Slashdot Mirror
Google Fiber Pauses Operations, CEO Leaves, and About 9 Percent of Staff Is Being Let Go (bloomberg.com)
The future of Google Fiber has been shaky ever since Google's parent company, Alphabet, was founded. The original plan was to expand Fiber's blazing fast internet service to more than 20 cities, with the goal of eventually delivering nationwide gigabit service. However, Alphabet hit the reset button on those plans Tuesday. Not only is Google Fiber CEO Craig Barratt leaving, but about 9 percent of staff is being let go. That translates to about 130 job losses, since the business has about 1,500 employees. Bloomberg reports: Barratt wrote in a blog post that the company is pulling back fiber-to-the-home service from eight different cities where it had announced plans. Those include major metropolitan areas such as Dallas, Los Angeles and Phoenix. Moving into big cities was a contentious point inside Google Fiber, according to one former executive. Leaders like Barratt and Dennis Kish, who runs Google Fiber day-to-day, pushed for the big expansion. Others pushed back because of the prohibitive cost of digging up streets to lay fiber-optic cables across some of America's busiest cities. "I suspect the sheer economics of broad scale access deployments finally became too much for them," said Jan Dawson, an analyst with Jackdaw Research. "Ultimately, most of the reasons Google got into this in the first place have either been achieved or been demonstrated to be unrealistic."
Since they are running from the street to my neighbor's house about 3 doors down I hope they finish it before they pull back!
...in Seattle where I live there are multiple providers offering 1Gbps service. Thanks to the Directors Rule, we don't have to put up with companies pulling up our streets and sidewalks on the taxpayers dime. This is what thinking ahead gets you.
Watch for TPG's acquisition of RCN to serve as a test bed for GoogleWireless.
Damnit Google fiber, frontier took over fios in dallas. You were our only hope.
People think it should be cheap and easy to get high speed broadband internet to everyone. They think we should have a dozen different companies doing it and they all can compete and prices will fall through the basement. What they don't understand is how fucking expensive it is to run wires around the country. I don't know why Google, in all their arrogance, thought they could do something on the cheap that people a lot cheaper than them have been trying to do for decades. All I can do is smile and laugh at their hubris, and listen to everyone on /. bitch about 'monopolies' when as you can see there is a very good reason there are very few broadband providers in most areas - you can't divide the customers up that many ways and expect anyone to make a profit. And if there is no profit, no private business is going to attempt it.
I was hoping they would make it to my area simply because the only option I have for fast internet is Comcast, and I would love to have an alternative. We are just up the road from a Google data center and already have the Free Wi-Fi in parts of the city, so I figured we were a lock. Crud.
Dammit! How hard is it to dig a trench and lay a cable in it? I know the trench-digging part at least is easy, because where I live they manage to knock out at least one vital utility a year digging around at random.
Do I have to do it myself? Because me and at least 20 people I know would gladly volunteer to buy a spool of fiber and dig a mile of trench each with hand shovels if we knew for sure they wouldn't arrest us for it.
The real question, of course, is how hard it is for local politicians not to take bribes from incumbent telecom providers to slow things down. And the answer is, apparently, pretty hard.
What this means is there really isn't ever going to be any meaningful competition in internet service providers in the foreseeable future. If Google with all it's cash can't feasibly put a competitive service together then no one can. If anything, competition is disappearing, with AT&T/TimeWarner's merger and all. Although we still need to see if that gets approved.
of course everything Google (or Tesla) proclaims is perfectly achievable and wanted, laws of physics or economics or pesky human desires be damned, and not at all corporations talking out of their asses just as corporations always have and always will. Is anyone honestly surprised?
