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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."
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.
Consider yourself lucky. I'm in Seattle and the best service I can get is a pair of shotgunned 128K ISDN lines for $350/mo. It's either that or dial-up. I can't even get a solid 2 bars on my phone.
Same here in Austin... if a house has access to Google Fiber, it can add $20,000 to the value, from what a real estate agent told me.
Usually old gas pipe was steel/iron. What they do is push some plastic pipe down the existing pipe, then blow hot air under pressure into it. This causes it to soften and expand so that it takes the form of the existing steel/iron pipe. The existing pipe can now safely rust away. At least this is what they do in the UK.
Oops I mean $560/house.
You're still (probably quite a bit) low. Your $20/hr is definitely short of the fully loaded cost of those guys (these are usually not day laborers picked up outside Home Depot, but skilled professionals in their own right, and even the flaggers are probably members of CWA) and your time calc is also probably just to "pass" the house. It costs more time to put the peds/dog houses in at each house, then to string or bury the cable to the house itself. All in all, your labor cost "per house" is probably pushing 10x the above number.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?