Google just announced the details of its project to bring gigabit fiber to the home (FTTH) in Kansas City, and it’s a nerd’s dream come true:
The costs starts with a $300 construction fee to get the fiber installed at your house. After that, there will be two kinds of packages for Google Fiber.
For $120 per month, the first package is the “Gigabit + TV” package with 1TB of storage, internet, and a single lump of all channels in a single bundle. It will include major broadcast networks, “hundreds” of “fiber channels,” and on-demand movies and shows. Premium movie channels will still be an additional monthly fee. Google will waive the construction fee for new customers for a limited time.
A $70 per month Gigabit-only package will provide internet and the 1TB of cloud storage on Google Drive. For a limited time, Google is also offering a third package with “average” broadband speeds for *free*. It will be 5Mbps down and 1Mbps up, assuming they are willing to chip in on the construction fee for the fiber line.
A 1 Gb connection is about 100 times faster than the usual cable broadband download, and about 500 times faster on upload than the usual cable. Though $70/month may seem like a lot, I pay more for my current Internet package, and this is 40 times faster on download and 200 times faster on upload. Even the $300 “free” deal is pretty good if you’re going to be in your home for a couple of years (that bandwidth is about what a $20/month DSL plan offers). The equipment is also much better than what a cable company provides. The $120 package includes a DVR that can record 8 channels at once and store 500 hours of HD programming, and a Nexus 7 tablet which can be used as a remote control (along with a regular remote).
To understand why Google did this, you need to understand that their main goal is for users to have unfettered access to Google’s services and, as a consequence, Google’s ads. Google doesn’t want to be in the ISP business, but they looked at the ISP marketplace and saw a bunch of cable providers who are more interested in screwing every penny out of subscribers with caps than innovating. Now there’s an easy answer for the Time Warners and Comcasts of the world who whine that high speed Internet just can’t be provided economically: look at Kansas City.
We’re definitely in the enemy of my enemy is my friend territory, but this could be a major win for consumers. We suck at broadband. And in many parts of the country, there’s no infrastructure issue. If your cable provider set aside 12 channels on their system for Internet, and upgraded to the latest standard, your old fashioned cable could carry 304 Mb down and 108 Mb up, which is 60 and 100 times the national average, respectively.
WereBear
If it kicks some cable behind, I’m all for it.
They scream about free market; yet they have given the cable companies area monopolies from the beginning. And toothless regulation.
Lee
What we really need to do is have more cities start providing this service just like they do with water and sewer.
Walker
Having infrastructure controlled by a private company is always a problem. This will hurt us in the long run.
PeakVT
Surprise! – existing monopolies prefer to extract rents over innovating. Hoocoodanode?
Nunca el Jefe
Is there something about KC that made it easier to implement this program there, rather than somewhere else? I remember something about options for different cities to be chosen, but am not clear on the why or how of KC getting so lucky.
Odie Hugh Manatee
We’re paying $204 for HBO, CineMax, phone and 20/5 service. I would jump at the chance to have gigabit for $120!
Competition in broadband, we need it.
Brian
While 300 might not be bad, it seems silly to pay someone for the privileged to buy their product.
Richard Shindledecker
Yeah – but when are they going to get to us in the Boondocks of NYC?
mechwarrior online
I wouldn’t get it, not even if you paid me. Let’s keep in mind that google has, broken into and stolen peoples data off their wifi while doing google maps, legally owns your emails and reads them, tracks where you go from your cell phone, monitors your internet searches and traffic, I could go on. Now google is not the worst violator when it comes to this sort of issue, apple and facebook are notoriously god awful as well, but they are one of the worst.
Essentially if the NSA or CIA did what google, facebook, apple, and the rest are doing, it would be illegal and people would be threatening revolt. But those companies are viewed as hip and cool so they get away with it, even as they claim ownership of your emails and all online activity.
I would NEVER trust my internet activity to google. Other than throw away email accounts and android devices that I promptly take over and disable features from I don’t use googles products either.
Make no mistake, this is part of google, apple, and facebooks three way war to see who can own the most people, and own you they do. Some of them go so far as facebook in owning your lifes history, your photographs, and more, others are like google and own your email and all your online search activity, or apple and decided they will simply track you 24/7, but they do legally own you as long as you are using their service.
