[ed. Nice to see somebody with muscle and deep pockets bringing some competition to the cable companies.]
The web-search company announced that a bundle of TV and ultra-fast Internet will sell for $120 a month. That includes three devices needed to stream Wi-Fi signals and to store large amounts of computer data and TV programming. It will also come with a Nexus 7 — an iPad-like device that runs on Google’s Android operating system.
“Not just Internet TV, but real TV with your favorite channels,” said Milo Medin, vice president of access services at Google.
The company’s demonstration of the TV service appeared as impressive as any DVR-type service on the market. It allows people to control the TV with the Nexus tablet, with their smartphones or with old-fashioned remote controls. A household will be able to record eight shows at a time, store 500 hours and search through “tens of thousands” of on-demand movies in Google’s catalogue, in addition to Netflix accounts.
The TV package has big holes in programming, however. It lacks ESPN, the most popular and expensive part of most cable packages, and other Disney Corp. offerings.
“We’re launching Google Fiber with content providers who share our vision,” a Google spokeswoman said in an email when asked about the missing channels. “Over time, we will be expanding our TV package well beyond the channels it currently includes.”
Or you can get stand-alone Internet at speeds more than 100 times faster than most broadband for $70. By comparison, Comcast Corp. recently announced it would sell speeds of 305 megabits per second — Google’s offering is three times faster — for $300 a month.
Both the TV and Internet-only deals come with two-year contracts, for which the company said it will waive a $300 installation charge.
There’s a third option. The arrival of Google had set off worries that people with no Internet would be left out of a community transformation fired by faster-than-fast Internet. So Google announced it would provide free Internet service — albeit at far slower speeds — for seven years to customers who pay for installation. That $300 charge can be paid off in monthly $25 installments.
Google-only
Google’s fiber optic network will run slightly different from how Google described it in early 2010. Then, the company said it would “operate an ‘open access’ network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers.”
On Thursday, Google Fiber project manager Kevin Lo confirmed for the first time in an interview that Google decided not to open the network to other Internet service providers.
“We don’t think anybody else,” he said, “can deliver a gig the way we can.”
Google’s entry into the TV and Internet service is enough to make a cable man’s knees buckle. Comparing the prices on the services is difficult — particularly because no other company comes close on Internet speed and Google’s TV package is so different from standard services. Somewhat surprisingly to analysts, Google is not offering landline phone service.
Still, it’s a bold declaration by Google that speeds of a gigabit-per-second are practical and affordable in the home.
The cable and telephone industries have long said that the cost of stretching fiber optic wires all the way to the home has made such speedy Internet impractical. They also contend that customers rarely express interest in speeds much beyond 10 megabits a second, much less something 100 times faster.
Google looks as though it’s able to cut the cost of deploying such a network in two ways.
First, by targeting neighborhoods with the strongest interest, it can lower its installation costs by going only where there are large numbers of eager customers, stopping by once and moving on.
Second, it brings the same electronic engineering and manufacturing know-how that has increasingly scaled down the cost of building football field-sized data centers around the globe.
“We’re an engineering company,” Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette said in an interview Thursday. “Google has a knack at looking at things in a different way.”
The competition spoke boldly in the wake of Google’s announcement Thursday.
“We compete with anyone, anytime, anywhere,” said Time Warner Cable spokesman Michael Pedelty.
The company’s 900 local employees, he said, can stand up to Google’s challenge. “Bring it on,” he said.
by Scott Canon, Kansas City Star | Read more:
