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Google Fiber To Cut Staff In Half After User Totals Disappoint, Says Report (dslreports.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from DSLReports: Sources claim that Google Fiber has been disappointed with the company's overall number of total subscribers since launching five years ago. A paywalled report over at The Information cites a variety of anonymous current and former Google employees, who say the estimated 200,000 or so broadband subscribers the company had managed to sign up by the end of 2014 was a fary cry from the company's original projection of somewhere closer to 5 million. Google Fiber has never revealed its total number of subscribers. A report last October pegged the company's total broadband subscribers at somewhere around 120,000, though it's unclear how many of those users had signed up for Google Fiber's symmetrical 5 Mbps tier, which was originally free after users paid a $300 installation fee. Disappointed by sluggish subscriber tallies, The Information report states that last month Alphabet CEO Larry Page ordered Google Fiber boss Craig Barratt to cut the total Google Fiber staff in half to roughly 500 people. That's a claim that's sure to only fuel continued speculation that the company is starting to get cold feet about its attempts to bring broadband competition to a broken duopoly market.
I'll sign up anytime, any day! Get me out of Comcast and I'll be happy!
Maybe creating an old-school highly capital investment-intensive utility is a little harder than it appears for the new high-tech industry geniuses.
That's some pretty strong fiber. So there are worse things than just getting fired.
I don't know how you can be dissapointed in your subscriber numbers while simultaneously restricting your rollouts and walking back planned rollouts even in areas with high demand.
Where is Padme?! What's going on?!
she is being covered in hot grits right now.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Can't subscribe if it ain't available!
I'm in an alleged Google Fiber City and I can't get it!
The sign up/announcement process is also shit. My suburb originally wasn't on the list, even now it's not on the main list communities, only when a downtown address is put on the list.
Fiber doesn't need to be cutting staff, it needs to be increasing staff to increase awareness--I don't know anybody who actually likes either Com-Crap or AT&T. But nobody knows when/if it will ever actually be available for a given address because google is keeping plans and community details a secret.
Austin: Fiber 100: $50/month ($100 installation fee*)
Is that expensive? I don't think so. Maybe consumers are afraid of the spying?
Certainly, that's the reason I am uninterested in their product. They squeeze and resell enough information out of me already; I'm not ready to pay them for the privilege of trawling through every last bit of information that goes to or from my household, at any rate of speed.
Its probably bundling with other services. iirc Google had a TV + Internet + Home Phone(?) but I'm sure many families also want to bundle their cellular.
...But I'm really starting to think internet-as-a-municipal-utility is the answer here.
Well, except for the whole direct government control of my data thing.
Most people are so used to Internet Service being the Monopoly of the Cable provider that they are not aware of alternaties in the few areas where Fiber is available. Not to mention that Cable actually does compete in those few areas where there is legitimate competition from Fiber
About three months ago fiber rolled out to our area and my apartment complex already paid the install fee. However I have not switched yet. Why?
1) Already in a contract with telecom company.
2) There is zero reason to trust an 'evil' company like Google from harvesting my data. Yes, most ISPs do it. But Google is one of the worst privacy whores on the planet.
3) Pricing is not that competitive. 1GB service is nicely priced, but most of my devices are 100mb and I don't use that much internet. 100mb service is not much cheaper than 1gb service, but it's still a bit more than what I'm paying and still bit more than I need. 25mb service is a sweet spot, $15 is about $20 less than I pay now and is slightly faster. I would consider this if not for #1 and #2. 5mb service I guess technically I already have since the apartment already paid the install. Maybe once my telecom contract ends I ought to just use it for the remaining ~2 years.
4) Not allowed to host servers. This is a big issue for me. If I'm going to pay for 1gb internet, why the hell can't I host a server on it? With ip6 and such high bandwidth we really need to get rid of this draconian rule. If it were removed, I would totally consider buying the 1gb service regardless of 1, 2, and 3...
