ISPs ask city for deal matching Google Fiber's special treatment

Envious communications companies are requesting parity deals from Kansas City's local government -- deals which match the special treatment Google received while deploying its city-wide gigabit fiber service. Google Fiber went live about two months ago for both KC and KCMO,...

Read more

Well TWC, AT&T, Verizon probably were all sitting on copper cables that they can milk the consumer with for another 100 years so of course they did not want to spend money on new fiber likes.

Now that someone else actually tries to upgrade the age old infrastructure they cry foul, yet they have been pocketing all the profit over the last 40? years instead of setting some aside for future network upgrades.

Suck it dinosaurs!

Well said!

Those wacky people in Kansas with their fancy fiber opticals and whatnots. That's just a fad. It'll never catch on. Pants made from parachute materials, now that's the thing!

When it was first announced I started to look at the job market out there. I would have been willing to relocate for it. (I'm sure my Wife might not have been to keen on the idea though)

Kansas city, here I come!

Hmm... I have 100mpbs in my home (romania) for about 10$ (20$ with tv and a free 7mbps 3G usb dongle). is it that bad in america? I do know other countries have it bad (ex Italy), but in Europe the speeds and prices are generally pretty good. I get about 30-40mbps from servers in the UK

Sounds like Telstra over here! hahaha

It's definitely not worse than in Romania. It's probably nice that you're getting internet that cheap, since you could have not probably afford it otherwise, after spending over 50% of your income on food.

Plenty of people to just fine in Romania. I have lots of family there and they can afford to come visit me in Canada. I'm sure you have never been there and know nothing about it.

No the UK is pretty bad, Virgins 120mbps service isn't covering much of the country, BT's Fibre is getting there, I am actually able to get it now which is nice but its not quite as fast as Virgins (download anyway) the upload is amazing, 20mbps is pretty good for an upload speed here.

It still costs around £40 a month for that service though, which is like $75 for essentially slower speeds than what you would get in America for that kind of price.

OMG!

Here in Mexico I'm paying 35 USD/mo for 2 mbps and digital cable

They received special treatment because city officials made money off these transactions. News is media, and media is meant to deceive the obvious. Anyone that works in an urban area knows no task goes without certain people getting taken care of.

This installation was set in place by the second biggest tech company in the world. They could have easily afforded what companies half the size are forced to pay.

I pay 80 a month for 50mbps.....
I can pay 10 dollars less and get 20x the speed, yes please!
Google is benefiting mankind by offering this service at this price, it's a huge step forward.
Verizon...how much do they charge for their fiber?
Oh that's right, $210 a month for...what speed now? Ohhh yeah, its 300mbps.....
These old providers are in for a major change.

A little off topic but I love how so many people on various forums post thier speedtest.net results and think thier bandwidth is so glorious, poor fools don't realize the difference between megabytes per second and megabit's per second.

Sadly all of you miss the point.. speed is USELESS if there is a data cap etc... and that is a HUGE flaw within the current system.

I fortunately have an ISP w/unliminted data (up/down).. but only get a 1.6M Loop down and .8 up. But while others (cable etc) locally are "faster" what good is it if you get killed after only a tiny bit of data?

Local cable cap is typically 60GB... local DSL is a whopping 40 before "penalties" etc..


So it's like a nice Ferarri (50M cable) with the low gas light on to start. F'ing pointless