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Google Fiber Is Changing Its Strategy as Costs Grow (fortune.com)
Google is taking a strategy timeout on its high-speed-internet business. According to WSJ, the Google Fiber unit is -- including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas -- after its initial rollouts proved time-consuming and expensive than anticipated -- is rethinking how to deliver internet connections in about a dozen metro areas (could be paywalled; alternate source). From a Fortune report: Turns out it is very expensive to run wires -- or in Google's case, fiber optic cables -- to each and every house that wants service. Known as the "last mile" problem, the high costs, in turn, make it difficult for companies to earn a solid rate of return on the installation investment. Google's effort, through its unit called Fiber that launched in 2010, is now seeking alternative means to connect to consumers homes or finding other people to pay the cost. Google has sought deals with municipalities and power companies to pay for the connections and is also exploring less expensive wireless technology. Meanwhile, Google has suspended efforts to add new cities such as San Jose, Calif., and Portland, Ore., using its prior strategy of stringing up cables to each customerâ(TM)s home.
What ever happened to Google TISP, their plan to run fiber through the sewer infrastructure?
"Google is taking a strategy timeout on its high-speed-internet business. According to WSJ, the Google Fiber unit is -- including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Dallas -- after its initial rollouts proved time-consuming and expensive than anticipated rethinking how to deliver internet connections in about a dozen metro areas"
What the fuck, seriously
File this under #SawThatComingAMileAway
It's easy to run fiber up and down the streets. It's a real bitch to run fiber from the street into the house.
Natural Monopolies do exist? shocking!
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I already have Fiber and Broadband to my house but oh wait, Google can't use those because my local politicians gave certain franchise rights to companies who made the investment in digging up the street. In my case at least it isn't a last mile problem, it's a blocked mile problem.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Stop running wires below ground and run it above ground. Make a deal with the existing power companies to use their poles. I don't remember the exact figures, but above ground wiring is somewhere around 5-6x cheaper on average (and probably more in dense areas.)
a nominal fee of up to $1k to get Google Fiber run from the nearest utility pole about 50 feet to my house near San Diego. Anything to get rid of the telco and cableco monopoly. Then I'd cut the cable cord, as I have already done with AT&T.
No planning of any kind of coordinated/mandated ditch/tunnel to each home. Absolute bitching if people dig up yards.. 100% contractor use ends up leading to unknown cable placements that end up getting cut. You pretty much have to cut lines these days to run new lines or repair existing lines. Humans are humans anyway so really there isn't a foolproof method to make sure they always locate and mark lines down they ran under the budgets that are necessary to get it done. The city/electric company gets a huge portion of the money and I think should be responsible and mandate lines going through roads/to homes be recorded accurately for the cost they require. Combine this with storms, roads, and road work that constantly cuts lines and you have a constant expense replacing everything. You even have to rent poles for large $$ sums from cities/electric. It all adds up and when you have people bitching about 50$ a month for Internet that cost your company $4000 to run a line to... you start to understand the problem. If cities don't start planning something simple like an open marked channel to homes this problem won't go away.
"Turns out it is very expensive to run wires -- or in Google's case, fiber optic cables -- to each and every house that wants service. "
Holy cow...did nobody at Google see what happens with similar utilities? Or did they just assume the old rules didn't apply to them since it was "on the Internet"? I thought the 1999 "we'll make it up in volume" rules were already thrown out. I highly doubt Economics 101 courses at Stanford leave out the discussion of natural monopolies.
The only thing I can possibly think that they were thinking is that the value of the data they were able to mine by being plugged _directly_ into your Internet usage habits would be way bigger than the cost to run fiber to thousands of houses.
Why do you think Verizon et al is now trying desperately to get out of the wireline business? They're a public utility and can't raise rates whenever they feel like it, unlike their wireless business. At the same time, you have real physical stuff deployed in the ground that needs to be maintained. It's the same over at the electric company, or worse, the water authority. I can't imagine how much it costs to maintain 100+ year old pipes and clean up after water main failures.
I said it years ago when this shit started up. Google doesn't have the money to become a national ISP.
The major telcos are worth far, far more than Google is because they have infrastructure in place which simply cannot be replicated today without trillions of dollars or a huge "fuck you, get it done" from Congress. It's not just about last mile costs, it's about the "franchises", crooked politicians, existing lobbyists, landlords on the take, etc. for nearly every city and town in the country.
