I know hordes of Internet geeks out there like me were hoping that Google would roll out its insanely fast gigabit Google Fiber Internet service all around the country. I’ve been wishing that Google had plans to make the service widely available after it saw how successful it was within Kansas City. However, new details have surfaced that all but rule out a broad rollout of their crazy-fast Internet speeds – at least any time soon.
According to a report from Business Insider, Telco analyst Jason Armstrong of Goldman Sachs published a note estimating it would cost Google nearly $140 billion or more to deploy its epically fast Google Fiber service to the entire United States. If Google chose to target only major metropolitan areas in the US, the price would be a slightly more modest $70 billion.
Google is certainly worth a lot of money, but the search giant has under $45 billion in cash on hand. That’s a far cry from the $70 billion mark needed to service major metropolitan areas. Unless it takes many, many years to build out the network, Google would need some large partners or a massive loan to equip any significant portion of the country outside of Kansas City with Google Fiber service.
The report estimates that if Google were to go a more conservative route, spending about 25% of their annual $4.5 billion Cap Ex on the project, they could roll out the service to only about 830,000 homes per year, or 0.7% of US households. At that rate, they wouldn’t be able to cover the whole country for about 142 years.
[via BGR]