Third time this week. I'm reading through slashdot comments on my mobile and get a popup ad with a "data:text/html;base64" url. Here's a couple screen grabs:
http://imgur.com/a/E4fuR
first photo shows the URL. second photo shows that chrome thinks the page is still on slashdot's website. The ad pops up and fills the screen on it's own, without me clicking on anything (so it's on some sort of setTimeout or something). It won't let me use the back button either. This crap is very invasive. Slashdot should not be showing these sort of ads
Of the 23 homes on my street I'm confident I saw 12 installations since GF started hooking us up in April. I'm pretty sure it is more, probably approaching 75% if not more. And I've seen the trucks all over the subdivision in the last 4 months. I can stand on the second level of my home and easily pick up 10 GF wireless signals. So in my KC suburban subdivision the uptake seems pretty significant from what I've seen. I have TV, internet, and phone through GF. I hope they can keep it up as the service has been outstanding. I've had no outages or problems and they have been quick to respond to questions and requests.
Been waiting here in Overland Park, KS for over year since they announced it. Their build-out is slow.
Except the burden of entry appears to be too high for the largest company in the world.
Oh, you don't offer it in my area?
> They should have been far more aggressive in getting their service in as many places as possible.
Maybe. Or maybe if it didn't sell well in Kansas City, and it didn't sell well in Austin, and it didn't sell well in Provo - it doesn't sell well. More cities would have been more fail.
Kind of like politicians in places that have been 100% controlled by one party, representing one viewpoint, for decades and it hasn't worked, places like Detroit, Chicago, etc. While campaiging the same politicians stand up there and point to the same problems, while supporting the same "solutions" that they've been doing for 30 or 40 years. If it's not working, maybe it's not going to work; maybe try something else.
It may be very wise for Google to say "well, that didn't work, we'll try something else" rather than doing more failure faster.
The top or the bottom?
Watch out, there are Llamas!!
It's going just like Motorola. Nothing unexpected.
The competition will keep dragging their feet so Google can't enter their domain. I've seen it happen here in Europe. Why do you think BT still has a defacto land line monopoly here?
Awesome, you won a reward! What was it?
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
Scams hosted by CloudFlare.
I got something similar about Google awards or some such crap from Google
It loaded a pop up that the only option was to click OK.. It stopped safari from allowing me to close the page without clicking that OK button.
Only way around it was to close the browser then open a new url from the iphone search tool.. Only then I could close that page off!!
It said I was the Lucky Aussie of the day!!
To solve this in the long run I had to install Adblock.. Sorry slashdot your ad network has failed you, no more ads for me!!
This sort of crap is exactly why Adblock is vital to being safe I the net.. Think of it like a franger for when you visit the whore that is the Internet!!
Third time this week. I'm reading through slashdot comments on my mobile and get a popup ad with a "data:text/html;base64" url. Here's a couple screen grabs:
http://imgur.com/a/E4fuR
first photo shows the URL. second photo shows that chrome thinks the page is still on slashdot's website. The ad pops up and fills the screen on it's own, without me clicking on anything (so it's on some sort of setTimeout or something). It won't let me use the back button either. This crap is very invasive. Slashdot should not be showing these sort of ads
Confirmed. I've seen it multiple times in the past few weeks on my Android phone's Chrome browser.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Hiding the URL with base64 URI is plain malware.
Slashdot is arguably in violation of the CFAA if they are hosting or complicity loading that code.
To confirm, you mean you've seen it while viewing slashdot, correct?
Third time this week. I'm reading through slashdot comments on my mobile and get a popup ad with a "data:text/html;base64" url. Here's a couple screen grabs:
http://imgur.com/a/E4fuR
first photo shows the URL. second photo shows that chrome thinks the page is still on slashdot's website. The ad pops up and fills the screen on it's own, without me clicking on anything (so it's on some sort of setTimeout or something). It won't let me use the back button either. This crap is very invasive. Slashdot should not be showing these sort of ads
Not only this, but fucking auto fucking refresh is still fucking annoying us, and if you click Older >> at the bottom of the page, it takes you to the older articles but very frequently puts you at the bottom of the page (wtf?), and the big ads at the top take so long to load that the comments I'm reading are often jumping around as the ad finally loads and adjusts the page height, etc. Ugh.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
I'm wondering if Google ever really planned to do more than a handful of city-wide Google Fiber rollouts. I think that they were more concerned about scaring the phone and cable companies into upgrading their broadband speeds than really becoming a serious competitor as an ISP. Now that many areas in the US have faster speeds, they are more likely use bandwidth intensive Google services like YouTube, and probably download more paid content from the Play stores. Even if they decide to purchase that content elsewhere, Google is still serving those users ads!
