Google Fiber, part of the Access division of Alphabet, is reportedly planning to offer 100 gbps broadband speeds for its consumers in the US. According to ZDNet, one gigabit speeds, which US incumbents like Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and AT&T could not match, were Google Fiber’s main selling point to attract users.
This forced incumbents to boost speeds in areas where Google Fiber was available, but its coverage was limited and remained stagnant for five years until last month, when it revealed plans to expand to five more states. Now, Google Fiber seems ready to reignite competition. The ISP’s CEO Dinni Jain says he wants to offer affordable access to multi-gig speeds and claims that a colleague recently got 20Gbps download speeds in Kansas City when testing the service, the report said.
“We used to get asked, ‘who needs a gig?’,” Jain was quoted as saying. “Today it’s no longer a question. Every major provider in the US seems to have now gotten the gigabit memo, and it’s only going up from there – some providers are already offering 2, 5, 8, even 10 gig products,” he added.
Google Fiber currently offers a symmetrical 1gbps service for $70 a month and last year started selling a 2/1Gbps download/upload service for $100 a month, with 1TB of cloud storage. “In the coming months, we will have announcements to dramatically expand our multi-gigabit tiers. These will be critical milestones on our journey to 100 Gig symmetrical internet,” Jain said.
Google has also announced that it is making text-to-speech voices sound better. The company via a blog post said that it is rolling out a major upgrade to its Speech Services by Google speech engine. As a part of these changes, Google is rolling out a more natural and clearer voices to the text-to-speech voice in Android apps.
Google, in a blog post on its Developer blog, said that it is rolling out these changes to all 421 voices in a total of 67 languages. “We are upgrading the Speech Services by Google speech engine in a big way, providing clearer, more natural voices. All 421 voices in 67 languages have been upgraded with a new voice model and synthesizer,” Google wrote in a blog post.