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.

Comments

With good reason!

[Gravis Zero]

This guy didn't have nearly enough fiber in his diet. ;)

Where do I submit my resume?

[Oswald McWeany]

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.

Re:Where do I submit my resume?

[Picodon]

Also, you might have a better chance to actually get fiber to the home than ever in your lifetime.

Just install it

[theurge14]

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?

Re:Just install it

[Oswald McWeany]

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?

Alphabet?

Re:Just install it

[interkin3tic]

City governments. But then people would need to actually pay attention to local government.

Re:Just install it

[Jfetjunky]

AT&T is already doing it. I have fiber in my house in Leander, and had it in my apartment in central Austin. They priced it to exactly compete with Google Fiber's project price.

Re:Just install it

[Anonymous Coward]

City governments. But then people would need to actually pay attention to local government.

Doesn't work. Existing duopoly providers (Comcast, Spectrum, AT&T, etc) have bought all the state legislators, and they pass laws saying that cities can't build their own infrastructure.

Re:Just install it

[bored_lurker]

AT&T. Verizon. Frontier. And a whole host of other player.

Google was interested in getting fiber with high speed access to more people because access means more google applications (and therefore revenue). Honestly I don't think Google ever cared about Google Fiber being successful as a business. What they cared about was kick starting the the above mentioned carriers into better faster networks so they can generated bigger faster revenue. It is the same reason Facebook is looking to deploy networks (e.g. wireless via blimps in rural areas). With the advent of the CORD project (under ON.Labs) higher speed access is being made less expensive through commoditization of the access interfaces. This means that they can deliver up to 10G services and can reduce the cost of 100M - 1G services which is what Google wanted. Really I don't think they have any interest in being in the access business.

I can tell you that this plan (if true) has largely worked. When I speak to the carriers (I do this for a living) they have OTT (Over The Top) envy, saying they need to be more like Google, Facebook, Amazon and Netflix

.

Re:Just install it

[the_saint1138]

An exaggeration, sure, but the above post shouldn't have been downmodded.

There are lots of instances of ISPs strangling municipal broadband movements either through lobbying or direct legal action.

Re:Just install it

[stabiesoft]

I told a friend when google first announced we will never get it in our neighborhood. He was a little confused until I described the economics of trenching versus hanging on an existing pole. We never got it. Another friend in a "pole" neighborhood has it though.

Re:Just install it

[interkin3tic]

Hence the "people would need to actually pay attention to local government." State legislators are absurdly inept and corrupt because no one pays any attention to them except for special interests. I mean, I don't see that changing any time soon, so not much point in discussing it, but it's not like it's in the US constitution.

Re:Just install it

[interkin3tic]

I don't need to look it up, I've dealt with comcast and centurylink.

Meanwhile the water comes to my house without fail, the electricity at most flickers when there's a powerful storm, the roads outside my house were just repaved last month, and the US postal service brings me enough junk mail to wallpaper all the rooms in my house.

I'll admit that around where I live, we don't have many "TAXES ARE THEFT!" conservatives bent on proving government can't do anything by defunding every successful government program. I could see people elsewhere getting upset their tax moneys might possibly go to people downloading porn and sharia law videos and demanding it stop.

Re:Just install it

[WankerWeasel]

That's simply untrue. There are numerous cities around the US which have built their own. Generally the issue has been that most tax payers don't want to pay for the creation and maintenance of such systems. Even once they're launched it's unlikely a significant portion of the people in that city will switch, which means that they're still paying to keep the service running while getting no benefit in return. As such, in most cases the successful ventures have been cities picking a contracting company to take care of building their system and maintaining it, for profit.

Did Google expect Fiber to succeed?

[dysmal]

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?

Re:Did Google expect Fiber to succeed?

[known_coward_69]

They built a lot of hype in the first few markets and got cheaper deals from the town to use the utility poles. Then the ISP's wised up and fought their sweetheart deals they shouldn't have received in the first place.

What do they expect?

[Chas]

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.

Re:What do they expect?

[known_coward_69]

the search business makes the money, the fiber business not so much. Years ago some financial blog said that Google Fiber would never work because they estimated that it would cost $140 BILLION for a national build-out.

Alphabet has no plans to feed the fiber business money with cord cutting and live tv streaming being the next big things

Re:What do they expect?

[interkin3tic]

IIRC google realized that their ability to remain on top forever could be threatened by the fact that comcast was a middleman between google and users. Spending money to get rid of that middleman makes sense. With the death of net neutrality looming especially. "We're sorry, google and youtube are not available on your plan, but comcast-nbc-bing search with motionview is!"

