Just how fast do you need your home internet to be? More importantly, how much are you willing to fork over to Google each month to turn your home into a miniature data center? According to Google, the answer is an eye-gouging $US250 a month plus fees for blistering 20-Gig speeds on a WiFi 7-enabled, plus-sized router.
The Mountain View tech giant proclaimed it was finally rolling out its fabled 20-Gig Google Fiber subscription Tuesday, which inevitably comes with that enormous price tag attached. The company also sells 1 Gig services for $US70 all the way up to 8 Gbps for $US150, so the $US250 for 20 Gbps isn’t that far off the mark.
Also, you’ll need to live in Kansas City, North Carolina’s Triangle Region (the area around the towns of Raleigh and Chapel Hill) or the states of Arizona and Iowa to be the first to access these speeds. Google said it was working to bring the service to more areas, though the company is notoriously selective about its areas of operation. Google expects installations to start in Q1 of 2024.
It’s all very experimental, obviously. The company’s head of Google Fi, Nick Saporito, wrote in the blog post that the new service works on Nokia’s 25G PON and should offer the same multi-gig uploading and downloading speeds throughout one’s home. It’s also on WiFi 7, which Google has previously bragged was “not even fully certified yet.” WiFi 7, compared to WiFi 6 and 6E, also enables signals to transmit across multiple GHz bands simultaneously.
It’s also working on a custom router that’s a fair bit bigger than your traditional box. Google worked with broadband company Actiontec to design the “pre-certified” WiFi 7 router. When you start paying for the service, the company says it will send trained technicians to install the ultra-fast Google Fiber in your home. In a recent Reddit AMA, Saporito said you could also use your own router hardware for the 20-Gig service, though you’ll need an SFP28 cage supporting 25G optics. “Thousands” of people have already inquired about access to the new service when it was still in beta, according to Google.
It all seems a fair bit excessive, but Google is promoting the service to developers who may be creating apps or games from home that need excessively fast internet connections throughout their residences. While one can imagine there are a few people out there wondering if they could host the most epic LAN party ever devised, all over WiFi. Saporito said in his AMA that Fiber “envisions a future in which the internet is far richer” than today, with even more AR/VR, 3D, and AI content needing to stream directly into people’s homes without any compression.
Of course, such a future necessitates that these newfangled routers get smaller and the services get far cheaper.
“As for the exact speeds of the future… we’ve already said we’re on a quest to 100G,” Saporito wrote.