[hmcdona1]

I live in San Antonio, a city where Google Fiber has been an option to a good part of the city for many years. When they came to town standard minimum speeds of competitors bumped from 20-50mb/s to 100-300mb/s almost overnight. Meanwhile, my family and friends just a couple of hours away in Houston were stuck with baseline options in that original range for years until AT&T rolled out their own 1gig offering much more recently.

If nothing else they have proved the competition was needed.

[cogman10]

I've seen the exact scenario play out in Boise.

In my neighborhood, I was restricted to 100Mbps down for 10 years @ something like $100->150/month. The price was also constantly climbing. The only competitor for my neighborhood offered 40mbps down for $100/month.

The MOMENT a new fiber provider announced they were going to build out to my area, all the sudden 600 down cost them $60/month and the caps went away.

Once the buildout happens in my neighborhood I'm switching anyways out of pure spite.

[WorldMaker]

Google Fiber completely shit the bed in Louisville (KY). The initial announcements did seem to spur more build-out and price cuts among the two incumbents, but even with One Touch Make Ready, Google eschewed the utility poles they were supposed to use, attempted "micro-trenching" which made zero sense in the city's climate and screwed everything up so badly (including creating a massive mess of potholes for the city to clean up) that they just shut the network back down and skipped town.

Unsurprisingly the incumbents are back to their usual complacency and their prices have steadily been on the rise in the couple years since Google Fiber did such a terrible job. It's one thing to shut down Messenger App 2 of 6, it's another thing to just entirely cut and run from an infrastructure project leaving bills behind to the City's taxpayers to pay.