Time Warner recently revealed, when it comes to Google Fiber, that it’s resorting to a time-honored strategy of major corporations facing severe market changes: Denial.
Before we share with you why, precisely, Time Warner thinks you don’t want Google Fiber, we should lay out the prices. Google Fiber gigabit internet with TV will run you $120 a month, $70 a month if you don’t want TV, or you can get average Internet speeds now with the option to upgrade for $25 a month for a year to pay the fee for hooking you up to fiber, and then it’s free.
Time Warner does offer you gigabit Internet, but it’s so expensive they don’t even price it; you can get 50mbps speeds for more than $200 a month, though. So, based on these two wildly different comparisons, this is what a Time Warner Cable executive said at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference:
“We’re in the business of delivering what consumers want, and to stay a little ahead of what we think they will want. … We just don’t see the need of delivering that to consumers.”
That’s right, not enough people are paying enormous amounts of money to Time Warner Cable to get gigabit internet, so obviously they don’t want it! Pricing in the modern economy is clearly not a concern, especially with all those business customers!
We get that there’s a degree of spin to anything entitled the “Morgan Stanley Technology Conference,” but this is… well, it sounds a little desperate. Google is obviously happy with how Fiber’s been working out in Kansas City, and it’s not hard to see the company is sick and tired of dealing with cable companies. It’s getting to the point where slow Internet speeds are inhibiting Google’s growth as a company. When we did the math, we found that Google could earn potentially $3.6 billion a month by undercutting cable companies, and that was before apps sales, streaming ads, Google’s cut of TV revenue, and who knows what else.
In short, denial’s not a good river to take a swim in, since there’s a very large shark in the water.
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So where is this fiber service available? If its only select areas how soon will it be before we start to see it widespread? Because $70 is not much more than I’m paying right now for crappy internet…
Kansas City is the only location right now: Google is testing the service and working out the kinks. My guess is later this year they’ll start looking at other municipalities.
It’s great that flyover country was chosen to pilot this, while here in Philadelphia we get to deal with the choking death-grip of Comcast’s monopoly.
I can’t imagine it’s worse than what Charter is doing to me…its so bad at this point that I’m actively seeking out AT&T, which as you well know is the AT&T of companies
I always assumed FiOS was an option in Philly. It’s not Google, but it’s fiber and a notable improvement over Comcast.
Where I live, we have a choice: Comcast or RCN. I went with cutting the cord and paying RCN.
^ same. I’m in DC.
Monopoly was probably the wrong word. FiOS availability varies by neighborhood. A few blocks south or east and I could get it. I was told that my neighborhood wouldn’t be getting fiber because it’s just not viable with Comcast’s market penetration.
C’mon Google… Seattle wants this. Make it happen.
We should be glad that sewer systems were built in an age without free market orthodoxy.
Marketing rep. “So you want sewage out of your house? Most of our costumers prefer to remove it manually. And fresh water? 10 l/day should are sufficient for most”
Right, except for one thing: the local cable monopolies are in no way indicative of a free market. They built the original systems only after obtaining governmentally-mandated exclusive franchises that essentially made overbuilding a losing proposition — until recently. Now that other delivery methods are becoming possible, the monopolies might finally be broken…just in time for TV to end as a viable business.
And also in time for white space broadband.
@Old Fat Bald Chick Magnet
Good point (and to be honest, I don’t know if sewers or telephone lines were built by the government or not).
However, the thing that is vexing me is this: All that is needed for high speed internet is fiber in the ground. There are millions of unemployed people and the silicon dioxide supply is plenty, yet our economic structure makes the use of this resources very hard. Bonus point: If the feds built and owned fiber lines, we had no more need to discuss net neutrality. Cut the damn middle man already.
What use cases are there for most people where gigabit internet is a real world upgrade over what people have now?
Netflix is flat outright being shady with their super HD and 3D HD system where they only enable it for companies that are hosting their rebroadcasters for free/low cost with their Open Connect system. On my crappy low end Comcast connection I can download an iTunes 1080p HD file much faster than real time and they are of higher quality than the normal Netflix HD. Multiple streams from Netflix for multiple people in the household? I’ve had Netflix prevent me from playing on one device when I had a stream going on another devide.
Normal web browsing wont benefit greatly from it, most web page elements are small enough where a faster pipe wont decrease load time. Online gaming wont benefit greatly from it, had a WoW guildie do a 2 man raid over a LTE connection and it used a couple MB of his bandwidth cap.
Shit son. Lots of people are on WiFi and that’ll cap out at best 300Mbps if you have compatible N devices and are dry humping the access point.
25 man raid*
That’s a valid question, I think. But for me it was about the apples-to-oranges comparison they were using to justify it. Come on, TWC, you don’t see a LITTLE difference?
Pricing is what it is. But there really is no need now for Gigabit residential internet. The one area where Gigabit internet shines is the one area that Google says you can’t use with their service. No self hosted servers on Google fiber.
I based it off their business class Internet, which was what they referred to in the course of the conference.