Anyone Have Google Fiber?

So Google just announced it was going to offer their fiber service in Atlanta. I'm not sure if they will offer service to my exact address, but it would be nice if it scares Comcast into upping their game. Does anyone here have Google Fiber and did it affect your surrounding internet options?

Charlotte is getting it as well. I would love to hear what everyone thinks of the service. TWC is teh suck.

I hear the cable ISPs suddenly become a lot nicer to deal with, sudden doubling of speeds and things like that.

I don't have it as my suburb of Austin is about a mile out of the range. However, TWC sent an email out that everyone on their internet plan would be upgraded. The low end went from 15Mbps to 50 and the high end went from 100Mbps to 300. Other than that, no big change. The other offerings haven't really had any drastic changes.

-Rob

Would love to have it but for some reason Google decided to limit it to just Austin so 95% of my neighborhood has it but the 5% that I live in which is Round Rock does not get it. GRRRR. It would be a major bonus as I work from home very often.

TWC sux. After 15 years, they are now 2 miles closer to my house. I call every few years and "inquire." Once they told me they would be happy to run a cable to my house for only $14,000. If I owned the cable and leased it back to them for all the other drops, that wouldn't be a bad deal, as they would get their money back in well under a year, but that's not how it worked. 14 large and they own the cable and can then sell services to the hundred+ houses they passed to get to me. Last time I called, I let their high pressure sales lady sell me on a plan, gave a CC#, everything, we'll be there Thursday. A half hour later, I get 2 emails, one a confirmation of my order and immediately after a cancellation of same order. No explanation in the email, but another phone call eventually brought up that the nearest drop was 2 miles away and tough luck. AT&T was even worse. Took a half hour to get a human to tell me they could care less. And that was after their automated phone tree hung up on me 3 times.

In reply to Dr. Hess:

What do you have now? When we were in town we either hat Cox Cable or AT&T DSL, neither stellar, but Cox was the better of the two. U-Verse was just going in everywhere when we moved off, I have friends there that seem to like it. When I lived out toward Goshen we got Wireless Broadband ran by some mom-and-pop outfit in Springdale, they came and mounted a "radar" antenna on the side of our house and aimed it at an antenna on the Eastern side of Mount Sequoyah. Download was on par with DSL, upload was abysmally slow, and they'd call and bitch at you, threaten to cancel your service for any P2P bandwidth hogging (Limewire was still big back then), we got our connection turned off a few times because my roommate was a moron, but an apologetic phone call got us reconnect.

When I read the title I thought to myself, I am a little bound up. I could use some Google Fiber.

Kenny_McCormic wrote: I hear the cable ISPs suddenly become a lot nicer to deal with, sudden doubling of speeds and things like that.

Dude, if Google Fiber came to Cleveland, cable could triple their speeds and give it to me for free and it still wouldn't be worth it to me to use cable.

Speedtest.net scores for GF are ridiculous. Four figures down and up.

In reply to Knurled:

The interesting thing is the speeds over cable up to the limits of the DOCSIS protocol are totally arbitrary for the most part. You're paying for more speed for negligible amounts of electricity used to handle more data through the ISP's network. The limiter is just a number in the modem's config file that the base station(or whatever its called) sends out to it. When they increase speed in fear of google fiber, they just gave you a faster config file. If you've got little regard for the law, you can hack that file and uncap the modem.

I'm using 3G at 5GB/mo. There's nothing else out here. 2 miles is the closest now.

I know that I am at an age where I need as much fiber as I can get!

I have Google Fiber.. One of the first in Kansas City to get hooked up..

The desktop shows something like 950mbps up and down...

45minute videos take minutes to upload to Youtube.. The processing here on my end takes much longer..

Oh... and AT&T keeps calling saying they can offer super fast internet.. something like 20-30 mbps.. I just laugh! They don't know what fast is!

ronholm wrote: Oh... and AT&T keeps calling saying they can offer super fast internet.. something like 20-30 mbps.. I just laugh! They don't know what fast is!

I have Uverse at 24mb. my other option? Comcast. Uhmmm...HELL NO.
I just call AT&T every so often, threaten to leave and they chop huge chunks off my bill.

Lets say that we treated internet providers like common carriers. Would that work better for Google Fiber or worse?

Honestly, give Google a few years and they will be charging for services the same as all the other providers. Always happens with the "new" guy in town.

SyntheticBlinkerFluid wrote: Honestly, give Google a few years and they will be charging for services the same as all the other providers. Always happens with the "new" guy in town.

Still, any form of competition would be welcome for most Americans.

I berkeleying hate AT&T, but I'm glad they are considering a fiber network here just so I have an option that is not TWC. What they charge for internet only here is criminal.

ProDarwin wrote:

SyntheticBlinkerFluid wrote: Honestly, give Google a few years and they will be charging for services the same as all the other providers. Always happens with the "new" guy in town.

Still, any form of competition would be welcome for most Americans. I berkeleying hate AT&T, but I'm glad they are considering a fiber network here just so I have an option that is *not* TWC. What they charge for internet only here is criminal.

Oh I understand what you are saying, the cheap pricing and awesome speeds will woo people away from their current provider, but as GF gets bigger and bigger they will charge more. This happened with Uverse when it first came out, but when they actually started charging the actual prices and their system started having issues, customers went back to other providers.

The folks that can get google fiber now are lucky, because it's so damn cheap, but once telecommunications politics start to come into play, it will be game over for cheap pricing.

Trust me, one or more of the big providers will start causing problems for Google in the next couple years.

rob_lewis wrote: I don't have it as my suburb of Austin is about a mile out of the range. However, TWC sent an email out that everyone on their internet plan would be upgraded. The low end went from 15Mbps to 50 and the high end went from 100Mbps to 300. Other than that, no big change. The other offerings haven't really had any drastic changes. -Rob

This is more WTF-worthy to me than Google's speeds.

I have.... 18mb down, 1.5mb up.

I think i can get 50/10 if i pay like.... $120 a month.

I wish I had the google fiber. Does it taste better than Metamucil?

Seriously, I have TWC and get 20 down and 2 up and I have to pay extra for that 'faster' service. TWC is my only option without moving for now.

AT&T here 15 down and .94 up. And I have no idea what that means. I just like to compare numbers.

T.J. wrote: I wish I had the google fiber. Does it taste better than Metamucil? Seriously, I have TWC and get 20 down and 2 up and I have to pay extra for that 'faster' service. TWC is my only option without moving for now.

I have the same service. It sucks. Came from NoVA area where there was competition, so for the same price I was getting faster service.

Fingers crossed for the vote tomorrow.

For 5 years we had Comcast Business at our home office and never had any complaints. Any glitch or problem was taken care of very quickly. I took a job outside the house and Jane got a call from Comcast that she could save 50.00 per month by switching to consumer class. Absolute clusterberk. They could not get anything to work. Suddenly "Support" people could not speak English. Our e-mail got screwed up, phone number was even changed. All the horror stories I had heard about Comcast suddenly came true. Finally, after literally screaming into the phone and threatening legal action, after they demanded 2000.00 to make the change back to business class, we got changed back to commercial class. Tech that came out was known to us, remembered Jane, was in and out in 30 min. TOTALLY different operation. He also said when techs learned and got good, they were transferred to business section. The two operations could not be any more different. I, too, am anxious to see the arrival of GF. Hey, it's Ft. Lauderdale, not BFE Arkansas.

In reply to ProDarwin:

Wait...what...vote tomorrow? Is that state-wide or a county/city specific thing? I'm afraid I am out of the loop on this.