47 ms·

Google Fiber Cutting Jobs and Halting Rollout

440 points by gm-conspiracy 10y ago

Leszek 10y ago
Previous discussion (mostly about the blog post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12792928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12792928
- Yhippa 10y ago
  I read that one first then started seeing these articles like the OP all over. What incredible spin. Two completely different things happened if you read each one separately.
  - ihsw 10y ago
    I was thinking this article is simply reducing the market-speak down to relevant information -- Google is putting Fiber on life-support until someone buys them out. Like many acquisitions to buy customers, Fiber may be acquired for the same reasons.
    - curiouscats 10y ago
      It sure would be great to see Sonic https://www.sonic.com/ https://www.sonic.com/ buy it out.
atomical 10y ago
A nation-wide rollout would have been one of the most transformative things Google could have done. Growing their profits now depends on a thirty year bet on unproven technologies.
the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
Can't say I'm surprised. I expect Google fi to have a similar fate in a few years. It's not Google business.
- jonknee 10y ago
  Project Fi doesn't involve nearly the amount of staff though--they're using someone else's network. As Google has found out, digging holes and getting permits doesn't get cheaper with better software.
  - Yhippa 10y ago
    I have no idea what the economics are but I imagine the carriers they're piggybacking off of could charge higher fees for MVNOing if Fi were to get to a certain scale.
    - jonknee 10y ago
      Depending on the contracts they have I guess anything's possible, but MVNOs aren't a new thing and they don't typically get kicked off a network for being successful.
    - hga 10y ago
      Compared the the standard MVNO, they're less exposed because their system uses WiFi whenever possible. How much less that exposure is I have no idea. Disclaimer: I'm a Project Fi subscriber for the last half year or so.
  - zanny 10y ago
    They could build a robot that digs the holes. Maybe with Boston Dynamics robots. Oh...
    - knz 10y ago
      I'm not sure the cost is in digging the actual hole. The costs for planning, permitting and litigation can be substantial.
- kyrra 10y ago
  What fate would that be? Fiber isn't going away, they have just stopped expansion. There are also hints about investing in other tech instead of laying new fiber across an entire city (WebPass as the article mentions). I agree that Fiber isn't Google business, which is why Alphabet was created. It allows for the company to try expanding into areas that aren't just software. Also, Google does a LOT of infrastructure work with datacenters and the fiber they own across the country/world. (though that is more business focused than consumer/residential)
andrewvijay 10y ago
Just as expected. It was just to force the network carriers to speed up wasn't it?
- ethanbond 10y ago
  Force them to speed up (maybe) in a dozen cities? I don't think that's "just as expected."
  - andrewvijay 10y ago
    If they have sped up in a couple of cities then the next cities will get soon too. You have to evaluate a new business move before scaling up. And data is one of their primary modes of income. Measurement is very valuable.
  - 67726e 10y ago
    I certainly have no idea if it's because of fear of Google Fiber, but AT&T has started rolling out their fiber offering in the Charleston, SC suburbs over the past year. It's not all doom and gloom.
- Thaxll 10y ago
  It's pretty much a fail.
- rhino369 10y ago
  Didn't really work because the cost to deploy nationwide 1 gig is super expensive. It's only going to happen if there is profit in it. If Google wanted to create a market they shouldn't have priced it so low. Even if you could do nationwide gigabit for 70 bucks, there wouldnt be any profit. Isps aren't going to do a massive capital expenditure to make the same money.
- vram22 10y ago
  If that was so, did it work?
rch 10y ago
This should have been the headline on yesterday's news.
staticelf 10y ago
That sucks for citizens of the US. I think the Swedish (Nordic?) model for bringing internet connectivity to it's citizens is superior. The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded. For example, I have 250/100 mbit/s for free. My rent pays for this. But I could if I wanted to easily upgrade to 1gbit/s up and down. I can change ISP (even if that wouldn't be paid for by my rent) and I would know that I always could get the same internet-connectivity speeds. Although, while this is true for many parts of Sweden, it's not available for everyone. Some places still have networks owned by one company without any access to the city network.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- gregmac 10y ago
  > The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This is the model that should be used everywhere, if we were to actually consider it a utility. By default it does nothing, but if you pay some company to terminate it to the internet then you get internet, using whatever speed they can provide. Let the ISPs compete based on the service they provide: internet speed, reliability, support, and other add-ons like (e-mail or malware filters or the best wifi-router-modem included) or even the lack of any add-ons. Even if this isn't a "municipal service" strictly speaking, if contracted out to a telco of sorts, it should be done the same way, and we should not allow the same company that provides the physical lines to provide the actual service, since it's anti-competitive.
- Brakenshire 10y ago
  > The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded. The UK version is that the cables are owned by one highly regulated company (BT OpenReach) which then has to sell on to retail ISP's at a set rate. Fibre To The Cabinet (that is, using copper for the last few hundred metres), was rolled out to probably 70% of households without subsidy, and from then on it has required government funding for rural or otherwise difficult areas. The speed is nowhere near what you're listing, though. It's something like 10-50 Mb/sec.
SEJeff 10y ago
Well google announced they were exploring a fiber rollout in Chicago. Now both AT&T along with Time Warner Cable have 1G service throughout parts of the city. Alternatively, one can look at this not as a failure, but as a success. The point of Google fiber was to force carriers to get faster internet to everyone. It appears that it has been working. This benefits google directly as their properties such as Youtube can deliver more and better content. For Google, this is a win/win proposition.
- mmanfrin 10y ago
