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."

Comments

hand mirrors and morse code

[Pseudonymous Powers]

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.

Re:hand mirrors and morse code

[Pseudonymous Powers]

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".

Re:hand mirrors and morse code

[guruevi]

It's pretty hard. I only have experience with a metropolitan area network but I suppose home fiber will have a similar cost. For a ~1 mile stretch consider the following:

a) You have to engineer the way the cables will go where they will terminate, what equipment you'll be using, where you'll be tapping off (fiber to each house or to a central unit).
b) You have to survey for existing cabling and make sure your installation doesn't encroach upon private property. This could be as easy as dialing a number and getting some plans or as expensive as having a ground radar and doing land surveys.
c) You usually have to notify and have permits for digging up. Sometimes the city will take it upon themselves, other times you have to do it. Cost of permits and notices to 100 houses
d) Install tubing, lay cables, 8 people, a backhoe and a dump truck will take a good week or two if all the surveys have been done correctly. Off course if you manage to hit a thing with the backhoe, you could be delayed for a day or two. You still have to pay the construction workers.
e) Fill the holes and repair side walks, lawns and streets you have broken open. Again, 4-6 people with equipment will take about a week doing that.
f) Fielding complaints, law suits, talking to locals why you didn't re-plant their lawn Kentucky Blue Grass etc

And then we haven't talked yet about material cost of lines, piping etc. Our estimates average about $500k/mile with a mix of overhead and underground cabling which isn't expensive since you can easily service 200 houses on a mile stretch. Underground is about 5 times as expensive as overhead. Obviously most of these costs are eventually fully funded by the tax payer (operators pretty much get paid for laying Internet lines) but it's a huge upfront cost and a player like Google won't benefit from grants since it's not really a local political player.

Last week we had a backhoe operator hit a line twice, the second time he literally ran off and went missing for 3 hours without notifying anyone. Obviously he doesn't work there anymore but it caused a delay of 2 days between fixing the line and finding a new licensed operator and bringing them on site.

RANT!

[rfengr]

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.

Re:RANT!

[Kohath]

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.

This is too bad.

[aussersterne]

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!

Re:This is Unfortunate

[guises]

Well it may be true that no one can feasibly lay cable in a fiscally competitive way, but that isn't the only way to achieve a competitive marketplace. Redundant cable is really a pretty stupid way to do that - we could always just do what most countries do and implement unbundling access rules. In fact we have those rules on the books already, they were part of the telecommunications act of 1996, they just couldn't be exercised because of the FCC's stupid "third way" decision to classify ISPs as something other than telecommunications services. Now that they've reversed that decision, and once all of the lawsuits regarding that have been resolved, maybe we'll be able to have some competition among ISPs.

Re:In Seattle...

[tripleevenfall]

I live in Seattle, and the best I can get is a carrier pigeon delivering an illegible scrawl of slashdot postings on a crumpled up Halls lozenge wrapper.

Re:They better make it to my house...

[mlts]

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.