Seconded, both comments. Google has a real chance to become a dominant ISP without becoming a despicable one.

Five years ago I might have agreed with you. There's no reason to trust that google (another giant private company that disabled my ability to comment on youtube or rate android apps because I dared not to want to join g+) won't pull some crap once they're in a dominant position in the ISP market. Like with many other things google saw the writing on the wall regarding how they at the behest of the ISP and looked for ways to be at least minimally prepared for the worst.

At the risk of a trite response, it's the evil you know versus the evil you don't, and frankly getting rid of the evil I know (pretty consistent 5-10% packet loss across the board, spiking during bad weather, repeatedly tracked to terrible work in the outdoor cable boxes, but that I get charged 40$ a pop to temporarily have them fix) is worth a gamble in my books.

Being coerced into joining a free social network that no one uses is nothing compared to the horrors offered by Comcast.

But is it a good use of their cash? Fiber isn't a high return business, especially in a regulated environment with build out requirements.

It's not the Fiber that's the fee earner. By having more people connected with faster, more stable connections they can continue pushing the envelope with things like higher definition on YouTube and suchlike but this is the razzle-dazzle that people will see without noting the true purpose; you're accessing the net through their service so they can now pin all of your surfing habits to a physical person driving more benefit to their primary Ad business.

Just imagine what end-users can do with gigabit upload speeds. If you think streaming is big now, just wait until Google Fiber kicks the gigabit market into high gear. This is one of the best things Google is doing right now, and I can't wait to see how it changes the Internet.

> GFiber is the antidote to these parasitic bastards.

Google Fiber is a contended service, just like every other retail ISP. They're not doing anything particularly different.

Here's the average transfer rate on their 1 Gbps headline product:

http://www.speedtest.net/isp/google-fiber

Yes, 190 Mbps. Fast, but still contended.

Is it possible that's more to do with people testing over WiFi than with the speed of Google Fiber itself? It's hard to tell a lot about the data, since they only provide averages.

I think that average includes the free tier of Google Fiber which if I remember correctly is 5 mbps.

I've heard that Google Fiber has inspired other ISPs in its service areas to initiate high-speed service. I wanted to see this contention though so I clicked around in speedtest.net a bit. Can you point out some contention, because I didn't actually find it [http://www.speedtest.net/local/kansas-city-mo].