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from the non-soluble-fiber-is-good-for-digestion dept.
Fluffeh writes:
"Google has officially invited 34 cities in nine metro areas to become the next batch of the Google Fiber rollout.
Google said it 'genuinely would like to build in all of these cities,' but that the complexities of deploying networks may not allow it. 'During this process, we will work with each city to map out in detail what it would look like to build a new fiber-optic network there,' Google said. 'The most important part of this teamwork will be identifying what obstacles might pop up during network construction — and then working together to find the smoothest path around those obstacles. Some might be easy, some might take some creative thinking or a few months to iron out, and in some cases there might be such local complexities that we decide it's not the right time to build Google Fiber there.'"
(Score: 5, Interesting) by hash14 on Thursday February 20 2014, @12:59AM
Looks like Google is more interested in kicking incumbent ISPs into action. Look how AT&T responded to Google's plans in Austin by developing their own fiber network. I think the grand plan of GFiber is that they can threaten to move into any area that doesn't have sufficient competition, and they can use this to get incumbent ISPs to develop more on their own, since they have no motivation to otherwise.
But Fios already offers about 75/35 for $70/month, and I don't think bumping that 10x-100x is enough to allure customers to Google Fiber at this time; perhaps it will change in a few years when even those speeds are starting to look slow. But right now, it looks for now that they're targeting areas where services are one provider charging the same price for 3Mbps.
That said, what's more worrying about Verizon is their gate-keeper mentality, that they should be allowed to choose what passes over the pipes that we pay them for. I don't think this will change until we start seeing more services like Netflix which offer high bandwidth streaming of content which replaces traditional TV (not just your regular Youtube-type channels, in their current state at least). Perhaps Google will start providing services like that next....