Google Fiber

[Stewie]

I know Google Fiber has been discussed in other threads. As a customer for 18 months it seems to me that I'm getting more than advertised.

I signed up for the $300 installation with free Internet service for seven years (through 2023) just to see if I liked it and wanted to upgrade. My service is throttled at 5 Mbps, but it appears I get 5 Mbps all the time and it never drops below the threshold no matter how much bandwidth I'm using.

I can stream two 1080p movies to two TVs (perfect picture/sound) and lose no bandwidth when checking my download speeds using Speedtest. I can surf the net and do other things that use bandwidth and nothing ever slows down.

I'm glad it's working out this way. Is there something about Google that always keeps the minimum bandwidth no matter the usage? It seems that way to me.

[Gravedigger]

It's a drop in the bucket of what their service can do, it's easy for them to hit that mark and deliver on what is advertised.

I love listening to Spectrum and Xfinity commercials, talk about how they're so fast, and can deliver a "fiber rich network" when there isn't a single bit of fiber anywhere in there. Just utter BS, they even put out attack ads against Google when they were scaling back on the KC area like it was a political race. When I paid $48 a month for Spectrum just for their 100 mbps speed, and then I got 10 times the speed for $30 more, it's no question who the better service is.

[sedated]

I also use the free GF. I can't quite get 2 TVs to stream through Roku's (one works while the other lags to the point of being unwatchable), but for some reason I can do Roku on one and Netflix through my Blu-ray player on the other.

Kinda makes me wonder why people need 1,000,000 Mbps internet. If it's this good with just 5, I can't imagine why I'd need more than 10.

[Fish]

Fiber is a different animal than other broadband offerings. If you're getting a nice stable connection now, then it'll likely be that way the entire time. That's just the awesome nature of fiber broadband. And when you've got a really stable 5Mbps connection, you can stream anything and everything you want. Especially if you're just pushing one stream at a time.

I pay for the Gigabit service. But truth be told, 95% of what I do with my bandwidth would have sufficed with the free connection. It's almost impossible to max out that gigabit connection. The sources you download from become the bottleneck and you'll never max out your bandwidth. But that said, when you do have a nice source with sufficient bandwidth, it's pretty incredible to see that data stream in at multiple MB/s. I can decide to try a huge 60-100GB game, and that shit just flies. Once you experience it, everything else is slowmo.

[mnchiefsguy]

Originally Posted by Fish

Fiber is a different animal than other broadband offerings. If you're getting a nice stable connection now, then it'll likely be that way the entire time. That's just the awesome nature of fiber broadband. And when you've got a really stable 5Mbps connection, you can stream anything and everything you want. Especially if you're just pushing one stream at a time.

I pay for the Gigabit service. But truth be told, 95% of what I do with my bandwidth would have sufficed with the free connection. It's almost impossible to max out that gigabit connection. The sources you download from become the bottleneck and you'll never max out your bandwidth. But that said, when you do have a nice source with sufficient bandwidth, it's pretty incredible to see that data stream in at multiple MB/s. I can decide to try a huge 60-100GB game, and that shit just flies. Once you experience it, everything else is slowmo.

Yep. I do not need the full bandwidth pipe of the 1000 Mbps connection (although we often have four netflix streams and downloading all going on at once), but I am not going back. Bandwidth needs are constantly increasing as well as streaming becomes more and more prevalent at greater quality.

I love my google fiber and hopefully they stay in this business for a long time.