...this much. Part of their problem is there billing model. They have no realistic billing system, and this is alienating customers. It is highly unrealistic to expect everyone to be able to pay there bill on the same date every month, and that is alienating customers. When I first got fiber I thought it was awesome until I learned how there billing system works. You don't get to pick your bill date like you do with Comcast, Time Warner, or any normal service provider. Google picks it based on your install date, and then doesn't allow you to change it. This doesn't work in an economy like the US currently has unless you are independently wealthy. Most consumers have to balance their budget, and juggle bills around to meet unexpected expenses. Then to top that off they don't have a payment arrangement system of any sort. They only give you 15 days to pay past your due date, and then a total of 45 days before they shut you off. Also once you hit your 15 day mark the next bill is added to the total bill, and you have to pay both bills by the 45 day mark or they shut you off. Even if you pay the original past due balance they still shut you off unless you pay the next months bill too. If you look at the Google support forum blog this is one of the highest complaints with several threads asking about a fix for the billing system, but Google has basically said fuck you consumers pay us and juggle your bills around paying us. I still have Google fiber for the moment because besides this issue it is the best option for me. However it sucks having to arrange all my other bills around paying my Google Fiber bill so I don't get screwed by their payment system.
Are you telling me that Google can't make fiber profitable by charging people $100/month for it???
Because I know a lot of people who are paying much more than that and getting crappier service in my area.
Dammit! How hard is it to dig a trench and lay a cable in it?
It's challenging. Not in the sense that they don't know how to do it but rather that it's expensive and unless you already have customers it's financially risky. To build a whole network is enormously expensive.
I know the trench-digging part at least is easy, because where I live they manage to knock out at least one vital utility a year digging around at random.
Umm, that would be evidence that it is NOT easy.
Do I have to do it myself? Because me and at least 20 people I know would gladly volunteer to buy a spool of fiber and dig a mile of trench each with hand shovels if we knew for sure they wouldn't arrest us for it.
I don't think you have the foggiest idea what you are proposing. I have immediate family that has been in the business of laying underground cable. There is a lot more to it than digging a trench and dropping a cable to the bottom of it.
Big party at ATT, COX, Comcast, and more.
The politicians like to party with there big backers.
Why the fuck could the entire country be electrified (rural electrification), stringing heavy cables to every small town. Why the fuck could the entire country have telephone access (rural telephony), stringing twisted to every small town. Now in the 21st century they can't run a damned glass fiber (cheap compared to copper) in the most dense areas, never mind stringing it along mostly empty telephone poles. Give me a fucking break. I suppose the telcos took the money and run.
I live in a GF area and love it. There are three tiers, 5 Mbps for $0 (yes, free broadband), 100 Mbps for $70, and 1 Gbps for $90. They have been absolutely bulletproof, the speeds are for real when tested, and the online system and the way that it integrates with their WiFi router is awesome.
I have had multiple providers over the years, including Comcast and Verizon, and Google Fiber's product and service are easily better than the others.
If Google can't make this work, there may be no hope for anything better for a long time to come. I just hope I don't lose it here!
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Turns out good internet infrastructure costs a shit-ton of money.
Even if they built it, how long would they keep running it before killing it like so many of their other failures?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
No new CEO, and no clearly articulated plan for what "wireless" looks like? Does "wireless" even come close to competing with fibre? Will it include mobile wireless service, which sounds also quite expensive.
What the plans, Googz?
Minor advantage, at least here in Jacksonville: the prospect of GF arriving scared AT&T into stringing more fiber. I was able to get it at my place this summer, and already having DirecTV meant no data caps, a lower bill than the combined Comcast/DTV/Vonage bills I had been paying, and a jump from 75/12 Mb to 940 symmetric. And being able to call up Comcast and tell them to DIAF didn't hurt my well-being either. Only problem now is what to do in two years when the contract expires and I won't have GF to threaten them with....
FTA....
Moving into big cities was a contentious point inside Google Fiber, according to one former executive. Leaders like Barratt and Dennis Kish, who runs Google Fiber day-to-day, pushed for the big expansion. Others pushed back because of the prohibitive cost of digging up streets to lay fiber-optic cables across some of America’s busiest cities.
'Others', as in SHORT SIGHTED 'ACTIVIST' SHAREHOLDERS who want that quarterly price target hit, were the ones who pushed back.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
"Not enough fiber".
What the fuck do you mean paused, I'm in a Google Fiber city and not only can't I get it, but I don't think I'll ever be able to get it.
It's paused because people who want it aren't able to fucking get it.
And they stop? Yes, please continue down easy street selling ads.
