Some residents in Austin, Texas will finally have the chance to sign up for Google Fiber. The company announced today that the south and southeast regions of the city can choose from three different plans.
For $70 a month, residents will have download and upload speeds up to 1 Gbps as well as 1 TB of cloud storage across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+ photos. If people are willing to dish out $130 per month, the package offers a TV plan with over 150 channels, along with HD channels and the ability to record up to eight shows simultaneously.
Both plans also include a waived $300 construction fee with a one-year commitment. For those who don't want to pay for either plan, Google also offers free Internet service. However, the speed is severely limited to only 5 Mbps download and 1 Mbps upload speeds, and users would still have to pay the $300 construction fee.
Google Fiber is also available to small business owners in approved areas for $100 a month. The package includes the same super-fast Internet speed and waived construction fee. There is also an option to add one static IP or five static IPs for $20 a month or $30 a month, respectively.
Each of the five eligible regions have different deadlines to sign up for Google Fiber. For example, the region of Bluebonnet has the earliest deadline of January 19, 2015. A closer look at Bluebonnet shows that it is split into smaller portions. Each portion needs a certain number of sign-ups in order for its area to get Google Fiber.
At the time of this writing, nine of the 31 areas in Bluebonnet have already met their sign-up goals. On the other hand, the region of Onion Creek has until July 16 to sign up for Google Fiber, and at the moment, none of its 28 areas have met the sign-up goal.
Getting to the point of actually signing up for Google Fiber has been a long wait. The announcement of Fiber arriving in Austin was made in April 2013, but the physical construction of the network didn't start until September 2014. Additionally, the Google Fiber for Small Business plan only started last month in Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri.
As for the other Google Fiber cities, Kansas City and Provo, Utah, people there might have to wait a little longer. Sign-ups for two counties in Kansas City are expected to open sometime in 2015, and construction of the network is still ongoing in Provo. Still, that doesn't stop Google from looking ahead to other potential cities such as San Jose, California, Portland, Oregon, and Atlanta, Georgia.
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