I guess though google realized that will take a longer time than they need to be concerned with and they have enough money they can just buy off lobbyists or something.

Re:What do they expect?

[swb]

It makes you wonder just what the business model was to begin with and whether it was ever anything more than a feint to goad incumbent ISPs to enhance their service offerings, especially in light of all the public speculation they around "who's city is next?"

"Focusing" on wireless may be just another attempt to re-create the same situation with wireless, although this seems harder as anyone can lay fiber, but not everyone has spectrum and arbitrarily building out wireless networks is more difficult because of this.

I wonder if Google fiber had other service tiers or was more friendly to business use/small-scale hosting if it would have had more uptake, but this still asks where's the business in providing the service and it tends to run counter to Google's general mission of getting everything in one of their cloud offerings.

Re:What do they expect?

[hnjjz]

Laying fiber is a time and labor intense job. Hence, EXPENSIVE. And they found out just HOW expensive.

Laying fiber is actually not that time and labor intensive if you can get unfettered access to the utility poles/tunnels. Google was able to lay fiber very quickly in initial pilot areas where the local governments allowed Google such access. However, the phone and cable companies sued to only allow Google to do work on utility poles/tunnels when work crews from the incumbent providers are present. One can guess how helpful the phone and cable companies have been in making their work crews available for Google's fiber laying efforts.

Re:What do they expect?

[known_coward_69]

its not 330 million people because a lot of people are married

the labor costs a lot more money

you need people for the legal and permit work

you need to pay a lot of counties and companies monthly fees for the utility pole space in case there is a storm to pay the overtime costs to bring the wiring back up

you also need to buy a lot of network gear and pay the monthly recurring costs for support, etc

and you need to figure on $70 a month in revenue per household

Re:What do they expect?

[known_coward_69]

of course they sued, if you allow one company access like this then you need to allow everyone access. but then you need to figure out who's going to pay the costs in stringing the wire back up in case of a big storm.

Re:What do they expect?

[Shatrat]

You're making a lot of bad assumptions. Not every house has a single person living in it. Not every house (pass) is going to sign up for service. The typical cost of a FTTH build is around $2,000 per home passed, and depending on the market you may only get 20 to 40 percent of those to actually sign up for service. Then there is millions of dollars worth of networking gear required for a market, and many thousands of dollars per month for transport costs and IP transit, plus the expense of operational and engineering staff, which is not cheap because there's no shortage of demand. Of course, what Google did instead of hiring experienced network engineers is hire silicon valley college grads who care a lot more about 'disrupting' shit than reading manuals and standards docs.

Google thought they could 'disrupt' the market and do things cheaper than the telcos and MSOs and instead did a lot of dumb things that raised their costs relative to the AT&Ts and Comcasts of the world.

Re:What do they expect?

[thule]

Exactly! Why don't people understand this? Of course the cable/telco's had grounds to complain about this.

Re:What do they expect?

[Anonymous Coward]

A fiber company came to my mid-sized midwestern university town and the cable/phone companies squealed like pigs trying to stop them. The commissioners narrowly gave them the goahead and people swapped to the fiber company as they rolled out so fast they literally couldn't field enough techs to do the installs at reasonable times. People will crawl over broken glass to get rid of Comcast.

They're still expanding here and Comcast started literally running ads against them, mentioning them by name when they're really not that big of a company (they're still independent as of yet- I expect them to get bought out eventually). Comcast is competing on a really weird level too- trying to sell "wireless speed" by giving out wireless router/modem combos that aren't complete dogshit. It works for some people because people will buy a fiber connection, hook up a $30 walmart special WAP and proceed to put 40 devices on it and wonder why it sucks.

Re:What do they expect?

[dgatwood]

of course they sued, if you allow one company access like this then you need to allow everyone access. but then you need to figure out who's going to pay the costs in stringing the wire back up in case of a big storm.

Everybody. Each company is responsible for repairing its own lines in the event of a big storm, just as has always been true. Your question doesn't make sense.

Re:What do they expect?

[WankerWeasel]

Is most cases the fiber is already there. There's dark fiber all over the place across this country. Usually they simply purchased the existing fiber around the city and only had to lay the last mile service.

Fiber is dead, all hail our cableco masters!

[elrous0]

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?
 

Re:Fiber is dead, all hail our cableco masters!

