No, mine doesn’t. My ISP actually state straight-out that they do not log or monitor.

Why would you use one that did?

1–Good point, but they are indicating this is live today at the Retail Partners. If these are showcase locations, why not show it off as best you can?

2–Another good point. Unless that happens though, the user experience won’t be the 100x faster they are advertising. They don’t say “much faster” or “really fast”, they say 100x faster. Will the average consumer experience that. No. That isn’t Google’s fault.

3–They specifically said you MUST use their router. That specific question was asked by two visitors to the Google Fiber space–Can I use my 802.11ac router since yours doesn’t provide that service. They said only if it’s a WAP. This specification is consistent with other providers such as U-Verse. Could this change? Absolutely and possibly even before September 9th’s rollout.

4–The issue wasn’t about making phone calls but rather other devices that use phone lines such as fax and alarm systems. Moving to Google may have additional costs if consumers want to keep a telephone line and use Google’s other services. Not a huge deal but when I listened to consumers ask about “switching” from Time Warner or AT&T that was a very popular question. “You don’t have phone in your bundle”. Again, this is about the average consumer, not about some technical enough to understand terms such as CDN, 802.11c etc etc. They need to move this from a niche product for technical people to something the average consumer will switch to.

I agree with you that “Download speeds are limited by the servers you download from”. Google is heavily advertising everything is 100x faster with their service. If the servers can’t provide or measure that speed, it is not 100x faster. If my home and office were both on Google Fiber, downloads would be wicked fast and it would feel like one big LAN. The old adage of a tree falling comes into play. If nobody can see or utilize your high speed connection then how much faster is it?

The product is being marketed extremely heavily here in the Metro because they NEED the average consumer to sign up. Not people that read blogs or even know what a router is. They just want to surf the internet faster. They may not know what a torrent is and thus not see the true power. I’m not sure why Hulu/Netflix/Amazon/iTunes would invest in making their backend faster because it serves them no business purpose. Even with heavy adoption rates of Google Fiber, a vast majority of the US won’t have these speeds so why change? Unless these CDNs provide faster download speeds the true power of Google Fiber won’t be utilized. My car has the capability of going over 100 miles an hour and my friend’s Lamborghini goes even faster but on Westport road the speed limit is 35 miles an hour.

The premium channels are not a forgone conclusion. When I worked at a cable company a few years ago I know that ESPN charged about $10 per subscriber for the cable company and it had to be included on the basic tier and they were very particular about placement on the channel lineup. Google’s TV service uses a unique channel lineup and puts the HD channels in the low numbers. The more channels Google adds, the more expensive the service becomes or they absorb that cost and less profit. I would expect if they get enough people to commit to the TV service, they’ll expand offerings because they’ll better be able to recoup those costs.

Google is saying everything is faster, which is true, but they need to convince consumers to with providers that have a long track record of providing service. Not everyone is concerned about speed, especially in a rough economy.

Thank you so much for that detailed comment. Wouldn’t it be awesome if Google came out with more info about this. Comcast or Verizon would be happy to tell me every detail of their system so people like you are I can make informed decisions. Right now we are working on the tiny crumbs and tidbits. I invite you to consider that while you or I might sign up for this, how can you pitch this to someone still running a 2006 Windows XP machine with Internet Explorer 6? That’s the person Google needs to convince to switch from AT&T or Time Warner in order to make this thing work. They sure are spending serious $$ in order to do so.