Google Fiber recently announced the launch of a new retail kiosk in North Star Mall to enable easy customer service for its growing customer base — another sign of the company's growing foothold in the Alamo City.
The kiosk is in a high-traffic area enabling easy access to Google Fiber services, said Sasha Petrovic, general manager for the southwest region of Google Fiber. At the kiosk, customers can sign up for Google Fiber, receive product demos and education, upgrade service, and access customer service for account or service inquiries.
Petrovic declined to give specific numbers of San Antonio subscribers across the past several years, but noted that Google Fiber's reach has grown to 150,000 households in San Antonio.
Google Fiber, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG), began rolling out San Antonio service in 2016. Petrovic said 2021 was the company's biggest year for installing cable since it began building its San Antonio network. This enabled Google Fiber to expand the number of local households that it can serve by nearly 50%. The company added customers last year at about the same rate, said Petrovic.
Construction crews are working in other untapped areas in the northeast, northwest, and inner west sides of the city, including Leon Valley, Encino, Stone Oak and near St. Mary's University.
"Once we've completed these portions, we'll continue building out across the city including neighborhoods on the south and west sides," Petrovic said.
In October, certain sections of San Antonio's service area got access to 2-gigabyte service, with 2,000 mbps downloads and up to 1,000 mbps uploads for $100 a month. However, that 2-gigabyte service is not yet available in all areas of the San Antonio network.
According to a spring 2021 report by the Business Journal, Google Fiber saw a 32% increase in demand across its markets during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. This was in part due to an increase in stable and consistent internet usage needed by households to work and do school from home.
