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After teasing the advancement a year ago, Google Fiber says it’s ready to start offering the company’s 20Gbps internet service to select residential users later this year.
The upcoming service will arrive alongside a company-developed Wi-Fi 7 router that can broadcast the extremely fast broadband speeds across a home.
But for now, the company only plans on offering the 20 Gig service “to a small group of GFiber customers in select areas." Interested customers can apply through an early access program run by the GFiber Labs, the innovation hub for Google Fiber. Selected customers can expect “symmetrical speeds up to 20 gigabits.”
The service is probably overkill for most users. But the cutting-edge technology is about laying the foundations for an even faster internet to prepare for next-generation hardware and apps that may require a higher bandwidth. Google Fiber has already been offering 5Gbps and 8Gbps speeds to thousands of customers, along with 20 Gig speeds to certain campuses such as the University Missouri - Kansas City.
Importantly, the company developed the 20 Gig service without needing to lay new fiber. “GFiber will be one of the first ISPs to deploy Nokia’s 25G PON technology, which will allow our customers to break the 10 Gig barrier that limited existing architectures,” the company said in a blog post. “Nokia’s 25G PON provides up to 10x speeds energy efficiently and without requiring any changes to the existing fiber in the ground.”
There’s no word on how much the 20 Gig service will cost. But the company is charging $150 per month for the 8 Gig plan. Google Fiber plans on sharing more details in the coming months.
In PCMag's survey of the Best Broadband Internet Service Providers for 2023, Google Fiber earned the top spot as the fiber-to-the-home broadband service of choice, the best in the nation. While the service is fast, it also has the best price per Mbps of any ISP in our results, according to the numbers provided by BroadbandNow. And it earned an incredible 9 for satisfaction in our Readers' Choice survey.