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.
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?
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!!!
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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