reliable Internet at a fair price. With increasingly connected homes and ever-improving technologies, speed is more important today than at any time in our history. We're continually evaluating our service to make sure we're bringing you the best experience and speed possible—so we’re making some changes. We’ve discontinued Fiber 100, your current Internet plan. Beginning in February, we’ll increase your upload and download speed from up to 100 megabits per second to up to 500 megabits per second. This new speed is only available to our current Fiber 100 customers. That’s five times the speed—which means you'll be able to download an HD TV show in seconds instead of minutes, have more connected devices than before, and an even better streaming experience. The price of your bill will increase by $5/month beginning in February. These updates will kick in automatically.

    • Just got an email:

      With increasingly connected homes and ever-improving technologies, speed is more important today than at any time in our history. . . . . The price of your bill will increase by $5/month beginning in February. These updates will kick in automatically.

      B.S.

      Not everyone needs a 1,000Mbps internet connection. For a lot of people, 50-100Mbps is plenty.

      IMO, what's important today is wide availability of broadband service, choice in providers, and several speed/price tiers. My parents would be perfectly fine with a 25Mbps connection, something Time Warner (pre-Spectrum) once offered for around $30/mo Their lowest plan is now 200Mbps for $65/mo., overkill for people who use the internet to read the news, email, and stream videos from YouTube and Netflix every n

      • For my uses these days, an ideal balance would be around $40/mo for 50/10 Mbps, but that's not offered here.

        I recently moved, and as far as I could find beforehand, there's only one actual broadband ISP in this area (unless you count satellite as "broadband"), and the cheapest plan they offer is about $36/mo for 28/3 Mbps, and that's an "introductory" price. It's gonna rise to about $61/mo in a year. At my old place, I was getting 200/10 or so, for $70/mo.

        If I'm gonna have to deal with that price range, I'

      • Hell my parents are still on a 3 Mbps DSL line - and they watch Netflix all the time. For them it's just good to have the option of something that's not dial-up.

        I'm on 100Mbps myself but honestly I could probably live with 20-25Mbps just fine if I had to. Above that level connection stability is more important to me than raw speed. Particularly while gaming I'd rather a 20Mbps connection that never goes down than a 500Mbps connection that randomly drops out every few hours.

  • Seriously, it's as much an iron rule as not needing more than 640k of RAM.

    Oh, wait, you are talking about 100 MB/s.

    You poor poor people, that's like 1/1024th ...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Vairon ( 17314 )

      It is not 100 MB/s plan that they are canceling. It is a 100 Mb/s (100 megabits per second) plan they are canceling. That is megabits not megabytes. Network transmission speeds are usually measured in bits not bytes. 100 Mb/s is only 12.5 MB/s.

  • In New Zealand (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sit1963nz ( 934837 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @06:02PM (#59485600)
    I can get Gigabit for NZ$95 (US$ 62) , uncapped, no ports blocked, no traffic shaping, no slow downs etc etc etc. (One month we did 10TB of traffic)
    Oh I get Amazon TV thrown in with my provider, others offer Netflix for free. No modem rental if I sign up for 12 months, I have a choice of about 20 different ISPs.

    So considering its a country of about 5 million , where the majority of the internet traffic heads overseas by long undersea cables, the USA is basically paying too much for stuff again.

    • Re:In New Zealand (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Chromal ( 56550 ) on Wednesday December 04, 2019 @06:13PM (#59485638)
      It's less that we're paying too much and more that our government is in a failed state and corporate neocolonialism is extracting all value from this civilization until it has been bled to death. See also: for-profit health care.
      • Yea, we have socialised healthcare which I would fight to keep. I think my entire years worth of meds costs me about $100 for our whole family
        We actually have consumer protection laws that work to protect the consumer. My sons MacBook died at 3 1/2 years, took it back to where we bought it from (under NZ laws the retailer is responsible for sorting shit out), and one new motherboard later, cost $0
        The US is a big fan of socialism... for the military.... so it can be done.
    • You can get that, (and I can too) because when we decided that taxpayers ought to fund the infrastructure (or rather when the two big telecoms companies said they wouldn't pay for it) the government of the day decided to regulate the crap out of the resultant monopoly.
      That is why Chorus does not get to decide how much it can charge the ISP's for wholesale access to the network, the regulator does. In the US by way of contrast, taxpayers have flung billions at their telecoms companies in an effort to get t
      • Actually its a partnership between the NZ government and Chorus.
        Chorus was originally part of Telecom/Spark, but realised they would not get the contract so they had to split Chorus off.
        And yes, the government (independent panel ?) decides the wholesale rate available to ALL ISPs.

        More a case of a government actually being "By the people, for the people".