Hint: They're going to hit similar problems when they try to expand "Project Fi".
The cities should eminent domain the poles. They take over doing the wiring and maintenance on the peoples. Companies wishing to use the poles accept the government doing the wiring and maintaining the poles in a neutral manner. They each pay a fraction of the cost of the pole. If 1 company is using the poles they pay 100%. If 2 they pay 50%, 4 25% etc. The more companies offering services using the resource the cheaper it is for all companies doing so.
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
From everything I read when Google started rolling out fiber, the idea *really* was never to become the next big nation-wide ISP for broadband. It was more of an attempt to "shake the tree" ... to get existing providers to sit up and take notice that people really did want better, faster connections than they were currently selling.
That's one reason there was always such a big "to do" about Google trying to select where the next city was going to be for a fiber rollout.
I think this was a strategic move to dial up the pressure on the existing providers to improve their offerings. (Once you have a critical mass of people asking, "Hey Comcast/Charter/Cox/Verizon/AT&T/whoever .... why is it I can move to Kansas City and get broadband from Google that's 100x faster than what you're selling me for more money?!" -- you've hopefully created some momentum for a change.)
But... but... but... blame someone else!!!1111!!!!
Rather, run fiber optic to all neighborhoods. Than broadcast over a wireless signal to the last mile.
Living in Kansas City and having had Google Fiber since the beginning, I feel sorry for the rest of the country. :)
That being said, while the wired internet is fantastic, their Wi-Fi hardware could use some improvements.
We've known about the "last mile" problem for decades. On the internet wasn't gonna change that. Good-luck kiddos, you're at the point we were at decades ago, keep innovating!
Roads, electricity, water, gas, telephone: All of these things could only be built with significant involvement/investment/regulation from the government. It should be blatantly obvious that no amount of "free market" magic by itself is going to get fiber infrastructure built to every home in the country which currently already has the aforementioned infrastructures; most of which are much more expensive to build out than fiber lines. This is what I find most aggravating about the whole broadband mess. I'm imagining an alternate history where Eisenhower was never able to build the Interstate highway system because a bunch of powerful monopolies already had a bunch of bumpy dirt roads with exorbitant toll booths.
In June, Google announced that it would acquire Webpass, an urban ISP that delivers ethernet drops rather than requiring cable or DSL modems. WebPass has fiber connections throughout its various cities ("San Francisco, Oakland, Emeryville, Berkeley, San Diego, Miami, Miami Beach, Coral Gables, Chicago, and Boston") and connects the last mile with a wireless connection to the customer's rooftop using point-to-point radios.
This is mentioned in TFA as well:
Webpass already offers 100+mbps (up and down!) for $46/mo ($550/y or $60/mo) at the residential level, and I'm under the impression the speed is actually bottlenecked by the ethernet switching and cabling within each participating building rather than the wireless signal; they support up to 1Gbps using this model.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
Google is digging up my neighborhood currently. Unfortunately my neighborhood (subdivision) is at the intersection of two cities and my city isn't the one getting Google Fiber at the moment. The house that I share the back of my property line with will be able to get Google fiber but I won't for about another year. My guess is that with this announcement that year may become permanent. Sigh...
I think Google and its parent company Alphabet deserve a lot of praise for this. They have re-invented the wheel and learned lessons that the rest of the world learned 100 years ago: infrastructure isn't cheap.
Kudos to the brilliant minds at Google for figuring this out. I am sure glad that they can bestow this knowledge upon the rest of the world. Whatever would we have done without them?
The "last mile" should be a public utility, like land-lines used to be. The carrier (ISP) should then be relatively easily switchable per what individual customers want in order to finally give us real competition, instead of 2 actual (crappy) choices plus a 3rd fake choice that most places have now
It's not economically efficient (i.e. redundant) for each vendor to lay wires all the way to each house. Centralize the final wiring, but make the up-stream part easily toggle-able between vendors so that many vendors can enter the market without investing an arm and a leg. They'd only have to run (or rent) wiring to the switching stations/nodes, NOT to each house.
That's how Vulcan's would do it. Ferengi-like humans got us our current oligopoly mess. Only the airline industry has worse customer satisfaction ratings than the big telecoms. Comcast et al. are just shy of crying babies, lost luggage, no leg room, and long airport waits.
Table-ized A.I.
Paywalled Google finance strategies on Slashdot you say?
