How many folks want fiber in their homes?

[ everyone raises their hands ]

Keep your hands up if you’ve looked into getting fiber.

[ everyone’s hands remain up ]

Keep your hands up if you have fiber at home today?

[ 96% of hands go down ]

Everyone in our country wants fiber, but it’s my belief that the evil folks at cable companies and telecoms are sabotaging fiber in order to maintain their legacy businesses: be they content in the case of Time Warner or phone calls and text messaging if it’s AT&T.
As your internet gets faster you spend more time online. This is one of the core tenets of Google’s success. Instead of adding features to Gmail, YouTube and Google search, they historically focused on making things faster (at least first).

Why?

Because speed drives usage.

Some of you are old enough to remember taking a sip of coffee or checking your Blackberry while the Yahoo home page loaded. In those days we would sometimes leave our computers in frustration and turn on the TV, pick up a magazine or make a phone call.
Those days of giving up on slow internet are over, and it’s been brutal on traditional media. Kids don’t make phone calls, and they are giving up texting for Voxer and Apple messaging. They play video games and social media over TV sometimes (in some cases all of the time).
Four out of five Gen-Y folks working for me have “just internet” at home. No cable or Direct TV. In fact, many don’t have TV sets, electing instead to watch Hulu, Netflix or stolen content. Ironically, they call stolen content “bittorrented movies” or “bittorrented TV shows,” as if they were distributed or produced by a Time Warner competitor called “bit torrent.”
Sure, Verizon does have a couple of million folks on FiOS — but it’s a small percentage of the United States and it’s absurdly expensive.
Oh yeah, a new startup called FreedomPop is coming up with an iPod Touch 4G-capable phone case.
You know what they call an iPod touch with a 4G connection?
AT&T’s biggest nightmare (zing! pow!), or more simply “the iPhone” (double zing! pow!).
AT&T and Verizon refuse to give the 100% of Americans who want fiber (even if some don’t know they want it yet), so Google is doing what any other visionary company would do: taking their customers.

Google Fiber, in case you don’t know, is a “pilot” in Kansas City where Google is rolling out gigabit connections for $70 — with a terabyte of Google Drive storage. Read about it