According to J.P. Morgan’s State of Broadband report released Friday, “The speed race is on and customers are taking higher speed tiers as 1 Gbps marketing has been relatively effective, despite few customers actually needing that level of service.”
And the 13-year-old Google Fiber initiative remains on the leading edge of this competition, launching for the first time new symmetrical 5 Gigabits per second and 8 Gbps symmetrical-speed tiers in Mesa, Arizona.
The price tag for 8 Gbps, a Wi-Fi 6 router and two mesh extenders: $150 a month. The symmetrical 5-Gbps tier comes with the same hardware and runs $125 a month.
Mesa is also the first Arizona city to receive Google Fiber service, which also supports the operator's two other incumbent tiers: a symmetrical 1-Gbps plan for $70 a month and the $100-a-month symmetrical 2-Gbps plan that also includes the Wi-Fi 6 router and two mesh extenders.
Each of the four plans also includes a terabyte of cloud storage and professional installation. Google outlines its new 5- and 8 Gbps offerings, which were originally announced last fall, on this landing page. Also, Ashley Church, Google Fiber’s West Region general manager, discusses Google Fiber's broader plans for Arizona — which include expansion throughout the state — in this blog post.
In October, Google said customers in Utah, Kansas City and West Des Moines could begin testing the faster 5- and 8-Gbps tiers “as early as next month.” It described rollout of the faster tiers in five states starting in early 2023.
Back in 2016, it appeared that Google might be losing interest — as it sometimes does — with its fiber internet service. It laid off 9% of its workforce that year, paused expansion in 11 cities and completely withdrew from Louisville, Kentucky.
Last summer, however, Google Fiber touted renewed growth plans, expanding into 22 metro areas from 17, while entering Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska, Nevada and Idaho for the first time.
The Google Fiber Mesa announcement coincided with a J.P. Morgan report showing the increased importance of 1 Gbps-and-above service offerings for cable operators, particularly in regions marked by overbuilding.
Regardless as to whether customers really need a gig, a competitive marketing environment among ISPs is effectively convincing them they should pay for it, anyway.
Currently, J.P. Morgan said, MSOs offer speeds ranging from 900 Mbps to 1.2 Gbps in around 90% of their collective footprint. Only 23% of their customers now take these service offerings, but the investment bank sees that take rate expanding to 55% by 2025. ■
