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Google Announces Plans, Pricing For Kansas City Fiber Network
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.
Kansas City, Kansas City here I come.
They got some crazy strands of fiber there and I'm a gonna get me some!
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
If there were a half dozen people in my house, all plugged in, it might be worth it. But I'm paying 1/3 as much and even with all three computers streaming radio and TV and torrents, it's still plenty fast for me.
Not enough to get me to move to KC.
Free Martian Whores!
From the article:
...And people who want much slower but conventional broadband can get it for free if they pay a $300 connection fee.
You only pay if you want gigabit speeds. And it's the same price as a 50/25 FiOS connection, so that seems pretty fair to me. Of course, even my 50/25 FiOS is far faster than what most servers seem able to deliver, so it's unlikely to make much difference unless you're planning to host a reasonably heavy server...
You can't put a price on faster porn.
well, Verizon charges, what, $200 per month for 300 Mb/s FiOS? I'd say what Google's offering is a pretty good deal.
Those prices could be competitive, depending on what's being offered. $120 for TV+internet - if it's comparable to Direct TV I'd hop all over it.
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.
under either incumbant ISP's or our politicians. Lack of widespread broadband isn't a technical problem. It's purely political.
I posted this on Slashdot months ago:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2497294&cid=37860766
Since it's election season, I posed a question about broadband availability to the 10 candidates for our local state representative. Only 3 responded, and... Outside of Google lighting a fire, my parents are literally going to die of old age before they get broadband.
http://www.mathewbinkley.org/?p=392
Where exactly have you seen prices for 1Gbps Internet access that make $70/month seem high?
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
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.
So 5/1 is free for at least 7 years (with a $300 connection fee), or pay $70/month for 1000/1000.
What if I need more than 5 Mbps down but less than 1000 and I don't want to pay $70/month? Even 50/10 would be awesome!
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
$75/mo just for internet seems steep for most people. And very few who really need 1G can't afford it. It's not like the relatively piddle amount of money it's saving them is going to induce a massive wave of job creation.
Now if it were 100Mb for $25 that would be more news worthy in my opinion.
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)
No, it's not comparable to DirecTV. Most of your DirecTV bill goes to the content providers, not DirecTV.
So with this being only $50 for the TV part you'll get fewer channels. It won't be DirecTV's selection, but it might still be worth $50. Heck I know a lot of people who would rather have fewer channels and only pay $50.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Well, sure. $70/month isn't bad at all. But $75!? Come on! That's an outrage!
yvan eht nioj
You like so many others are confusing QoS with traffic shaping. QoS is good - done right. If done improperly, its bad. Traffic shaping, on the other hand, is generally what causes complaints - frequently baselessly.
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. That's a good thing. QoS is all about QUALITY of transport. Traffic shaping, on the other hand, is all about restricting some for the benefit of others. That's different.
I'm paying $45/mo for 10/2mbit from Time Warner - that comes to about $4.50/mbit for download speeds. Factor in that the upload speed is even crappier...
You'd think someone who's so adamant about RAID terminology wouldn't be complaining about redundancy.
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?
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
"so it's unlikely to make much difference unless you're planning to host a reasonably heavy server..."
Good Luck With That-
-1 google, your shiny is now worthless to me
"
Unless you have a written agreement with Google Fiber permitting you do so, you should not host any type of server using your Google Fiber connection
"
http://support.google.com/fiber/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2659981&topic=2440874&ctx=topic [google.com]
The one time fee internet looks like it's 5Mbits down/1Mbit up.
https://fiber.google.com/plans/residential/
They're not burying the cables? Is wind not a problem out there? I thought they had tornadoes...
Kansas City resident here ... and a fairly old one to boot.
Tornadoes happen, but each tornado affects a relatively small area. I was a tornado spotter in my youth (yes, we actually train volunteers to do this in "Tornado Alley"), and I've only seen three tornadoes in my life, despite actively looking for them when conditions are favorable to their formation. This is why there are plenty of 100+ year old homes in the area ... the likelihood of a tornado hitting a specific location in any given year is very low.
Kansas City itself is somewhat protected by the "urban heat bubble" effect - the Kansas City metropolitan area is a bit more prone to heat lightning, but less prone to tornadoes than the more rural surrounding areas.
As for just plain old wind ... lines on poles and the poles themselves easily handle the fairly routine wind gusts of up to 35mph. Storms might have 45mph winds, which usually is also fine. On rare occasions wind speeds are higher than that, like last week's storms to the north of Kansas City that had 90mph winds ... those storms will knock out wire-on-pole services to neighborhoods, but having your internet service disrupted for a few days isn't much of a problem since more than likely your power would be out as well for the same period of time.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
Seemingly like everything Google does these days, this is another half-hearted effort which sucks because I would really love to see someone stick it to the telco/cable dualopoly, especially now that Verizon has a back-room handshake deal not to compete with the cable companies for wireline and the cable companies won't start their own wireless network (look it up - VZW is buying spectrum from the cable co's and has terminated all further FIOS expansio, right about the time their old telco/infrastructure CEO retired and their new MBA CEO took over). We also have a bunch of republican state governments (sorry - so far it's 100% republican) that have made it illegal for city governments to deploy fiber, even if they sell access to third-party ISPs and don't run one themselves)
Anyway, Google is only going to roll out fiber to neighborhoods where at least 10% of the potential customers sign up in advance, not to the entire city. I could totally understand running your fiber backbone rings then waiting to extend it into individual neighborhoods until people sign up - limit your capex for deployment - but this seems a bit insane.
