Economics of Google Fiber and what it means for U.S. broadband

Re:Economics of Google Fiber and what it means for U.S. broa... by amalag on Friday July 27, 2012 @07:37AM (#4300916)

Curious why they don't have another mid range offering, 5Mb/s free then 1000Mbs at $70 are the only options? I would love something in the $15-$25 range.

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Re:Economics of Google Fiber and what it means for U.S. broa... by dsr_ on Friday July 27, 2012 @08:03AM (#4300968)

By making the low tier free, they avoid many costs. Billing. Tech support. Compared to their gigabit-chewing neighbors, the free tier isn't even using bandwidth of any significance.

Supporting a middle tier would cost as much as the high tier in everything except bandwidth. The one-time payment of the free tier helps pay for the infrastructure in the neighborhood, but doesn't incur any real costs after that. (I expect customer support for free will consist of a web form to report an outage, and a wiki.)

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Re:Economics of Google Fiber and what it means for U.S. broa... by Avenger42 on Friday July 27, 2012 @09:47AM (#4301343)

> customer support for free will consist of a web form to report an outage

And how do you get to the web form if there's an outage? :)

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Re:Economics of Google Fiber and what it means for U.S. broa... by Retric on Friday July 27, 2012 @10:11AM (#4301457)

Cellphone? However, I suspect they could automatically detect outages based the in home battery backed up router not responding or losing contact with all other devices on the network.

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Re:Economics of Google Fiber and what it means for U.S. broa... by splinterofchaos on Friday July 27, 2012 @11:31AM (#4301891)

I suspect offerings like that will be rolled out within the next year or two, if all goes well.

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