First came the hieroglyphics, and then the cores. And then came the giant street saw, carving a thin line into the subsurface for the cable. Finally, after more than seven years after their announcement on April 9th, 2013 and that Austin would be a Google Fiber City, Google contractors embedded fiber into our street.
I'm not sure when the fiber will go live, but we'll have to decide at that point whether we want to switch from Spectrum. We haven't been unhappy with Spectrum, barring them selling us faster internet but installing a box that wouldn't let us access its full speed. Google's model of installing the last mile in the street is worrisome given the amount of new construction that occurs in our 'hood (which increases the likelihood of line severing).
It appears that Google offers 100Mbps at $70 a
month and 1 gigabit at $160 a month whereas our current set-up costs
$110 a month at these speeds:
so hhhmmmmm..... We'd also have to figure out how to get the fiber from the street to the house, which will be no small affair.
Sadly,
Google's contractors littered the holy hell out of the neighborhood
with hundreds of cut zip ties, half a hundred water bottle caps, a
couple dozen water bottles, and dozens of adhesive labels all over just a
few blocks. A request I sent to Google Fiber to request their
contractors to not litter went unanswered. So much for that heralded
customer service and "Don't be evil" tagline (although, admittedly, they
removed that back in 2018).
In my experience Google is definitely better than Spectrum. We have almost no outages and when they happen we generally know only because they're sent us an automatic credit to our bill.
ReplyDeleteI think they also use their sideways fracking technology to install the cable to the house because they somehow got the cable to our house under two existing brick paths without disturbing anything.
Although now that I'm looking at how yours was installed I'm not sure it's the same thing. They dug portals every 4 yards or so and blasted water sideways to create holes for the cable in our neighborhood.
ReplyDeleteAppreciate the comments! They are still hooking everything up, so we'll see what they offer once they start offering up their services.
DeleteIs their service available in your area yet? Did you sign up?
ReplyDeleteThey just recently laid the lines in our area and I’m hoping to find out what to expect.