With the money that Google has in the bank, they could have installed broadband in 25 mid-size cities by now. At this point, they'll probably abandon their plans to expand soon be looking for a buyer for the few cities where they actually installed service.
I think Google finally realized (or knew all along, like many other companies have) that wireless technology is the future of consumer broadband. Supporting a wire going out to every single customer just doesn't make sense if you can do the same thing cheaper and more reliably over thin air.
Google never seemed serious with glacially slow roll-outs in older neighborhoods while fiber-ready suburbs with qualified subscribers were left wanting.
I live in Portland, OR. Yes we have a high concentration of techies with spare cash. We even made our state change some laws to accommodate Google Fiber. That law made us lose millions in recurring tax revenue from the likes of Comcast. That was more than a year ago. We still do not have Google Fiber. And now this? You have to be freaking kidding me!
News for NERDS, you're supposed to be chained to a desktop PC - mobile is far too hip to be square.
If they hadn't offered their service in areas that already had other decently fast option available and instead focused on under served areas... I bet they would have seen a lot more subscribers....
Ignoring the pop-up, I'm not sure why you willingly subject yourself to that torture.
Go install Avantslash on your server and read Slashdot on your phone that way.
Not only will your eyes thank you for it - but your data cap will too.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Cutting staff in half just because the results are disappointing...
Is professional misconduct punished by drawing and quartering or something?
I don't even use the mobile site on my mobile devices. Maybe that's because I recall as commonplace desktop monitor screens that had ~1/6 the pixel depth/width that my phone has.
(Yes, size is a thing--but so is resolution.)
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I have two solutions for you (I use both): Noscript and Ublock Origin. These are the 2 best Firefox plugins ever made.
The problem is the quasi-monopolies (i.e. industries with very few players but very high barriers to entry)—but in the other direction.
I'm a Google Fiber user, but in this area, the moment that Google Fiber announced, the two other providers both suddenly rolled out gigabit fiber plans at around $70/mo. after years of charging about that for 5-20 megabit plans. Their customers all switched to the new plans while waiting for Google Fiber to build out (took many months) and as a result didn't go through the hassle of switching to Google Fiber once it was available, since they already had an affordable gigabit plan with their current provider.
Basically, Google encountered the power of monopolies in exactly the classic sense. They found out that it was very difficult to enter an existing monopoly-served market because the large interests are able to instantly match whatever the new kid on the blog was offering.
It also demonstrates the power of competition—as soon as *someone* was offering $70/month gigabit fiber, all players in the area were. But sadly, it is the new kid on the block that suffered most by incurring the costs of trying to enter at a lower price point without realizing the expected benefits.
As an aside, I also imagine that were, hypothetically, to pull out of this area, those gigabit fiber plans from the others would suddenly and magically "disappear" again.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
MUNICIPAL FIBER!
There's no other way. Verizon stopped rolling out fiber years ago. In fact they've sold off some of their FIOS business. Verizon is all about wireless, that's where the cash cow is. So it's no surprise that Google would follow suit. Each wants the low hanging fruit. The only way we are going to get fiber is if municipalities roll it out themselves.
Oh the 2Mbs is broadband crowd. Stop shilling for Verizon.
Google Fiber is available in my metro area. The problem - roughly 80% of the population lives outside city limits. Google Fiber is only available within city limits. Google made business decisions to save their money on infrastructure to not offer it outside the city limits. There's not really anything we can do about that. I have no idea if they did their research or not, but the reason that most people live outside city limits is that property is ridiculously expensive within the city limits and most metro residents are simply priced out of living there. I guess they didn't get enough millionaires to buy it there. If they weren't smart enough to realize that desperately poor people who make up the other main group of residents within city limits weren't likely to buy much either, then maybe they need to look at their people who made the decisions to offer what they offered where they offered it. As far as I can tell nobody in my county of residence can get Google Fiber, which is a real shame because I'm sure a lot of us would get it if we could. And I do truly mean that as far as I know ZERO county residents where I live can get Google Fiber. ZERO. We can't buy what you won't sell to us, Google.