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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?
I'm routinely reminded of the fact that the only reason Google hasn't ascended to Umbrella Corp-level mass evil manipulation of the world is that it is, in many cases, completely incompetent. Great engineers inventing great algorithms, but its successes are in spite of its own internal dysfunction.
If it ever figures out how to operate intelligently, though... Look out. We'll all be doomed.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
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.
Not sure this is anything to do with incompetence, It is just like most google Beta's, once they realise it isn't going to make them money they basically abandon it regardless of who is affected. Fibre is great for consumers, but it is expensive and under googles model hard to successfully turn into a good revenue stream.
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"
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.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
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.
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.
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.
I'm in the Pacific Northwest. If I brought an 850-mile-long cat6 cable down to your place, could you spare a wall port?
#DeleteChrome
At least the Royals finally scored last night!
Seriously....they suck at executing and keeping product lines around.
Yeah, because central planning never had any issues at all and always provided everything that people wanted and needed.
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.
it spooked 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.
That's exactly what Google was hoping would happen. Everyone I knew from Google (although no one involved in the project, so no inside knowledge) indicated that Google wants high speed Internet everywhere, because as far as they're concerned, more Internet = more Google.
The incumbents were dragging their feet, so Google Fiber was created mostly as a project to spook the incumbents into doing their own Fiber faster.
Unfortunately, I suspect Google found out *why* the incumbents were dragging their feet. Just providing fiber as a utility service is *enormously* expensive, with a massively slow payback.
Anyway, if the incumbents can get their fiber act together, that would remove any reason for Google to continue supporting a Google Fiber project at all. As it is, it seems they've mostly shelved it anyway. Kind of sad, but unless Americans and Canadians are willing to be packed into the same density as Koreans, super-high speed Internet is going to be mostly restricted to a few enclaves for the foreseeable future.
Their TV service is not perfect but Time Warner's was far worse.
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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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.
This is again a side effect of net neutrality. Heavy infrastructure costs + regulations on what the fuck you can do with that infrastructure = death sentence for ISP.
There's no reason for a company to keep pouring money in that kind of bottomless pit. It's not with the handful of dollars they're getting in subscriptions that they're going to pay for all that infrastructure. So Google is smart to pull out now, just like they're going to pull out from drones when they become heavily regulated.
I'm all for net neutrality on paper, but in real life it's just not going to work.
Let's all remember the little red hen.
Once upon a time there was a little red hen who scratched about the barnyard until she uncovered some grains of wheat. She called her neighbors and said ‘If we plant this wheat, we shall have bread to eat. Who will help me plant it?’
“Not I, “said the cow.
“Not I,” said the duck.
“Not I,” said the pig.
“Not I,” said the goose.
“Then I will,” said the little red hen. And she did. The wheat grew tall and ripened into golden grain. “Who will help me reap my wheat?” asked the little red hen.
“Not I,” said the duck.
“Out of my classification,” said the pig.
“I’d lose my seniority,” said the cow.
“I’d lose my unemployment compensation,” said the goose.
“Then I will,” said the little red hen, and she did.
At last the time came to bake the bread. “Who will help me bake bread?” asked the little red hen.
“That would be overtime for me,” said the cow.
“I’d lose my welfare benefits,” said the duck.
“I’m a dropout and never learned how,” said the pig.
“If I’m to be the only helper, that’s discrimination,” said the goose.
“Then I will,” said the little red hen.
She baked five loaves and held them up for the neighbors to see.
They all wanted some and, in fact, demanded a share. But the little red hen said, “No, I can eat the five loaves myself.”
“Excess profits,” cried the cow.
“Capitalist leech,” screamed the duck.
“I demand equal rights,” yelled the goose.
And the pig just grunted.
And they painted “unfair” picket signs and marched round and around the little red hen shouting obscenities.
When the government agent came, he said to the little red hen, “You must not be greedy.”
“But I earned the bread,” said the little red hen.
“Exactly,” said the agent. “That’s the wonderful free enterprise system. Anyone in the barnyard can earn as much as he wants. But under our modern government regulations productive workers must divide their products with the idle.”
And they lived happily ever after, including the little red hen, who smiled and clucked, “I am grateful, I am grateful.” But her neighbors wondered why she never again baked any more bread.
lucm, indeed.
It seems like every great corporation starts with great engineers. ... and then slows down when it's filled with other people.
Look at Wikipedia. The majority of their payroll doesn't even go to servers or engineers. It goes to administration and "community outreach." They don't even make content--their users do.
Look at YouTube. They were a great startup and then... in the last 5 years, you can count the number of actual, useful , innovative features on one hand. Everything else has been incremental, or a complete fuck up inspired by morons in management.
Oh, look, Google got bored of something again and dumped it. /something grumble google reader
Yes, yes, socialism sucks.
That will be why the US ISP's do so well without any taxpayer money at all.
Oh, wait, they don't.
Or here's a more recent story about the sort of crony capitalism you have to live with in the US.
Gosh but socialism is so awful.
I own an ISP and net neutrality is a *good* thing - for us and for our customers. Net neutrality has *always been* part of the internet's DNA. If you believe otherwise then you've been swallowed the propaganda and you're about to get tossed onto someone's dinner plate.
Telecom infrastructure is MASSIVELY profitable. Just ask Carlos Slim what a "money pit" it has been for him. The reason why Google can't pull it off is because the ROI is measured in decades rather than a few years that every wants to demand these days. Google fiber would have been a huge money maker 30 years from now - after everyone at Google who stands to actually profit from the venture is already dead.
Telecom infrastructure is MASSIVELY profitable [..] Google fiber would have been a huge money maker 30 years from now
This is absurd. The kind of "massive profit" you're suggesting would mean that people in 1985 would have known exactly what kind of telecom infrastructure would be in use today. It's not even realistic to predict that wired connections will still be relevant in 5 years.
Your numbers don't add up unless the ISP can milk the cow.
lucm, indeed.
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).
But deploying all the equipment for an ISP is expensive with or without net neutrality. The high cost prevents competition since a new entrant might only pick up a handful of subscribers, not enough to cover all the costs. And the competitor might drop prices in response, but then no one switches and so the new entrant goes belly-up. (The entrenched ISP then goes about gradually increasing prices to pre-competition levels.)
There is a way to solve this via regulation. Separate the infrastructure and the service. One company sells access to the wires/cables, another sells the service (a virtual ISP). This is effectively how dial-up internet service functioned.
Such a system already exists for cell phones. They are called MVNOs: Mobile Virtual Network Operators. Third-parties resell the service on AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint. It's usually, but not always, cheaper. Even big companies like Walmart and (ironically) Comcast make use of this to sell their own branded cell service.
And yet there are plenty of countries out there that have Net Neutrality and pervasive telecoms infrastructure. Your just need a coherent set of regulations. The fact is Telecoms companies in the US are making massive amounts of money from their ISP operations. There is plenty of scope for them to spend some of that on providing service to lower income areas in return for their licenses to operate, it's just that right now they don't have to, so they don't.
The little red hen then patented the idea of 'bread' and decided she owned any and all loafs regardless of who baked them.
She then traded 'her' bread for the land the baker used so now no one could grow any other non-bread food.
Begone, foul troll.. Or bot, or whatever ignorance of which you are created.
The infrastructure, and the maintenance thereof, *is* the service. Yes, carrying bits is vital too, but that's the easy, invisible part of it. Hardly anybody buys a router for its firmware -- it's the hardware, the infrastructure, that they care about.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
In order to even break even they have to attract the majority of the subscribers to their service. That's nearly impossible in an area that already has a decent reliable service. While most here hate Comcast, the truth is that the majority of their customers are fine with the service they provide and won't bother switching. Is Google Fiber a bit faster and less expensive? Sure, that's not enough to get most fairly satisfied customers to switch. I'm positive there's better and cheaper car insurance than what you have now and yet you don't bother switching. The same is likely true with your cellphone plan/provider. Google Fiber made their big push when Net Neutrality was coming under fire. With Obama in the White House, that threat lessened and they eased up on Fiber. Will the current administrations attack on it be enough to bring interest back for Google? Maybe. But I think they've realized it's simply too expensive and the ability to attract enough to even break even on the investment is nearly impossible. They can only have so many areas of the business bleeding millions/billions.
firing engineers for writing memos, demonetizing Ron Paul from YouTube and all the other ways they are implementing the Google Cultural Revolution.
---------
The loveliest trick of Goolag is to persuade you they don't do evil.
First comment I see here and it has a minus one which I don't know why because this person is generally saying Google is not like the Son of God coming to save us. Then lots of comments about evils of govts, socialism, net neutrality, etc. This same attitude is applied to other infrastructure done by governments and paid by taxes. But then taxes are bad, nobody wants to pay them and yet everyone bitches about our terrible infrastructure from traffic jams to slow internet.
mfwright@batnet.com
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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But the story keeps going, next week the pig made stone soup and the hen happily shared it. The week after that duck baked pies with some berries she found, etc...
Cheap storage VM.
I had Google Fiber at my previous house. I thought it was very good. My current house didn't have it, so I switched to Time-Warner. The internet was slower than Goog, but not bad. TV seemed as good. Their DVR reminded me of Windows. Crap compared to either Google's or the Tivo, but GoodEnough (tm). My only real problem with Spectrum-Warner is the obscene price.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Wireless has been getting better, but it's still shit connectivity. Sure, their are cell towers everywhere, but they provide a fraction of the bandwidth that a wired connection has, usually with many many horrible restrictions (data caps, horrific data charges, movies now getting auto-downsampled on a wireless connection). The current cell companies would have to be forced out of the infrastructure, as they've proven themselves especially poor stewards. Hell, I can't believe even Comcast is better.
Wireless spectrum is shared. Unavoidably shared. There are limits to how much you can pack into it. If everyone switches to wireless, they'll have a slower Internet connection that cannot theoretically get faster.
Most people get fiber because they want something, like movies or web surfing or something like that. The physical infrastructure is just something they pay for to get the good stuff.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
it's just that right now they don't have to, so they don't.
Exactly. So either you accept the current mediocre service and high-five yourself for net neutrality, or you let the market do its job and you allow better options for people who don't mind paying for them. You can't have it both ways; it's your principles, not Comcast's, so it's your problem, not theirs.
lucm, indeed.
Begone, foul troll.. Or bot, or whatever ignorance of which you are created.
I can't help but notice that people who resort to name calling rarely have meaningful information to provide, other than "my way or fuck you".
lucm, indeed.
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.
Fiber in the ground is a 100 year utility - nothing on the horizon is going to compete with it for capacity, reliability, or even long-term ROI.
And "640K of memory ought to be enough for anybody".
lucm, indeed.