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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
Based on this and other responses, plus my own experience with outages, it sounds like what America really needs now is some better methods for tracking where the existing infrastructure is, better standards for placing new infrastructure so that the next crew can put something else in without destroying what's already there, and better laws for determining who's liable when things go wrong.
Of course, when I say "what America needs now", what I really mean is "what America needed 100+ years ago, when they first started putting these things in".
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.....
When Google first announced their gigabit fiber plans I predicted this would happen, although I thought it they would actually finish a couple of cities before they gave up.
You won't see widespread fiber to the home in your lifetime. Running all new wiring, to every house, in every neighborhood, in every city, was never a good idea. Would I like gigabit fiber? Of course. Who wouldn't. But the U.S. is too big, it costs too much, and it takes too long. Instead, we should be pushing for something that would benefit everyone, not just the 1% of the population lucky enough to be blessed by Google.
End restrictions on municipal broadband.
Local loop unbundling. Make the phone/cable oligopoly open their networks (that were built with government subsidies) to real competition. Speed will go up, price will go down and stupid bullshit like data caps will disappear overnight.
There's no incentive to make it easier next time. They want the huge "next time" contract. The more stuff they have to tear up, the more they can profit.
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
If someone can't cover a $400 bill and has cable TV or broadband they are a moron.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'