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Google Fiber Expands To Olathe, Kansas
skade88 writes "If you are one of the lucky 125,000 people who live in Olathe, Kansas, the rest of us congratulate you on your new amazing $70.00/month, 1 GB Google fiber service. Google also announced they will be letting us know about further cities that will be wired up with Google Fiber service soon. This shows that Google Fiber is not just a sandbox they are going to keep in Kansas City, Google Fiber is a real business they will keep expanding. In other exciting news, the FCC wants to see at least one community in each state with 1 Gigabit home service by 2015."
So 1 GB? Thats only 8 seconds at 1 Gb/s. Now thats a low data cap, or a bad summery.
This is incredible.
Korea and Japan must be looking on in envy. Why, by the year 17000, over 50% of US homes will have a fast internet connection! Won't that be something!
to set up Gigabit internet service in 52 communities?
That's a real lofty goal.
And how much will this cost taxpayers in the for of subsidies for the large telecoms?
>In other exciting news, the FCC wants to see at least one community in each state with 1 Gigabit home service by 2015.
That's cool. Can it be where I am in New Mexico? I don't even get decent 1.5mbps DSL here.
I'll take 100Mbit for $7
All it takes is $$, or $$$, or $$$$, or maybe even $$$$$ or $$$$$$. With enough money you can run your own fiber.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I am one of those residents - (Just moved back from Chicago-Land last October) - For those curious the city is pronounced O-LAYth-UH We are a suburb of KC and it seems the Olathe Government took cues from the issues with the city that Google was having In KC and tried to ease Google's issues by putting what they want explicitly in the writing of the contracts. I hope it arrives sooner than later and thank you for your Congratulations
What can you do with 1 Gigabit Google Fibre that you can't do with 20Mbps DSL or 50Mbps Cable internet? Obviously I am talking about residential customers and not data centers or commercial users. Complete overblown PR hype by Google and lovingly covered by media outlets getting on the bandwagon desperate for content to fill their websites and news-cycles.
That Google choose what is pretty much the geographic center of the (continental) US to start this endeavor.
From Kansas City,
1500 miles to Google (Pacific ocean)
1000 miles to Atlantic ocean
660 miles to Canada
660 miles to Gulf of Mexico
And is uniquely situated, split between Kansas and Missouri.
Really does make for a great statement to grow the broadband infrastructure from the center out.
What is this? The Kansas local newspaper?
I'm not normally one to criticize Slashdot editors for their choice of articles, but this seems just a little bit too local. High speed internet is being rolled out across the globe. In the Netherlands, you can just order it built to your home or office, and if you're lucky, the laying of the actual cable itself doesn't cost any money, so you just pay your local internet provider.
Or is this just the 1st place in the USA that has entered the 21st century? Welcome.
p.s. For the skeptics, here's a random link of fibreoptic internet in Veendam, which is the Dutch equivalent of a prairie town in Kansas.
http://www.veendamkrijgtglasvezel.nl/
1GB/s line, only 70 bucks / month
How do they make any profit ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Who love to point out that their country -- often the size of one of our states -- has had this for a long time. Some people will never, ever get it.
... why Cox is buying up all the small CATV systems in Kansas that it can.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Just now 1GBs? And for 70$.... http://www.skynet.lt/Internet/ - 40$ a month for quite some time already.
I'm tired of comcast and their BS. There is no purpose to be with them anymore. They monitor, throttle, and even limit the things you can do. Watching a video will be throttled differently than loading a webpage and torrents just about guarantees a letter in the mail telling you to stop it unless you use a virtual machine or something. They are too much of a headache to deal with and I'm glad to see Google is competing because AT&T isn't going to cut it but on some days I wonder...
stupidity officially arriving to Internet...welcome kansas
whoa...
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
I pay more than $70/mo for Comcast's "20 mbps", 6 strikes, and ALL of their competitor's websites (COX/Charter/Brighthouse) simply redirect to Comcast's order page with a message that says "Sorry, we don't service your area Comcast does". There are no reasonable alternatives. Yeah Capitalism!?!?
> the FCC wants to see at least one community in each state with 1 Gigabit home service by 2015.
Aren't these the same helpers who spent a decade forbidding fiber to the house "to help us"?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I see some comments above saying Google can't possible do this and make a profit. I live in a rural area of Sweden and we got fiber to this small area years ago. And yes, we can have 1 GB/s if we pay for it, but it's quite expensive so most people go with 10/100mbit or 100/100mbit. Sure, you won't get 100mbit when downloading from China but you do mostly get it when downloading from Europe (and that means that most torrents download at full speed). 1 GB/s isn't "magic" or "impossible", it's just seems like magic because the US is years behind places like Sweden, Japan, Korea, etc. Locally 10/100 costs $52/month, 100/100 cost $62/month. 1GB/s costs $156/month. Google offers 1 GB/s for about half the price of what it costs here, so they are doing good, but still: I'm not that impressed.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
Admittedly as someone who has not really followed the google fiber thing, what is the catch? Does google get to monitor all of your traffic and pop up ads on your PC or sell that information to advertisers? Do you have to accept their CA so they can also monitor all of your SSL traffic? Do they port-block, or block VPN?
