14 DAY TRIAL // Google Fiber is finally making its way into Austin. Starting this December, the south and southeast portion of Austin, Texas, will finally become part of the Fiber family.
Google has expressed interest in expanding to Austin for a while now, listing the city on its site for just as long. Up until now, however, people haven’t actually been able to sign up for the service.
The Internet giant plans to implement a similar process as it did in Kansas. There, areas were divided into neighborhoods and residents had to commit to get Fiber. Once a certain level of interest was displayed, Google started rolling out the cables and the devices. If the threshold Google has set in place isn’t met, then Fiber won’t be expanded there. In Kansas, people have received a second chance, so it’s quite likely that the same will happen in more cities as Google Fiber expands.
GigaOm notes that the limits of each neighborhood are going to be defined in Austin in groups of several hundred houses. They’ll all be connected to a single fiber hut, where the Google network meets the metro network.
The pricing of the service in Austin hasn’t been disclosed, but chances are that things will be pretty much the same as in all other cities when the service is available. Mark Strama, chief of Google Fiber Austin, confirmed that there would be a $300 (€235) construction fee as part of the connection process. Those who don’t want to pay more than that will be able to get access to a basic 5Mbps service for that price, with no additional monthly fee for as long as they’re connected to the service.
Google is deploying 3,000 miles of network in Austin, building everything from scratch. It looks like the company has also surveyed 10,000 telephone poles and will do the same for an extra 40,000, during which time it will collect 10 to 20 data points on each to determine how to deploy the aerial portion of the network.
In Austin, Google will be competing with AT&T’s gigabit fiber, as well as a small gigabit network provided by a local ISP called Grande Communications.
The company has so far expanded to Kansas City, Kansas, and Missouri and Provo in Utah. Plans for expansion include at least another 30 cities, although the process is really slow at this point.
Google is reportedly looking into moving its Internet providing business to wireless too, but that’s a little far away into the future at this point.