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Kansas City Was First To Embrace Google Fiber, Now Its Broadband Future Is 'TBD' (vice.com)
Five years after the opportunity arose in 2011 for Kansas City to become the first community to pilot Google Fiber, expansion of the gigabit per second service has come to a screeching halt. Kaleigh Rogers from Motherboard writes about how Kansas City's broadband future is "to be determined." From the report: Thousands of customers in KC who had pre-registered for guaranteed service when Fiber made it to their neighborhood were given their money back earlier this year, and told they may never get hooked up. Fiber cycled through two CEOs in the last 10 months, lost multiple executives, and has started laying off employees. Plans to expand Fiber to eight other American cities halted late last year, leaving the fate of the project up in the air. I recently asked Rachel Hack Merlo, the Community Manager for Google Fiber in Kansas City, about the future of the expanding the project service there, and she told me it was "TBD." Kansas City expected to become Google's glittering example of a futuristic gig-city: Half a decade later, there are examples of how Fiber benefitted KC, and stories about how it fell short. Thousands of customers will likely never get the chance to access the infrastructure they rallied behind, and many communities are still without any broadband access at all. Many are now left wondering: is that it?
They hooked up every house in my subdivision... except mine. After much calling back and forth, it became clear how mismanaged this Google Fiber project was. Their left hand did not know what their right hand was doing. It was laughable to keep getting so much contradicting information about the status of my "install". Finally they called and canceled on us. Oh well, Google started falling out of favor with me years ago. I am probably lucky that I am not all the more tangled up with them.
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Google time and again hops into area with grand fanfare, claiming it will revolutionize an industry. The pattern however is that within a year or few when the fanfare dies down they lose interest and chase the next shiny object. Even if they come out with a new service I lust for, I would just be cynical and skeptical due to a long history of failing to follow through.
I concur with this. Google may have smart folks, but their implementations SUCKS. IMO android is a tire fire compared to iOS, we live here in KC and have google fiber + tv. And the TV part is an absolute abortion. Rather than embed the software IN the end users device they insist it be run from the cloud. Guess what? That is a horrible idea. The UI is slow, jerky, you can't FF or RW through commercials on recorded! shows and movies, but if you pause TV for 30 minutes you can use that as a buffer to FF through commercials. Consistency FTW! The UI because it is cloud based becomes unresponsive resorting to having to reboot the TV and Network box to get it to work. It's just a horrible UI and app. I am not impressed with google, at all. I see google being replaced at some point because they simply can't make a product that isn't a mess. They create tons of services and apps and kill almost all of them once people start using them. Im just not a fan of google. I don't know what they are going to with the Fiber rollouts. They got special rights and leeway from the city of KC to roll this out and now they cant get it done. For whatever reason. Someone needs to start doing some high speed wireless pop's all over the city. I don't think anything but wireless has a shot in hell because of all the laws and regulations restricting laying fiber that have been built up over the decades.
First pass a resolution to build out fibre in the rest of the city yourself with an appropriate bond measure.
Create a special utility to manage it. During build out it will be it's own independent company and contractor but will later be turned into a public utility. It will have the power of the city to tear out streets in the middle of the night and to work 24 hours a day in certain circumstances. Use many subcontractors and don't require unions. Use your union guys to inspect the work and maybe work in difficult areas. Build it out one small section at a time per contractor. Let the contractors compete and use the appropriate contractor for each section.
Last invite providers to install trunks into your faciliy at their cost and under your rules. Customers are required to buy their own city approved optical interface equipment per house and to pay a one time $500 hook up fee to have the equipment installed.
The whole thing will be paid off in ten to fifteen years and the city can either keep the money coming in or reduce everyone's bill.