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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?
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."
Have they actually rolled out new fiber anywhere?
Who knows. They don't share any plans or thinking. They're as tight lipped as every other telecom.
I recall getting shouted down because I said Google wasn't any better than the incumbents and that they'd cherry-pick the better neighborhoods and leave the rest in the dark. Some Google fanboi insisted they'd wire the ghettos and show everyone how it's done.
The truth is that Google's incentives are as fouled up as the traditional providers. They all want the easy-to-reach customers that have lots of disposable income. Comcast et al. want to sell expensive bundles to a captive audience and Google wants lucrative data about people with money. None of these parties have any incentive to stretch their systems beyond dense, high income urban areas.
Small, independent operators motivated to light as many properties as possible as cheaply as possible could solve this problem, but they have no hope getting through the regulatory mine field and the incumbent obstacles. So here we sit in our balkanized country with mountains of rules and regulations, fat government blessed monopolies and costly, limited pathetic Internet service, getting scrutinized with a digital microscope because we have only a handful monster operators, vertically integrated from your POP all they way up to the NSA and everything in between, to choose from.