Google Officially Launches Google Fiber > Google Price Innovation

Google Price Innovation

FREE only after you pay the $300 construction fee for a "FUTURE INSTALL of 1gbps".....

$300 for 7 years of internet....something that would probably cost you in the neighborhood of $3000 at a competing phone or cable service (maybe more).

mind boggling the kind of savings that could be for people in KC. Especially those who've cut the cord and don't watch cable/satellite TV anymore.

reply to compuguybna
The point is actually quite clear. A lot of the KC area is apartments. They need to get everything wired up as fast as possible. Thus the point of the free option is to try to get everything wired.

Wiring a rental for 300 bucks isn't bad when you consider the guy who moves in 2 years from now might pay the full 70 or 120.

Also the free option is only going to be available to the first person who has it installed. Once a place is wired, there are no future install fees. Google will either force people to get the 70 dollar plan or charge a much smaller fee for the 5mbit plan.

Are the first-install comments fact or assumption? True, once a demarcation is established future install costs are zero or at best minor but the free-for-7 is only for the first installer?

The free Internet for 7 years only applies to the first installer does not make business sense. Say the first installer paid the $300 and moved out after 2 years. Why would Google not want another $300?

reply to sonicmerlin
The reasoning behind the free service is that, by the point you're getting the free service, they already had to pay to pass your house, so the additional cost of serving you is minimal. They make a small profit on the $300, so it does help fund the build, and they don't have to do a truck roll in the future if you decide you want to go from 5 meg to 1000 meg; they just flip a switch and you've already got all the necessary hardware in place. So it's easy to convert you to a paying customer in the future.
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Developer: Tomato/MLPPP, Linux/MLPPP, etc »fixppp.org

reply to taz
The 300 is to cover the cost of physically installing the fiber connection. The free internet plan is a way to encourage people to pay the 300 to get connected.

Google's goal is to get as many houses/apartments connected as possible.

Once they connected every house, they can have maximum potential customers in an area.

Once a house is connected the 300 dollar fee is no longer necessary, the place is already connected.

Google is using all internally designed hardware, both in the datacenter, on the head-end, and the customer premises. AT&T uses (or would ues), unless I'm mistaken, all third party hardware, which means substantially higher costs.

Of course, there's a big R&D effort required for this, but Google has already done substantial parts of the R&D for other products that can be re-used. They've been building their own optical hardware in-house for years since their scale is large enough that they realized it was enormously cheaper to design and build their own 10GigE switches in-house. I would be surprised if they're not leveraging components from a variety of existing projects for this stuff.
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Developer: Tomato/MLPPP, Linux/MLPPP, etc »fixppp.org