Google Fiber is coming to Atlanta, Charlotte, Nashville and Raleigh-Durham (opens in new tab)

Also worth noting that Google isn't doing this because:

1) They want to be an ISP

2) They feel bad for America and want us to enjoy faster internet.

They're doing it because they have plans for products which necessitate nationwide high speed internet. I don't know what those plans are... maybe making YouTube the everything-video-delivery-system, maybe massively collaborative work tools as they expand Google Docs et al... maybe something we haven't even heard about... but they've got something coming that they require Fiber for.

This is a business plan.

That's what happened when GMail offered 2 GB inboxes. The competition got serious.

In Austin AT&T and Grande (Local ISP) both started offering Gigabit shortly after the time Google announced Austin as a fiber city. It's working.

Saw the same thing from Comcast in a very rural area - doubled speeds for free with higher tiers available. Went from 50 to 100. I think we are finally seeing some change.

In my market (Atlanta) it's not even really about the speed. Granted Comcast is far more expensive per mbps than Google Fiber. It is "fast enough" except that Comcast will cap data usage to about 300 GB per month before charging fees.

Given that reality one wonder why the incumbents don't raise all their speeds to dissuade google from entering there various markets. Perhaps the shear magnitude of their collective greed obscures their reasoning?

I have Time Warner here in Austin. Although Google Fiber is not yet available for my place, in the last 6 months, TWC has increased my speeds and sent out new modems/routers.

The cable industry has been working on ramping up speeds for the last decade starting with DOCSIS 3 to compete with Verizon FIOS. The development of DOCSIS 3.1 for gigabit speeds over cable actually started before Google Fiber existed. It seems like people don't want to give Verizon credit for this because perhaps Google offers a more compelling story or maybe because it would suggest that competition in the telecom duopoly actually worked out pretty well. Even after Verizon scaled back / halted their build-out of FIOS they had dumped so much money into it that we suddenly had a competitive market for FTTH/G-PON equipment and trained contractors to build it. Google Fiber and muni FTTH projects couldn't have existed without Verizon basically seeding the market for it in the US.

I hear you. The problem is that the response is super local. ie I think Google hoped that just entering the space would spur activity on regional and national levels. So far though it seems to be only those specific cities that Google launches in then respond. I hope that changes but the bigger guys are calling Google's bluff and just matching it in the small cities (like mine wooo hooo!) that Google launches in.

My friend just got the gigabit service, first area to get it. So jealous. The price isn't even all that high.

Comcast also doubled speeds in Portland recently without raising prices. http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2014/11/c...

Even when they do that, you should still support Google Fiber by switching to it. If nobody switches then Google Fiber will die for lack of customers and revenue and the established players will go back to using their old attitude towards the customers, and never upgrade again.

Sorry for an unrelated comment (but it's rare seeing Phoenix tech people around here).

Do you (or other Phoenix people reading this) go to Coffee and Code in Mesa on Wednesdays? If not, you should!

It's an awesome coworking event at heatsync labs (a hackerspace I help run).

Okay, sorry again for offtopic comment.

I'm in Charlotte and I have two ISPs, and neither of them gives me any data cap or any problem watching 2 Netflix streams.

My neighborhood has buried cable, so I don't know if the fiber will come to my house.

> CenturyLink and Cox were perfectly fine dabbling in 50mbps service for the rest of eternity without true competition.

Why isn't there competition between those two?

> the idea of going back to < 50mbps makes me sad.

Sincere question. What are the specific functional improvements that you've seen at a much higher mbps? Better youtube performance? Faster p2p? Faster web page load times? More supportive of a multi-device household?

Yup, I got the postcards from Cox in my neighborhood (N. Scottsdale). Same thoughts as you.

I've experienced the opposite so far in my area; I've received a data cap from Comcast for which my monthly overage charges exceed $100, on top of the $50 base cost, for the same 50Mbps service.

in the meantime, here in baltimore, comcast still has it's monopoly which was initiated in 2004.