  Chicago is 1% of the country. I live in the Bay Area (Berkeley). My only choice above 20mbits is Comcast. AT&T's lines near me are old, I can get a max of 18mbits with them; Sonic says I can get about 12. I own my own home, so I can't get Webpass. LMI and the other local ISPs offer things like 3mbps for $90. I have literally zero reasonable choice other than Comcast. I'd happily pay double what Google charges for Fiber for a quarter of the speed they offer. I just want off Comcast. Google shuttering Fiber is the last hope I have. I don't think I'll have any other choice for at least a decade.
  - jakelarkin 10y ago
    Lmi and Paxio started a 1G fiber rollout but it only covers a few streets in West Berkeley. It took 5 weeks to get Comcast wired at my house in Berkeley. Terrifying that the next best options available to me were Unwired 10Mbps (burst & shared) wireless for $90/month or 1.5Mbps DSL (gah).
- agumonkey 10y ago
  package Google class Internet implement Musk.Tesla.Model {}
- imgabe 10y ago
  Even with 1Gbps from other providers, I'd still prefer Google. I think they're far less likely to do scummy things like impose bandwidth caps.
  - 10y ago
post_break 10y ago
Wonder if Google fiber will just shut down and give a 30 day notice or something scummy like that.
- ihsw 10y ago
  They will sooner let the Fiber division be acquired than simply cancel them all outright.
samfisher83 10y ago
Building infrastructure is hard. Even 100 years later we still have original AT&T (Verizon and AT&T) as the dominant telecommunications company. Google also seems to just give up on a lot of its products: Google+ Hangouts Project Ara Google Buzz Google video Orkut Talk Meebo etc. http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/visuel/2015/03/06/google-memorial-le-petit-musee-des-projets-google-abandonnes_4588392_4408996.html http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/visuel/2015/03/06/google-memori...
- FT_intern 10y ago
  building new infrastructure is much harder now than decades ago. It's been much easier for the companies to retain infrastructure
  - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
    But everyone moving to fiber IS building new infrastructure. Sure, they're continuing to cash in on telephone wire and coax, but fiber is new infrastructure. And Google discovered that you CAN'T just make money deploying Gigabit fiber for $60 a month. Getting even a 50 Mbps fiber circuit around here is hundreds of dollars a month.
    - delecti 10y ago
      Much (most?) "new" fiber is just companies lighting up existing dark fiber infrastructure.
      - newjersey 10y ago
        The expensive part is "the last mile". I imagine laying down cable on the side of the I-70 is easier than laying fiber in Manhattan under the pavement, above the utilities, and above the subway system. Or finding space to put up those boxes to "land" the fiber optic cables for a neighborhood.
      - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
        I know in some areas, whole towns are wired up with glass that isn't in use, but around here, I regularly see trenches being dug to run fiber. And nowhere near "to the home" yet even, but along major roads, to industrial parks, etc.
hcayless 10y ago
GF has been tearing up our neighborhood this week and last laying cable (I'm in Chapel Hill). AT&T did the same about 6 months back. I was holding out for Google, but this makes me think even when they get it up and running, the support will be nonexistent. So maybe better to go with the devil we know (we already have AT&T U-Verse, just not gigabit). At least they lasted long enough to force AT&T's hand...
- madamelic 10y ago
  I was really confused for a second why your girlfriend was laying cable... :)
- mdip 10y ago
  I'd still switch to Google Fiber. As someone who spent over a year dealing with what AT&T calls "support"[0], concerns that Google could be any worse would be minimal for me. In all likelihood, if they do completely abandon Fiber, rather than finding another way to provide the service that doesn't require digging, they'll sell it off to another ISP (I think TFA mentioned CenturyLink). Their DVR was (is?) based on SageTV's product, which I ran at home and found to be excellent (the extent to which it differs from their original product may change my mind on that assertion, though). [0] I had a problem with my DSL service at my family's home up north that required sending out a tech on 13 different occasions, which required me to drive two hours up north to meet him. I went through four different DSL modems (none of which were broken, but they were basically throwing darts at a wall with a blindfold on). They'd show up, find nothing wrong (on one occasion they offered to replace my interior wiring and decided against it when they discovered I ripped it all out and replaced it with one proper cable run using better cable than they'd install ... and the readings from their test equipment indicated the wire was very clean). They never actually fixed the problem as a result of a service call, it just went away at some point last year.
- erikb 10y ago
  Honestly. If GF dies you can still take AT&T. Therefore I would risk it if I were you.
gm-conspiracy 10y ago
Anybody know what is going on here? This seems like a page out of Verizon's FIOS rollout. Is Google working on their own cellular network (non-MVNO)? Is this due to the FCC reclassification of internet as a common carrier?
- dboreham 10y ago
  It's due to the fact that building a decent network for residential customers at scale is very expensive and not that profitable unless you have a long-term monopoly.
  - coldcode 10y ago
    And the people with the long term monopolies want to keep it that way.
  - austinhulak 10y ago
    Ding ding ding! This is exactly it. As a Google Fiber customer in Austin, it honestly wasn't any better than any of the other ISPs. Ironically, the only thing that was better was the DVR and live TV search that came with the TV service.
- wrsh07 10y ago
  I wonder if they're moving towards something more scalable, like Webpass [http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/22/12009600/google-fiber-webpass-acquisition-gigabit-internet http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/22/12009600/google-fiber-webp...]. There's tons of red tape laying actual fiber, and that probably makes it harder to provide high quality internet to as many customers as they'd like to.
- mdip 10y ago
