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Today is National 8/11 Day; August 11th highlights the significance of underground excavation safety when doing home projects. By reinforcing the importance of calling the national 811 hotline before digging, everyone can help prevent damage to underground utilities and ensure the safety of workers and homeowners alike.In the United States, near...

If you've ever signed up for internet service and honestly not been sure what is included in the price, you're not alone. So the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is doing something about it.There’s been a lot of talk about the FCC’s Broadband Consumer Labels. These “nutrition labels” are designed to make it easy for customers to understan...

Update: As of October 5, 2023, eligible customers who are enrolled in the Affordable Connectivity Program with Google Fiber Webpass can sign up for a net-zero cost service plan offering uploads and download speeds of up to 300 Mbps. To get access to this $30 a month plan ($0 with the ACP benefit), Google Fiber Webpass Customers must first qualif...

When we started Google Fiber eight years ago, we knew that building a new fiber network was going to be hard, slow and expensive. But what we didn’t fully appreciate were the obstacles we would face around a key part of the process: gaining timely access to space on utility and telephone poles to place new communications equipment. One par...

Update September 20, 2016, 6:00pm PDT: It’s a great day for Nashville. Congratulations to Nashville Metro Council and residents on passing Council Member Davis’ One Touch Make Ready ordinance on its third and final reading. This will allow new entrants like Google Fiber to bring broadband to more Nashvillians efficiently, safely and quickly. We...

Ed. Note: Today, we have a guest post from Heather Burnett Gold, President of the Fiber to the Home Council Americas, and Michael Render, Principal and Founder of RVA, LLC. They are sharing the findings of a new research report on how access to ultrafast Internet can boost the value of multi-family homes. There are a slew of successful TV sho...

Broadband access truly makes a difference in people’s lives, bringing economic, social, and educational opportunities to those who are online. Yet more than a third of Americans still do not subscribe to home broadband, while half of the nation’s households in the lowest income tier do not subscribe. For many families, affordability remains one ...

We were heartened and encouraged when, a few weeks ago, the City of Louisville, Kentucky unanimously passed an ordinance that paves the way for its residents having access to faster and better broadband. So yesterday when we heard that AT&T was suing the City of Louisville for passing this so-called “One Touch Make Ready” rule, we were disap...

Nearly three years ago, Nick Budidharma, an 18­ year­ old game developer, drove with his parents from Hilton Head, S.C., to live in a “hacker home” that’s connected to the Google Fiber network. Synthia Payne relocated from Denver to launch a startup that aims to let musicians play together in real­-time online. Kansas City -- America’s first G...

Ed. Note: we’re often asked about the economic impact of fiber networks — what does a gig really do for a local economy? To help answer your questions, we have a guest post from Heather Burnett Gold, President of the Fiber to the Home Council Americas, and Dr. David Sosa, a Principal at the Analysis Group. Today they are sharing the findings of ...

Ed. Note: Local governments from across America often ask us about what they can do to prepare their communities for fiber networks. We’ve learned a lot from our work with KC, Austin and Provo — but we were also curious about what a longtime industry expert might recommend. That’s why we turned to Joanne Hovis, a communications policy expert and...

This is the second post in our “Behind the Scenes” blog series, designed to answer some frequently asked questions about how things work at Google Fiber. Today, our construction manager John Toccalino is going to explain the steps in actually building a Google Fiber network and why it takes awhile. - Ed. Today your Internet and TV service are ...

Today we’re introducing a “Behind the Scenes” blog series, designed to answer some frequently asked questions about how things work at Google Fiber. Today we’ll hear from Derek Slater, a Government Relations Manager at Google who works with the Fiber team, to explain how we work with local city governments to build a fiber network. - Ed. When ...

Ed Note: From time to time, we invite guest bloggers to write about their work — and why they think faster Internet speeds are important — here on our Fiber blog. Today we’re joined by Joe Kochan, the COO of US Ignite, a nonprofit that’s been traveling the U.S. searching for developers who want to build new tools for a faster web. US Ignite is j...

Google is all about building data-driven products. When users of Google Navigation wanted the ability to circumnavigate heavy traffic, we began to use real-time traffic data to suggest alternate routes. When Google engineers began to tackle the problem of automatic translation online, they relied on translation data from hundreds of thousands of...