Google Fiber said it has begun to sign-up residential and business customers in North Hills, the mid-town area of Raleigh, N.C.
Google Fiber said the debut there, which comes five months after Google Fiber’s launch in Morrisville, also comes amid the grand opening of its new Raleigh Fiber Space facility in the 518 West Jones building in Glenwood South, Erik Garr, Google Fiber’s southeast regional manager, announced via this blog post.
In Raleigh, Google Fiber’s residential plans include Fiber 100 (symmetrical 100 Mbps) for $50 per month (or starting at $140 per month with a TV bundle), and Fiber 1000 (1-Gig symmetrical) for $70 per month (TV bundles start at $160). Google Fiber is also selling three services tailored for businesses.
Google Fiber competes in the market with incumbents that include Charter Communications and AT&T, which is also offering a fiber-based 1-Gig service in select areas.
Garr also noted that Google Fiber is preparing to serve its first “Gigabit Communities” property at The Oaks in the coming months, referring to a program that brings free 1-Gig to select public and low-income housing properties.
Google Fiber has also begun to highlight markets supported by Webpass, the wireless broadband provider that the company acquired in October 2016.
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“Since we announced that Webpass is part of the Google Fiber family last year, we’ve been working together in the cities both Webpass and Google Fiber share: Chicago, San Diego and San Francisco,” Dennis Kish, president of Google Fiber, announced. “Webpass has been offering superfast Internet service — up to a gigabit per second — in these cities for some time, and has the full support of Google Fiber to continue doing so going forward.”
Webpass-enabled Google Fiber markets are now represented on the company’s deployment map with a green-colored pin. Others Webpass markets include Oakland, Miami, and Boston.
Google Fiber’s greater focus on Webpass markets follows a decision last year to pause expansion plans as it focused on current deployments and continues to pursue less expensive wireless options.
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Google Fiber is part of Alphabet’s “Other Bets,” a unit focused on longer-term, so-called “moonshot” projects. For all of 2016, that unit generated revenues of $809 million, up 82%, driven primary by Nest, Google Fiber and Verily (formerly Google Life Sciences), alongside an operating loss of $3.6 billion.
