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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.
But relaxing the existing rules to allow competition would be DE-REGULATION! Nobody wants that, right? It's not like regulatory capture is often used to stifle competition by existing markets or anything.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
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.
I believe this is true, and what happens when you allow a bunch of 20-somethings attempt to bring products to market. While it's possible they are reasonably intelligent, they lack vision, drive, wisdom, and long-term focus. Google isn't too bad at developing technologies, but they are utterly abysmal at delivering those technologies to consumers.
It's an ethos that appears to driven by the Silicon Valley mentality of constantly throwing things at the wall. I recently heard that no one in the valley takes you seriously unless you've had at least two failed startups. Everyone wants to know how many things you've thrown at the wall, how many stuck, how many didn't.
No one cares that you spent countless amounts of time and money very cleverly building tech that can't clear regulatory hurdles, solves problems no one has, isn't affordable by the time it hits the market, or has no real-world applications.
Hey, you built a wall of unusable tech blobs? We love those! Here's a $3M salary to sit in an open-air office not too far from the ping-pong table, just to think about things that we could possibly monetize.
I'm sorry, but your opinion seems to be wrong.
Privatization works when there is competition and choice on the individual level. Issues where if a company fails, then we don't need someone to rush up and give them a helping hand, because there is no alternatives for their services.
If I don't like my ISP, I should have appropriate substitutions to choose from. If I don't then it should be a well regulated industry, where I as a consumer have a place to express my feelings towards the service, Even if it means talking to my elected official.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Spot on. Google tipped thier hand by publicly declaring that they wanted to make internet and phone service universal and free. They met the enemy
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
We really need municipalities to try harder at rolling out faster broadband, since they are more vested in it's overall success.
There are plenty of municipalities that would love to. That's why the incumbent ISPs have gone to state legislatures to ban municipal broadband.
...how much of the US was pretty much given on a silver plate to the current ISP monopolies, and how much ISPs are still paying politicians for things to remain that way... it's just sad.
For anyone thinking this is Google's fault, you really need to search around and read articles that explains it from the company's side.
To put it very simply, it was taxpayer money that paid the entire infrastructure to handle the Internet, rights to it was haphazardly given up to ISPs, now everytime Google needs to pass fiber through existing infrastructure (which sometimes is the only way), it needs to gently ask permission to the likes of AT&T and Comcast to do so, which of course will do everything not to let them, including suing Google when the local government tries to expedite the whole thing.
Google Fiber failed because the government gave US infrastructure on a silver platter to existing ISP monopolies. That's why. It's the same reason why the FCC is working the way it is right now. You guys have an effective telecommunications mafia up there and it's gonna stay that way.
It's why Google caved in and started working on the next high speed transmission technology instead of wasting time and money in something that won't work out. Don't take it from me though, just search around for the information.
The topic is how evil the companies are. Not what their service is like.
My service has improved drastically since the transition
They fuck up DNS resolution every other day. Some genius decided that they would shut off their name servers every so often. Probably in an attempt to force people to not hard-code their name servers. Problem is said genius failed to account for the length of DHCP leases when calculating that shutdown schedule. So every other day, DNS resolution breaks until the router fetches a new DHCP lease.
The fix is to use a competent ISPs name server....such as google.
The city is largely bending over backwards to try to help Google Fiber. The problem is our state legislature, which is flaming red and never misses an opportunity to fellate AT&T for more bribes, sorry, "campaign contributions". Our legislature has never seen a broadband bill favoring AT&T that they didn't like, nor a broadband bill helping Google or municipalities/utilities that they wouldn't go out of their way to squash.
The people living in cities are being held political hostage by the people in rural areas who voted (R) without thinking. I'd imagine Kansas is in a similar predicament.
If I don't like my ISP, I should have appropriate substitutions to choose from. If I don't then it should be a well regulated industry, where I as a consumer have a place to express my feelings towards the service, Even if it means talking to my elected official.
Your elected representatives, at least the ones who take 'campaign contributions' from the big boys will tell you "You have plenty of competition. Look, you have Comcast cable. Or AT&T u-verse. Or Verizon cell service, because a cell phone connection is totally like home Internet broadband. They're totally the same. So you have T-Mobile and Sprint and all these other carriers. Oh, and look, we found an ISP willing to do some sort of over-the-air point to point thing to your location -- TOTALLY the same thing. Watch the dancing monkey."
The service is excellent. Google's uptime has been flawless, the original install appointments went smoothly and were kept, the equipment is high quality, and the gigabit service does actually deliver a full gigabit of bandwidth up *and* down in tests. And all for $70/month, which includes 1TB online storage via Google Drive.
Just as cool, you can simply log into fiber.google.com and downgrade to 100mbps ($50/mo.) or 5mbps (free) at will. You can upgrade and downgrade, click, click, click, and it will pro-rate costs for you automatically. Basically, it's a flawless service in every way.
One of the things that I'm convinced hurt Google in this area is that there was already entrenched competition from the usual suspects in national broadband brands.
For decades, it had been 5mbps-10mbps down and a fifth of that upstream as the maximum service tier at every major provider. And for that you paid $50-$70 monthly. As soon as Google Fiber deployed, suddenly *every provider* offered Gigabit for less than $100/mo. plus value adds and promos. I mean, it took weeks max, once Google Fiber started scheduling installations. Just like that. And a lot of people stuck with the devil they already know, particularly if they were already getting TV and/or landline service through them, and particularly if Google had install times a week or two out but their current provider could bump them up within a day or two.
Google broke the market wide open here, but at the same time ended up with scraps in the end. Most of the people that I know stuck with their previous provider and ended up with gigabit speeds anyway at or near their previous subscription cost once Google entered the local market. I worry that if Google were to pull out of the market for some reason, suddenly "market realities" would reduce the offerings of the other providers once again to $70/mo. for 5mbps, as it had previously been.
So I hope Google stays.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW