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pizza

Usually when people in Silicon Valley use the word "amazing", I roll my eyes.

But $0 internet is very amazing.

On top of that, $120/mo for cutting edge consumer entertainment is just a slap in the face to other service providers.

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$120/mo for cutting edge consumer entertainment is just a slap in the face to other service providers.

I pay $120/mo in New York and get high speed internet, and cable TV with HBO (conspicuously missing from Google's offering) and ESPN. Don't get me wrong, I'd switch to Google in a heartbeat, but I don't actually think that $120 price point is much of a slap in the face to existing providers.

EDIT: and this is just in Kansas City. Given the existing variations in price across the country, I'll be very surprised if we are all paying $120 when (if?) it rolls out nationally.

Well, that depends on your ISP and where you live. I pay $160/month for a higher-tier internet (Blast) and basic cable from Comcast.

How is $70 w/o TV and $120 w/ TV not a slap in the face to other ISPs when it gives you gigabit without data caps?!

Because most customers don't care about gigabit. I'm a tech geek and I don't care about it- my existing speed (around 10mpbs, I think) has rarely posed problems for me.

In any case, $120 in Kansas City is not ever going to translate to $120 in New York City.

This is incorrect. It is why places like T-Mobile run commercials about caps and why there are tons of articles and blogs and Twitter comments about data caps. A lot of people care.

That's all mobile, though (and also wasn't what I was commenting about). My provider (Time Warner Cable) doesn't have any data caps- I know others do, of course.

In Orlando I'm paying $240 a month to get 40Mbps down / 5 up with a full channel lineup, plus Showtime and NHL Center Ice. So THIS would be a huge deal to people in my area where only one cable option exists in a lot of Central Florida.

Edit: Fixed bandwidth

I get decent internet, home phone, and sdtv for around $200 here :( Worst part is, I don't think my situation is that uncommon.

Did it come with a free Nexus 7? Google's going to decimate the existing cable and DSL offerings in Kansas City in less than a week.

Wait, is this only in Kansas City? How long until everywhere gets it?

Yes, this is just for Kansas City. Given that it takes a physical build-out, I imagine 'everywhere' getting it is not in the foreseeable future.

Yes, although there are rumblings about other locations. I can tell you that if it does 'decimate' the entrenched carriers they will go thermonuclear as well (so Google ends up opening another front in the legal wars) You can already see some of the tactics where cable companies have convinced legislatures to make it illegal to allow either public funds to be spent on infrastructure or to allow non-contracted third parties into a region.

Think about that question. They're not leasing lines. They're building them.

No way to know. This is a pilot program. Running fiber to the home cost effectively is as much a political challenge as anything else. They're hoping to blow the doors of in KC to then help make things go more smoothly in other cities.

Its $120/mo for:

* 1Gps Internet

* TV service

* A Nexus 7 tablet

* 2TB 'Storage' that has features that make is sound like a full NAS to me

* 1TB Google Drive (1TB dropbox would run ~$100/mo alone)

Its a bit more than your average TV+Internet package you'd get from a telco.

I wonder how much money Google can make from a single household that is using Google products on the internet? As long as Google makes more money over time than the internet connection costs them, then it could be a very profitable for Google to increase the number of people using Google products and gain great product PR and brand loyalty from these people who get free internet.

Yep, how much monitoring and data collection is Google doing here?

I wouldn't sign up for Google provided internet.

Here's the privacy policy: https://fiber.google.com/legal/privacy.html

So it looks like they know which shows you watch (the same way Netflix does).

Other departments of google don't know which websites you go to, "except with your consent." There can be a lot of mischief hidden in those 4 words.

While this would normally be a concern, I don't think many people trust Comcast or Time Warner any more than Google.

Comcast and TWC don't wrap all their services in a single, trackable userID.

Yeah, If they show me one more ad relevant to my interests, I'm deleting my Google account all together!

"Amazon has found that every 100 ms of latency costs them 1% in sales."

"Google has found that an extra 500 ms in search page generation time made traffic drop by 20%."

http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/09/23/latency-costs-sales-and-...

I don't think Google plans to bring this level of high-speed internet to everyone in the US, but they're certainly trying to spur the competition on.

If people use the internet more, Google makes more money.

Cutting edge is right...

"Record up to eight programs simultaneously, just because you can. And with an unprecedented two terabytes of storage, you will never have to worry about having enough space to record your favorite shows."

And the included remote is a Nexus 7. Sounds almost too good to be true.

I hope they still provide a regular remote of some sort. I don't want to have to unlock a tablet and go to an app to change the channel.

Yup, there's a standard remote with both IR and bluetooth capability. (I work at GFiber.)

Would you do an AMA while it's still fresh in people's minds?

This is very disruptive on both ends, free and $120 per month. Hits the cable providers, telcom providers, and even apple, Netflix, Hulu, and roku where it hurts. Nice work google!

They are still missing a few key channels - CNN, Disney, and espn - all of which my household can't live without (I know, first-world problems). And I think those are some of the harder, more valuable properties to acquire. Anyone know whether google will be able to get those channels?

is $120/mo good? That's more than any other bill I pay except rent.

It's comparable to the price of the usual "Triple Play" Internet+cable+phone service offers from cable companies and telcos.

It still sounds outrageously expensive to me. In Portugal the cheapest fiber triple-play plans cost $40 a month.

I probably should have clarified that it's competitive to those packages offered in the USA. We're used to getting gouged by our telcos here in the Land of the Free :D

I had the same feeling, but maybe the Netherlands are just cheap. You can get phone/internet/tv combinations here from €40-70. Although the fastest internet connection you get there is usually 'only' 120Mbit.

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