Subscribe
Austin residents will receive Google Fiber service under three rate plans: $70 for 1,000/1,000Mbps or 5/1Mbps at no charge after paying a $300 construction fee. A package including television costs $130 a month.
Google Fiber announced its prices this week in anticipation of a December launch in the capital city of Texas. But Google Fiber will arrive with at least two competitors beating them to the gigabit space: Grande Communications and AT&T.
Austin is the first city in the country to have three concurrent gigabit providers. Only Time Warner Cable has elected to sit out the city’s gigabit broadband fight. Google Fiber is expected to face stiffer competition in Austin than in Kansas City and Provo, where it also operates gigabit fiber networks. AT&T U-verse with GigaPower matches Google’s $70 price and San Marcos-based Grande Communications beats it, charging $64.99 for its 1,000Mbps service.
Google is sweetening the deal by converting the former home of a children’s museum into a “Fiber Space,” a community center at 201 Colorado Street – hosting concerts, community meetings, and clubs, in addition to showcasing Google’s fiber network.
As with AT&T’s gigabit U-verse upgrade, only a limited number of residents in Austin will initially be able to get the new fiber service. Google is initially lighting up areas in south and southeastern Austin. For some, the wait to eventually sign up could take up to several years as Google slowly builds out its network in the city of 885,000 people.
Yay! we’ll be able to order next month… But, no telling when installation will be.
One thing still needs to be said, though; 5/5 (or 5/1-ugh!)Mbps is too damn slow, and $70/mo is too damn much. I wish they’d offer 500/500Mbps for $50/mo. Guess we’ll have to share with the neighbors.
I would gladly pay $70 for G.fiber. My DSL here in KY is only a 1.5 down and I pay 67 a month for it. With some of the bills I’ve seen when working for Comcast there for a while, $70 is an absolute steal for a gigabit connection.
Once you go much beyond 200Mbps, the speed differential is somewhat meaningless, at least for the next few years. If Google offered 500/500 for $50, almost nobody would buy the $70 gigabit service. Building out the fiber network is hugely expensive, so they have to begin recouping the costs somehow. As it is, AT&T’s Gigapower service in Dallas, where they don’t have to compete with Google yet, is $120/month. Also Gigapower is capped at 1TB/month, which you can burn through in just over two hours at gigabit speed. I live in Austin and am currently paying $60 / month for… Read more »
Don’t know how ATTs service can be considered competitive knowing that it has a data cap and that you won’t ever see the gigabit speed. Hell even though you should have the speed to support 4k Netflix or Youtube they will throttle it to hell. With google you will see your speeds usually and is always faster than ATT. Google also has no Data Cap, No throttling, a lower ping (ATT is mainly A fiber to the neighborhood approach which is far worse. They use copper to the house. Yuck), better customer service, Much better trained technicle support (Sad when… Read more »
fjfdybvfgj, I want to agree with you about the customer service, but I just can’t. First of all, Google is notoriously hard to get ahold of and secondly, they’ve chosen to hire local madhouse “teleNetwork” to do their GF customer support. I worked there once. They mostly do outsourced call centers for ISPs and some corporate software. It’s rock-bottom pay, rock bottom quality. Austin is crazy about doing employment drug tests; not teleNetwork. Turnover is measured in hours, not weeks or months. TomM: It does look like they’re installing throughout the SE wedge bordered by Hwy 71 up to the… Read more »
I can get ahold of google in like 2 min and on top of that the customer service is much better than most other ISPs. I know many people who have had to call and their issues were solved within 10min at the most. I called once and it took 5min to resolve issue. When I had Comcast it would take a few hours to get ahold of somebody, Got transferred to Customer Retention since I wanted to cancel (took another hour), got bounced between reps trying to get me to keep service (about 2H), finally got them to cancel… Read more »
Not sure you can compare Google’s support for low cost or “free” services like Gmail or Google Apps with their Google ISP services, where people are forking out considerable amounts of money every month. I guess we shall just have to wait and see.
Come over to San Antonio, we have bacon!! \o/
5/1 in SE Austin for free will be a godsend to the low income households in that area. People in Austin (me included) are very happy TWC is finally getting some real competition.
Google installation vans are already installing fiber in some south Austin apartments. They are installing underground conduit along major routes like South 1st Street and South Lamar. They have recently applied for hundreds more construction permits, many of which have only a 3 month timescale for completion. So expect to see a rapid deployment over the next year.
I live in NW Austin, so I’m guess I’ll have another year to wait, at least. If it’s sooner, I’ll be happy to be pleasantly surprised.