  Is this due to the FCC reclassification of internet as a common carrier? I wondered a little bit about this, myself, when Fiber was launched. They have a lot more motivation without network neutrality as a matter of regulation because it'd open up the ability of ISPs to penalize their products[0]. I'm generally of the opinion that government over-regulates, but I was in support of the whole "Network Neutrality" situation because broadband services availability for many/most in the US is limited to one provider and that one company is also usually either AT&T or Comcast, known more for how much they suck than for the services they provide. It's not too hard to believe that if common carrier status were removed, AT&T or Comcast would lower their caps and start offering services that are exempt from those caps (especially Comcast - suddenly Hulu or anything NBCUniversal is all-you-can-consume, but Netflix/Amazon Video/YouTube are not). In a world like that, Google does have more motivation to roll out an ISP that does the opposite with their own services (or more likely just doesn't discriminate with anyone's traffic). Fiber resulted in a sudden expansion by many other ISPs to service with higher performance (and in many areas that are not even on the future Fiber cities list), so they've kind of accomplished the goal that has the greatest benefit to them -- more eyes on their products at a speed that makes them more useful. At the end of the day, though, I'm not so sure that the FCC reclassification is much more than a tiny bullet point in favor of not spending the money required to do a fiber roll out. They are certainly aware that Republicans are itching to dismantle this reclassification and their nominee has promised to do so IIRC. And though the Democrat's nominee has indicated that she'll keep that reclassification, I'm not willing to take her at her word on that. If that were their main reason for allowing fiber to "transition" to whatever new option they're looking at that (hopefully) costs a lot less to roll out but still doesn't exist in the places they want to roll out to, I'd be pretty surprised. [0] I'm not advocating that network neutrality be dismantled to give Google more motivation.
stinger 10y ago
another one bites the dust
fowlerpower 10y ago
See this title about what's happening to Google Fiber is much more direct, honest, and to the point than the corporate PR google Post and title that confused me into thinking I'm actually going to be able to sign up for Google Fiber. Their title: "Advancing our amazing bet" Point being that our ISPs right now need some disruption and I think a lot of people were hoping this Google Fiber would catch on. A lot of folks assumed Google would eat whatever losses to make this a hit. Apperatnly not, apperantly some short term profits trump anything else.
- TearsInTheRain 10y ago
  Google has been going in a new direction towards "fiscal responsibility" when it comes to their moon shots.
  - fowlerpower 10y ago
    I get that but let's be honest and up front about it.
josh2600 10y ago
I wrote about this elsewhere and am pasting my thoughts here as I think they're relevant to this community: 1) Google Fiber is dead. Long Live Google ISP. Google cannot afford to lay fiber in the ground because it's a long game and Google doesn't really want to play the long game (they just want to put pressure on competitors so they can move more bits along the wires, generating more searches and more streams with which to shove ads in your face). Fiber never was the most efficient way to do this, but there's something sexy about "Google Fiber" as opposed to "Google Point to Point Radio Towers". The reality is that wireless delivery of bits is way cheaper than fiber because you don't have to tear the ground up (over the last mile obviously since the arteries must be fiber links). Clarification: "long" refers to 30-year payback periods for physical asset investment. There are a lot of things with higher returns on that timeline than fiber that google can invest in. I don't actually think it's profitable for anyone to build unsubsidized networks. This is why networks should be public and operators should be private, but that's a topic for another day! 2) Fiber is cheap, construction is expensive. When I helped Comcast build out the fiber network in SF, what struck me was the relative cheapness of the assets we were putting in the ground compared to the cost of tearing up the street. The conduit and the glass inside the conduit cost almost nothing, but tearing up the street in SF is $300/sq ft. Crossing cable car tracks was like $50,000. Then there's the actual cost of construction: people. Getting contractors to arrive on time, finish on time, and avoid overtime is fraught with peril. It's actually really hard to move physical atoms around in a manner similar to programmatic systems, and so many models that have real world elements stumble against the harshness of actuality. I suspect Google's cost modeling for building a fiber network was optimistic. 3) Wireless is fast, but does it scale to city size? It's not hard or particularly expensive to deliver gigabit over wireless. You basically need a tall building to rain down radio waves onto the masses. What I wonder about, given that we have no cities running on majority wireless point to points, is what happens when you hit scale? That is to say, point to points have a limited wireless footprint (because using beamforming we don't need to splay the signal everywhere, we just send it in one direction), but one can easily imagine a saturated wireless environment as generating a significant amount of noise. Wireless networks are easy when there's only a few objects on the network but get significantly harder as the physical area reaches device saturation. That is to say, WebPass might be super easy to operate when only a handful of buildings are on WebPass, but it might be much harder if a whole section of the city is online. 4) Google bought WebPass a while back. The writing has been on the wall for a while that the fiber game was killing uncle Google. I can only hope that they don't bow out completely. I think that wireless makes Google significantly less of an existential threat to their carrier partners as well. Overall, I remain cautiously optimistic about Google's future as an ISP. On a final note: Google Fi is not an answer to Google fiber disappearing. The two are tangential, disjointed offerings that cannot, for a bunch of reasons, compete with one another (most notably the wireless data caps).
jgrowl 10y ago
Forgive me if I'm incorrect... The way I understand it is that they are halting planning in cities that they marked as potential locations, but that does not mean they are discontinuing the roll out and service in cities that are already in progress. For example in Nashville, they have been trying to roll out fiber in Nashville for over a year now but have only been able to install on less than a dozen utility poles so far. This is because of the rules that prevented anyone other than the owner of the existing lines to move anything. This meant that if Google wanted to add lines to a pole with existing AT&T and Comcast lines, it would require both companies to move their own lines independently of each other in coordination. This means roads would have to be closed 3 separate times for each vendor. Nashville recently passed the One Touch Make Ready ordinance that allows approved vendors to do all of the work at the same time. Now both AT&T and Comcast are suing the city: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/comcast-sues-nashville-to-halt-rules-that-help-google-fiber/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/comcast-sues-nash... I hope that google stills continues to deploy to cities that are already in progress. It took community effort to get the ordinance passed and subjects them a lawsuit. It would be a real letdown.