Having google as an ISP, I’d rate it about the dumbest thing you could possibly do. But hey, it’s your right to sell your life to someone.
It’s a trap, and plenty of idiots will fall for it.
Schlemizel
@Brian: I’m with you on that. Plus the $120 is not much different from what I pay now. Not sure what value I would get out of some of those options – I’m fussy & have no need for cloud storage and have never had an time when I thought “gee, I need to record 8 shows at once”. The additional speed is nice but I’m not moved.
I did a gig for a county in Iowa back in the late 90’s. They had a dispute with their cable contractor & kicked them out, taking control of the entire cable operation themselves. I was brought in to help engineer an ATM (it was THE thing at the time for high-speed traffic) network that would link all their government offices, hospitals and schools. This would be available for home use for a small fee. They were doing this in part to spend some of the money they were racking in from cable fees. Fees they had reduced when they took over but still were providing a very large income.
Brian
@Schlemizel: I’d understand if you needed the speed. But I simply have very little use for anything more than the 20 Mbps I have now, so BJ loads a few seconds slower… I have to wait 2 mins for netflix to buffer? I am not paying 300 dollars for that.
Tony
Lafayette Louisiana has similar service owned by the city/parish utility system. Cox and BellSouth delayed the project for years with lawsuits instead of simply spending the money to build a better system:
mechwarrior online
@Richard Shindledecker:
Unless you want google to own everything you do from your computer connected to your ISP and be able to sell it you don’t want this product, google is nasty. Doofy as it is, Comcast and Verizon have FAR better track records when it comes to your privacy than google does. Sure it costs more, but it’s worth it.
@Brian:
Really fast internet is largely for connecting to work, piracy, streaming movies, and playing video games. If you’re not pulling massive files from work, streaming netflix, while pirating 720p movie streams, and playing video games all at the same time you’re not going to notice it.
Furthermore if you’re stupid enough to use wireless, which is slow as dogshit, than paying for a really fast wired connection from your router to the main node isn’t going to do jack shit for you since you’re laptop is still connecting over wireless.
And I’m willing to get some people happy for this are more than stupid enough to think it will make their wireless faster.
El Cid
@Brian: Exactly. Having a faster internet connection from my ISP (and mine too averages a speed test of 20 Mbps, at the very slowest 5) doesn’t mean that the websites or online services provide data any more quickly.
Most of the time the limits on speed I face aren’t from the internet service, but from content providers.
El Cid
@mechwarrior online:
I have a fixed landline at home, but use a mobile connection for roaming, and it isn’t as “slow as dogshit”. I can do anything fairly rapidly, from downloads to streaming Netflix.
Yes, it may be true that at some given time my ability to stream HD content via mobile connection may need some buffering time, but given that most of the time I experience the same no matter how fast the theoretical connection speed given content providers’ speeds, most of the time I don’t experience the presumably much faster speed of the landline connection.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@mechwarrior online: I’m curious, do you think that google is the only company capable of doing this? And yes, it would be illegal for the government to do this, but it’s legal for google to because you agree to it if you sign up for their stuff. What’s keeping yahoo or comcast from reading your stuff? Nothing. And you don’t really know if they are or not.
Punchy
@Nunca el Jefe: I think they chose KC b/c I live there.
mechwarrior online
@El Cid:
No wireless connection is capable of gigabit speeds, not one that you can get, and no wireless device you have is either. There are a few with a range of just a few feet, but unless you work in IT, defense, or R&D, you’re never going to encounter one.
To get gigabit speeds everything needs to be gigabit. So your device needs a gigabit ethernet port, with a cat6 cable, connected to a gigabit switch, to a gigabit router in order to get that. If you have a wireless device it’s NEVER going to see the speed, end of story. And this also assumes (an assumption which will usually be wrong) that the source of your content also supports it.
In short, outside of being completely hard wired on a LAN, you aren’t going to see it.
A side business I work on supplies gaming servers and over 99% of the time people having problems with games are being morons and using wireless, they switch to ethernet and the problem goes away.