The problem with Google's "Everything is Beta" mindset is that they can pull the plug on anything whenever they want.
I am pretty happy with Fi right now, but I know its just a trial-balloon. Once the hype ends, if it isnt a market-dominating force, they will pull the plug on it.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
Google hit a brick wall when Comcast and other Utilities refused to let Google put their fiber in Comcast utility easements, which effectively killed Google in Metro Markets. Also, Google hasn't paid what it owes the Trans-Atlantic / Pacific cable laying companies what they owe up front cash to. And the US Government shut off the money subsidizing tap Google was counting on. Then there was the in house resource fight between Project Loon (Internet via high altitude balloon access points) at Google's X Moonshot Factory and this Fiber Project. If you haven't got Google Fiber at this point and your neighbor did, construction has ended and you're SOL.
Google seems to be doing business strategy based on whack-a-mole. Try this. Does it work out? Great. Doesn't work out. drop it and try again.
They where just plain lucky that the first few where a hit and gave them enough money to absorb all the misses. And if you do enough tries, you will hit something eventually.
So this is just another where the beta program is being discontinued. They will first probably let it bleed dead and then just cancel it all, not even sell it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
I'd be surprised, but this is such a common pattern with Google/Alphabet (which I will refer to as Google for the rest of this post) when they try anything that's not Ad/Search related that it's more of a *meh*.
Google Health, that Energy project that they seem to have wiped from search results, Google+, Google Glass, and so on. They put a huge amount of upfront capital into these projects and hype to hell out of them only to abandon them when they realize that it takes effort to build new, ground breaking businesses. Not everything will be handed to them like ads/search was. From that I can tell, it also seems to be a function of internal champions - one person drives these projects and when they lose interest, the projects die.
From the tech eco-system's perspective, this is frustrating. As soon as Google announces one of these projects, everyone assumes they'll succeed and competition is stifled. Investors don't want to compete against Google. I run a genomic informatics company. Google Genomics is making noise in this space and every time we talk to investors or customers, we inevitably spend 5-10 minutes talking about Google. My stock response is to walk them through Google's past efforts with non-Ad/Search products and ask them if they're willing to risk Google losing interest.
Google has an important place in the tech world, but they still act like a tween trying to fit in.
-Chris
I live in a small town in Ontario, Canada (pop ~2000). A few years ago, a company came to town with FTTH (100 MBps, usually pretty consistent, quite happy with the service). To get fibre around this small town, horizontal drilling machinery was used. Our town is fairly uncomplicated for this (not too many paved/concreted areas, mostly single dwelling homes), and even still it was a major undertaking to get around buried electrical and gas lines and mistakes happened (punctured water mains, severed electrical lines, property access). I can completely understand why a city like Dallas might be logarithmically more difficult to lay fibre underground. Think about any stretch of a city block downtown and imagine trying to get fibre under it. I would think that wireless internet would make far more sense in a city. What a logistical nightmare.
It seems like more and more over the years, nothing from Google is immune from abandonment syndrome.
It's like the guy who came with with Google Fiber did it as a 20% project and decided recently VR was cooler. "Sell off the trencher Fran, I'm getting' a Vive!"
If it's anything but placing ads for search I'm not sure I would trust Google with anything again. I host my domain mail with Google and frankly I'm thinking about shifting away from them for that...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Google may have gotten smart and realized that its two lines of business would just end up being a disaster.
Have gnu, will travel.
Google Succeeded as far as I'm concerned. Their initial point wasn't the fact that GOOGLE could do it, it was the fact that ISPs across the country were not being honest about how much bandwidth really cost. While it may not quite be at the same $75-ish price point of Google Fiber, there are now countless companies who have done massive upgrades to their networks to support FTTH in markets that were previously uncompetitive, even ones Google was't even eying. Where I live, CenturyLink used to offer only 3mbps DSL service, but in January of this year they rolled out fiber city wide and now offer both symmetrical 100mbps and 1gbps services in the $100 range. Just checked this week, and Comcast is now offering their 2gbps service locally as well, which wasn't there when I looked over the summer. So while we were never on Google's radar for some reason or another, the other existing ISPs got their fucking asses in gear finally and upgraded BECAUSE of pressure from Google in other markets, and strong consumer demand locally.
