Google’s fiber network is greatly needed in our community. Current ISP’s provide slow speeds for high prices (bundles that don’t save you money), and poor customer service. ISP’s are setup so they have as little competition as possible, and are able to take advantage of the consumers. When a company is hated so much it needs to change its name to xfinity, drastic measures need to be taken. This is where google can intervene to provide an alternative, and much faster option to everyone else. The introduction of a new ISP with better speeds could spark some competition and maybe help out verizon and comcast get their stuff together. The community (home and school) would benefit as well, especially those with IT/Networking Fields such as the Center For Advanced Learning (CAL) that we attend.
Current services offer somewhat limited options. The higher end internet packages are mainly available only if you get them with phone and T.V – and still are pricey. Comcast (or xfinity now) also messes with customers’ bandwidth and offers quite unreliable service. As an IT consultant and someone who works with computers more than with people, I have seen comcast demonstrate some bad practices in the professional field as well; they are rather shifty and make life harder for other companies to install/fix networking setups (in houses and very expensive condominiums). In general, America has seen a very weak growth in the speed of internet that’s available to the public. This picture demonstrates that quite well http://i36.tinypic.com/293wmrb.jpg. Considering the internet was concieved in the United States, this is very depressing to view. We need google to bring us back to life (with electric paddles).
As it is already obvious the current options presented to the people of gresham are weak at best. With google trying to move to a cloud based type of system giving the people of Gresham a taste of this Ultra High-Speed Internet would be a great start to showing them what is possible. If people are happy with their internet from google, they might be interested in checking out Chrome OS or even looking into a google phone. Something that makes Gresham a great place to test out this fiber network is the education system. In the gresham are there are four highschools, one college, and a charter school The Center For Advanced Learning. All of these schools could greatly benefit from a faster connection. Not to mention freeing the residents of Gresham from the tyranny of Xfinity/Verizon, and hopefully forcing some new internet plans to be set in place.
In the past google has provided us with projects such as gmail, andriod, chrome, and of course its search engine. We hope google can impress us one more time, and provide us with its Ultra High-Speed Internet infrastructure. This will only be another addition to the line of powerful products and services google has created, and we look forward to it.
- Andrew & Tudor
EDIT: Just a great example of Comcast’s fine customer service.