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Comcast will if they receive a court order, and they’ve gone to bat to fight those repeatedly. Google puts that they do in the agreements they sign. Google landed in court for hacking into peoples wifi, google has stated that their customer is their product. Google has been sued for tracking peoples browsing. Yahoo has not done any of this.
Frankly getting your internet from google and expecting any sort of privacy is as stupid as getting it from the NSA and expecting it as well.
Google is not the only one, facebook, apple, and others are pretty devious as well, but google is one of the worst offenders.
Frankly I don’t care if people want to sell their lives to google, but don’t expect me to do anything but laugh when they get screwed over for it.
Mary
I’m actually kind of surprised that Google is entering the multichannel video market and providing last mile connections to do so. Can’t wait to see what kind of content related litigation this might spark.
jh
@mechwarrior online:
I see someone had their CrankyFlakes this morning.
Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo and Comcast and any ISP of any note are all capable of tracking and compiling your online activities and many do as a matter of practice.
Google wants to track us to better sell us stuff.
Comcast wants to track us to prevent us from accessing content that competes with their cable tv content.
We get that.
The bottom line is that there anyone should assume that there is almost no such thing as privacy on the internet and unless you take extraordinary steps to prevent being tracked, you may as well get a hold of the fastest, cheapest connection you can.
BGK
Has Google made any comment on what the backbone/upstream speed is? ISPs and last-mile providers can bloviate about gigabit all they want, and it’s pointless if their next hop is a 100Mbps uplink to Cogent or other such crapola. Ninety-nine times out of one hundred, that’s where they cheap out and that’s where performance will fall apart.
mechwarrior online
@Mary:
I doubt it will. Google is already in the video market selling single view or 24 hour view pay to watch video.
If the content creators like HBO don’t want their video on google it won’t be. Just like with Netflix. Google doesn’t have much say in this. Comcast is partners with Time Warner and has their hooks in other options. Keep in mind that content providers still yank their content from places like Direct TV when DTV won’t pay them properly.
Anybody can create an alternative to cable, doesn’t mean the various creators can’t tell them to go pound sand if they aren’t getting paid enough.
Comcast is only part of the problem with your cable TV bill. The rest is that profits are socialized among content creators since very few of the channels are anything close to profitable. Those channels only exist because things are sold as a package and then the profits divided up.
I’d like to see this change, but I doubt it will.
mattH
Instead of relying on companies with horrid track records, when it comes to customer service and privacy, who’s sole reason for acting the way they do is to maintain infrastructure monopolies, why aren’t we investing in the basic infrastructure as a public utility?
Mary
@mechwarrior online: Except that under FCC regulations allow an MVPD to sue a vertically integrated and its affiliated MVPD for discrimination. This is a big deal in the TV industry right now and the FCC just had a big notice-and-comment about whether a video service like Sky Angel, which does not provide last-mile connections to the user, is permitted to sue under these rules. By providing that connection, Google shuts down the argument that has so far thwarted Sky Angel’s attempt to pick up Discovery Channel.
The point is – yes, anybody can create an alternative video content distribution service, but Google is entering a very specific and highly regulated field by offering a service that integrates both live streaming pre-scheduled content and transmission path. That’s a big deal.
J.W. Hamner
So what exactly are the nefarious things that Google/Facebook et al is supposed to do with reading my emails and having my browsing information? This is the thing I’ve never understood from privacy obsessives.
Mary
@mattH: Because Free Markets! and Small Government!, that’s why.
p.a.
will competition really increase available speeds? In theory, doesn’t competition imply lower (and decreasing) profit per unit, leading to less $$$ available for R&D, upgrades, experimentation? Aren’t those nations with higher speed internet set up as gvt. or private monopolies with cost-plus structures and strict oversight to require innovation? As TNC says “talk to me like I’m stupid”.
John X.
@p.a.:
Northern Europe, South Korea and Japan all have fiercely competitive markets and much faster broadband. The dirty secret to all of this is that the technology to deliver these high speeds is 1990s tech and does not cost all that much in the overall scheme of things.
The cable companies just don’t want to invest. Their business model revolves around securing a local monopoly, laying some line, doing the bare minimum to maintain it and reap the huge profits. They simply don’t have the culture to keep up with technology, which is why our network is 20 years behind those of other developed nations.
