The American Statesman reports:
Google will launch its ultra-fast Google Fiber Internet service in South and Southeast Austin in December, Google officials said Wednesday.
Google announced in April 2013 that Austin would be the second U.S. city - after Kansas City - to get its Google Fiber 1-gigabit service. Google has since added the ultra-fast service in Provo, Utah.
Google initially said the service would be available in Austin by mid-year 2014, but that deadline came and went without the service being ready to launch.
Signups will begin in December for new users in South and Southeast Austin, said Mark Strama, head of Google Fiber’s Austin operations.
KXAN TV has some more details on construction as well as a map.
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The Register reports
Residents of Austin, TX may be regretting the decision to bring Google Fiber to the city. The Austin American Statesman says that last year, 254 complaints were filed with the city over problems related to construction of the network.
The complaints include reports of landscape and property damage caused by crews tasked with laying cable for the Fiber network.
One such incident was an October flood which, residents say, was caused when contractors laying fiber cables blocked off storm drains. The resulting flood is said to have caused an estimated $760,000 in damages.
The Statesman report notes that other homeowners have complained of trespassing and blocked driveways.
[...] Not every city should expect to see construction to the extent of Austin, as some of the host cities (Provo and Huntsville, for example) are selling or leasing their existing (or planned) municipal fiber networks to Google.
In our previous coverage of Austin's upgrade, we linked to KXAN TV's report of messiness already associated with construction.
Google Fiber Signups in Austin to Begin in December
Google Fiber is a popular topic here — specifically how it is evoking competition from fat, lazy incumbent providers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Sunday October 19 2014, @09:32PM
Austin... yuck
I screwed around on zillow and my house (about 1800 sq ft, built about 1960, etc) is $650K in Austin although the Austin house has a little postage size lot (fat chick on bar stool thing goin on where the house isn't all that much smaller than the lot)
So I paid a perfect 1/8th mil where I live although the most recent bubblelicious bubble price is about $200K.
So I could move to Austin and pay $450K more for a roughly identical house, and probably get about the same pay (which is in itself a huge problem) to get "cheap google fiber" or stay here and spend $450K getting a gig-e leased line business class fiber installed and paying for it for roughly a billion years.
So thats why I say "yuck" about Austin. Oh that, and your awful weather. And the whole "being in Texas" thing.
But yeah other than that, great news, can't wait till the wire up the rest of the country which at this rate will only be about 500 years.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday October 20 2014, @04:32AM
So thats why I say "yuck" about Austin. Oh that, and your awful weather. And the whole "being in Texas" thing.
Weather is weather, whether you're in Austin or not, but being in Austin does mitigate the "whole 'being in Texas' thing" to a large degree. I mean, I here there is music and culture, and even actual universities! So Google Fiber is just the, um, silicon dioxide filaments on top?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 20 2014, @05:03AM
I lived in Dallas for a couple of years (really Plano & Richardson) it wasn't all that different from Los Angeles, just flatter and cheaper.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 20 2014, @04:55PM
I went down there for the first time in March for SXSW (won the trip at the Ghostery hackathon, never been, why not?). Mixed feelings about it, for sure. SXSW as a festival eats the entire town for increasingly more of the year, covering a whole bunch of things that really make no blessed sense being in the same festival. Hordes of hipsters, 20-yr olds, and creepy orange-tanned VC and MBA types awkwardly mixing in a modern-day rendition of the Caligula orgy scene. Then there's the very, very odd penchant of the downtown of alternating modern office towers and burned out vacant lots (which become pop-up venues for SXSW). On the other hand the Texan girls with their cowboy boots are quite fetching, and the general vibe of the town is worlds away from, say, Houston or Dallas. The food options are decent, with East Side Kings, Ironworks BBQ, and other inventive restaurants. So the addition of Google fiber could well tip the balance for a lot of folks--I was briefly tempted to relocate. But in the end even a blue island can drown in a sea of bloody red and you can't wish the Texas away. And, coming from Brooklyn, it's a small, small town.
The real solution is not to bring the rest of the world to Austin for Google Fiber, but to bring Google Fiber to the rest of the world.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday October 20 2014, @05:17PM
but to bring Google Fiber to the rest of the world.
Like I wrote at present rates it'll only be several hundred years for them to roll out everywhere...
An alternative cool stunt, instead of giving a very small number of people very fast internet connections, would be giving the whole planet a very slow connection. World wide free wifi. Wonder how they'd manage that? Its an interesting idea.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday October 20 2014, @09:14PM
I have long thought ad hoc mesh networks would make things very interesting. With FireChat it looks like it's started to happen a little in Hong Kong, in one respect. But if more new cars start to come out with wifi the nation's highways might also become data highways, often through spots where there is no other connectivity. Latency will suck, but something is better than nothing.
Alas it doesn't also solve the NSA problem, too, but nothing is ever a silver bullet.
Washington DC delenda est.