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Google Fiber Is Losing Its Second CEO in Less Than a Year (businessinsider.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Fiber, the high-speed internet service operated by Alphabet, has lost its second CEO in less than a year. Gregory McCray is stepping down from the CEO job of Access, the Alphabet subsidiary that houses the Fiber unit, Google confirmed to Business Insider on Monday. The change is the latest shake-up at Access, which announced in October that it would stop rolling out its 1 gigabit per second wired broadband networks to new cities and focus on newer, wireless options, such as the Webpass wireless service it acquired last year. The Access group also had layoffs towards the end of 2016 and shifted hundreds of other employees to different units within Google earlier this year. Alphabet CEO Larry Page said in an emailed statement to Business Insider on Monday that the company is "committed to the success of Google Fiber" and was looking for new leader for the business.
This guy didn't have nearly enough fiber in his diet. ;)
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Brilliant.
I was excited until they removed some dots from the map on their site.
Now I feel like Rocky Dennis, knowing I'll never have GOOGLE FIBER in my area. What a fuckin' shame.
Can I be the next CEO please Larry?
Even if I only last a year I will earn more than I make in a lifetime as a programmer.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
I'm in Austin (the 2nd city served by Google Fiber) and I still can't get it in my home.
If Google can't get this done, who can?
The homeopathic option: Imprint the characteristics of fiber onto the air.
If you do a good job, you get lots of money.
If you do a bad job, you get lots of money and then even more money to go away.
I should have majored in CEO.
Look at the history of projects that Google has started and killed off when they don't meet expectations. I can't say i'm shocked that Fiber stalled and appears to be dieing. Current Fiber customers should be nervous because if/when Google decides to kill this project i have the utmost confidence in Google to shaft these people.
Did Google leadership really expect Fiber to succeed? Or did the most recent CEO step down because he realized that Fiber (like almost every other product) is "beta" and they'll kill it on a whim when they decide to go in yet another direction?
Laying fiber is a time and labor intense job. Hence, EXPENSIVE.
And they found out just HOW expensive.
So now they're going to "concentrate on wireless". Yay. "Google FIBER is concentrating on WIRELESS".
Basically it sounds like they did a cost projection and figured out that they weren't going to have ANYTHING close to the penetration they'd initially planned. So Alphabet yanked most of their funding. So the company is running in maintenance mode. Working at supporting the few markets they have and flogging a small group of techs for ideas on how to expand coverage in those areas so they don't have to do anything more than maybe spend a few million on upgraded wifi access points.
It's depressing. But the mere threat of them moving into Chicago prompted my cable company to offer gigabit service at a reasonable price. So I guess they accomplished SOMETHING.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I knew when Verizon stopped pushing FIOS that fiber was dead. Google loves splashy launches, but they quickly grow tired of anything involving day-to-day maintenance and long-term commitments. Google has the attention span of a methed-up squirrel.
On the upside, cablecos are now the only option for high speed internet for most people in the U.S. And they have pretty much unbreakable monopolies. Isn't that WONDERFUL?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
they might start showing some more interest. Originally Google Fiber was probably a hedge against the ISPs. They lost interest when the Obama admin sided with them. Kinda like how Valve dropped the Steam box when the Microsoft Store flopped.
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Clearly, they need more fiber in their diet to stop the runs.
other telecommunication lines in the ground. Especially those that were paid for by the American Public (just about every line laid by Ma Bell/AT&T and most other phone companies). -- you know, one of those tacked on extras on every phone bill since the creation of Ma Bell. Not to mention right of way grants from the government(s) because the phone system was considered necessary for the growth of the United States.
It will have to be set up such that the entity responsible is its own company (like the US Postal Service) with safeguards in place so the US government can do NOTHING with the copper/fiber except maintain, upgrade, and expand it. No tapping it at will (or continuously), no running it all through NSA headquarters, no monitoring (except for quality control), and so on.
Then you open it up to anyone who wants to be a phone company, internet provider, and so on. For each account hooked into the national communication grid, it cost the providing company $24.95 (or whatever) and then the Comcast, AT&T, and Google's can play on the same field but compete based on price+service.
I dislike nationalization as much as the next person, but to get the overall internet prices and speeds we want then I fear this is the best solution.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Sorry, I couldn't think of a better headline that would fit.
Several states have passed laws which ban municipalities from deciding to build residential broadband networks all by themselves. Those laws might have saved many towns from flawed, overpriced broadband rollouts, by incompetant political appointees.
For those commenting that Google is discovering that laying fiber is just "too expensive", that is flat out incorrect.
The truth is, laying fiber is the cheap and easy part.
The difficult, time consuming and expensive part is dealing with all the politicians and regulations.
It used to cost $3k to deploy fiber to a home, its now down to $500. With a $100/month service, that is a very attractive business model. However, when you spend years arguing with entrenched competitors over right of way on poles and politicians who are unable or unwilling to fix the problem, it is very hard to make progress to reach your potential customers who are begging for competition and options.
I don't think a solution requires that cities build and own the fiber. City owned is what the telco/cable co's are complaining about. The companies are competing against government which isn't fair. If the city makes it easy for another company to come in and compete with the other companies, then I don't see how they would have a legal argument against it. The exception to that is if the local cable company has an exclusive franchise agreement with the city and the city is trying to violate that contract. A lot of infrastructure was built because the city offered no-compete to the cable company so they would drop a lot of money to build out the system.
The other issue is access to poles. Some states have passed rules that allow new companies to touch or move cables that are not theirs while pulling their own new cable. This streamlines things by reducing paperwork to coordinate and get permission to touch each pole with the other companies..
It seems to me that cities should start issuing infrastructure-only franchise agreements. It be great for at least two or more per city. The idea is that the infrastructure only company builds out the cables and terminates to a meetme building. ISP can come in and sell Internet to anyone on the cable. The ISP's pay the infrastructure-only company for maintenance and service of the cable. This would be much closer to the old dialup and early DSL days
The FCC involvement is an "easy fix" (e.g. NN), but better management at the local level would be huge.
Please bribe (aka lobby) our politicians to give us municipal fiber. You are the only one that can out-bribe current special interests. Plus, it would probably cost you less in bribe money to have municipalities do it themselves
Rather than laying down fiber, why not offer satellite based internet service. Right now, there are only two existing providers which offer up to 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up. If Google wanted to invest in it, they could start their own service with higher transmission speeds and higher data caps compared to the two existing providers.
I'm not sure how much the investment would cost compared to laying down fiber though.
I live in San Francisco and Web Pass (acquired by a Google Fiber) is my internet provider. Web Pass is wireless. I get upload and download speeds of about 700 Mbps (advertised at 1,0000 Mbps) for $44 per month. It's awesome. I hope Google Fiber stays alive and well for many years to come.