Dennis G.
It is another chapter in a covert war that we have been waging with Iran for 30 years.
Fresh Air interviewed the author of a book on the subject earlier this week. The Twilight War by David Crist sounds like an important book. He is a military historian who writes the secret histories of recent events for government officials with the clearance level to read them.
Shawn in ShowMe
Looks like I’m moving to Kansas City.
Maude
@John X.:
The DSL around here had to get new hamsters to run the wheels.
Sentient Puddle
@p.a.:
If a firm was in a market with no competition, they wouldn’t exactly have much of a need for R&D in the first place, would they?
LanceThruster
I laughed until I realized the joke was only in my head.
I thought the “Gigabit Fib[b]er” was a reference to the Mittbot.
Yutsano
@Shawn in ShowMe: I may have to transfer to my KC office now.
liberal
@Sentient Puddle:
False.
Counterexample: Bell Labs.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
Yay! Shangri-las in the title! One of their best, IMHO.
liberal
@p.a.:
IMHO there are aspects of a “natural monopoly” to much of communications.
If we’re talking about laying actual cable/fiber to homes, it’s a terrible waste of resources to lay more than one cable to the same house if they do the same thing.
That doesn’t mean it’s entirely a natural monopoly (since wireless can provide competition), or that I’m fond of communication providers (I hate the industry as much as the next guy).
bago
@mechwarrior online: lolwut? The NSA has a yottabyte datacenter http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
that records and parses everything.
Privacy only exists online as cryptography, and the willingness to break it, either by brute force, rainbow tables, or more reliably, social engineering.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack
bago
Seriously, once you can sniff tcp or udp packets you’ve got yourself a probalistic data stream you can copy. All you have to do is get yourself into the routing tables. If you are an ISP and are contractually agreed to provide the government with copies of all of your data, it makes it look like google is child’s play.
ThresherK
@liberal: But that brings us to the “last mile” problem again. Everyone wants to take tolls on the grand trunk highway, nobody wants to be responsible for laying that fiber to sparsely populated subdivisions and not be selling those users everything possible.
I hate the industry as much as you do (I hope). I am in the process of switching amidst the phone people and the cable people, and the last thing I want to do is the “Benny Hill double swap” where I realize the least worst option is the one I left.
NotMax
The disparity between download time and real time (a 2 hour movie still takes 2 hours to view, a book must still be read one word at a time) could end up with such a backlog of downloaded material that the both hard drives and the cloud will resemble the Collier brothers mansion.
Jay in Oregon
@Brian:
How about no bandwidth caps? In the coming age where everyone wants stuff stored in “the cloud”—DropBox, Google Drive/Google apps, iCloud–and everything is streamed to you, making sure your ISP can’t gouge you when you go over some arbitrary bandwidth limit would be nice.
And people frequently point out having a 4G smartphone or tablet is kinda meaningless when your data plan allows you to hit your cap in about 15 minutes.
I remember a while back that Netflix had to start downgrading the quality of the video streams it sent to Comcast users so they would be less likely to hit their bandwidth cap. And yes, all of the dropbox/syncing services store local caches of your files but they still have to be pushed back and forth.
I’m of two minds. Giving Google more control over my life and my data isn’t too appealing, but my current option is to help pad Comcast’s bottom line. If even having Google in my area would mean that Comcast has to stop dicking around and offer real service at a reasonable rate, I’m all for it.
The Other Chuck
We’ll find some way to fuck it up. A few dozen homes in KC will have a LAN and that’ll be it. Our country can’t have nice things.
Jay in Oregon
Related to that:
Comcast is planning to roll out superfast internet connections, but only in areas where they are facing stiff competition from Verizon FiOS.
http://www.itworld.com/personal-tech/287219/comcasts-new-305-mbps-internet-service-underscores-value-competition
Retief
And the world comes full circle as Google enters AOL’s old business. They are also giving away free cds of Chrome.
El Cid
@mechwarrior online: Where did I say that I thought it was gigabit? Did I?
If I didn’t, don’t respond as though that’s what I’m talking about.
Pay fucking attention.