Google Fiber connected its first set of homes yesterday in the Hanover Heights section of Kansas City. The ultra high-speed network claims that it offers speeds of up to 1 Gigabit per second. So far there are no reports that those speeds have actually been achieved, but Hanover Heights resident Mike Demarais attracted a lot of attention yesterday with his twitter post touting the new service; he said he was getting more than 600 Mbps with an Ethernet cable, and 200 Mbps on Wi-Fi. Currently, most Americans have Internet speeds that are well below 50 Mbps.
Google plans to continue rolling out the service to other neighborhoods, but so far all the announced locations are in Kansas and Missouri. That’s good news for cable companies and wireless carriers who are hard at work promoting their own high-speed Internet services around the country. AT&T expects its U-Verse (bundled phone, Internet and cable service) product to be one of its fastest-growing businesses in the coming years. Verizon Wireless has partnered with several cable companies to cross-market services, meaning that Verizon can sell Internet and cable service combined with wireless service in areas served by both Verizon and one of its cable partners.
Disruption from Google is nothing new for wireless carriers, as evidenced this week by the highly successful launch of the no-contract Nexus 4 smartphone. Google started selling its latest smartphone on its website yesterday, and the most popular 8GB model has already sold out.
Google Fiber is of course a threat that comes from a very different direction, and given the limited reach of the rollout so far, it appears that it will be a while before Google Fiber is a nationwide phenomenon.
Google’s service costs customers $70/month, or $120/month if they want to include Fiber TV. It also comes with a terabyte of network storage. Yesterday Google shared a video of one of the first installations on YouTube (below). YouTube, owned by Google, is of course one of the major reasons the company wants to get into the ISP business. The faster you can download videos, the more ads you can watch. And one of the best ways to ensure primacy of your content is to own the pipes that deliver it.
