Google Fiber Sheds Workers As It Looks to a Wireless Future (engadget.com)

Mariella Moon, writing for Engadget: Alphabet is making some huge changes to steer Google Fiber in a new, more wireless direction. According to Wired, the corporation has reassigned hundreds of Fiber employees to other parts of the company and those who remained will mostly work in the field. It has also hired broadband veteran Greg McCray as the new CEO for Access, the division that runs Google Fiber. These changes don't exactly come out of left field: back in October, Google announced that it's pausing the high-speed internet's expansion to new markets and that it's firing nine percent of the service's staff. Wired says running fiber optic cables into people's homes has become too expensive for the company. A Recode report last year says it costs Mountain View $1 billion to bring Fiber to a new market.

Comments

Wireless is not a replacement

[DogDude]

For speed, security, and reliability, wireless isn't even close to being a replacement for fiber. Our business only uses wireless for fun stuff for our customers. Our real business is over wired connections, and will be for the foreseeable future.

Electricity, Phone, Fiber

[Zobeid]

Somehow we managed to wire up the whole country with electrical power, and somehow we wired up the whole country with phone lines, and yet laying out fiber is always TOO COSTLY. It can't be done!

Re:Electricity, Phone, Fiber

[crt]

Keep in mind that a big reasons we managed to wire up the whole country with electric, phone, and cable is that we gave those companies local monopolies on delivery of power, telecom, and TV.

If you were to offer Google a monopoly on Internet access in an area, it would appear profitable VERY quickly.