Google Fiber has recently announced expansion into four new markets: Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte and Raleigh-Durham. Congrats to Kossacks in these cities!
The good news: if you live in these cities, you don't even need to sign up for GF to reap the benefit of higher internet speeds - they'll be just handed out like candy. When your cable company no longer enjoys a monopoly, it's astonishing what these pirates will simply give you.
My experience with Google Fiber and Time Warner Cable in Kansas City below the squiggle.
Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO were the first cities to receive Google Fiber and if I remember correctly the first installations were in late 2011 or early 2012.
My neighborhood in Kansas City, MO was not included in the first batch of 'fiberhoods', and nothing really changed as far as my situation was concerned. I had crappy Time Warner Cable service for which they charged me an arm and a leg for slow internet speeds and cable tv service that required me to drive to their offices on a bi-monthly basis and exchange a faulty cable box for a new one. Fun times.
Early in 2014, my neighborhood was finally able to sign up for Google Fiber. Suddenly and without warning Time Warner Cable took a personal interest in me, Dem Beans, at exactly the same time that my neighborhood was able to sign up for GF service.
I got endless cards, letters and emails from TWC offering me loads of free shit! Free movie channels, just for me! Without asking they doubled my Internet speed to 50Mbps speed for free. And all I had to do to get my free movie channels was to go to their website, or call them, to get my free shit. What they didn't say was that my 'free' movie channels would put me on another two-year contract - sneaky devils. Yes, they were afraid of losing me, Dem Beans, their personal cash cow, to Google Fiber. I loved their fear and reveled in it, even if they had to be duplicitous in tricking people into another two-year gig with them. Their sudden generosity did not go unnoticed:
Kansas City, Kansas was selected from a pool of applicants to be the first city for Google Fiber in 2011; and it has become the flagship territory for the network. While the service has expanded to other cities, and Google has announced plans to spread it further, Kansas City is the most familiar with the service, so it makes sense that the incumbent providers would begin their counter-attack there. Still, the speeds being offered by Comcast and TWS pale in comparison to the 1 gigabit per second offered by Google.
While the move may seem generous, the cost to increase bandwidth for existing customers is almost negligible for these cable companies. Jim Hayes, president of The Fiber Optic Association, said that these companies aren't really giving much away, especially with all of the discussions around throttling; most recently demonstrated by Verizon's spat with the FCC.
Suddenly I was also deluged with mail from AT&T, which prior to my neighborhood qualifying for GF didn't offer U-Verse in my little sparsely populated greenbelt KC neighborhood. All of a sudden, I could get it.
How odd is that?
AT&T Inc. has countered Google Fiber with plans to offer its GigaPower network to more than 20 major metro areas. Kansas City is on the list, including Overland Park, Leawood, Shawnee and Independence. This month, GigaPower launched in North Carolina's Research Triangle, offering 100 megabits for $90 a month or gigabit speed for $120.
As it turns out, Austin - another Google Fiber city -
is also enjoying this bounty.
AT&T maintains it has been planning this fiber upgrade for a long time, and that Google's announcement didn't affect the timing of its network.
But Rondella Hawkins, the telecommunications and regulatory affairs officer for the city of Austin, said she had never heard about AT&T's plans before Google's news came out. Hawkins was part of the original committee that put together Austin's application to become the first Google Fiber city. The city ultimately lost out to Kansas City.
"Our application for Google would have been a good tip-off to the incumbents that we were eager as a community to get fiber built," Hawkins said in an interview. "But we never heard from them. Until Google announced that it was going to deploy a fiber network in Austin, I was unaware of AT&T's plans to roll out gigabit fiber to the home."
Grande Communications' CEO Matt Murphy admits that without Google in the market, his company wouldn't have moved so aggressively on offering gigabit speeds. It also wouldn't be offering its service at the modest price of $65 a month, considering that the average broadband download speed sold in the US is between 20Mbps and 25Mbps for about $45 to $50 a month.
So, to the new Google Fiber cities, be prepared to suddenly be treated like a valued customer by your previous cable monopoly. Astonishing what competition - the first real competition they've had in many cities - will do to a shitty cable company.
Oh, and I signed up for Google Fiber for half of what I pay TWC for vastly superior service. Sorry, Time Warner Cable. Years of abuse aren't wiped away by a 'free' 25Mbps upgrade.