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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.
You can't put a price on faster porn.
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.
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
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.
What it's doing for the world is introducing a competitor to the ISP oligopoly that actually has the muscle to not be stomped on. When people start seeing how cheap it actually is to provide broadband (after all, the $300 is to cover the infrastructure installation - after that it's FREE), it might light a fire under AT&T, Comcast, etc. to actually start playing by the rules of capitalism again.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
You'd think someone who's so adamant about RAID terminology wouldn't be complaining about redundancy.
"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]
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"
The hole point of Google's experiment is to show people that 20MB, 30MB or even 50MB is not enough, we all grew complacent with our current slow internet speeds and, given the option, would chose slow internet, Google is trying to break that. What we have now is a race to the bottom where entrepreneurs don't create services which require fast internet because no-one has a fast internet, and no-one buys fast internet because there are no sites/services to use it. Google's idea is to foster a new generation of web services where bandwidth is simply not an issue.
What they are doing is the internet equivalent of the Apolo program, and you are saying "I don't want a rocket, why don't they build cars?". I don't even live in the USA and I don't have ANY hope that Google will open an ISP here, but I'm happy and hope they succeed because their work will show the whole world that we can/should have more.