Posted on 09/29/2022 11:07:17 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Google is planning to offer much faster broadband speeds in the US areas where it operates its fiber networks, all the way to 100Gbps.
Google Fiber, part of the Access division of the search giant's parent company, Alphabet, currently provides a 1Gbps service, and began upgrading its speed in 2021 with the introduction of a 2Gbps product offering downstream bandwidth of 2Gbps and upstream bandwidth of 1Gbps for $100 a month.
That comes up against AT&T Fiber's similar tier at $110, Verizon Fios and Ziply Fiber's 120 plans, and Frontier's Fiber 2-gig is $150, although, of course, Google's $100 pricing may not hold.
The ad giant now says that this was just one step in a journey to making multi-gig speeds widely available and accessible, and claims new multi-gigabit tiers unveiled over the coming months will be "critical milestones on our journey to 100 Gig symmetrical internet."
This was revealed in a blog post by Access CEO Dinesh Jain, who said Google Fiber foresees an internet that depends on faster and faster speeds, which doesn't seem especially controversial. The pricing – if it remains – seems reasonable for a service that is many times faster than the broadband services many Americans have access to.
"We're already closer than you might think. This month, we took our testing out of the lab and into the home, starting with our first trusted tester, Nick Saporito, the Head of Commercial Strategy for GFiber," Jain wrote.
This test installation at Saporito's home in Kansas City is supposedly capable of providing a download speed of 20.2Gbps, with a screenshot offered to prove it, although curiously omitting the upload speeds.
Jain said he can see a time when communities across America will have at least two, if not three, fiber providers, and that differentiation will then have to be delivered in how the network is built to deliver symmetrical multi-gig speeds at accessible pricing – which is what Google Fiber believes it is doing, of course.
Last month, the company disclosed it was in talks with city leaders in several states, with the goal of introducing its high-speed fiber-to-the-home service in more locations. These included Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada, and Idaho, which it said will be the main focus for growth for the next several years, along with continued expansion in existing metro areas.
Such expansion hasn't always gone so well for Google, however. Back in 2019, Google Fiber pulled the plug on its service in Louisville, Kentucky, after agreeing to pay the local authorities $3.84 million for damage to the streets apparently caused by the use of "micro-trenching" techniques that saw fiber lines buried just a few inches below the pavement rather than much deeper down.
According to the company itself, which spun out of Google in 2015, burying trenches less deep than others should save time. ®
Well, except that Google wants to be your ISP.
That’d be like having Gretagore monitor my thermostat, or Stacey Abrams monitor my fridge.
Geez, I feel like a dinosaur. Our internet runs at about 60Mbs and the wife and I have no issues. Not sure what use we would get out of 100Gps.
heh—mine’s a bit faster than 60Mbps, but I use it to work from home.
WOW! FASTER PR0N!........................
I'm paying $75/month for 1 Gbps symmetric now. My ISP was just "acquired" by a larger local ISP. New users will pay $99/month for a new 1 Gbps symmetric. Existing users were "grandfathered" in to the original monthly contract price.
Google would have to make an investment in fiber and do lots of infrastructure installation to bring 100 Gbps to my area. It is only present because local entrepreneurs made a significant financial commitment to install the fiber and get the external connectivity. I don't think the current fiber is capable of 100 Gbps. No switch hardware on my own premises runs faster than 1 Gbps. A few of the machines have Ethernet at 2.5G speeds, but they actually run at 1 Gbps on the local LAN.
“Geez, I feel like a dinosaur. Our internet runs at about 60Mbs and the wife and I have no issues. Not sure what use we would get out of 100Gps.”
My wife and I have basic TracFone Samsungs, and I use a Chromebook. On the basic Comcast, everything works as fast as we key in the data/question/login.
Sometimes after dinner about @ 6:30 pm, streaming shows can be a little slow getting onto or into a show. By 7:30 to 8 pm, that disappears. Our grandson tells us that the other old fogies and college kids are logging on to the same internet on our culdesac. His hotshot apple phone and IPad have zero problems in our home.
So like you, we basically have zero issues.
I still remember the thrill of upgrading to 14.4k
Probably uploads half your hard drive every time which slows things down.
If you stream videos, and game it takes a lot of “juice”. I am satisfied with my 400 mbps service.
I’m on DSL and get 30Mbps download and pretty close to that for upload which is fairly new. Used to get 10 Mbps download and 1Mbps upload at best. They’ve been running fiber optic in all the neighborhoods along the state hwy but are waiting on a fedgov grant to run it down the state hwy to town. 20 miles of rocky Ozarks hill country.
I remember the baud rate of 8,800. It took minutes to upload a catalogue at the local Library.
Good old dial up. Choices were aol or earthlink. IE or netscape.
For basically ever... we have had 20 meg or less...
Then Musk sent me a starlink (not personally of course) and we see 150+ meg internet...
we got no clue what to do with all the speed.
I’ve got 400Gbps now. I’ve gotten used to the speed of web pages loading as if they’re local. It’s quite amazing how internet speed can make your local computer feel so much more powerful.
No Goog. Not even for free.
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