26 July 2012

It feels like game over

I’m Jesse Pollak, a rising sophomore at Pomona College. This summer, I’m a hackNY Fellow and technical intern at BuzzFeed. To assist in my learning process, I’ve decided to write a blog post every day: today is day 65. You can follow me on twitter or keep reading my blog.

Today, in case you didn’t already know, Google announced the specifics of Google Fiber—their solution to residential internet connectivity. In the tech world, their announcement caused quite a splash; for instance on Hacker News it’s been #1 all day, has 754 upvotes, and over 382 comments, making it one of the most popular posts of all time.

When I saw the website, I was instantly struck by the power of their mission. Over the last few years, I’ve had the pleasure (sarcasm) of renegotiating and switching the internet and television services at my family’s home in DC. To say the least, it’s been a terrible experience: we get charged $200+ for the “triple play,” have to deal with shitty service, and get slow internet. With the price of the top tier plan, and 1 Gigabit bandwidth their offering, I would switch in a second, and I assume many others would as well. In fact, I bet that with this offering alone, Google could wipe out the competition.

But, it’s their free plan that really seals the deal. With a free plan, I believe that Google really will kill all of their competition. Essentially, they are bringing the freemium model to the internet—it’s been proven that upselling works wonders, so it will almost certainly work here.

While right now it’s only offered in Kansas City, I believe that this plan could be a huge boon for Google; one that could add an entire huge layer to their offerings and make the company an even more essential layer of the United States information technology infrastructure. And, even if they don’t succeed as I expect, I have no doubt that by making this move, Google’s competitors will be forced to react and consumers will benefit everywhere.