- itake 10y ago
  I think what they are saying is they are not profitable with what they are currently doing and at best, they are re-evaluating their business model to try to find profitability and at worst they are going to close up shop all together.
- silverlight 10y ago
  I live in KC and they are still rolling out here. Next phase ends Nov 3. I assume they are I'll keep rolling out in the metros they are already in as the leg work is done for the most part.
  - BatFastard 10y ago
    I am in Atlanta and we are scheduled for it on Dec 15 2016! If there is a god, don't stop now!!!!
- deleted 10y ago
yekim 10y ago
So bummed to read this. Even though I wasn't going to directly benefit from Google Fiber, it was sure nice to have a non-entrenched player tackle this market. From the big G's standpoint, it makes good biz sense to exit this market. I sure hope the subtext in the article comes to fruition ie that Google / Alphabet has figured out a better way to get high speed internet to homes in the US sans fiber. In an ideal world, this fast fiber internet ought to be a municipally managed utility, with my tax dollars paying for the fiber in the ground. Then, my take home dollars paying for whatever competing service(s) I choose to light up said fiber to bring me access to the net.
dbg31415 10y ago
The Google Fiber rollout in my neighborhood has been a debacle from the start. They walked around and put up door tags -- really really big ones saying, "Google Fiber is coming!" and immediately after that the 0 crime neighborhood I live in had a slew of break ins. Anyone who didn't remove this massive door tag was an easy target, the crooks knew who was home and who wasn't. Then like a week later... they put the exact same door tag up on all the doors. And we all laughed... but we were like, "WTF, Google..." Then the next day they put the exact same door tag up again... even doubling it up on homes that already had a door tag. They door tags were just promos to sign up; they didn't tell us to mark our sprinkler systems, or who to call in case the construction crew accidentally cut our water lines... The actual cable laying came about a month later... and it's been going on for 7 weeks at this point. Some days the guys work, most they don't. Doesn't appear to be any pattern to it. There are a bunch of expensive drilling and trenching machines parked at the end of my cul-de-sac and along the street in the spots where residents used to park. 7 weeks and counting...
- madengr 10y ago
  Are you in KC? I am in OP.
  - dbg31415 10y ago
    Austin, and I get that it's the construction firm and not Google, but yeah... it not good UX. Ha.
- chiph 10y ago
  Google really underestimated how hard it was going to be to run cable underground in Austin, with it's limestone ("Austin Chalk") often just inches below the grass & shrubbery.
dbg31415 10y ago
The Google Fiber rollout in my neighborhood has been a debacle from the start. They walked around and put up door tags -- really really big ones saying, "Google Fiber is coming!" and immediately after that the 0 crime neighborhood I live in had a slew of break ins. Anyone who didn't remove this massive door tag was an easy target, the crooks knew who was home and who wasn't. Then like a week later... they put the exact same door tag up on all the doors. And we all laughed... but we were like, "WTF, Google..." Then the next day they put the exact same door tag up again... even doubling it up on homes that already had a door tag. The actual cable laying came about a month later... and it's been going on for 7 weeks at this point. Some days the guys work, most they don't. Doesn't appear to be any pattern to it. There are a bunch of expensive drilling and trenching machines parked at the end of my cul-de-sac and along the street in the spots where residents used to park. 7 weeks and counting...
josh_carterPDX 10y ago
They backed out of Portland after spending a ton of money and time with city officials. Sad to hear this is not happening and hope Google finds a way to get back into this because the options today are a joke. This will just embolden companies like Comcast to charge more for horrible service.
- kyledrake 10y ago
  Portland spent a lot of time and resources (during a serious housing crisis), bent over backwards to give them everything they wanted... and they decide to just punk out, lay off their operations team and walk away from years of planning because they can "do fast wireless for some apartment buildings". Thanks, guys. There's a tiny ISP (US Internet) in Minneapolis that's already wired half of the city with fiber with some loans as capital, they're not a public company and they don't have billions in CoH and they still figured it out. They've already started offering 10Gbps to home users. Yes, ten gigabits, that's not a typo. And they're profitable. Laying fiber is impossible for a megacorp with billions of CoH and access to the overflowing "talent" of Silicon Valley like Google perhaps, but not for a small business like US Internet. Let's hope Portland gets a US Internet of it's own. We're all better off if the future of the web is built by smaller decentralized companies anyways.
  - josh_carterPDX 10y ago
    That's awesome. I absolutely hope they come to Portland as this city loves to support the underdog. :)
  - 2trill2spill 10y ago
    > There's a tiny ISP (US Internet) in Minneapolis that's already wired half of the city with fiber with some loans as capital, they're not a public company and they don't have billions in CoH and they still figured it out. They've already started offering 10Gbps to home users. Yes, ten gigabits, that's not a typo. And they're profitable. That's not entirely correct they have about a quarter of the city wired with plans to finish in 6 or 7 years[1]. The linked image is pretty small but it's all I can find. Note the linked map only shows 40% or so of Minneapolis. Also they have been providing Business services like dark fiber for the last 20 years, so it's not like they are completely dependent on home fiber income or new to the business. I just recently got US Internet fiber, we have the 100 Mbps plan for $39.95 a month and it's great! I noticed that when I ping 8.8.8.8 latency went down from 33ms to 22ms. Also we have more bandwidth and cheaper internet than when we had Comcast. Of course the best part of US Internet is not having to deal with Comcast anymore! Finally US Internet forced Century Link and Comcast to launch their own fiber services[2]. [1] https://fiber.usinternet.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Screen-Shot-2016-09-19-at-3.02.22-PM.png https://fiber.usinternet.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Scre... [2] http://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/comcast-fires-back-at-centurylink-us-internet-2-gbps-launch-minneapolis http://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/comcast-fires-back-at-c...
