Google Fiber comes back to life with 5 gigabit service, plans for 8Gbps soon
Enlarge (credit: Google)
Last year Google Fiber announced it was kind of coming back to life. For years, the service-which had Google roll into a town, lay down miles of fiber-optic cable, and start competing with the local ISP monopoly-had "paused" further expansion. Now, for whatever reason, Fiber is back, and the company is offering a new high of 5 gigabits per second.
Of course the downside to Google Fiber is always the very limited rollout area. Google says 5 Gig service is coming to "Kansas City, West Des Moines, and all our Utah cities," and that's it. Google Fiber announced plans last year to roll out to five new states eventually but has no plans to ever reach a wide rollout.
If you live in one of the blessed Fiber cities, the service sounds great, though. That's 5Gbps symmetrical, so 5Gbps download and upload speeds, which is a massive improvement over something like Comcast and its ~35MB upload speeds. If you're a content creator, developer, or, especially, someone who regularly generates 4K video, normal ISP upload speeds can be crippling. Google's 5Gbps service is $125 a month, which includes a professionally installed 10 Gig fiber modem and "a Wi-Fi 6 router and two mesh extenders."