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Google Fiber Drops Free Basic Service In Its Original City (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader writes: When Google Fiber first rolled out in Kansas City, it offered a free 5Mbps service if you were willing to pay a construction fee. As of recent, Google has quietly dropped that free tier in its first Fiber area, and has replaced it with a 100Mbps option that costs $50 per month. Anyone using the free tier has until May 19th to say they want to keep it. Note: Google will still offer the free service in low-income areas. Google Fiber customers in Austin and Provo still have the choice of the free internet option; Atlanta never had it to start with. Recode suggests this may reflect a broader change in strategy: Google has fiercer competition from incumbent carriers, so it may have to offer a fast-but-affordable selection to get those customers for whom the gigabit option is either too costly or sheer overkill.
'...pray I don't alter it further.'
That's just depressing. I live in Japan and have Gigabit fiber (500 up/500down on Speedtest) for $30/month with no data cap. For $80 I get cellphone service (from a different company): unlimited 4G LTE and unlimited voice minutes for ~$80/month. Great for tethering my tablet or laptop when out of the house (or phones of friends visiting from out of Japan). America is raped by the service providers.
Obligatory "I live in Romania and I have a 1Gbit (up/down) connection for less than $15 a month.". And it really does work at those speeds. When I installed WoW it downloaded the client at 100MB/s, 19GB went so fast I thought I already had it installed previously.
The thing is 3g/4g connections while cheap still have data caps which sucks.
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Yes, its the standard argument. But densely populated areas in US like New York still don't seem to have the same Internet value as Japan.