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Google Fiber To Launch In Austin, Texas In December
retroworks writes WSJ blog reports on Austin, the third city to get fiber-optic high speed internet networks laid down by Google (Kansas City and Provo, UT were the first and second). The service averages 1 gigabit per second, about 100X the average US household speed, and costs $70-120 per month (depending on television). Google promotes the roll-outs by holding "rallies" in small neighborhoods. The sign-up process starts in December, focusing on south and southeastern parts of Austin, a Google spokeswoman said Wednesday. It was announced that fiber was coming to Austin back in April.
Good for them. and also Fuck AT&T, Comcast, Cox, Time Warner and Verizon!
...and I'm never getting fiber internet. Certain parts of the city are completely ignored for infrastructure upgrades. We just spent $10 million putting bicycle repair kits and air pumps in the richer parts of town, while delaying the sewer installation in my part of town (we were annexed by the city in 2007 and were supposed to have sewers hooked up in 2012...it's 2014 and now they're saying they "hope" it'll get done by 2015). We spent another $1-2 million on "sharrows", which are little arrows that go in the roads to show that we should share those lanes with bikes. We also just spent something like $30 million finishing a bicycling bridge over Town Lake.
In other words, rich people in the south and southwestern parts of town get whatever they want on the taxpayer dime while people in the north and east have to put up with roads without sidewalks, failing sewer systems, and lackluster police protection. Yay.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
Austin may be the third city to get Google Fiber, but that doesn't mean Kansas City is all up and running. I live in Kansas City and I'm still waiting for my Google Fiber connection to be hooked up. The fiber is now on the utility pole behind my house, but they haven't run the fiber to my house yet. A recent email from Google stated that it might be as late as spring 2015 before my neighborhood is hooked up.
In the mean time, I plan to improve my latency by hiring Lorenzo Cain to run my external HDs to/from whom ever I'm trading files with.
"the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached to it." - Grandpa Simpson
... Canada!
I thought this said Australia and got really excited for a second.
Why oh why do we have such shit internet here?
Let me just comment this, before people start piling in. These "100 Gbps" speeds that other countries have are not real. If you get a "100 Gbps" connection in South Korea for example, you are not getting 100 Gbps. The difference is that those countries don't have sue-happy lawyers and thus can make any claim they want.
The year they finally get around to having 10% of the country wired for fiber.
If you're in the part of northeast Austin where the tech companies are, I'd think Google would want to get those areas done fairly early. Technology professionals will use fast internet and spend money online. The city government may not give a shit, but I'd expect Google to start with the densest concentrations of good customers.
About two hours from Austin is College Station, where the cable company has long been providing about 10mbps for $70 or so. They just announced this will be the first place their speed will go to 100Mbps for no extra charge, and gigabit will be available for a little more. I'm thinking they noticed Google fiber down the road and figured they better get their act together.
There hasn't been much real competition until Google fiber - just DSL, at the same slow speed and the same price, but several weeks to get set-up.
I want 10mbs for around $10. Basically I don't need that much for work during the day and Netflix at night. I don't even need that great a ping time.
Keep in mind that those are the needs of someone who develops software that is heavily network centred. Once in a blue moon when I really need a full iso of a linux distro I might grumble that faster would be better but I am not sure that I would notice the difference 99.9% of the time.
As written, this headline says that Google fiber is going to launch in Austin, and that Texas is going to launch in December.
Put the comma after "Texas" too, and you'll have something that's correct.
Why would anyone want this from Google? Seriously! They will datamine every single unencrypted bit that you send and receive, for life, and sell it to the highest backdoor bidder, including the government, the credit bureaus, and walmart.
Bet you $100 they require your real name, email address, telephone number, date of birth, and social security number to sign up too.
Screw that.
Austin TX will be vaporized by the US Air Force after the "cleansing" of Dallas-FT. Worth proves pointless with the death of 5 million legal US residents and 15 million illegal aliens.
Of the 5 million US citizens incinerated 90% will be low-to-middle income democrats.
Obama will order additional thermonuclear strikes on Los Angeles, Iowa and Idaho in order to achieve balance of the number of democrats killed with an equal number of republicans killed before the November 4 elections.
So which connector do I need to flush to get Google fiber?
I live in KC and it's a real pita to find a place with google fiber. Google will only wire up an entire complex at once and they charge the owners a lot of money for it.
I live in a city that isn't stuck with Comcast or its ilk. Which of course means my city will be the last in the country to get Google fiber.
...ever heard of Canada?
Are they simultaneously expanding elsewhere?
Are they being blocked by cable companies who know they will lose to any competition?
They are also deploying weather balloons in extremely poor countries to get people anywhere on the internet.
At this rate those people will have better internet than most US citizens, and for free.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Would you believe when I moved to that area, there were cattle grazing at the intersection of 183 & 620, which was a stop sign as I recall. :)
I get so frustrated reading these kind of articles. We get 3mb for $70/month. That's 3mb with horrible latency and dropped packets. That's 3mb that frequently requires pages to be reloaded in order to complete properly.
Of course 3mb is a lot better than my first connection which was, and I kid you not, 110kb via an acoustic coupler on a good old fashion TTY. So I guess that makes my complaint a first world problem.
Oh well, never mind. Century Link just carry on with your fine upstanding service.
I can't wait until it comes (hopefully) to SLC.