dmalvarado 10y ago
That was fast. Give it 5 years before the infrastructure and service is sold to ATT/Time Warner/Spectrum/WTF
exabrial 10y ago
Sensationalist headline... My analysis: They're realizing big cities are not profitable and installation costs a ton of $. My guess is they'll try to go for smaller towns with better utility pole infrastructure.
nickysielicki 10y ago
I think it's hilarious how many people think it's consistent to simultaneously hold the opinion that this is a tragedy and that Google Fiber was the ISP that they wish they could have, while also supporting federally-imposed "net neutrality" and the implicit claim behind it, which is that all ISPs are just dumb pipes that are moving bits, and that consumers are agnostic about who does it. All the sheep on Reddit who got behind FCC mandated "net neutrality" are directly responsible for this. Urbanites get a warped view of this country and vastly underestimate the amount of places where satellite internet is their only option. Yet they have the nerve to bitch and moan about what a tragedy it is that they can't stream 4k video without buffering. The government must fix this! To hell with the rural schoolchildren and their lack of access to wikipedia, I want to watch high-def cartoons! There was so much innovation taking place behind the scenes to provide a decent web-browsing experience via satellite internet and WISPs. And it's all for naught. I'm still excited for this next year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViaSat-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViaSat-2
- MagnumOpus 10y ago
  What is the contradiction here? > "net neutrality" and the implicit claim behind it, which is that all ISPs are just dumb pipes that are moving bits, and that consumers are agnostic about who does it This is consistent with wanting a dumb ISP that moves more bits for less money and with fewer outages. Nobody wants Goog Fibre because it comes with #"google prime video library" or whatever tie-in. They want it because it moves more bits more reliably as a big dumb pipe ought to.
  - nickysielicki 10y ago
    That's a fair point, maybe some people don't care about the added services... but Google Fiber comes with a lot of added extras: * 1TB of Google drive * A Google-made 802.11AC WAP that doesn't suck. * Cable box has built-in chromecast and is built on top of SageTV. * Bill management through a Google website. Maybe I'm just a pessimist but I don't believe that Google put ~$100MM into Fiber simply because they wanted to be a dumb pipe and put pressure on other telecoms to compete. How do you rationalize that to shareholders? Maybe they have some people in the public convinced that they entered this market out of the goodness of their heart. But it's pretty clear to me from Fiber and from Project Fi and OnHub and NEST that they believed that they could succeed as an ISP because of the frameworks they would put around their internet services, not simply by outperforming in performance.
cargo8 10y ago
The title of this post is pretty deceptive — it clearly implies that the Fiber project altogether is being halted. My understanding from this article amongst others is that they are simply rethinking their approach to, rather than laying down fiber throughout all target cities, beam high speed internet from local way points to the roofs of high rises (like WebPass does in SF, which they acquired). It is pretty reasonable to, if this seems a viable approach, halt expensive infrastructure operations to lay down hard wired fiber and cut the jobs associated with these logistics and operations.
- draw_down 10y ago
  If you think this is deceptive try reading the original announcement.
shmerl 10y ago
They should have known it's a long term investment and ROI happens only when certain scale is reached. Why change their mind now?
- mdip 10y ago
  I think there are two big reasons: The market changed. When they launched Fiber, they're announcement was reminiscent of GMail when it launched. Back then, getting a 15-30MB free web mailbox was normal and Google announced a start at 2GB. Memory may not serve me perfectly, but I believe when they launched Fiber, there wasn't a single ISP offering residential service at 1Gbps and very few at even 100Mbps. I live in a city that is neither Fiber available or even on the list of future Fiber cities, but I can get multi-gig service for the price that I think the 100Mbps service was offered when Fiber launched. Most of this happened because of Google Fiber -- these companies were not terribly interested in increasing their capacity and service before, but knowing that a huge company like Google, who realistically had the funds to do a roll out, was potentially going to invade their monopoly territories was enough to get the market to move. This also, unfortunately, reduced the need for them to do it. Market-wise, they'd have to fight harder for customers since their service may not be so much faster/better/cheaper to get people to endure the hassle of switching. The reality of what the market is was discovered. They had hoped they'd be able to do the roll out cheaper, with the involvement of local regulatory bodies itching to have their cities added to the program and paving over regulations that historically made doing a roll out like this very expensive, time consuming and difficult. The incumbents, who already had networks and had to deal with and work through those same regulations cried foul, started suing and made this all more costly and difficult. Back to point #1, with other ISPs offering service at a similar speed and at a far reduced price from when Fiber launched, this took some of the motivation to pave over those regulations away from the regulatory bodies. And this is all without the reality that many of those elected officials who make the laws that caused these problems have their re-election paid for by the AT&Ts, Comcasts and Verizons to a far greater extent than they do Google, so they're even less motivated to help them out.
  - shmerl 10y ago
    But now that GF is slowing down, incumbents will fall back into their monopolistic slumber. Without threat of competition, they won't be motivated to spread their upgrades wider. So in a sense, yes, spreading more Google Fiber makes monopolists compete, which makes spreading it harder, but that was the whole point for Google, wasn't it? So if they back down now, their goals will be compromised.
