Google quietly pulls the plug on the free tier option for Fiber in Kansas City, the first location that the company rolled out the high-speed Internet service to.
Originally, subscribers in the area had two choices: $70 for gigabit Internet access or $0 plus the installation fee for 5 Mbps. Anyone currently on the latter has until May 19 to let the company know that they want to keep it.
For the record, it's still available in Austin and Provo with a $300 initial payment to set things up, and it never did land on Atlanta.
Now that it's going away, Google has a spot to fill, and it replaced it with the $50 per month Fiber 100 that provides up to 100 Mbps. Just to be clear, it won't come with the $100 construction fee, assuming that it's under a one-year commitment.
Other plans include the standard Fiber 1000 and the Fiber 1000 plus TV that offers more than 150 channels for $130 a month.
At this point, it should be noted that the move hasn't been explained yet, but at any rate, it won't have an impact on the Mountain View company's implementation of 1 Gbps broadband to housing projects free of charge.
To boil things down, this development appears to be Google's effort to win the competition in the market with a more affordable option compared to the Fiber 1000, not to mention that the waived $100 installation fee just makes it even inexpensive, particularly for apartment dwellers who can't dish out the cash to cover the starting cost.
On an interesting note, Mark Bergen of Re/code says that the Fiber department could be facing pressure to turn the service into a money-making machine. Considering that it's the most expensive subsidiary under the Alphabet corporate umbrella, that shouldn't come as much of a surprise at all.
Photo: Paul Sableman | Flickr