        The US has shown (again) how industrial oligarchs control government policies to the detriment of the people.
        • Partnership is a charitable way of putting it, but not entirely inaccurate I suppose. :-) The reason Chorus was split off from Telecom is actually because Labour announced the funding, but not who was going to get the money, and the assumption was that it would either be shared among lots of providers, enabling competition, or a new network provider would be created, probably an SOE.
          Labour then lost the election (2008 I think?) and National announced Telecom was getting the whole $1.2 Billion.
          Labour mad
          • Which ever way you slice it, the voters actually benefitted.
            And where I live, there was zero cost to having it installed.
            And the cost in small town NZ (for example Taumarunui... not where I live) is exactly the same as in Auckland (again not where I live)

    • I'm curious, do you get 1Gbps to servers in USA and Europe or only in NZ?

      • Anywhere, its effectively treated as a dumb pipe

        • I understand but your dump pipe could be congested undersea.

          I am in Canada and I get only 28% of my usual/maxium speed on speedtest.net's Vodafone New Zealand server.

          I did get the full speed to a server in Japan and France though.

    • All thanks to something called 'competition', a concept long forgotten in the US.
      Thank your congressman for being in bed with the lobbiests from AT&T,Comcast and Google that make sure that they can maximize their profit.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Megane ( 129182 )
        That and a minor detail called "population density", a concept long forgotten in Europe.

    • the USA is basically paying too much for stuff again.

      Yeah, like the defense of New Zealand.

    • I suspect that keeping costs down is easier to do in a country of 5 million than a country of 300 million.

      • Also a country with 26 times less landmass. In the end broadband access is about running lines - and often, replacing lines (eg, moving copper up to fiber). With so much land and people in remote parts it's harder to cover the US. I'm not saying we don't have issues, but for valid comparisons you have to look at countries with similar sizes. EG, Canada, Russia, China, Brazil, Australia, etc. In general bigger (in terms of size) countries just don't have as cheap/fast of a connection compared with more

      • You have much higher population densities in your cities + you have higher volumes which means you should be buying stuff cheaper + lots of the stuff in made in the USA, NZ has to buy it all in.
    • You also have a Department of Internal Affairs trying to ban videos and copies of Manhunt...
      • You have a piss poor democracy. Gerrymandering, voter deregistration , failing to supply enough means for people to vote, etc etc etc.
        • Which doesn't seem to have a whole lot to do with internet speeds, plans, or pricing. Which makes as much sense as me pointing out NZ has the highest rate of suicide for young folks. It's a red herring, and not even a good one...

          Now if we wanted to swing it back to the topic at hand: can you really say your internet connection is "no ports blocked, no traffic shaping" when you have government agencies censoring it? Because last time I checked, DCEFS shapes and blocks traffic for over 75% of NZ internet

    • What city & provider?

  • Considering that they're withdrawing from some markets altogether (eg, Louisville, KY) and that their pace of installation has slowed way down essentially everywhere else (they're theoretically still in my area, but haven't been installing new fiber now for about 2 years), this is just further evidence that they're in the process of winding down the entire Google Fiber enterprise.
    • This is sadly true. They've lost most of their leadership and at one point rotated through like 4 people in charge in less than a year. It's been a mess since day one and continues to falter. It's only a matter of time before Google shuts it down completely.

    • My city was announced for Google Fiber some years ago. Everybody was excited. I redid my home LAN with gigabit everywhere to ensure nothing inside my network would slow down this miraculous Google Fiber connection.

      There were Bechtel crews trenching major roads. Fiber huts got built and the surrounded by fierce-looking fences. These Google people weren't playing.

      Oh wait. Yes they were. About four years have passed now since the huts went in and essentially nothing else has happened. A handful of apar

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Megane ( 129182 )

      San Antonio has been a Google Fiber city for a while. But the last peep from the project was at least a year ago, when people complained that they wanted to put one of their huts in a public park. They've supposedly started on two of 20 or so regions, but I haven't seen anything about it, even negative press, since then. Even worse for me, I'm in an adjoining small city and adjacent to one of those two regions, but it's not even colored in on their map. (Probably because they would need to negotiate a separ

  • Gee, the dozen or so people who can actually get Google Fiber are gonna be steamed.
  • Gimme-Gimme-GIMME!
    Oh, wait, Comcast
  • I forgot about google fiber since it isn't available to me but the google of today would never think to launch it. Increasingly all google does is incrementally put more commercials in youtube. I am a heavy user of the google earth PC application, would they ever develop that today? No way. They have no interest in anything that doesn't make you log into their servers.

    • Last I heard, they suspended further rollouts in 2016 so even as an existing Google product, it could end up like G+, Hangouts, Goggles, Picasa, Wave, Inbox, and numerous other projects.

  • I was signing up for Spectrum TV and internet a year ago, and the cheapest internet plan they could offer was 400Mbps for 60 bucks a month (80 after 12 months). I specifically asked them if I could just get their old 100Mbps plan, and they said that it's not possible any more. I think it really is a plot to just milk customers for more money using big numbers as a justification. I for one could do fine on a 100Mbps connection if it cost less than 50 bucks a month.

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