The search giant chooses a second city for its fast broadband service
搜索大鳄谷歌锁定新的目标试水高速宽带服务
Apr 13th 2013 |From the print edition
Larry the cable guy
宽带网络牛人——拉里
FIRST stop, Kansas City. Next stop, Austin. On April 9th Google said that it had chosen the Texan capital as the second location for Google Fiber, an ultra-fast broadband network. Google will offer the same deal there as in Kansas City, where it began connecting households in November. For $70 a month it promises both downloads and uploads at a gigabit per second, fast enough to send a high-definition feature-length film in a few blinks, and a terabyte (ie, a shedload) of cloud storage. Television, with a Nexus tablet that serves as a controller, costs an extra $50. Google Fiber also offers a free version (after a connection fee). At five megabits per second for downloads, it is only a little slower, by Google’s count, than the average for which Americans now pay.
Analysts at Sanford C. Bernstein, a broker, estimate that in Kansas City Google will spend $84m to pass 149,000 homes. (Connection will cost a few dollars extra per home.) If it expects to make a mint from selling broadband and television, it may be disappointed. According to Pivotal Research Group in New York, in essence no one has ever made a financial success of building additional cable networks in America. Incumbents that are entrenched in lots of cities can cut prices and improve services to see off isolated entrants.
一家经纪公司Sanford c . Bernstein的分析师估计,为使网络覆盖堪萨斯城的149000个家庭,谷歌将投入8400万美元。(光纤进入每个家庭将花费大量的成本。)如果指望靠出售宽带和电视服务获取巨额回报,结果可能不会乐观。据纽约市场研究机构Pivotal Research Group的调查显示,在美国,基本上没有哪家公司靠建设附加的有线网络取得经济上的成功。盘踞在各个城市的传统运营商可以通过降价或提高服务质量,把孤立的市场介入者驱逐出去。
But sweeping aside America’s leading broadband and cable-TV suppliers is probably not what Google has in mind. More likely, it wants to spur them into speeding up their own services. The goad is working: on the same day as Google said it was coming to Austin, AT&T declared that it too planned to bring gigabit-per-second broadband to the city. “Users who have faster connections do more,” said Kevin Lo, general manager of Google Fiber, who also welcomed AT&T’s announcement. The more they do online, using Google’s search engine, watching videos on YouTube and so forth, the better for Google.
By having its own service Google will also buy a direct link to consumers, from which it can learn a lot about how they will use ultra-fast connections. Austin, a high-tech hub, may be a good laboratory. The search company will be able to dabble with experiments in television advertising, which it knows much less about than it does about the online variety. Its investment in wires may be money well spent.