ukyrgf 10y ago
This news comes out one week after Comcast informed me they'd be enabling an arbitrary 1 TB data cap. I have to get out of Florida, I guess.
mtw 10y ago
And here I was hoping the service would be extended to Canada :/
client4 10y ago
In Montana we're having success installing fiber, but we aren't outsourcing construction and using cheap electronics. I do wish we could use Google's set-top ONT though.
Animats 10y ago
This is discouraging. I thought that Google Fiber was over-hyped for the number of users actually connected, but didn't think they'd just give up. Perhaps Sonic, which provides gigabit Internet service to parts of San Francisco at a lower price than Google [1], will take over Google's operation there. [1] https://www.sonic.com/sanfrancisco https://www.sonic.com/sanfrancisco
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  There is some indication in the article that they aren't giving up on providing broadband, but halting expansion of the current Fiber offering and business model as a vehicle for that, preferring other approaches.
izzydata 10y ago
I had just signed up for it in Overland Park, Kansas. Hopefully they still do the construction here where they already said they would.
davesque 10y ago
Well this is some pretty depressing news.
windlep 10y ago
Fiber the way the US does it is rather lame. Consider that where Google has put in fiber the houses now have: - Copper telco lines - Coax cable lines - Google fiber There's zero reason for anything other than fiber in an area being updated to it. States/municipalities should solicit bids for a company that wants to maintain the fiber infrastructure, and other companies wishing to provide phone/tv/internet over the fiber can all compete on their service over the one fiber line. We only have one telco and one cable line because states blessed monopolies for this, they should do the same for fiber, and open access to it for competition from service/content providers. It'll never happen, but I can dream...
ryao 10y ago
People in the technology community should start organizing the construction of local government owned municipal fiber networks in their communities. I am abroad right now, but I have decided to start speaking up in mine when I return to the United States because I finally believe that I know how such a thing can succeed. Local communities could use municipal bonds to pay for a 10G-EPON build outs where multiple providers can provide transit, VoIP and IPTV over the same cables using PPPoE and VLANs. Then a per subscriber fee could be assessed to make pay back the bonds. This would be an ILEC/CLEC model, except with local government ownership much like they own the roads. The situation where incumbents drop prices could be handled by having a default CLEC that offers free ITU broadband service at 256Kbps. People would switch for that and then switching to a better CLEC could just be a phone call. The incumbents could not compete with free service over a 30 year period and the municipal government owned ILEC + private CLEC model would win.
- consultutah 10y ago
  Provo Utah did something like this which failed and was bought by Google which now has also apparently failed. Fun times.
  - ryao 10y ago
    Did Provo handle the fiber to the premise while requiring people to purchase internet service from CLECs to use it with the exception of a crippled free tier to get people to bite? If not, they did not do this. Furthermore, they did not stick with it over 30 years, which is the time frame required for such an endeavor to be a success. The entire point of the idea is to divide responsibilities so that no one organization takes on too much and do so in a way that fosters competition. That includes funding via municipal bonds where pay back is expected to take ~3 decades. Had they done this, Google could have just been one CLEC among many and Provo would still be at it. Local governments ought to focus on building roads while businesses focus on building the services that are provided through them. Having each business build its own network of private roads is infeasible. It sounds absurd when stated in this way, but that is what is happening. We need the local government to do the one thing it is good at doing, which is enabling transportation for private industry. Private industry can do the rest. That includes IP transit in such a way that tier 1 ISPs like Hurricane Electric would have a very low barrier to becoming CLECs. If each subscriber pays a fee dedicated to repaying the municipal bonds over a 30 year period, this would pay for itself. If people operating it mess up, they can be replaced. The CLECs are interchangeable from the customer's standpoint. The contractors running the infrastructure are interchangeable from the community advisory board's standpoint. The members of the community advisory board overseeing are replaceable from the local politicians' standpoint. The local politicians are replaceable by the public. It is very different than what we have now where if people are unhappy, they cannot replace the incumbents and have little ability to voice grievances. This is the sort of system that I want in my community. I am abroad right now, but when I get back to the US, I intend to start gathering people to discuss how this could become a reality in my area.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I understand the legal and other difficulties of dealing with local governments and incumbent providers. However, it may also be that Google is going to be more careful where it spends its money. Hoarding cash may be protection against interesting changes in the economy.
sidgup 10y ago
Oh google, at least see through on one of your bold ideas?
jcoffland 10y ago
> Because Google runs most of its business on the internet, analysts have suggested that its entry into the costly world of fiber optic internet was an attempt to motivate existing internet providers to accelerate the introduction of faster web connections. Hasn't Google said before that one of their reasons for starting Google Fiber was to push other companies to expand high-speed Internet access in the US? Has this happened or has Google Fiber just run out of steam? I know Sonic is rolling out fiber in the Bay Area. I'm sure Google Fiber has put some pressure on them to up their game.
askopress 10y ago
In Estonia I get 500mbps up and down with unlimited bandwidth for 35 euros, monthly. I think it has a lot to do with the ability to roll out newer, faster stuff much easier than with a big country - and we do have quite a few ISPs, each of them fighting to provide even faster speeds. Wonder why in U.S they don't really try to do anything to be better, and if they do increase speeds, the bandwidth is still stupid low.

