UTOPIA, an open access Fiber to the Home (FTTH) provider, is jumping into the low-price fiber broadband game by reducing the cost of its 1 Gbps residential service from $299 to $65 a month.
Seven of the Utah-based ISPs—including Beehive Broadband, Brigham.net, InfoWest, SumoFiber, Veracity Networks, WebWave, and XMission—that provide service over the UTOPIA network now offer the lower-priced 1 Gbps service.
The service provider is hardly alone in reducing the price of its 1 Gbps service.
Besides Google Fiber (Nasdaq: GOOG), which has been offering its 1 Gbps-capable service also for $70 in areas where it has built out network facilities, fellow municipal provider EPB Fiber announced it cut the price of its 1 Gbps offering from $300 to $70 a month.
In the past year, there has been a land rush of 1 Gbps FTTH announcements. Besides UTOPIA and EPB, a host of other municipalities and independent telcos, including Iowa's Cedar Fall's Utilities and Springfield, Vt.-based Vtel, also began offering their own fiber-based services.
But what's even more interesting is how the large cable MSOs and Tier 1 telco, particularly Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA), AT&T (NYSE: T), and CenturyLink (NYSE: CTL) have responded to the 1 Gbps challenge.
After Google Fiber purchased the struggling iProvo network for $1 and later revealed its pricing plans, a report emerged that Comcast (Nasdaq: CMCSA) would introduce a 250/50 Mbps tier for $70 a month.
Outside of Utah, Tier 1 telcos are also making moves.
Only hours after Google Fiber announced that it would bring the service to Austin, Texas, AT&T said it was going to build out a 1 Gbps FTTH network in the city sometime later this year. CenturyLink, meanwhile, began a 1 Gbps FTTH pilot in Omaha, Nebraska, leveraging existing fiber that was part of a cable network built by its predecessor company US West.
For more:
- see the release
Special report: Google Fiber, AT&T, CenturyLink drive the 1 Gbps game
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