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Re: Not a true representationHere's the key though: Google is offering access 20x faster than their nearest competitor, for less off-promo than their cheapest competitor charges on-promo for one-twentieth the download speed (and one-two-hundredth the upload speed). I'm sure many cities would make concessions to keep such a quantum leap in town.
As for free access for anchor institutions, franchises tend to have that clause in there. For Google, since we're talking about a complete FTTH system, these institutions are just another premise. Not a big deal to wire, not a big cost to serve.
As for under-served areas, Google is being very transparent about why they will end up not wiring some neighborhoods out of the gate: they'll have less than 10% (or 5%) market share when they're done. Google is relying on everyone signing up all at once to keep deployment costs per premise low, so they can't afford to go into a community and wire one out of every twenty-five households, who already have cheap broadband from AT&T (via DSL) if they want it. I don't hear anyone in KC complaining about Internet prices on the low end, so that's likely why everyone's okay with Google redlining. It's just a fact of life that a brownfield FTTH overbuild is a bad way to serve customers who aren't willing to pay $50 per month for Internet access of any sort. |