440 points by gm-conspiracy 10y ago

Previous discussion (mostly about the blog post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12792928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12792928

Yhippa 10y ago
I read that one first then started seeing these articles like the OP all over. What incredible spin. Two completely different things happened if you read each one separately.
- ihsw 10y ago
  I was thinking this article is simply reducing the market-speak down to relevant information -- Google is putting Fiber on life-support until someone buys them out. Like many acquisitions to buy customers, Fiber may be acquired for the same reasons.
  - curiouscats 10y ago
    It sure would be great to see Sonic https://www.sonic.com/ https://www.sonic.com/ buy it out.

atomical 10y ago

A nation-wide rollout would have been one of the most transformative things Google could have done. Growing their profits now depends on a thirty year bet on unproven technologies.

the_mitsuhiko 10y ago

Can't say I'm surprised. I expect Google fi to have a similar fate in a few years. It's not Google business.

jonknee 10y ago
Project Fi doesn't involve nearly the amount of staff though--they're using someone else's network. As Google has found out, digging holes and getting permits doesn't get cheaper with better software.
- Yhippa 10y ago
  I have no idea what the economics are but I imagine the carriers they're piggybacking off of could charge higher fees for MVNOing if Fi were to get to a certain scale.
  - jonknee 10y ago
    Depending on the contracts they have I guess anything's possible, but MVNOs aren't a new thing and they don't typically get kicked off a network for being successful.
  - hga 10y ago
    Compared the the standard MVNO, they're less exposed because their system uses WiFi whenever possible. How much less that exposure is I have no idea. Disclaimer: I'm a Project Fi subscriber for the last half year or so.
- zanny 10y ago
  They could build a robot that digs the holes. Maybe with Boston Dynamics robots. Oh...
  - knz 10y ago
    I'm not sure the cost is in digging the actual hole. The costs for planning, permitting and litigation can be substantial.
kyrra 10y ago
What fate would that be? Fiber isn't going away, they have just stopped expansion. There are also hints about investing in other tech instead of laying new fiber across an entire city (WebPass as the article mentions). I agree that Fiber isn't Google business, which is why Alphabet was created. It allows for the company to try expanding into areas that aren't just software. Also, Google does a LOT of infrastructure work with datacenters and the fiber they own across the country/world. (though that is more business focused than consumer/residential)

andrewvijay 10y ago

Just as expected. It was just to force the network carriers to speed up wasn't it?

