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."

Comments

Why not Houston?

[fewnorms]

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 :)

Re:Why not Houston?

[interkin3tic]

Just throwing this out there: perhaps google figured that Houston public officials were already bought and paid for by one or two telecoms, and would be determined to make this second test a failure. Houston isn't exactly known for having honest public officials acting in the interests of the public. I remember hearing that public transit or even biking was near impossible in houston due likely to gas and car companies' influence.

I feel your pain, living in Chicago. Google fiber is never coming here. Even AT&T can't buy decent 4G speeds here.

Re:Why not Houston?

[Wheelie_boy]

Because Austin, like KC, owns its own electric utility. That makes it way easier to string fiber along the power right of ways. Plus, yeah, Austin is cool.

Re:Why not Houston?

[saveferrousoxide]

627 sq miles vs 271 sq miles. Toss in the UT campus (50k+ students crammed into per capita income, AMD, Motorola, and Samsung, and I think the choice actually becomes pretty clear. Houston has small areas where the money is consolidated, oil firms, Rice, and...NASA's kinda close-ish?

Re:Why not Houston?

[bradrum]

1. Owning their own electric utility.
2. I am guessing there is already a pretty good amount of fiber in the city already....
3. High levels of actual city official interest. Meaning they are will to actually make the difficult choices happen to make this happen.
4. High visibility when South by Southwest rolls through every year.
5. Tons of apartments and properties that will go out of their way to install this stuff to lure the kids in. I used to live in apartment in Austin that was one of the first in the nation to install high speed wireless internet. This is a huge renters market.
6. Its a much smaller town than the gigantic blob cities like Dallas or Houston.

I like the speed

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:a national roll out is only 100 years away

[symbolset]

In the very announcement they link to the FCC broadband page about how to build out your own community gigabit municipal fiber network. You don't have to wait for Google. They would rather you didn't.

SXSW

[Scot Seese]

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.

Re:Meaning

[Hunter Shoptaw]

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.

AT&T announces gigabit network in Austin

[paulbsch]

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

Re:AT&T announces gigabit network in Austin

[symbolset]

Obviously they would like to drive Google's adoption rate down and costs up so as to put a stop to this gigabit nonsense before it goes national. Cut off the air supply even if they have to engage in dumping, but only in areas Google is targeting, not TWC areas they have agreed to stay out of. Not going to work. They are still ATT.