It' stories like these that's making me not sure if google is evil or not(i'm guessing the least evil of them all)

Yep, I had to do exactly this here in Austin. I literally went door to door, met many of my neighbors for the first time, and mentioned that we were only a few signatures away from fiber in our neighborhood. Even after getting all of the signatures we have to wait until June for our install, which kind of sucks, but it's better than continuing to deal with Time Warner.

One could use lob.com to send postcards to everyone in their neighborhood about why they should sign up with that link...

I'm with you, but don't get your hopes up. Verizon never wired the city for FiOS because it was "too costly" [0].

Though something I always wanted to try when I lived downtown was netBlazr [1], which beams internet from antennas on the tops of buildings. If you've got your own place or can convince your landlord to install an antenna, they get fantastic reviews.

[0]: http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/10/08/wahlberg-fios...

[1]: http://www.netblazr.com/residential/

Excavation projects are famously successful in Boston, so the Google Fiber people are probably chomping at the bit to get their shovels in Beantown dirt. <\s>

But seriously, your hypothesis about GF's non-evil fundamental DNA is a good one. It makes for a much better user experience.

Same situation for myself currently. Doing some grad work at ORNL also.

I'm really frustrated by comcast, my fiance and I have a hard time doing bandwidth using things simultaneously (netflix/twitch). I constantly watch our data meter to make sure we don't approach the cap.

Although it's kind of baffling because I recently lived in the bay area. AT&T's UVerse I had wasn't much better in terms of the bandwidth and price, I don't recall a cap though.

I'm here for a few years before fleeing back to CA. I've been researching how to start any sort of movement for reasonable service in town but it seems the town council is pretty alright with comcast, even though some tech business have actually moved from knoxville to Chattanooga for the internet. So really not sure what to do other than give up.

EDIT: Wow, I actually didn't realize how bad the situation is here in Knoxville, read more here http://www.metropulse.com/stories/features/downtown-knoxvill...

Hey cool! I grew up in Knoxville! :) I still have family there, so I'm up there several times a year. Last time I was up there I saw a billboard for gigabit connections being offered by TDS Telecom, but I'm guessing that's in a reeeeeally small area there near Farragut.

FWIW, It's the same way down here in Huntsville. Google Fiber in Nashville and Atlanta, fiber in Chattanooga, and I'm stuck with a 25 megabit cable connection that I pay out the nose for. We're trying to get something together here with the local utility[0] (a la Chattanooga), but it's still in the very early conception stages. It's still years away, if ever, from actually happening.

[0]: http://launchfiber.com/

Wrong kind of trial. In Comcast's "trial", you're put on the stand and found guilty of your wallet being too full, so they relieve you of your burden.

I'm from Knoxville, though I currently live in the Raleigh-Durham area (one of the areas the fiber gods have smiled upon). You should consider coming out here. I would not go back.

(Land prices are super cheap in Knoxville, though!)

Google does not want to be in the telco business at all, it just has to be to protect the source of its revenue which is people connecting to them via some ISP. They are purposely building out in cheap to build areas. If they started hooking up rural areas and areas with high land values and labor it would be a very expensive exercise. What Google is trying to do is get into enough homes as cheaply as possible to light a fire under other telco companies without actually having to build out the whole country.

> I'm fully aware of the extreme cost of rolling out a fiber infrastructure in new locations,

It's really not that much. I could do my entire town for a little under $9m. Fortunately, Google just announced they'd be coming here (Raleigh-Durham) so hopefully I won't have to.

One probable reason is the regulatory hoops they need to jump through to rent/build the infrastructure and roll out the service.

I assume your comment was not meant to come off as hostile, but please don't use the word 'rape' to refer to things other than sexual violence. Doing so creates a hostile environment and minimizes the experiences of rape victims.

