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.

Comments

Hard to take that seriously

[phantomfive]

It's hard to believe that they thought they could get away with leaving the fiber two inches under the ground.

Re:Hard to take that seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

Besides isn't like google to abandon a lot of their projects and leave users high and dry? Rely on google and good luck? The only mainstay is the search portal. Thankfully these are results we can could on. Fair and balanced.

Re:Hard to take that seriously

[zilym]

It's hard to believe that they thought they could get away with leaving the fiber two inches under the ground.

IKR? Why didn't they just stick with their fiber in sewers plan?

Re:Hard to take that seriously

[AmiMoJo]

There has been a lot of interest in shallow trenches lately, with various schemes to make them work. Armour plated conduit, under asphalt or paving slabs, that kind of thing.

If someone can figure out how to get the cost of installing last mile infrastructure down there is a huge opportunity to build not only new data comms networks, but charging for electric vehicles and smart sensor networks. Vast potential profits for decade after decade.

As Google discovered it's not easy, but for places where they can't just hang stuff on utility poles it's the only idea anyone has for making the new infrastructure economically viable.

Re:Hard to take that seriously

[hazardPPP]

Besides isn't like google to abandon a lot of their projects and leave users high and dry? Rely on google and good luck? The only mainstay is the search portal. Thankfully these are results we can could on. Fair and balanced.

Good ol' Google, keeping everything in "beta" and abandoning it on short notice after some period of time. Only, you, real physical services that people pay for - like Google Fiber - aren't free-to-use online apps. Is it gonna be like this with Waymo one day too? "Sorry, can't fix that bug that repeatedly crashes cars into lamp posts, your vehicle will become inoperative within 30 days."

Re:Hard to take that seriously

[jellomizer]

"You gotta know the territory!"

Two inches of asphalt on Solid Granite Bedrock in an area that has rather consistent temperatures Is more then enough.

In other areas, not so much.

There are potholes over 2" deep. Potholes happen when water seeps into the asphalt, freezes, and unfreezes cracking the asphalt. I don't want to think about the pressures on a tiny strand of glass wrapped in plastic, from this.

However this problem show the problem that a lot of tech companies have. They are too West Coast Centrist. A lot of cultural oddities in America are due to different geography and weather patterns.

Coastal Cities are usually larger and more tolerant to other cultures. Because they have people from all around the world stopping by and living there. While interior cities which are landlocked, are smaller and less diversity in people, who are often more dependent on each other.

West Coast cities have more of a temperate climate, while East Cost Cities are known for their cold winters. This effects building codes, and environmental usages. I am on the East Coast. My home needs a slanted roof, and I have two sources of heat for the winter, it isn't uncommon to have at least one car that is all wheel drive. However if a major earthquake hits us, we are probably screwed.

I wish Google realized the complexity when deploying fiber, the California method just doesn't work in Kentucky.

Re:Hard to take that seriously

[omnichad]

No kidding. They named their parent company by combining the words alpha and beta and that's all they do.

Re:Hard to take that seriously

[dgatwood]

Actually, it surprises me. In areas where you don't have deep freezing, laying utilities a couple of inches down normally works fine; it's actually the normal way of doing installation in much of the Tennessee Valley area. Of course, it might not work if you have very sandy soil, but AFAIK, Louisville is clay soil, much like where I used to live, so I would expect it to work just fine.

For example, they laid the cable TV lines in my parents' neighborhood in Tennessee with shallow trenching, and they've been down for twenty or thirty years. It's how they ran a replacement phone line and a replacement cable line from the boxes by the street out their house last year after rodent damage (mice like the taste of the wires, apparently). And so on.

This story makes me wonder if their contractors did the shallow trenching wrong. IIRC, you're supposed to A. do it during wet months so that the ground is soft (or add enough water to make it soft) and B. have somebody going along behind, pressing the ground back together so that the cable can't come back up. If you don't do either of those things, you're going to have a bad time, particularly when the ground shrinks as it dries or thaws. I've heard stories of such botched installations, though I've never actually seen one.

Re:Hard to take that seriously

[dgatwood]

That's the part I don't understand, once you've trenched through the asphalt, digging a few more inches isn't that hard, they probably could have buried it 8" down with little additional cost.

From what I'm reading, it sounds like the did it the way you lay the sensor loop wires for a traffic light. You don't trench at all. Rather, you use a circular saw and cut a straight line two inches deep. Then, you shove the wire down into the resulting gap and put tar on top of it.

It works for sensor wire, because it doesn't flex much, it is laid down in a small area, and the asphalt is usually brand new and soft when they put it down, so it squeezes together a bit anyway. I'm not too surprised that it doesn't work for fiber, though. For long runs, it's better to knife-trench the dirt beside the road, and bore under roads, sidewalks, and driveways — more expensive, mind you, but it avoids problems like this.

Re:Hard to take that seriously

[Strider-]

You cut with a circular/wet saw, then fill the micro trench with a sealant.

That’s what Novus does in Vancouver, BC. They microtrench concrete sidewalks with a wet saw, stuff the fiber into the slit, then seal up with some sort of epoxy. Works quite well. That said, they run multiple links to each building so there’s multi-path redundancy built in.

Not an engineered solution

[E-Lad]

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.

Lame

[cheesybagel]

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.

Sounds like an accounting solution

[Solandri]

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.

Re:Sounds like an accounting solution

[Anonymous Coward]

It was a test. Everybody is trying to figure out how to make FTTH financially viable. Existing cable infrastructure is ridiculously profitable and can make life very hard for newcomers who need many years of steady revenue to pay off the initial cost of a new network. Comcast et al can undercut any offer. Their networks already exist and bandwidth costs are almost nonexistent. So what do you do if you have no network yet? You try to figure out how cheap you can build FTTH before you run into problems. The experiment in Louisville proved that they can't do it that cheaply.

What about the environment?

[Vinegar Joe]

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?

Pole fighting to blame?

[portwojc]

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.

Re:Pole fighting to blame?

[kurkosdr]

Which is the real problem here. Why do utilities have private ownership of poles or ducts that are located on public property? Shouldn't they be forced to lease them or something?

Re:clean up?

[ChoGGi]

According to the linked wdrb.com article they started (something) back in August.

Internet from an ad company

[AHuxley]

The approved ads load nice and fast?

Always funny

[kenh]

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.

Re:Always funny

[Kjella]

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.

Of course we laugh also the other way around, when a newcomer upends the competition because they keep doing things the way they've always have done and can't imagine doing it any other way. Hindsight is easy.

Re:2 fucking inches?

[grahamsz]

Through my yard, i don't think my fiber is more than 4" deep in a plastic conduit and it seems to survive just fine. Obviously it doesn't have cars driving over it, but the shallow trench seems like a reasonable compromise to make installation a bit more manageable. I'm sure some portion of them need replaced every year, but I haven't heard of anyone having reliability issues near me.

I'm in colorado where it's currently 2F

What were they drinking?

[gmiller123456]

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.

It's not just the weather...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.