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San Jose is all for it, but Google Fiber remains coy about whether it’s going to build a fiber to the home system there, or elsewhere in the south Bay Area. On Tuesday, the San Jose city council voted unanimously to approve a construction plan and five fiber hut site leases on city land, for a prospective Google Fiber buildout.
Jenna Wandres, the Google representative at the meeting, said that they plan to build out to virtually the city, with the only possible exceptions physically hard to reach locations in the hills. She said they plan to build 2,300 miles of fiber plant – more or less the total street mileage in San Jose – regardless of household income levels in neighborhoods. That’s not a ironclad guarantee, though. It leaves the door open a crack for Google to prioritise builds on the basis of pre-sales or other consumer demand metrics, as it has done in other markets.
Pricing is not set yet, but it’s likely to follow the pattern set in the southeastern U.S., according to Wandres. There, Google charges $130 a month for a gigabit plus TV service, $70 for a gig alone and $50 for 100 Mbps service. Wandres said that there will be a fourth price plan, at least for low income neighborhoods, but it hasn’t been determined yet.
The construction plan calls for 40% of the network to be installed on utility poles, and the remaining 60% will go underground, with both traditional trenching and microtrenching techniques used.
The City of San Jose is getting about $5,000 a year in lease payments for each of the fiber hut sites. That’s more than twice the rate Google is paying in San Antonio, for example.
The City of Mountain View approved similar plans earlier this month. Google has not yet said, though, whether it will actually implement any of the approved plans. Wandres said that if they do decide to move ahead in the south Bay Area, it would be Google’s first “organic build” in California. San Francisco is the first California city with a Google Fiber project, but it’s mostly using existing fiber lines and involves little or no new construction.
No word on when a decision is expected.