With the Wall Street Journal reporting this evening that Atlanta is among 4 Southern cities selected to receive Google Fiber – and an official announcement expected to come tomorrow – Atlantans are already asking questions about the much hyped, but perhaps not widely understood, service.
For starters, how much does it cost?
We can begin to get a sense of Google Fiber’s price from the cities where it is currently available: Kansas City, MO, Austin, TX and Provo, UT.
In Kansas City, the city with the most comparable population to metro Atlanta, Google Fiber offers Gigabit Internet and TV (150 channels) for $120/month with a waived $300 “construction fee” and include tv and network box and DVR. If you just want gigabit internet, the service is $70/month in KC with a waived “construction fee”.
Most notable may be the Basic Internet option, which provides customers with 5mbps download/1mbps upload speeds for free for 7 years if one pays a one time $300 installation fee.
In both Austin and Provo, the gigabit internet-only is also $70 and the basic internet option is also free. The Austin the TV/Internet option is $130/month, while Provo’s TV/Internet package is the same as Kansas City – $120.
Can an IT-savvy person please tell me, just how slow is a 5mbps download/1mbps connection (Google’s basic option)? Can you surf the web and stream TV shows without any issues? Would the gigabit connection benefit a “normal” user like me?
I’m far from IT-savvy but I can tell you my current connection is 6Mbps down/1Mbps up and it works fine for everything I do, including watch streaming video. (I’m a one person household with one TV, one Roku box, one laptop, one smart phone.) Up until 2013 I had a DSL connection that was not quite that fast (I can’t remember the exact speed) and it worked fine, too. I can’t imagine how I could possibly use a whole gig.
Lately, I have begun having some hiccups when streaming–not always, just sometimes. I suspect it has to do with the ATT “Uverse” service being provisioned over very old phone lines in my neighborhood. (They refuse to sell DSL connectivity here, will only offer what they call Uverse, which is really inferior to the DSL I had in Decatur.)
It seems to me the real value of Google coming to town might be pressure on AT&T to lay more fiber.
Honestly, the real value will be to the thousands of folks who can’t currently afford broadband internet in their home and now will be able to have it. I know I sound like Pollyanna, but I’ve talked to enough people in areas where fiber service (via Google or municipally driven) is already available and they said that the benefits to high-end users are great, but the community is even more impacted by the availability of high speed Internet to people who’ve never had access to it before.
Hadn’t thought of it from that angle, and absolutely agree.
I wonder about this though. Would those who can’t afford minimal broadband service be able to pay $300 up front? Maybe Google has some sort of payment plan.
I saw elsewhere that an alternative was $25/mo for a year.
We have 3 megabit DSL and regularly have two concurrent HD video streams. If might not be super-duper-ultra-4k-mega-HD, but they look great on our 32 inch TV and a laptop.
Blu-ray quality HD TV with surround sound eats up 10+ megabits per second. If you have either a big TV (55 inches or more ) or surround sound, you won’t be happy streaming TV over a 5 or 6 mbps connection. I currently have a 30 mbps connection via Comcast and it is barely enough for my current needs (two simultaneous HDTV streams plus whatever else is eating up Internet bandwidth at the same time). One year from now it definitely won’t be nearly enough; as more people get really fast (300mbps+) Internet, more companies will begin to offer more services over those fast Internet connections.
Bottom line, most people’s needs will change dramatically in the near future. If you’re okay with getting left behind – that is, not having access to the kind of things people will take for granted a year from now – then 5mbps will be enough. For the rest of us, gigabit Internet can’t get here fast enough! 🙂
The cost quoted is far more expensive than the price I currently pay for 12mbps (vs their 5mbps listed). It seems until we know the real quoted costs that it looks very expensive on paper.
For the 5mbps service, you’re only paying a one-time “construction fee” of $300 (or $25/month for 12 months) and then it’s free after that. No way your current service is cheaper than this.
The $70/month is for 1 GIGABIT per second, which is 1000 mbps. Way way way faster than what Comcast or AT&T offer to residential customers.
I’ve been reading a lot of local forums since the announcement and I think a lot of people aren’t getting that the difference is the GIGA versus the MEGA.
Yeah. Not to mention the capabilities of the TV service. To get 150 HD channels with Comcast will cost you a pretty penny and you’re not going to get close to recording 8 programs simultaneously (admittedly, can’t think of many times this would be an issue, though I have often wished for more than the two recording streams Comcast offers) or the DVR capacity Google’s offering.
Re the 5mbps for a one-time charge of $300, what happens if you move?
My strong suspicion is that if you move within a served area they might work with you to reestablish service at the new location at no charge or a reduced rate, but if you move out of Google fiber area you are SOL. That’s more or less how Comcast handles its high speed contracts.