Bandwidth is nice and all, but for many uses latency matters more -- any numbers on what that will look like?
"If you are one of the lucky 125,000 people who live in Olathe, Kansas, the rest of us congratulate you on your new amazing $70.00/month, 1 GB Google fiber service.
They can afford it.
The median income for a household was $61,111, and the median income for a family was $68,498 (these figures had risen to $72,634 and $82,747 respectively as of a 2007 estimate. Males had a median income of $45,699 versus $30,217 for females. The per capita income for the city was $24,498. About 2.4% of families and 4.1% of the population were below the poverty line, including 4.1% of those under age 18 and 4.1% of those age 65 or over.
The median age in the city was 32.9 years. 30% of residents were under the age of 18; 7.5% were between the ages of 18 and 24; 32.1% were from 25 to 44; 23.1% were from 45 to 64; and 7.2% were 65 years of age or older. The gender makeup of the city was 49.5% male and 50.5% female.[2010 Census Data]
Olathe, Kansas
The 2012 Median Income of US households was $45,018 per annum.
Household income in the United States
Olathe is 20 miles southwest of Kansas City.
In Kansas City, Google offers three tiers of service. The baseline fiber installation fee is $300, or $25 per month for 12 months. After paying that amount, Kansas City residents are guaranteed seven years of free broadband Internet service at current national âoeaverageâ speeds. The second tier costs $70 per month for the super-fast Internet service, and the top tier, which includes Google's TV service, costs $120 per month. The $300 installation fee is waived for the top two tiers.
Google Fiber Expanding Superfast Internet Service to Olathe, Kansas
Our county's broadband initiative to roll out fiber to all residents was thwarted by GOP corporatists like Nikki Haley who gave a legal monopoly on fiber access to AT&T - to prevent the county rolling out its own fiber network - even after the Federal Government paid for it and even though the county is legally obligated to hook everyone up as part of that Federal contract.
State's Rights! GO REPUBLICANS! WOOOOOHOOOO! God forbid rural poor people get inexpensive, reliable Internet access! YEE-HAW!
All that has to happen is some bigot in Kansas to type in a chat room "There was a Sardar"...and down goes the network.
and i don't care
Please please please get it right:
1 GB = 1 Gigabyte, a measure of data
1 Gb/s = 1 Gigabit per second, a measure of data rate
1 MB = 1 Megabyte, a measure of data
1 mB = 1 millibyte, a measure of data that doesn't exist
This isn't grammar, it actually changes the meaning of your useless, ranting post. Get it right!
I live in Olathe and we have had fiber to the curb for a few years. I had 25 up/down for a while and downgraded it to 10/10 to save cost. I didn't notice a huge difference other than large files. Of course the difference between 25 and 10 is pretty small maybe with gb I would find new ways to use the internet that I had not considered before.
Isn't the high cost the reason so many people hate Comcast, Time Warner, etc? $70 is a lot for Internet, for a business it would be fine but for home use that's way expensive.
Meh. Twenty Eight dollars a month for 6Mb/s DSL is good enough for me. I'd go faster but for not much more money. Point is a connection is valuable, but very high bit rates will not make the experience that much better.
I literally have fiber in my back yard. Thank you SureWest.
Can choose Comcast. Piss on you Comcast.
ATT uverse or DSL. Thank you for the good $/bit ratio.
GOOG fiber is coming soon. Hype and price, no thanks. Though the 300 dollar for 5mb/s service offer is tempting.
You are parched, how much for a glass of water in the desert? The second, the third. The ninety-ninth? Once satiated the price you are willing to pay decreases to the point more glasses of water have no real value to you. In this case the 1gb/s 'glass' costs a lot more than the 6mb/s one that satisfy the need.
then I'll order it now, during the lunch break.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Yeah, can not have anything to do with the fact that the highest line capacity telephone line switching center in the world was at one time in the caverns around KC. And all those backbones running in the rail rights-of-way coming together there.
NOPE, taxpayers look at what YOU BUILT, and again, please understand why DARPA exists.
As an Olathe-ite (-ian? whatever) I can't wait. Tired of being Comcasted and Uversed. Preparing to be Googled.
Don't ping my cheese with your bandwidth!
There is not yet one inch of Google fiber actually run here in Olathe. I figure minimum 6 months before they start laying it, and several years before it is available to more than a few.
In that time much can change.