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Google Fiber Abandoning Louisville Residents With Two Months Notice (theverge.com)
stoborrobots writes: Google Fiber is leaving Louisville, as reported in The Verge: "Google Fiber's attempt to roll out its gigabit internet across the city of Louisville, Kentucky has apparently failed so spectacularly that the company has decided to completely shut down the service and leave town altogether. CNET has a report on the news, which Alphabet's Access division confirmed in a blog post on Thursday. 'We'll work with our customers and partners to minimize disruption, and we're committed to doing right by the community, which welcomed us as we tested methods of delivering high-speed internet in new and different ways,' the Fiber team said."
TechCrunch's take: "It's a rare admission of defeat for Google Fiber, though it's no secret that the company isn't exactly bullish on the prospect of the service anymore. Louisville was supposed to be somewhat of a comeback for Google Fiber, which like so many Google services is now under more pressure to generate a profit. Clearly, that didn't work out." The issue apparently has to do with "shallow trenching," a process that involves laying fiber cable two inches beneath the sides of roads in the city and covering them up with sealant. "The company seemed optimistic about this plan until some of the cable started becoming exposed over time, requiring a second cover-up with hot asphalt," reports The Verge. "It seems Access realized it had to go a bit deeper with the cabling; in San Antonio, a similar method is used -- but the fiber is laid at least six inches deep into the ground."
"Unfortunately, things have somehow gone so awry in Louisville that Google Fiber claims it would need to rebuild the entire network to get everything to a satisfactory point, and it seems Alphabet just isn't interested in blowing the cash that would be necessary to do that. So instead, Google Fiber will today alert Louisville customers that their service will end on April 15th." In an attempt to soften the blow, Google Fiber says it will not charge customers for their final two months of service.
TechCrunch's take: "It's a rare admission of defeat for Google Fiber, though it's no secret that the company isn't exactly bullish on the prospect of the service anymore. Louisville was supposed to be somewhat of a comeback for Google Fiber, which like so many Google services is now under more pressure to generate a profit. Clearly, that didn't work out." The issue apparently has to do with "shallow trenching," a process that involves laying fiber cable two inches beneath the sides of roads in the city and covering them up with sealant. "The company seemed optimistic about this plan until some of the cable started becoming exposed over time, requiring a second cover-up with hot asphalt," reports The Verge. "It seems Access realized it had to go a bit deeper with the cabling; in San Antonio, a similar method is used -- but the fiber is laid at least six inches deep into the ground."
"Unfortunately, things have somehow gone so awry in Louisville that Google Fiber claims it would need to rebuild the entire network to get everything to a satisfactory point, and it seems Alphabet just isn't interested in blowing the cash that would be necessary to do that. So instead, Google Fiber will today alert Louisville customers that their service will end on April 15th." In an attempt to soften the blow, Google Fiber says it will not charge customers for their final two months of service.
It's hard to believe that they thought they could get away with leaving the fiber two inches under the ground.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I mean seriously, what the FUCK.
Here in California when the local fiber was being rolled out, it was either strung from the phone lines, or put down between 2 and 10 feet deep under the roads. While I have no doubt it was at great expense, given that the non-mountain regions of California *NEVER* freeze more than an inch or two down, this seems extrordinarily sloppy on Google's part. Somewhere like Kentucky I imagine gets much deeper frost and much more rainfall on average than California does, and should at least have matched the depth of fiber rollouts here in Easyville.
It's pretty clear if you'll need something for a while, don't use Google.
We'll work with our customers and partners to minimize disruption
Ain't that the truth.
Who, exactly, thought this was a workable idea? Two inches into the asphalt and covered with tar? I can't imagine how one, let alone a group, of civil engineers and the city's own engineers could be okay with this idea. I have so many questions.
1. What happens when the road needs to be resurfaced, nevermind the scoring of the pavement required to dig for and access other buried utilities.
2. How this won't accelerate deterioration of roads due to being a wound in the road that invites moisture, causing things like frost heave
3. How protected is the cable itself as asphalt shoves, slips, and creeps over time in places
4. Is the cable even meant to withstand the mechanical shock of traffic passing 2" or less above it over even 10 years?
The photos look absolutely atrocious given the short amount of time the stuff has been there.
That's what you get when you go ludicrously cheap Google. I am surprised they did not simply glue it to the road.
Coz that. Now that. Would have taken COURAGE.
Too bad the name means search, because otherwise it would be tied to premature pulling out. And I don’t mean sex.
It’s a wonder anyone takes google seriously anymore, for anything remotely approaching business critical.
Trenching costs about $5-$10 per foot for equipment and labor for a 24 inch deep trench. That's about $25k-$50k per mile. And you'd need to apply and pay for permits in a lot of areas. Some accountant at Google probably figured they could save a ton of money by trenching only 2 inches, and overruled the engineers who told him it was a dumb idea.
Who's going to pay to dig it all up and remove it? Google isn't just going to walk away and leave it, right?
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Considering they had to fight for access to the utility poles I guess this was the other option.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161101/08481735932/fcc-lends-support-to-google-fiber-louisville-fight-to-access-att-utility-poles.shtml
I don't know if that really was the result or not but the incumbents tend to fight tooth and nail to stop access in more ways than just that.
