Today Google announced that they are exploring bringing Fiber to San Diego. This is excellent news, but it will be a long time before anything actually happens. With Time Warner Cable bringing 300 Mbps/20Mbps connections to us later this year and possibly having gigabit from Google, consumers may actually have a choice in San Diego.
I’m not holding my breath that we’ll get Google Fiber here because we are a large city with aging infrastructure in many areas (in my neighborhood, we don’t have power cables in conduit and I suspect that we don’t have conduit in the street for cable or telephone). Also as my son correctly pointed out, San Diego has cable franchise agreements with Time Warner Cable north of Interstate 8 and with Cox Communications south of Interstate 8. Why would Google Fiber be different than cable? It would provide the same services that cable provides, telephone, Internet, and TV. I suspect that the city council would have to do something about the franchise agreements.
I’m crossing my fingers that Google Fiber will come, but in the meantime barring any problems with Time Warner Cable, I’ll be getting 200 Mbps service in a few months.