I HAVE google fiber. Construction teams dug up nothing; directional drilling rigs were used to "inject" 3 inch diameter plastic conduit underground; It was a fast efficient process. What I suspect is REALLY happening here is that now that Google Fiber is being impacted by idiotic legislation preventing them from selling the fiber network to the local governments.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160701/06533834875/frontier-backs-ats-lawsuit-to-keep-google-fiber-out-louisville.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150921/08095232312/cox-sues-tempe-arizona-nefarious-plan-to-bring-google-fiber-to-town.shtml
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160314/09374733901/isps-are-blocking-google-fibers-access-to-utility-poles-california.shtml
Now google just wants to deliver the same service via wifi; and maybe its not such a horrible idea, IF (and this is a big if) they can keep the latency low enough.
http://www.droid-life.com/2016/08/15/google-fiber/
http://www.extremetech.com/internet/229869-google-wants-to-use-wireless-to-bring-gigabit-wi-fi-to-more-fiber-customers
Typical Google. Plans are written in pencil and can be erased at any time. Always, always have a backup when dealing with Google. To rely solely on them is to be disappointed at some point in time.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
What they need to do is approach netflix and amazon and get them to invest in this as well. In doing that, they would gain investments rather than spend billions paying ATT and other CLECs, cable TV, etc.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I live in one of the largest metropolitan areas of the USA. Like pretty much all US metro areas, the number of people who actually live within the city limits of the major city we are named for is a lot lower than then entire metro area. Roughly 10% of the metro residents live with the city limits and 90% live outside it. In fact, the county where I live has more than double the population of the city itself, but no parts of my county are within the city limits. Google negotiated a deal with the city only in our metro area to keep their costs down. So nobody in my county can get Google fiber. The problem with Google's deal is that they didn't study the demographics here. Very roughly speaking, there are only two kinds of people who live within city limits because of outrageous property prices - the very poor and the very rich. The poor don't buy Google fiber. The rich can afford whatever they want to pay so there's no real reason for them to get Google fiber unless they really want to. Google advertises a surprising amount on local TV. Well, I'd love to be a customer, Google, but you didn't want to deal with my county, so you're out of luck. Maybe if you had instead offered it to my entire county instead of only the metro's city limits, you'd have had more business. Believe me, many of us would love to leave Comcast and AT&T but they are the only games where we live.
I used to not be too afraid of Google's technological dominance, but this is great evidence that Alphabet's well on it's way to becoming the full-on Umbrella Corp... They seem to only employee engineers and project leads who don't live in the real world, and lack a certain amount of common sense.
Laying cable is hard. And you can't just charge everyone marginal costs on physical operations.
Sometimes you can't software your way out of something.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
they would have utterly owned the market by doing that . Comcast and Time warner love to abuse small towns so they would have had a instant high percentage uptake.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
. . . to mention something appropriate to this topic, namely Google, and other tech companies, and their hiring procedures.
We've been reading for years on, on this site and others, about the stringent interview/tests required for Google applicants (and I used to hear the same thing about Micro$oft, etc.), yet nothing brilliant has come out of that company beyond their search engine --- yes, they've purchased the occasional company and added its innovations to their arsenal, but nothing particularly creative has originated in-house.
We saw the same thing at Micro$oft, although having been a contractor off and on there, I can attest to very unmeritocratic and nespotistic hiring going on there, contrary to the publicized bullcrap ---- and no, I've never gotten an interview with them, regardless of the number of work-related bonuses they gave me, and I'm not unique in that regard, yet people of no account have received interviews based upon playing tennis or paddle ball with certain employees, or being related to others.
I see this article/posting as yet another example of what I'm stating.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Google fiber was our only hope
...and then the wolves came.
We are pretty good these days about keeping track of shit. Probably not as good as we should be, but still pretty good. However we have LOTS of old infrastructure. The documentation can be bad or non-existent. There's not an easy way to deal with, unfortunately, since it isn't like we can just open up an access panel and have a look at what's there. It'll continue to be a problem for a long time, perhaps forever.
