Slashdot Mirror
After Years Waiting For Google Fiber, KC Residents Get Cancellation Emails (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Some Kansas City residents who have been waiting years for Google Fiber to install service at their homes recently received e-mails canceling their installations, with no word on whether they'll ever get Internet service from the company. KSHB 41 Action News in Kansas City, Missouri, "spoke to several people, living in different parts of the metro, all who have recently received cancellation e-mails," the station reported last week. "The e-mails do not provide a specific reason for the cancellations. Instead they say the company was 'unable to build our network to connect your home or business at this time.'" While Google Fiber refuses to say how many installations have been canceled, KSHB said, "there is speculation the number of cancellations in the metro is as high as 2,700." "The company says it has slowed down in some areas to experiment with new techniques," such as wireless technology, the report also said. Google Fiber is still hooking up fiber for some new customers in parts of the Kansas City area. One resident who had his installation canceled is Larry Meurer, who was seeing multiple Google Fiber trucks in his neighborhood nearly two years ago, in the spring of 2015. "I'm left wondering what's going on," he told KSHB after getting the cancellation e-mail. Meurer lives in Olathe, Kansas, one of the largest cities in the Kansas City metro area. Residents only five houses away and around the corner have Google Fiber service, the report said. But Meurer said he and several neighbors who never got service were "terminated."
why spend billions of $$$ to run wires when you can use someone else's network to sell your stuff?
Not just residents of KC that were sold a pig in a poke by Google. Look at a map of the Austin roll out, after many years very little coverage. Weak sauce.
That's a Comcast or Verizon tactic, not a Google tactic. Google is *NOT* wiring the whole country as you say... Just Kansas City, so their tactics can be different. In fact, that was the whole point of the Google Fiber initiative.
Google Fiber was abandoned just as the FCC made it illegal for ISPs to use the demographics of their subscribers for advertising purposes. This tells you what the purpose of Google Fiber was.
Honestly, it's something we have come to expect of Google. They take a fail cheap fail fast approach to everything. So they try a lot of different stuff but also cancel almost everything. It's a good strategy as far as staying innovative and profitable.
But from a customer dependability view point Google has earned being at the bottom. You really can't build on top of google services and stick around. Eventually they will shell it and you will lose everything. This culture of theirs also makes it hard for enterprises to take them seriously. We are looking at Chromebooks and there are all these corner cases that Google has just never really thought about. They never built the services with an enterprise mindset. They just don't seem to know what a standard enterprise's needs are. Similarly they don't seem to understand the user's need for dependable and predictable services either.
however that ruling was just (or soon to be) reversed so... why the cancellation e-mails now?
Uncertainty. The rule could easily be later reversed a Google left holding the bag; I'm guessing Google found the cost of building out wasn't worth the investment and so bailed after the initial test. Next step is probably to sell the infrastructure to an incumbent ISP and move on to the next big idea.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Perhaps Google has discovered the costs of installing fiber to the home and it's a lot more than they first thought. Now Google will find out the cost of operating and maintaining their systems and those that have their service may find the price of continued subscriptions may go up, but I don't know that for sure. In addition, Google has reduced the number of folks involved in fiber operations, supposedly to investigate some kind of RF method for delivery of very high speed Internet and TV. How's that working out? I'm not anxiously waiting to see.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
Was it a high-fiber shit?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }