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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?
Google is not the saviour of mankind. Stop thinking google can or will do everything they say they will.
I learned that Google Fiber was simply taking advantage of existing huge federal government fiber optic infrastructure in KC and other cities where they offered it. Since there was already a substantial fiber optic hub serving that city, the Google Fiber addition would not impose a significant bandwidth burden to it. (I just made up that last part, but the government facility stuff appears to be true.)
Perhaps recent changes in the Commander in Chief have resulted in changes to how these fiber optic assets are being used and accounted for?
slashdot: A failed experiment.
There I said it.
They completely underestimated how much of a pain in the ass and how costly it is to go up against established local incumbents (see: at&t). Google's hubris preceded them on this one.
Infrastructure costs money. That's how politicians get greased, streets get paved and licensed monopolies come into being. Public good, improving service have nothing to do with that so they're all secondary to how much can they charge for it.
Obviously, costs exceeded expected revenue in this case.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
Here in Salt Lake City, G Fiber built out right downtown but never made it to my house only 1 mile away from the center of downtown. Fortunately they were promising to expand further and it spoke the other players in the market enough that one of them brought Gigbit fiber to my house and charged me the same rate google charges in their service area. So in my book I still consider it a win and am glad G Fiber came to my city.
Private Enterprise is the scourge of the country, besetting us with pollution, fraud, exploitation, and more.
When we will ever learn? Surely we can start purging these vile parasites now that our new Revolutionary El Trumpenfuhmer Grande is now in office. We elected him to do just that, didn't we?
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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Is the business model just not there? FTTP services are shuttering a lot these days...what's the issue?
If it is Google Fiber specifically or from another company, the project was a total succeeds. In my neighborhood, access speeds went from being around 20-30mbps on the top end to Gigabit through CenturyLink. Countless other ISPs have all started offering gigabit class service due to the pressure that Google Fiber caused. Google brought competition, and the market was forced to react. (almost) everyone wins! Except those smucks still stuck in areas that have government restrictions on what can/cant be made available in their areas.
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.
Seriously, Google used to be the best before. Now, it is being ran by MBAs, who are turning this into MS at best.
Google is for all intents and purposes, dead and will go the same route as Yahoo.
What is needed now, is for a new site to come up with better tech in a different arena, and while they have a great name, drift into Google's space.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
At least the Royals finally scored last night!
Seriously....they suck at executing and keeping product lines around.
Yes, that's the word I read out internally to myself when I see 'TBD'.
In a world plagued with three letter acronyms, I suggest that the more common ones should be converted into full fledged words by means of stuffing them with vowels as required to make them easy to pronounce. Are ya with me?
What's the difference between Google and a toddler?
A toddler doesn't get bored with its toys so quickly.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If we really want fiber to the premises coast to coast in this country, we will need a government initiative to make it happen.
Trump wants to build a wall, and rebuild America's infrastructure - maybe it's time to include fiber in those plans and start treating fiber connectivity like the utility it is. This is too important to be left to companies with an attention span that lasts only through the current fiscal quarter.
I live in Independence, MO which is right next to/touching Kansas City, Fiber has moved into other regions outside of Kansas City, but hit a wall in Independence. The reason? The city government who refuses to allow them to do business inside the city. Our city council and mayor refuse to answer why, but Google Fiber was willing to move into this area at one point. I understand Fiber also dropped the ball, but they also weren't prepared for small time piece of shit politicians who fuck the peoples choices.
Six months after Google fibered my street, AT&T came through, too. All of a sudden it was economical for them, even though they have had FO technology since before the public Internet. And the cable carriers dropped their rates.
...with Google Fiber is the billing system. They don't allow paper billing, and they don't let the client set the billing date like most other providers do. My fiances corporate housing company has 1000+ units in Google Fiber areas, but due to the lack of paper billing her company will not use Google Fiber. That's a lot of lost money from the lack of a paper billing system. Googles reply was basically set up service with a credit card or go somewhere else.
This is one of the reasons they aren't making the profit they could be making. Let's do the math
1000 units * 199.00 a month for cable, phone, and internet. = $199,000 / month that they could be getting from her corporate housing company, but they don't want that money since it requires paper billing. What kind of stupid business model is that?
Google fiber was offered in our area in KCMO. Google asked local areas to pre-sign up and then hooked up the areas with the most interest. One of the neighbors hired a student to go door-to-door to ask people to sign up so we could be one of the early install areas. At about the same time TW cable offered price cuts and speed increases in the same areas. There was less interest in some of the areas farther away from the University and the more expensive homes.
