Instead, there you are, in a major city, surrounded by cutting-edge technology and technology companies, resetting your crappy cable modem for the fifth time in a day, barely able to eke out a few megabits of bandwidth in the evening. Good luck complaining about it to your provider. It couldn't care less.
ISPs now have a reason to be nervous. Time Warner was clearly worried about the impact of Google Fiber in Kansas City, and its fears have proven well founded. There was nothing Time Warner could have done about Google Fiber prior to the rollout in that city, but it could certainly take steps to become competitive with a Google Fiber service in other areas, if it starts acting now.
The million-dollar question is where will Google strike next: Seattle? Austin? Chicago? Des Moines? Chattanooga? There's no way to know. All the big ISPs realize they have nothing that can compete with Google Fiber, and they're sitting ducks in just about every territory they've ruled over for so long. They may slowly begin to admit their own sloth and indifference is to blame.
If Google has a sense of humor and wants to raise some blood pressure readings, it'll deploy a fleet of Google Fiber vans to various cities of various sizes. I can just imagine Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, and Time Warner each with a war room containing a big map of the United States on the wall showing dots where Google Fiber vans have been spotted, with executives desperately trying to figure out where the next attack will occur. Maybe it will eventually dawn on them that the only way to fight the scourge of cheap, fast broadband is to provide it themselves.
This story, "Google Fiber puts the ISPs to shame," was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Paul Venezia's The Deep End blog at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.