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Google Fiber's Austin, Texas Rollout Confirmed
skade88 writes "As earlier rumors suggested, Google Fiber will indeed roll out in Austin, Texas, with the first homes receiving service in mid-2014. The delay is due to the need for a whole new fiber network to be deployed for the service. It will only be deployed within the Austin City limits. Google says in early 2014 they will allow people in Austin register their address for service. They plan to deploy to the neighborhoods with the most interest."
Still think this should've gone to Houston. Search google, there's a TON of dark fiber already in the Houston area. With a bit of help, that could've been a great infrastructure right there. Oh well, guess since Austin is the hip place to be in Texas, we just get bypassed :)
Veni, Vidi, Velcro!
at the rate they are going
but I don't like:
- Google already has access to galaxies worth of data from ads, web beacons, etc.
- Now they will have all that, plus your DNS queries
- They will have your actual name, address, phone number, etc.
- Will they allow you to switch DNS providers?
- Will they allow backdoor boxes in their data centers?
- To whom are they accountable?
Questions, questions...
Of all the possible candidates in the U.S., Google chooses to roll Google Fiber out to the city that hosts South By Southwest every year, where countless thousands of media, music & technology movers, shakers and influencers congregate along with the journalists covering them.
Google will recoup the est. $50m rollout costs for Austin in just 1-2 festivals from word of mouth and countless thousands of mentions by journalists in national & international articles. Fifty million, you say? They'll get $200m worth of free advertising back in 2 years, when the "OMFG it's SO FAST" comments start bleeding into every story you see out of South by.
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
austin is a hipster town where SXSW takes place every year
Houston has 2 sports teams that i know of
google's fiber channel list has no HBO and no expensive sports packages. I bet houston has a lot more sports fans than austin.
no HBO option
and the spanish language stations seem to be missing a few big names
You can actually back up all your stuff to another machine across the Internet in a reasonable amount of time.
That's a BS post. I'm in the heart of the KC roll out and Google has lowered the bar at least once on neighborhoods getting in. They base interest by the percentage of the population of the fiberhood that enrolls for the $10 deposit. This is true "vote with your dollar" work here. It's really about how much the community is willing to go out and spread the word and get their neighbors on board.
Telecommuting, it can save more gas than any hybrid pretty much if you work in an office you can telecommute. Huge quality of life benefits from this when combined with flexible hours etc. The huge this is google is the only major thing since modems and ISDN that's symmetric it's a gig down and a gig up.
Public Service Announcement: Google Fiber requires you contact them for 'details' if you intend to use the service for a business. I believe this is in violation of FCC-10-201 'Network Neutrality' transparency. Of course I'm more concerned with their terms of service prohibitting hosting any server of any kind, as I consider that a violation of the blocking prong of the Network Neutrality rules (though the case of the residential client blocked from the remote server is the more common understanding of the blocking rule). In any event, for 7 and a half months now, I have had an outstanding NN(form 2000F) complaint with the FCC (ref#12-C000422224). It is currently in "enforcement review" after having been bounced once to the Kansas Attorney General who was not interested in pursuing the matter, though referred me back to the FCC for help. I think it is important to realize how google is participating in a widespread practice of disempowering residential internet users from the ability to provide traditionally unforseen and innovative services to the rest of the internet, in order to protect the established players (cough *them* cough) existing moneymaking servers from new competition, enabled by such advancements as the IPv6 solution to the scarce IP address problem. In fact, if you follow enough of my information warfare links here, you'll find that Google's CEO even agrees with me fairly strongly, but is apparently content to let the lawyers dictate the shape of Google's Gigabit residential internet of the near future. So be it.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3503531&cid=43033891
Just after Google's announcement, AT&T made an announcement that it will bring a gigabit network to ATX: https://www.google.com/search?q=at%26t+gigabit+austin&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:unofficial&client=firefox-a