Google wanted to not have to get permits from the local utilities or pay pole access charges. Kansas City was OK with that until the local utilities cried foul and all wanted the same rights. There was also an issue of attaching to the poles within 4 feet of the power lines.
They hauled a steel cable between all of the utility poles behind my mom's house and then attached the fiber to it. In the process the local phone service was knocked out. We got it back in a day or two. Since my mom only watches TV and doesn't do Internet, she didn't pick up Google fiber.
Kansas City straddles Missouri and Kansas.The Kansas side which has seen the most population growth is many different communities, served by many different providers.
The Kansas City suburb next to us was also offered Google fiber, they offered to connect all of the public schools and the public services such as fire and police. I watched them dig to within 5 miles of my house to connect the local fire department. I don't know how they got to the public school, surrounded by farm land, since it if 5-10 miles farther. There were contractors everywhere and lots of digging between the streets and the sidewalks.
I have heard that Google fiber was also going to Austin and Salt Lake City.
If it is Google Fiber specifically or from another company, the project was a total succeeds. In my neighborhood, access speeds went from being around 20-30mbps on the top end to Gigabit through CenturyLink. Countless other ISPs have all started offering gigabit class service due to the pressure that Google Fiber caused. Google brought competition, and the market was forced to react. (almost) everyone wins! Except those smucks still stuck in areas that have government restrictions on what can/cant be made available in their areas.
Uh, no dude. It wasn't.
A small section of the country wins, and every other community in the nation loses, because the incumbents were able to push Google out of the market.
It only goes to show that the carriers could give us all broadband, and would even probably make money from doing that.
is massively, massively overpriced. Comcast admitted in one of their SEC filings that their $70/mo package cost them just $9/mo net (e.g. that includes support). That means anyone that tries to compete at that $70 price point is already doomed because Comcast et al can just drop their pants until the competition dies out. Which as far as I can tell is exactly what they did here. That's not competition though. It's a temporary price cut until competition dies on the vine.
TL;DR: Municipal broadband for the win. Anyone who complains about socialism gets shouted down. Enough already. It's too valuable for it not to be a public utility. It's right up there with water and electricity.
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I'm on the Kansas side of Kansas City and I've had it almost two years; I can say it's the fastest, most reliable internet connection I've ever had at home, and at a decent price. I pay $50 a month, flat, no fees, taxes or other BS, $50 and it's never gone out. It's not their high-end offering, you can pay more and get faster speeds, but it's faster than I've ever had. I do not have the TV part of it, just internet, but there's really no need since the streaming of anything is really good (and there's a decent amount of broadcast channels for just mindless boob-tube watching). It was weird how they used three different contractors for various stages of install, but it is buried, and I have glass all the way into my basement. I think I was in one of the last neighborhoods to get it, I don't think it went any farther south or west, but I know several neighborhoods were complete before over in the KCMO side before I got it (obvious since that's where they started). I'm not sure if all that fiber is buried on the MO side, I am pretty sure where I am the county has strict restrictions regarding power, cable, fiber, or other cables that can be seen, I *THINK* they really push to bury it. Where the crews had to dig up yard they did a nice job of filling it back in and threw down some super space grass that really came in nice and quick, no brown and dead grass in their wake. All in all, it's been way more affordable, reliable, and faster than anything I've ever had with cable. Honestly, it's too bad they couldn't generate enough revenue to continue, it will be hard getting used to cable again if I move to a neighborhood without G-Fiber.
And not that the Goog has established long term lucrative advertising deals with all the affected players, it has agreed to stay out their sandboxes.
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.
Yup. Exactly the same as happened to the Verizon FIOS rollouts. Bought off by the competition.
Oh, look, Google got bored of something again and dumped it. /something grumble google reader
Yet another abandoned Google project!!! Include this with Nexus phone and tablets that are no longer upgradable, due to policy. Chromebooks that will soon stop receiving updates even though they are still usefull. Chromeboxes that are great for elderly and other non-sophisticated end users, saving them from Internet risk. Some models, still usable, too soon no longer to receive updates. Hangouts abandoned and replaced with less capable apps. Google ALWAYS abandons good products. This is why I do not recommend using any Google cloud services that compete with AWS. Google will likely abandon it!! Google has abandoned it's current fiber customers with higher prices, abandoned service plans, reduced plans and services, and no new 'sign ups'!!!
I find it interesting that many people here are complaining that Google and other telecoms are only focusing on high income "cherry picked" areas to provide Internet. It costs a ton of money to run fiber, what do they expect? If you want it run to everyone it really should be municipal...
