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.

Comments

I live in the Northeast part of Austin...

[Dimwit]

...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.

Re:I thought this said Australia

[jonwil]

Blame the combination of Telstra (who don't particularly like the idea of a network it has no control over and earns no money from as would have been the case for a FTTP NBN), Foxtel (who see a high speed network killing off their overpriced crappy pay TV offering) and the big movie/TV companies (who see a high speed network as leading to increased levels of piracy)

nearby, the cable co announced gigabit cheap

[raymorris]

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.

Re:nearby, the cable co announced gigabit cheap

[TWX]

They're full of shit. They're probably oversubscribed already. Sure, one subscriber without others on the line (remember, these are shared-bandwidth networks!) may be able to achieve 100Mbit speeds, or even one in the middle of the dead of night without other users to contend with could hit those speeds even on a shared line, but you're looking at lots of users on a segment. They throttle you to a certain speed because that's the fastest they can give you when utilization is low so that when utilization is high you don't notice the difference between the two too dramatically.

Most broadband providers now are in the same situation as dialup companies were at the end of the nineties; with dialup a provider needed to avoid oversubscribing more than about six users per phone line or digital-equivalent to avoid busy signals, but in order to be profitable they had to sell far more subscriptions. Some of the worst were 20:1 and actually getting a connection was nearly impossible. Remember redialing endlessly? That's where we're at with copper broadband now, they have to oversell to make it profitable but then everyone hates how poor the performance is, and the schmucks in customer service take the brunt of complaints, and they provide poor customer service because there's nothing they can do about it, and the corporate officers, board, and stockholders profit off the difference.