Time Warner recently revealed, when it comes to Google Fiber, that it’s resorting to a time-honored strategy of major corporations facing severe market changes: Denial.
Before we share with you why, precisely, Time Warner thinks you don’t want Google Fiber, we should lay out the prices. Google Fiber gigabit internet with TV will run you $120 a month, $70 a month if you don’t want TV, or you can get average Internet speeds now with the option to upgrade for $25 a month for a year to pay the fee for hooking you up to fiber, and then it’s free.
Time Warner does offer you gigabit Internet, but it’s so expensive they don’t even price it; you can get 50mbps speeds for more than $200 a month, though. So, based on these two wildly different comparisons, this is what a Time Warner Cable executive said at the Morgan Stanley Technology Conference:
“We’re in the business of delivering what consumers want, and to stay a little ahead of what we think they will want. … We just don’t see the need of delivering that to consumers.”
That’s right, not enough people are paying enormous amounts of money to Time Warner Cable to get gigabit internet, so obviously they don’t want it! Pricing in the modern economy is clearly not a concern, especially with all those business customers!
We get that there’s a degree of spin to anything entitled the “Morgan Stanley Technology Conference,” but this is… well, it sounds a little desperate. Google is obviously happy with how Fiber’s been working out in Kansas City, and it’s not hard to see the company is sick and tired of dealing with cable companies. It’s getting to the point where slow Internet speeds are inhibiting Google’s growth as a company. When we did the math, we found that Google could earn potentially $3.6 billion a month by undercutting cable companies, and that was before apps sales, streaming ads, Google’s cut of TV revenue, and who knows what else.
In short, denial’s not a good river to take a swim in, since there’s a very large shark in the water.