Hmmm. Good luck to Google, for the current ISP's are absolutely ridiculous. I think that maybe telephone poles should be owned by the state/city/county and ISP's should just pay a fee to the city to use them. The govt can raise money to pay for the poles through taxes or municipal bonds. This way competition can't be blocked out of using basic infrastructure.
But hey, at least ISPs won't be stifled from innovating anymore! Can't wait to see all of the marvelous innovations which wouldn't be possible for them to bring us if they were just a dumb pipe. Just think of all the jobs they'll create too!
This is great news. I have Google Fiber at home, and I've never had a speed test yield less than 940 Mbps up and down. Compared to Comcast, which was giving us "250" (read: "25") Mbps and had connectivity and uptime problems, Google Fiber is consistently fast and available. There was one afternoon early on where it was down for a couple hours (construction related), but we've had no problems since.
I hope they continue expanding to new cities so the other player(s) there are forced to compete.
I hope they come to my neighborhood in San Francisco. I recently tried the wireless internet provider that was just set up in my building. It is so janky, I can't sign up for recurring billing. I literally have to sign up again every month. When I called the guy who runs it, he said his payment gateway doesn't support recurring payments. Sigh.
I still remember how Time Warner miraculously discovered another 100 Mbps practically the day after Google Fiber announced that it was moving in. And TWC had the audacity to pitch it like some kind of gift, like they were making this great investment in their customers and upgrading them “for the same monthly rate”. Oh what crap they unleashed: the happy commercials, all the great things they were doing for customers, as if it wasn’t completely obvious that the only reason any of it existed was the threat from a real competitor.
I really wish it was easier to roll your own. I'd be more interested in a local co-op that forced competitive pricing and services, forced speed upgrades and allowed more choices.
Across the US, even in major cities, most residences don't actually have a "choice" in their provider.
Something I recently learned when one of our renters tried to get Satellite services in a heavily-wooded area.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 17.3 ms ] threadI hope they continue expanding to new cities so the other player(s) there are forced to compete.
https://www.sonic.com/gigabit
Then when Spectrum bought them out the mid tier disappeared; oh, and prices went up.
Across the US, even in major cities, most residences don't actually have a "choice" in their provider.
Something I recently learned when one of our renters tried to get Satellite services in a heavily-wooded area.