[Shatrat]

Fiber is not dead. AT&T and VZ slowed their deployments, but they're both in the middle of upgrading their GPON network hardware and they'll be supporting what they still have. Their main obstacle to deploying more is that they're betting on 5G and wireless fixed access, and don't want to invest money in their wireline plant when they can invest that money in a network that supports both homes and mobile phones. Personally I think that wireless with never be as good as fixed, and it won't even be 'good enough' for the majority of users as 4k, VR, cloud-based everything starts becoming the norm.

AT&T and VZs competition which do not have a mobile network, Centurylink, Frontier, Windstream, and the cable companies, are cheerfully deploying GPON networks. There are also lots of small companies and municipal networks being built every day.
It's not going to happen overnight because of the cost, but it's happening and the US is actually well ahead of Europe when it comes to fiber. Europe is mostly betting on vectored VDSL2 and G.fast to get them through the next few years.

Re:Fiber is dead, all hail our cableco masters!

[thule]

And who made that happen? LOCAL CITIES. Their regulation allowed a single company to come into the city and have exclusive access for years. It worked in so far as that cities have infrastructure, but backfired because cable companies' coax turned out to be the best option for high speed connectivity. Copper pairs didn't cut it. Verizon tried to do fiber, but get too much on making money on video around the time that video is getting squeezed (cord cutters drive up content prices while demand continues to drop). There is no money in video.

The only option I can think of is if cities granted infrastructure-only licenses and locked them in for some number of years (e.g. 10).

Re:Fiber is dead, all hail our cableco masters!

[MtViewGuy]

Also, why deal with having to run fiber optics into the home when Comcast is just about ready to do the national rollout of DOCSIS 3.1 gigabit-speed cable modem service? Comcast recently changed the video compression of their HD channels nationally from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, which frees up enough bandwidth to start implementing DOCSIS 3.1. In short, a swap from a DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem to one supporting DOCSIS 3.1 will get you Internet speeds you normally see in South Korea and Japan.

With Net Neutrality dying

[rsilvergun]

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.

More fiber in the diet

[sinij]

Clearly, they need more fiber in their diet to stop the runs.

Re:Cartman-Style Marketing

[thegreatbob]

I want it... I want it...

Nationalize Copper, Fiber, and All

[fallen1]

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.

Re:Nationalize Copper, Fiber, and All

[thule]

That is extreme. Wasn't Bell Systems nationalized for a short time in US history?

Consider an alternate idea. At the local-level (cities), grant infrastructure-only licenses. Cities already regulate right of ways and pole access. Traditionally cities would grant long term franchises to cable companies in exchange for them building out cable. Continues with that, but any new agreements require that the cable company cannot offer video (no money in that anyway) and Internet. This would be closer to how it was during the dialup and DSL days.

Gold star for the city to get more than one company to do this.

Re:Nationalize Copper, Fiber, and All

[CanadianMacFan]

Why not just force the existing cable and telephone companies lease the last mile. I'm with a third party ISP but they didn't have to dig up my lawn to install any lines. They lease the line from the cable company and have a switch in the nearest data centre to me. My data is only on the cable company's network for the short part and from after that data centre it's on the ISPs network.

This is all guaranteed by the CRTC. The cable company gets paid to maintain the line with a modest amount of profit and people get the choice of ISPs. The cable company would rather have all of the money but at least they get some (as far as they are concerned). The city wins because a whole bunch of companies are digging up the roads. Consumers win because there are better choices than the cable and telephone companies. Of course things could be better but I know that I I could be paying much more for less quality service with the cable company.

It's not the cost... It's the regulations...

[Alascom]

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.

Re:It's not the cost... It's the regulations...

[stabiesoft]

Maybe in your area, but the solid limestone in mine says it will cost > 2K/house just to trench. And don't forget when you trench, you may hit something else by accident if somebody missed a gas line, water line, sewer line, power HV or LV line, telco line, cable line, irrigation pipes on and on. There is alot of stuff under that ground. And I'm in a residential neighborhood. As you get into more urban, you have all the traffic control wire/sensors and on and on. And don't say its easy. When I had my fence redone, they found a pipe that had not been marked by the 811 people. "Laying" fiber on poles is cheap and easy.

Re:It's not the cost... It's the regulations...

[starblazer]

as long as you had the locate done and its still valid, it's the locating companies fault and they have to pay for it.

No city owned, but maybe infrastructure-only?

[thule]

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.

Invest in Satellite Internet?

[u801e]

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 really like Google Fiber

[rjzotti]

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.