Google Fiber Is Coming To Las Vegas 32
Google Fiber has confirmed that it has started construction in Las Vegas and Clark County, with its fiber internet service expected to be available "later this year." The Verge reports: On Wednesday, Google also confirmed that it's piloting simplified, "lifestyle-based" plans in Alabama and Tennesee, which were first spotted last month. The new $70 / month Core 1 Gig, $100 / month Home 3 Gig, and $150 / month Edge 8 Gig plans replace the 1 Gig, 2 Gig, 5 Gig, and 8 Gig plans that GFiber widely offers.
These new plans are also launching in all of the locations where GFiber is currently available in Arizona and North Carolina, GFiber spokesperson Sunny Gettinger tells The Verge. They're coming to most of GFiber's remaining cities within the next month, too.
These new plans are also launching in all of the locations where GFiber is currently available in Arizona and North Carolina, GFiber spokesperson Sunny Gettinger tells The Verge. They're coming to most of GFiber's remaining cities within the next month, too.
Re:Disrupting the ISP market since 2010 (Score:5, Funny)
At the rate they're going, it will disrupt the entire fiber market within just 200 more years.
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Google Fiber was never about Google rolling out Gigabit class internet everywhere. It was about scaring the telecom and cable companies into upgrading THEIR service to make other bandwidth heavy Google products like YouTube work better.
The amusing thing is that it kinda worked, too. You don't see a lot of telecoms promoting 5Mb/s DSL as a true broadband solution anymore like we did with they started.
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If your reasoning is correct, why are they still rolling out new cities, such as Las Vegas? Do you think Las Vegas residents don't have options already, to handle "bandwidth-heavy Google products"?
Any "bandwidth-heavy Google product" like YouTube, is supported just fine with traditional broadband, streams only require 10 Mbps downstream speeds. With today's cheapest broadband packages that cost $25 a month, every member of the household can view their streams at the same time, no need for fiber.
Google Fiber
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If your reasoning is correct, why are they still rolling out new cities, such as Las Vegas?
Two reasons:
1) Gotta keep up the pressure. Lots of providers offer gigabit now -- even outside of areas served by Google -- which is why Google Fiber is offering up to 8 gigabit. When Google started offering 8 Gb, the service in my brother's area (not mine, sadly) started offering 10 Gb, just so they can say they're better than Google.
2) It's a profitable business, at least in areas where the municipalities allow them to deploy the fiber cost-effectively, which are the areas they expand into.
Google Fiber has only had an impact in the specific cities where they offer service.
Nonsense.
Nice Speeds (Score:2)
The prices are up there, but so are the speeds. I currently have 300/300 with Fios, and it's only costing me $40/month, which seems like a really good deal. I don't know what I might do that would use faster speeds than that, but I'm interested in hearing what people who do have gigabit or faster speeds at home find those speeds useful for.
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Sailing the high seas?
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Never met an internet connection I couldn't saturate.
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Yeah, I have the same question. I am on a google fiber 500mbps account.
I can already watch two twitch stream full HD and upload a twitch stream full HD while the wife watches highest res netflix. And even like that I still have bandwidth left and latency is not impacted meaningfully. What would I need 8Gbs for?
Or is that for small business maybe?
Re: Nice Speeds (Score:2)
AT&T offers 5gb fiber here. I used to always get the fastest tier internet just because. Once I hit a gigabit I saw no purpose to go higher. Most networking devices cap out at 1gb. Shrug
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I recently switched my service plan (with Cox in Las Vegas) from 500 Mbps with a 1.2-TB (IIRC) monthly limit to 250 Mbps with no limit. After a couple of months of overages that basically doubled my bill, it'll be nice to have predictable billing no matter how much we end up using. 250 Mbps has been fast enough so far.
Re: Nice Speeds (Score:3)
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my home network and all the devices I own are more or less limited to gigabit speeds
Per-device, sure. But a 10G switch will provide each device with gigabit, up to your total bandwidth. My house regularly saturates my 1 Gb connection, so I'd be happy to get more if it were available, even though I wouldn't bother upgrading my NICs to 10G.
Re: back from the dead (Score:2)
Both early and late to the party (Score:3)
Google Fiber was one of the early companies to roll out reasonably priced fiber to the home. But it dragged its feet so long that now, the fiber market place is becoming saturated. In my 50-year-old neighborhood in suburban Houston, we had no fiber options just a couple of years ago, but since then, two separate companies rolled out fiber internet availability to every home. Even small towns like Buhler, Kansas have fiber internet available to every home. It's no longer the "new" thing, it's the commonplace, expected thing.
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Google Fiber was one of the early companies to roll out reasonably priced fiber to the home. But it dragged its feet so long that now, the fiber market place is becoming saturated. In my 50-year-old neighborhood in suburban Houston, we had no fiber options just a couple of years ago, but since then, two separate companies rolled out fiber internet availability to every home. Even small towns like Buhler, Kansas have fiber internet available to every home. It's no longer the "new" thing, it's the commonplace, expected thing.