Above was super elite american hacker story, then reddit won't cough up IP addresses. Now this one. As I scroll down I expect Microsoft Anniversary 10 news.
This site is gay now.
I don't know, but do Google Fiber's terms of service indicate whether they can snoop your data or even just your metadata? Some of this could easily be categorized as not even snooping, but operational data that any ISP would be able to collect in the course of running a network operation.
It wouldn't surprise me if the newly-realized "cost" problem isn't really a "cost" problem but a revenue/business intelligence shortfall. Google Fiber was dreamed up pre-Snowden and a renewed push to encrypt a lot more traffic.
There's still valuable metadata there even if you can't see the contents, but probably more if you can sniff the contents. Plus if you have a very high speed fiber connection it would make it less painful to run all your traffic through a VPN.
I'm in the fucking Polish Underground, you insensitive clod!
Once again we are reminded that the G in Google stands for Government.
If you had been paying attention, you would realize they are not really a private company.
Wouldn't the weather affect the wireless leg? I'm not sure I went my internet dropping when its raining or snowing.
"Known as the "last mile" problem, the high costs, in turn, make it difficult for companies to earn a solid rate of return on the installation investment."
Sad that google has gotten so greedy they'd rather forgo stealing customers from competition at the cost of an up-front investment.
If they charge $50/month for 10 years, that's $6000. Can it possibly cost anywhere near that to run a wire from one house to the street? Maybe just let the homeowners do it themselves!?
That is what Google should have done.
-Sell kits to people to run fiber themselves from house to house.
-Sell Google branded wifi routers that mesh with other wifi routers. Have multiple radios and multiple connections, break up data packets and have the data take many paths to get to you.
-Have new home subdivisions run fiber optics during construction.
-Get the main connection between cities and neighborhoods done with Google contractors and suppliers.
but...but...but...I thought they were providing a valuable service? I thought everything was suppose to be "free". You mean it's EXPENSIVE to run fiber all the way to the home? And here we thought these evil cable operators were just being greedy.
This is what Australia tried to do. There were cost over-runs and an ultra-conservative government that stopped it.
Problem with wireless is that it's usually a point-to-multipoint architecture for cost reasons. That means it is a shared medium and shared last-mile. What they normally do for the central distribution node is a sector antenna that beams out over an arc of say 90 degree. Then people living within that arc have highly directional dishes that aim back at the center node and they all share capacity. This could be dozens or even hundreds of homes over a single wireless connection that is already subject to radio interference and contention.
Why don't we do it like them. Oh yeah, socialism.
Not really. It's a point-to-point link, which means you have two directional antennas pointed at each other. The equipment manufacturer will have a done a link budget over distance, including free space propagation loss, atmospheric losses, and rain fade.
The latest wireless setups are outstanding. We've been using them for both of our business locations. Not as cheap as OP, but $400/month for 100/100 speeds is a fraction of what actual 100/100 fiber costs in my area.
We need the telecommunications act reinstated in a new way, where local transport is a utility or coop that only deals with transport to the home. They found out in the electrical deregulation fiasco of California that the free market works best where it can compete. Where it can't compete, you have to regulate. Anything else is BS pushed by lobbyists to prevent competition. Last mile transport providers that are also content providers have a conflict of interest and need to be busted up. Unfortunately that would impact google fiber, but if they take the medicine, you could call out the others for their cheating ways.
But if you read their FAQ, they don't support single family residences. Minimum of 10 units before they will install.
As a failed WISP, I'm curious what wireless gear they use. Do they have licensed spectrum? While it is certainly possible to get 2.4GHz or 5GHz gear to reliably run over 100Mbit, not sure how they would get to 1Gbps. Maybe with 24 or 60GHz? A problem with 2.4 and 5 is that other people can be using it and wipe out the signal. (plus there are those nasty tree leaves)
Also, if you price out wireless gear that can go 1Gbps, I suspect that would pay for $1500 of fiber installation. Which would you rather have? $1500 of radios that can't possibly ever go faster, plus they sit out in the weather and age. Or fricking fiber that can carry multiple terabits and is somewhat safely buried.
Well duh! Paint the town with WiFi and it'll still be fast and allow them to undercut ISPs.
People who want to pay for the last mile or communities where the cost isn't vast will be able to convince them to run fibre maybe.
Would be a much more doable strategy.
I know the point of this whole exercise was 1+Gb FTTH, but perhaps finding a 300mbps happy medium would serve communities well for now.