I also wish Apple/MS/et al would go after the market... it is obvious that the owners of legacy pipes intend to install toll roads on all internet access and have all made back-room handshake deals not to compete with each other. With billions in cash in the bank there is no reason the tech giants couldn't start an open-access internet utility to string fiber (just to the dense cities) to homes and businesses... Imagine Microsoft, Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, et al throwing their weight behind OpenInternetCo and designating the top 50 metro markets in the US (which would cover a huge percentage of the population) to receive cheap gigabit internet. Once the network starts building up you can run your CDNs on it and avoid interconnect/peering fees. Over time more and more of the traffic can stay inside OpenInternetCo's network.
If they don't jump on some sort of bandwagon soon (deploying fiber, $$millions$$ on lobbying, etc) they will find their internet-based services useless as the gatekeepers ratchet down bandwidth caps and try their hardest to soak up all the profits. We are also destined to see more and more "our video service doesn't count against your cap, but Netflix/iTunes/Google Play sure does! Oh and your cap is being 'enhanced' to a lower and $5 cheaper tier this month but the upper tier will cost $40 more"
The hilarious thing is that people often use the density/rural argument to explain why that's impossible in the US** but Verizon's own FIOS numbers prove that is BS. Once you stop investing in copper upkeep, deploying fiber is a relatively cheap operation. Verizon says they spent 20 billion to deploy fiber across half their footprint, but if you look at capex+upkeep on copper you realize a huge chunk of that fiber cost was offset! Even if we assume 20 billion, then extrapolate from there OpenInternetCo could cover the top 50 metro areas for less than 100 billion, the amount of money that just Apple has as cash in the bank. Presumably they'd kick in cash and bring on investors so I would guestimate 25-50 billion from all the tech giants combined would be enough. If I were them, I'd buy Sprint to get access to a cellular provider to ensure fair competition in that space but also to get access to their Tier-1 backbone and cross-country fiber network. Also add in someone like Frontier or Embarq/Century and you have an existing (and profitable) base to build from. You could eventually roll fiber to less dense markets and cover 80-90% of the US, and turn a profit.
**This argument also doesn't account for places like Dallas, TX that is plenty dense enough (and certainly in the city core) to support fiber deployments - the suburbs have it at far less density but that's because the suburbs were part of the initial FIOS deployment but the city proper is ATT territory and ATT isn't going to divert *any* CxO bonuses to infrastructure under any circumstances.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Isn't this pretty much a universal condition for residential internet?
Keep on knockin'
https://robbiecrash.me
You might want to check with FIOS. I was pulling my bill online yesterday and was hit with an ad for FIOS Quantum. Speeds up to 300/65 in some places. The best I can do is 75/35, but it's a hell of an upgrade from 35/35. My bill goes up $20 a month, so I'm paying $59/mo for 75/35 (part of a bundle of course). ANyway, if you haven't logged into your VZ account lately you might want to check. I didn't get any emails or hear a peep about it until I logged in.
Yeah and...
"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.
No sigs in BETA. Beta SUCKS.
Yes, you, Comcast, Rogers, AT&T, Verizon, and every other shitty ISP on the planet. For years now, you've slowly increased the cost of internet access while the speeds have remained largely unchanged for consumers (over 5 years ago, I had a 20Mbps connection for $40/month, now the same connection is almost $70/month). You haven't taken that money and improved the infrastructure, you've just been cashing in big time. I have a gig router with N wireless and cat 5e cables with gigabit nics, and have for nearing a decade. My hardware has been screaming for you to saturate it with bits, yet all you've done is force us to pay more money because you own monopolies (municipality cable, the "last mile" if you will, the telco lines, etc).
This is refreshing. Even though it's hard to identify "privacy, anonymity, and trust" with Google, they're still over 9000x better than any of these other guys. It's nice seeing what a company that isn't a big ISP with hundreds of millions in PURE NET REVENUE pouring in for ZERO WORK AT ALL can do. This really demonstrates what the outcome of spending money on infrastructure is. We have a point of reference now. Look at Google, now look at your ISP. Two orders of magnitude improvement. Two. WTF. This is putting KS on the map with the likes of EU countries and Japan in terms of internet capabilities. And what's more, the cable service is over IP, on top of a Gbps connection. The last time I checked cable prices here, Comcast wanted $89.99 for basic + a few decent channels for digital. For all the good stuff, it's like $139.99, and that's NOT including the internet connection. They'll let you bundle that with a basic 5Mbps for only $39.99 more per month! You're looking at > $200 for a connection > 20Mbps and a decent cable setup.
I really hope Google puts these jokers out of business. All of them. It's time for a revolution from the status quo.
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.
Keep on knockin'
https://robbiecrash.me
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.
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....
Come play Moral Decay!