However, either way..
Speaking from personal experience, even if you offer broadband internet access for a regular price of $19.95 to poorer apartment complexes you will only get a few subscribers. It is very counter-intuitive, since you would expect to get a large number of subscribers.
I was involved in a local ISP that was doing exactly this over a long period of time marketed to a large number of different apartment complexes with residents across the economic spectrum. At first it was heavily marketed to lower income areas since the initial thought was that they were being ignored by the bigger companies. However, after an extremely low response, the only ones we got more than a few subscribers from were the ones with middle class or higher residents on average (and we got many, many subscribers from those higher income complexes.)
After further research, many of hose poorer households either only had internet through their phones (I'm assuming for cost reasons) or, would just pay a much higher price to the cable company for internet access since they already had cable television. As a side note, many of the poorer households that had internet through the cable company were paying hundreds of dollars for their TV service, but, were struggling in other areas.
Based on my experience, if google or anyone tried to roll out fiber to the home to everyone and focused on poorer neighborhoods they would fail before they started.
The Akamai State of the Internet Report 1Q2017 says that the US average Internet connection speed is 18.7 Mbps (hurrah, the US is now in the top 10 countries in the world, pushing out The Netherlands!). Speeds are up 22% year-on-year.
What is the normal person going to do with Gbps to the home? No one has a TV they can actually see 4K resolution with, and 3-4 Mbps does a superb job of HD video. So the average American can have 4 great HD streams running at the same time into their home. The average American household has 2.5 people...
18 Mbps does fine for 4K non-live TV, even if you had a 100" TV that could let your eye resolve the 4K resolution with at average viewing distances. Give it a few years and 20 Mbps should do fine for HEVC encoding of live anyway.
Yes, some geeks might be able to download their Linux distributions a little faster....but how often do you do that?
The one major problem is that our 4km+ average local loops on DSL will limit that modality to 5 Mbps for the average DSL user. Yes people 1 km local loop can go at near 1 Gbps, but there is currently no technology for the "long loop" people to get there.
Meanwhile DOCSIS 3.1 will bring 10 Gbps speeds to HFC...once all the upstream Ethernet switches are upgraded. 400 GbE port switches are now shipping.
(I currently have 80 Mbps down on DOCSIS 3.0 HFC).
KC is a mob town. Always has been. That fact that nobody thinks of it that way is why they are so successful. Go watch the movie Casino or, better, read a book called Mobsters in our Midst that details all the players. Yes, the mob got whacked in the 70's, 80's, and 90's but those families didn't go away. They just got better at ducking the feds.
I am quite sure the local Comcast union was heavily involved in stalling Google out.
So we know Google can do search, email, and self-driving cars. Not so much networking apparently, as it looks like they committed then bowed out.
We also need a replacement for Youtube, as Google has given extreme political elements censorship power.
firing engineers for writing memos, demonetizing Ron Paul from YouTube and all the other ways they are implementing the Google Cultural Revolution.
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The loveliest trick of Goolag is to persuade you they don't do evil.
I saw a report that no more Fiber was being installed in KC one morning. That afternoon I got an email from Google saying that I was now able to schedule installation. Three weeks later I had Google Fiber installed. So maybe I am lucky, or maybe these reports don't really know what they are talking about. No idea which.
his current plan is to privatize it, e.g. hand it over to his buddies to profit from. He's not even shy about it, he's talked about it more than once saying that the way we'd pay for new infrastructure is to sell the existing stuff off.
What I'm saying is don't count on Trump & Co to accomplish anything in regards to infrastructure. You won't get government funded infrastructure from him, he's already said he won't do it.
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You seem to be confused about the relevance of anti-net-neutrality arguments to conversations about public infrastructure is strange.
protip: don't accuse people of being confused if you can't manage to write a proper sentence
lucm, indeed.
KC resident here. I've had Fiber hooked up twice now in two different locations. Early on, the growth was slow, but I often wonder if it's partially due to ignorance or lack of interest from residents. Yes there have been billboard advertisements, yard signs, maybe a radio or TV add here and there, but I don't think a lot of non-technical or older people grasp the value?
I say this because back in my rural hometown in NC, they struggle with getting anything faster than 1.5mb/s at a fair price ($50/m with landline). There were flyers send in the mail for laying down fiber that would bring speeds up to 25mb, but most everyone on the street is older and they don't even use the internet. No interest, no fiber. My parents with they could cut the cord, but their speed just doesn't cut it.