You can get fiber, if you are actually willing to pay. You just aren't willing to pay for it.
What I mean is they'll sell you a fiber connection, as fast as you'd like, but you'll have to pay the full costs. You pay what it takes to have the line run and installed, and then you pay the full rate for an unmetered dedicated connection and they'll do it. Real enterprise class service with a nice SLA and all that. Thing is, that is going to run 5 figured (maybe 6) on the install and 4 figures or more for the monthly. That's what it really costs, that's what actually running dedicated fiber costs and what dedicated bandwidth costs.
What you want is CHEAP fiber. You want them to roll out a PON network on their dollar, and then sell you can your neighbours access to share that bandwidth for a low price. That's fine to want, but demanding it as if they owe you is unreasonable. Particularly since for something like that to be economically feasible everyone needs to be willing to pay, not just you. If it is a shared network, with the costs not being paid upfront, then a bunch of people need to pay, and need to do so for a fair bit of time.
If you look in to it, you'll find more than a few people that have no fucks to give about fast Internet. any modern service is "fast enough" for them. You can't convince them to spend on higher speed connections. My parents are like that. They have 12mbit cable. They can buy at least 100mbit where they live, maybe more (I haven't checked lately). They just won't. They are happy with what they have. They've used faster Internet, when they visit me they get to use mine which is 300mbit, but they don't care. To them what they have is good enough and they would rather spend the money on other things.
So if you are really willing to pay, and I mean pay the actual installation, operation, and bandwidth costs for dedicated fiber line, you can have that. However if you aren't willing to, and I can't blame you if you aren't, you can't then demand that they should give you stuff for cheap.
Back in the day phone lines were so much, you didn't get to have your own phone line. You had a "party line". What's that? That's where everyone in your area as the same phone line. One line, multiple houses. It would ring a different number of times to tell you who the call was for, and if you wanted to call out and someone else was using the line you had to wait. Also this meant everyone could listen in on your calls, of course. However, that was the only way phone was affordable for most people. That's not to mention the cost of long distance, which in the old days was anything off your local exchange.
And for all the bitching about Internet service, it does keep getting better, by a lot. When I first got connected to the 'net 14.4kbps was all I could get. Faster modems were out at the time, but that's all my ISP supported. As time has gone on, I've got a steady and fairly regular set of speed increases until now I have a 300mbit connection. About 21,000 times speed increase in around 21 years. Not too bad, overall. Price is in the same ballpark too. Currently I pay $100/month for that connection. Back in the day it was $20/month for Internet and about $25/month for a second phone line, I can't remember precisely. So about $70/month in today's dollars. For that price I'd have to step down to 150mbit Internet, if we wanted to keep all things far. Still 10,000x faster. Not really that bad for a couple decades, particularly compared to a lot of other, more mature technologies. My electric service sure isn't 10,000x as good as it was in the 90s.
So ya, fiber and gig or 10gig Internet hasn't come to everywhere yet. So what? It is getting rolled out, perhaps not as fast as we geeks would like, but it is still happening, and tech improvements are increasing bandwidth on copper formats as well. What we have now works well for most people, and the improvements we've seen are not insignificant.
The preceding comments are a classic example of Dunning Kruger syndrome.
The GP seems* to exhibit the overconfidence of the uninformed.
The parent shows the knowledge of the informed as to why things are harder than the uninformed think.
* actually, GP's angry-sounding comment was in the form of questions, so calling them uninformed is admittedly harsh.
For a good answer to the GP's last question, watch https://youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs (warning: it's bad news).
That seems high considering the local gas utility has been replacing gas lines in the neighborhood (largely built in the mid-50s), and I would imagine that active work on natural gas lines is more complicated than laying fiber -- ie, you can't disrupt gas service and you're dealing with a flammable and potentially explosive gas.
Laying gas lines isn't really any harder than laying fiber. Easier in some ways because joining them is easier and the pipe is less complex. There are of course a few safety concerns which are serious but well understood and straightforward to mitigate. As for cost I would expect them to be roughly comparable in most circumstances. The main cost is really in the engineering and labor, not in the materials.