It was 15 years ago today, on February 10, 2010, that Google announced Google Fiber. This was the first truly high speed Internet service in a modern sense in the United States.
Why Google Fiber was innovative
Google Fiber was innovative because at the time, in most of the country, Internet speeds maxed out at 10 megabits per second. And depending on who your provider was, sometimes you couldn’t even get 10 megabits. As an experiment, Google announced plans to roll out Internet speed 100 times as fast to some medium sized metropolitan area, ostensibly to see what would happen if someone treated Internet as a 21st century utility. On March 30, 2011, Google selected Kansas City, Kansas, as the debut city, later opting to include Kansas City, Missouri, as well. It made its debut July 26, 2012. Selfishly, I have fond memories of this because it was perhaps the first time one of my blog posts went viral.
There was speculation at the time that Google had an ulterior motive, to shame more conventional ISPs into improving their service. Google never confirmed nor denied that speculation. But Google Fiber does seem to have had that effect. Once Google Fiber was successful in Kansas City and rolled out to other metro areas, cable and telco companies suddenly, mysteriously found ways to offer gigabit service themselves in other cities. And startups did it in locales the large telcos wouldn’t, like Lawrence, Kansas.
The question at the time was what people would do with such ridiculously fast Internet. But we quickly found uses for it. Streaming video is one of the most common uses, but working from home and going to school from home is a lot harder with slower Internet speeds. Very high speed Internet was a major boon during COVID.
Google Fiber today
Today, Google Fiber is only available in 18 cities, with six more planned, and that was after Google halted expansion in 2016. So it doesn’t seem to be a major business priority for Google anymore. That’s not really surprising, given the Google of today is not really the same company that it was in 2010. Google Fiber was innovative, bold, disruptive, and daring. It was also forward thinking. Today, Google is none of those things. It is the best example I can think of how Google has changed as it has aged.
If you have Gigabit Internet service and like it, you can thank Google for that. If Google had not released Google Fiber, it is doubtful that Internet service at those types of speeds would be readily available everywhere.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.