According to this flyer, US telco Time Warner Cable is asking its employees in Kansas City to share “tips, rumours and rumblings about Google construction or launch activity” related to Google Fiber for a chance to win money. Yeah, Time Warner is so worried about Google Fiber that it’s asking people to spy on Google so it’ll have a better idea of how screwed Time Warner is.
As you may know, Google is rolling out some thick pipes in the form of a gigabit fibre network in Kansas City as a sort of experiment on ultra-fast internet speed. Time Warner is an awful internet service provider and pay TV company. Google Fiber, with its theoretical 1Gbps speed, will very probably murder every crappy ISP in Kansas City, so TWC wants to collect intelligence on it by crowdsourcing spies.
Smart move? Maybe. But even if Google came to TWC with all its blueprints and told TWC exactly what it’ll be doing with Google Fiber and how to pull it off, I doubt Time Warner is capable of saving itself from its own ineptitude. [GigaOM]