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Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption We Were Promised (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Some eight years on and Google Fiber's ambitions are just a pale echo of the disruptive potential originally proclaimed by the company. While Google Fiber did make some impressive early headway in cities like Austin, the company ran into numerous deployment headaches. Fearing competition, incumbent ISPs like AT&T and Comcast began a concerted effort to block the company's access to essential utility poles, even going so far as to file lawsuits against cities like Nashville that tried to expedite the process. Even in launched markets, customer uptake wasn't quite what executives were expecting. Estimates peg Google Fiber TV subscribers at fewer than 100,000, thanks in large part to the cord cutting mindset embraced by early adopters. Broadband subscriber tallies (estimated as at least 500,000) were notably better, but still off from early company projections. Even without anti-competitive roadblocks, progress was slow. Digging up city streets and burying fiber was already a time-consuming and expensive process. And while Google has tried to accelerate these deployments via something called "microtrenching" (machines that bury fiber an inch below roadways), broadband deployment remains a rough business. It's a business made all the rougher by state and local regulators and lawmakers who've been in the pockets of entrenched providers like Comcast for the better part of a generation.
I actually think, in a different way, this is why Google Fiber failed. I believe entrenched telecom interest ended up influencing (effectively controlling) Google from the board & investor perspective, and (with help) forced the creation of Alphabet. That effectively broke up Google allowing investors to have an ala-carte platter of knobs to turn, whereas when Google was monolithic they didn't get to have that level of insight or control. It isn't hard to win investor support on the idea that Google Fiber is a bad short term investment (it's a fact!), and with the facts exposed more clearly as they are now, that put a nail in the coffin.
If you look at how Google bifurcated, its more difficult now for the cash cow (Google) to provided the nearly unlimited funding Google Fiber would take to deploy. There's no question that down the road, Google Fiber would become hugely profitable... but that wasn't allowed to happen and there will be no competition for AT&T/Comcast/etc. I'm not sure Google wanted to have all these shell companies, it just became the political fallout of them having tried to take on a number of really big enemies, and those enemies fighting back hard.