Add small town Texas too. A company I'd never even heard of, Pavlov Media [pavlovmedia.com], has been running fiber through various small communities all around Texas. They apparently are from Illinois and have a lot of service dotted all over that state, but are just now making in-roads into other states. Their pricing is better than TFS's list of GFiber pricing, though whether they stay that way or it's just a foot-in-the-door price, I don't know.
I just got a notice today that service is now enabled in my area (they d
Re: (Score:2)
how shared is google fiber at the local level? Do they have up 64 homes spit off the same cable back to the CO / RT or does each home have it's own run back to the co / RT?
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Google Fiber was one of the early companies to roll out reasonably priced fiber to the home. But it dragged its feet so long that now, the fiber market place is becoming saturated.
Which was exactly the goal.
Glacially slow rollout (Score:2)
The rollout in Austin began in 2014. I'm still waiting at my house and they are at least 15 miles away.
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Same in San Antonio. They constantly stick me with ads and emails about it too. They went into a couple wealthy neighborhoods and haven't expanded in a decade.
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They stuck it up here on the northside and I'm getting 1G/s symmetrical for something like $70/mo. I remember when I had it installed and then called to cancel Spectrum the market droid at Spectrum tried to explain how much of a better deal Spectrum was. Basically zero problems in the last couple of years since they installed it. Yes, Spectrum, that went out every other night at 3AM when I was trying to do work, and had some lame-ass asymmetrical model which really doesn't work in a lot of use cases today.
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Same in San Antonio. They constantly stick me with ads and emails about it too. They went into a couple wealthy neighborhoods and haven't expanded in a decade.
I don't like to say exactly where I live, but I live in US metro area larger than yours and our experience was the same. Google ran fiber here into the richest and most expensive part of our metro area and nowhere else. They served maybe 10% of the metro area residents by this. Then they considered it a failure because it turned out that rich people really don't care that much about saving a few dollars on internet costs, so there was no real big amount of customer desire to get it.
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And meanwhile... (Score:4, Insightful)
...ATT just dropped DSL in my area and most likely, will never install fiber.
My local ISP tried for years to install fiber, and they were constantly blocked by the telcos.
Their attitude seems to be, we won't serve you and will use every dirty trick in the book to prevent anybody else from serving you.
Slow Stuff (Score:2)
Who cares about Google Fiber at this point? It was clear over a decade ago that they weren't ever gonna expand in any meaningful way. They also have a shady TOS that allows them to harvest much of your data.
I'll keep my 100Gig home fiber here from a local company that supports net neutrality and has great support.
Let's hope they do a better job this time (Score:2)
Private last-mile lock-in is sad (Score:5, Informative)
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But not expanding to rural areas where needed (Score:3)
Lumos (Score:3)
Google Fiber is pretty slow to expand in cities that they are 'in'. Because of Louisville, they are are super cautious about adding new cities and how they do it. This article is wrong about what cities they are in - they are in about 15 now. And there are a lot of complicated reasons around the right to bury, competitors, and making bets as once they spend the money to lay the cable and get those people to actually sign up.
When it started they just assumed that if they came, people would sign up and they didn't do any marketing. Which got them nowhere. Then the CEO and all the VPs were swapped out with former Comcast/Insight execs and they started marketing the hardcore telecom way and making progress.
Now also as an Alphabet company, they are transitioning out of being a Google company and calling themselves GFiber and becoming a private company. They probably won't be fully independent for another couple years, but they are in the process of changing out their ERP and backend tools. Which sucks for the employees. Before, you were part of the Google ecosystem, had the Google perks, culture, stock RSOs, and could use any of Google's backend communication and development tools. It's becoming like any other telecom and less like a tech company. The exec will run it on a skeleton crew and cut any and all perks that are deemed too expensive. The upside will be flexibility - currently with Google, making a tiny contract change with a vendor can take 6 months worth of security, privacy and legal approvals with inscrutable business process tools that were born out of stacks of lawsuits.
They were always hampered by not being able to offer 'deals' the way Comcast/Spectrum/Cox does - the pricing is super straight forward, but also not exciting. And they have a really tough time cracking older cable consumers who want their same old 'triple' bundles with cable channels, phone and internet. And those people don't understand streaming and don't want to. They just want what they've always had, and to have access to The Weather Channel etc.
Interestingly to me, I'm in NC, and Lumos is coming for them. My city 'had' Google Fiber, but very few people actually had access and they didn't seem to be laying new fiber very fast. Then Lumos came out of nowhere, copied their product and pricing offerings and started actually laying a ton of new lines. Their advertising seems to be equaling or eclipsing GFibers's as well