Today businesses like Google have created an ENORMOUS overhead obligation to the people of the world by creating what have now become essential services including storage of essential information. They are more like utilities today than just independent businesses that can pull the plug on the public anytime they think they are not making enough money on what they are doing. When is government going to hold them to their obvious obligations? I think eventually they are going to become "to big to fail" just like the larger banks and they will become a continuing financial burden on the people.
E Proelio Veritas.
It makes you wonder if they will be sued when someone trips over an exposed loop and ends up being injured.
According to the linked wdrb.com article they started (something) back in August.
The approved ads load nice and fast?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
This is the one-touch-make-ready rule which the FCC has actually been trying to push through, to allow competing utilities to move the other's wiring on a pole to run their own. Otherwise the existing utilities can just delay and delay and delay.
12:50 - press return.
It's always funny to watch a major corporation think they figured out a great new way to revolutionize an industry by doing something no one else does - in this case, build a high-speed data network buried a whole 2" under city roads.
There's a reason the wizards of the major telcos never went out and did this, and it wasn't because they were too dumb to think of it. Places like Bell Labs, Western Electric and Bellcore invest millions of dollars developing industry standards to avoid just such a costly mistake. Doing something right the first time is always cheaper than going back and fixing it... In this case, Google found it cheaper to walk away than to fix their infrastructure.
Ken
Like so many products and services, they don't stick them out for the long term. Unless it makes a gazillion $$$ very quickly, they close it down. They also give little or no thought for the people who increasingly can be viewed as rather foolishly signed up for the service.
And they get away with it.
If this was Apple then there would already be half a dozen class actions filed against them but like Microsoft only the very, very rich sue Google (as in Oracle) and get away with it.
FU Google and all who work for you.
Who would have thought the Burbon Belt had wild temperature swings? We just had -5f and 70f in the same week, which is probably what solidified their plan to pull out now. That temperature swing is higher than normal, but not by much. I don't know what they were drinking when they came up with this plane, but it obviously wasn't from Kentucky.
The biggest problem with shallow trenching most likely isn't just weather or other natural phenomena, but rather clueless construction crews who cut corners with little to no oversight.
I've got a gigabit fiber run to my office building that covers about a half mile from the central office of a local ISP here in Texas. The first half comes over pole. The last 800 feet is shallow-buried (8-12 inches). The first year it was in place, a construction crew came through and was doing utility cuts along the road for a new building going in right where I know the fiber line is buried (I watched it going in).
I stopped by the site and asked for the foreman (in Spanish because none of the crew on site knew English). They said the foreman was on another site and wouldn't be back until the next day. I explained to the workers that they needed to stop trenching and check for buried cables, because I was absolutely sure that the fiber line was there.
After I got back to the office, I was informed that our internet was down...I knew exactly what had happened. I called the ISP immediately and explained the situation. They, in turn, contacted the utility they had used to install the last mile and informed them that they suspect that the line had been cut by construction workers. True to form, a utility truck showed up in the next half hour, and the technician wasn't making any headway with the construction workers until I walked down and translated for him. He got the construction company's number and called them up, asking for the foreman. I spent four years in the Navy, so I'm pretty salty...but this technician laid into the foreman using language that made me blush even.
So the utility had to run a new fiber line to the building, and this time they kept it all on the pole. I'm sure the construction company ended up footing the bill one way or another.
Choosing 2" burial is obviously stupid to anyone but the utterly clueless. I wouldn't bury cable in my yard that close to the surface. It's lawnmower bait.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
This move by Google harms the entire country, not just the city of Louisville.
I understand that In Kentucky, public schools often don't teach evolution. It's "just a theory". What if pervasive internet access could provide better education, and better opportunities to the people?
I think that without fast internet access, Kentucky's economy will continue to struggle to reach the 21st century, and its people will continue to be subject to the tensions of inequality that are driving authoritarian populism.
You can do better than this, Google.
ROFL. Down in the ground, without coming back up out of it like a zombie.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I'm in San Antonio, and hearing that they do not plan to abandon it (yet, at least) is good. Two-inch burial sounds really stupid, and Louisville is farther north, where they presumably get freezing weather much more than the handful of nights a year, with all-day freezing less than once a year on average, that happens in central Texas. I also live in a neighborhood with a back alley, so hopefully that will be cheaper to trench properly if they don't get to use the poles. But the ATT wires are underground along the alley too, so they'll have to pay some attention at least for the wires going across to individual houses. When I ran a BBS in the '90s and got a 3rd phone line, they trenched two 5-pair cables through my back yard between the junction boxes. I don't know how deep (I thought it was six inches), but there are places where it is already up to the ground.
When I lived in a neighborhood with no alleys in Austin many years ago, TWC re-cabled my block by digging a hole in every other backyard on one side, then used a hammer mole thingy to hammer a tunnel between them and then pushed conduit in behind it. They used the bottom half of an ordinary soda can that fit snugly over the end of the conduit to keep dirt out of the pipe, so it wasn't a tiny tunnel either. It was at least 12 inches down, maybe 24, so it should last forever.
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