It's more a publicity stunt than a business. Google has been per-announcing Google Fiber for five years now, and they've only installed it in parts of three small cities.

They previously tried "free" ("must have Google Account") city-wide WiFi in Mountain View. That lasted from 2009 to 2014 and was shut down on May 3, 2014.

Google has only been expanding to cities that give them extensive tax breaks and other perks that haven't been afforded to most other companies. This is a good thing as it allows Google to expand, but they would never do this unless they got these incentives, plus the guaranteed number of users pre-signed up for the service so that they can guarantee some sort of ROI.

There's nothing trivial about 1gbps consumer broadband (maybe if we were talking about 100mbps). It's very worthy of attention.

Very few countries have competitive access to 1gbps consumer broadband. You can name them on one hand.

Here is the TV lineup for Kansas city Google fiber customers. Looks like they have all the local and traditional channels. Then add-ons like HBO for $20/month.

https://fiber.google.com/cities/kansascity/channels/

AMC & IFC are missing.

Also LEO and MEO satellite internet, balloons, drones.

Any idea what cities in the Triangle are actually getting this? Cary? Chapel Hill? Durham? Raleigh?

But also no love for places near Atlanta like Decatur, Avondale Estates, College Park. They're just gonna go for the core + rich northern suburbs. It's a business decision and I get it, but hopefully they'll expand out to those areas soon. To many of those communities in the southern unincorporated areas of fulton/dekalb and southern near-suburbs, free "high speed" internet will be a HUGE boon to the younger generations.

I had a chance to hear a discussion with the Durham City Manager about this last year. Basically the cities that are most willing to work with Google (favorable laws/willingness to guarantee removing construction red tape/etc) have a huge leg up. There are strategic reasons too, but Google wants to come in, lay down a bunch of cables and move on to the next.

They have the leverage to ask cities to actively pull down barriers that other ISPs would face, and the cities willing to do that are the ones who get consideration.

Which suburbs are they? I tried 30004 - part of Alpharetta and had no luck.

There are quite a few factors outside their control, including existing infrastructure, local regulations, and local government willingness to accommodate Google: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/02/20...

In the middle of last year, Google announced that they will also look at other bay area cities like Santa Clara for Fiber. I don't see what happened to that and there is no more mention of Santa Clara in the latest post. Maybe it fell through? The last update I see is from the city claiming that the discussions have ended - http://siliconvalleypower.com/index.aspx?recordid=3191&page=...

I wish I knew the reasons for not picking a city.

A lot matters. For Charlotte, RST was installing a bunch of fiber and then they disappeared. GF is probably going to buy that up and use it.

I've got family in Winder. Y'all are kinda out there.

I dunno, Nashville's got the AT&T building, heck Google put it squarely in the shot and images for this rollout, seems almost like a message, though it is pretty iconic in a city with little other skyline.

Perhaps you're not color blind enough. :-) I'm much more than mildly color blind and I can distinguish the legend items just fine. Certainly more so than most graphs/maps I see.

Here's an idea for a web plugin: it takes displayed colors that you have difficulty distinguishing and moves them in color space, to the point where you can distinguish them.

Nashville is becoming a pretty good city for tech.

Google has taken a pretty good interest in us lately: http://archive.tennessean.com/article/20130925/BUSINESS04/30...

We have the second-fastest growing market of tech jobs: http://fortune.com/2014/12/23/tech-job-trends-2015/

We are attracting a large amounts of college grads: http://www.businessinsider.com/city-observatory-report-on-th...

Of course, I'm partial since I live here. Unfortunately, I'm in an area outside of metro that I'm sure won't get fiber.

Raleigh-Durham, Austin, and to a lesser extent Provo, are definitely regional tech hubs.

Another interesting observation is that all four of the new cities surround Chattanooga, TN which has had municipal gigabit fiber for years now. I wonder if that had anything to do with Google's decision-making process.

Friendly local government is a big factor.

For example: Google looked at Seattle's NIMBY laws regarding utility boxes on sidewalks (each requiring a lengthy community approval process) and said, "Nope!"

Seattle's new mayor is now looking how to streamline the process to make the city more Google friendly, should the opportunity arise again.

Google has been expanding into southern/western cities where the government is willing to play ball. If you try to build fiber in SF, people hold it up because the cabinets are ugly: http://stopthecap.com/2011/07/27/att-installs-first-of-495-u... if you do it in New York people turn it into a civil rights/social justice issue: http://www.speedmatters.org/blog/archive/new-york-mayor-bill.... Seattle: http://crosscut.com/2014/12/29/business/123222/google-fiber-....

Places like Kansas City and Atlanta are much more development-friendly. In Atlanta, it doesn't matter how ugly your development is--we're talking about a city bisected by a 15 lane highway. Moreover, these are "up and coming" cities who see fiber as a competitive advantage. San Francisco doesn't feel the need to offer fiber to get tech workers to move there. Heck, they're trying to get the tech workers to move out. A place like Atlanta is the exact opposite.

The RTP area has a large tech industry for the size of the area. SAS, epic games, redhat hq, cisco, ibm, netapp, emc, blah blah blah are all there.

They also have incredibly shitty ISPs, and lots of land to build out other ISPs.

As mentioned elsewhere, its a combination of factors at least for here in Provo. Provo does have a sizable number of tech startups like LucidChart and according to this report it was number 11 on the tech startup list http://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/moving-up-provo-orem-a...

Also, as part of the deal for coming to Provo, Provo city sold the existing fiber network to google for a single dollar and google's job was to upgrade the system to gigabit. The whole infrastructure was in place for the most part, so it was a good deal that they couldn't pass up. http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Google-Fiber-Provo-iProvo-P...

The reason Kansas City was selected was supposedly because they were the most willing to give access to utility poles and let google dig up streets/alleys where necessary to run the fibre. I don't know if that's the case with these more recent expansions, but i suspect it is.

Nashville, at least, has an insane amount of healthcare tech jobs at the moment. I don't know about the other cities, though.

Dude, Raleigh is home to the Research Triangle Park, one of the largest research parks in the country. Pretty much all the major tech companies have a presence here. Plus, three major universities all in the same general area. It's not some podunk little town.

Go where your adversaries are weakest. The reason your SP sucks and doesn't care is that they bought your elected and unelected officials.

Take a look at the privacy policy: https://fiber.google.com/legal/privacy.html

"Technical information collected from the use of Google Fiber Internet for network management, security or maintenance may be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, but such information associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber will not be used by other Google properties without your consent. Other information from the use of Google Fiber Internet (such as URLs of websites visited or content of communications) will not be associated with the Google Account you use for Fiber, except with your consent or to meet any applicable law, regulation, legal process or enforceable governmental request."

Philadelphia is insanely corrupt, owned by Comcast, and will not allow Google to build a network like these other cities will.

Read about the building of Comcast Tower and how a plumbers union forced Comcast to install unnecessary pipes:

http://forums.civfanatics.com/archive/index.php/t-166039.htm...

I believe that in amsterdam, even though you only have 1 fiber line running to your house, you can choose from many ISPs over that line. Since (I assume) google is not installing an entirely new fiber network, but merely buying fiber rights and doing last-mile construction, it seems like that would also be a reasonable framework to establish here.

I'm not saying it would be easy. It would take a lot of legal work. But if google's missions to not be evil, and disrupt the ISP market are to believed, they could make it easier.

> Great for competition now, sure, but once copper and coax become obsolete Google becomes the new incumbent monopoly.

Incumbent broadband providers are upgrading offerings in response to Google, so that doesn't seem like a particularly obvious end result.

So you're allowed to bad-mouth AT&T, Comcast, etc. here but if you bad-mouth Google you get downvoted. Got it.