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Google Fiber Pauses Operations, CEO Leaves, and About 9 Percent of Staff Is Being Let Go (bloomberg.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the new-strategy dept.

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."

3 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. RANT! by rfengr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:RANT! by Kohath · · Score: 5, Insightful

      What did electricity compete with? Darkness and ice deliveries. What does fiber compete with? Services that are already roughly comparable to fiber.

      Who needs electricity? Everyone who doesn't have it. Who needs fiber? A small percentage (10% ?) of people who want to do something a regular cable/DSL 25Mbps connection isn't good enough for -- and who can't already get better service.

      Fiber is an incremental benefit for a smallish subset of people.

  2. Re:hand mirrors and morse code by Pseudonymous+Powers · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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".