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A week after the cable industry signaled it was slowing down speed and system upgrades, Google Fiber has once again antagonized the cable industry with word their customers will soon be able to upgrade to 2 Gbps speeds for $100 a month, $30 more than what customers pay for Google Fiber’s 1 Gbps plan.
Google Fiber is testing its new 2 Gbps tier with interested “trusted testers” in Nashville, Tenn., and Huntsville, Ala., along with a new Wi-Fi 6 router and mesh extender capable of supporting reliable gigabit Wi-Fi speeds. Regular customers in those cities will get access to the faster tier sometime later this year, with Google Fiber and Google Fiber Webpass customers in other cities getting 2 Gbps available in early 2021.
“This year has made this need for more speed and bandwidth especially acute, as many of us are now living our entire lives — from work to school to play — within our homes, creating unprecedented demand for internet capacity,” according to an article on Google Fiber’s blog. “2 Gig will answer that challenge. At $100 a month, it’s double the top download speed of our 1 Gig product (with the same great upload speed) and comes with a new Wi-Fi 6 router and mesh extender, so everyone gets a great online experience no matter where they are in the house.”
Google Fiber also emphasizes the tier will come with no data caps or speed throttling. Google’s announcement may have come in part because cable and phone companies have gotten comfortable with their existing product offerings and have opted to slow down investment in upgrades. Some industry observers predict Comcast, and possibly Charter and Cox will perceive Google’s announcement as a competitive threat and reconsider plans to delay the introduction of DOCSIS 4, which allows cable operators to offer up to 10 Gbps. The announcement also calls out competitors for their anemic upload speeds, which are still a fraction of download speeds on cable broadband platforms. Google Fiber’s new tier will support 2 Gbps uploads.
Google Fiber is enrolling people to help test its 2 Gbps service, starting in Nashville and Huntsville next month and in our other Google Fiber cities later this fall. Customers can join the Google Fiber Trusted Tester program to get early access to the new speed tier. Sign up here to be among the first to test 2 Gbps in your Google Fiber city.
That’s great for the very small percentage that has access to GF . . . while much of the masses are stuck with Concast, Rectum, etc.
I used to evangelize GF, but I just can’t any more. It needs cheaper tiers that run at proportionate speeds, not wildly faster tiers for just a few more bucks. Before the cancellations, it offered drastically slower speeds for a slight discount. I think what we see is a company which is not trying to offer the product people want, but instead trying to get a target revenue per customer. Having cancelled their cheaper, insultingly slower tiers, Google Fiber is just a rich person’s option now. Or an option for large households or small businesses.
I suspect that most providers look at speed increases as a way to justify price hikes at little cost to them. I suspect most users see no discernible difference in faster service beyond a certain point. Who cares as long as you can stream UHD when loading as much as your family can? I now have 100M service from Spectrum but would prefer 30Mb at half the price even if it takes an extra 200 milliseconds to load a web page..
For new fiber networks the revenue per sub needs to be uniformly high to pay off the fixed cost of network construction. I am familiar with the finances of a newly built municipal ISP. A majority of expenses is debt service, so they need all customers to pay toward that debt. Hence, there is only one service tier, 1 GB, for all customers at $75 per month. Lower tiers will starve the system and have very little cost-based rationale sine the cost difference to serve a light user and a power user are minimal. If course this logic does not… Read more »
Plenty of people are willing to pay a hefty installation fee and then order budget-tier monthly service. Many of them will upgrade their service over time. What REALLY killed the cheaper tiers is that it was just a few bucks discounted for a LOT LESS speed. As I phrased it, “insultingly slower”.
What kind of amortization would you need to pay a “hefty installation fee”? Remember, install costs for FTTH service run around $1k, and Google is overbuilding so they *don’t* have to run some sort of infra anyway the way, say, AT&T does (which is why AT&T fiber is readily available in new subsidivisons, but is hit-or-miss in brownfield areas). Also, how is 100 Mbps symmetric service for $50 (vs. gigabit for $70) “insultingly slower”? It’s still enough to do everything on the internet, and then some, and doesn’t have any higher latency, or asymmetric uploads. If you’re talking about 5/1… Read more »
I don’t have anything that can hit > 1 Gbps speeds right now, but I’m planning to grab 10 GbE in my next desktop. $100 extra, but that’ll allow for actually utilizing tiers like this. Do I *need* 2 Gbps? Nope. But $100/mo is $30 cheaper than I’m paying right now for gig down, ~40 Mbps up. I can think of two reasons that Google picked 2 Gbit service here: Comcast’s FTTH product that they’ve had for awhile (the $300/mo one) is 2 Gbit. Current D3.1 cable systems use 31 or 32 D3.0 channels, plus a 94 MHz wide D3.1… Read more »
Whoops, misread…I guess they’re going to do 2 Gbps down, 1 Gbps up? That’s certainly doable on GPON; they’d basically just need to provide 2/1 customers with their own wave. Probably cheaper than upgrading to XGPON/NG-PON2/whatever-EPON-would-support-higher-speeds.
Google is not using GPON or its update NG-PON2, they are in DWDM-PON, which essentially splits the spectrum and provides two wavelength per customer, 1 λ for TX another λ for RX. The Google Fiber’s ONTs use Tunable laser. The optoelectronics are not tied to one specific nanometer. Thats why Google fiber’s latest installations could provide split ratio of 1:1024. WDM-PON is also part of NG-PON2, But it uses hardly 8 different wavelengths. with all those 8 wavelenghts they add up TDM. With that they can provide 10Gbps for split ratio up to 1:32
So maybe you might get 1gb or 750mb? Girlfriend has it in SW Austin, and we, if we’re lucky, get 300mb. Often it’s 150-230mb. Customer support says “Those are great speeds!” My AT&T Gig service is solidly 750mb to 920, all day, every day. Makes me wonder, if AT&T was available in that location at 1gb, if the Google Fiber speeds would magically increase.