ethanbond 10y ago
Force them to speed up (maybe) in a dozen cities? I don't think that's "just as expected."
- andrewvijay 10y ago
  If they have sped up in a couple of cities then the next cities will get soon too. You have to evaluate a new business move before scaling up. And data is one of their primary modes of income. Measurement is very valuable.
- 67726e 10y ago
  I certainly have no idea if it's because of fear of Google Fiber, but AT&T has started rolling out their fiber offering in the Charleston, SC suburbs over the past year. It's not all doom and gloom.
Thaxll 10y ago
It's pretty much a fail.
rhino369 10y ago
Didn't really work because the cost to deploy nationwide 1 gig is super expensive. It's only going to happen if there is profit in it. If Google wanted to create a market they shouldn't have priced it so low. Even if you could do nationwide gigabit for 70 bucks, there wouldnt be any profit. Isps aren't going to do a massive capital expenditure to make the same money.
vram22 10y ago
If that was so, did it work?

rch 10y ago

This should have been the headline on yesterday's news.

staticelf 10y ago

That sucks for citizens of the US. I think the Swedish (Nordic?) model for bringing internet connectivity to it's citizens is superior. The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded. For example, I have 250/100 mbit/s for free. My rent pays for this. But I could if I wanted to easily upgrade to 1gbit/s up and down. I can change ISP (even if that wouldn't be paid for by my rent) and I would know that I always could get the same internet-connectivity speeds. Although, while this is true for many parts of Sweden, it's not available for everyone. Some places still have networks owned by one company without any access to the city network.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
gregmac 10y ago
> The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This is the model that should be used everywhere, if we were to actually consider it a utility. By default it does nothing, but if you pay some company to terminate it to the internet then you get internet, using whatever speed they can provide. Let the ISPs compete based on the service they provide: internet speed, reliability, support, and other add-ons like (e-mail or malware filters or the best wifi-router-modem included) or even the lack of any add-ons. Even if this isn't a "municipal service" strictly speaking, if contracted out to a telco of sorts, it should be done the same way, and we should not allow the same company that provides the physical lines to provide the actual service, since it's anti-competitive.
Brakenshire 10y ago
> The municipalities own (most of) the networks and all the fiber cables, letting companies use them for a small(ish) fee. These companies later sell it to customers. This help people to get the best deals and ensure that the networks are continually upgraded. The UK version is that the cables are owned by one highly regulated company (BT OpenReach) which then has to sell on to retail ISP's at a set rate. Fibre To The Cabinet (that is, using copper for the last few hundred metres), was rolled out to probably 70% of households without subsidy, and from then on it has required government funding for rural or otherwise difficult areas. The speed is nowhere near what you're listing, though. It's something like 10-50 Mb/sec.

SEJeff 10y ago

Well google announced they were exploring a fiber rollout in Chicago. Now both AT&T along with Time Warner Cable have 1G service throughout parts of the city. Alternatively, one can look at this not as a failure, but as a success. The point of Google fiber was to force carriers to get faster internet to everyone. It appears that it has been working. This benefits google directly as their properties such as Youtube can deliver more and better content. For Google, this is a win/win proposition.

mmanfrin 10y ago
Chicago is 1% of the country. I live in the Bay Area (Berkeley). My only choice above 20mbits is Comcast. AT&T's lines near me are old, I can get a max of 18mbits with them; Sonic says I can get about 12. I own my own home, so I can't get Webpass. LMI and the other local ISPs offer things like 3mbps for $90. I have literally zero reasonable choice other than Comcast. I'd happily pay double what Google charges for Fiber for a quarter of the speed they offer. I just want off Comcast. Google shuttering Fiber is the last hope I have. I don't think I'll have any other choice for at least a decade.
- jakelarkin 10y ago
  Lmi and Paxio started a 1G fiber rollout but it only covers a few streets in West Berkeley. It took 5 weeks to get Comcast wired at my house in Berkeley. Terrifying that the next best options available to me were Unwired 10Mbps (burst & shared) wireless for $90/month or 1.5Mbps DSL (gah).
agumonkey 10y ago
package Google class Internet implement Musk.Tesla.Model {}
imgabe 10y ago
Even with 1Gbps from other providers, I'd still prefer Google. I think they're far less likely to do scummy things like impose bandwidth caps.
- 10y ago

post_break 10y ago

Wonder if Google fiber will just shut down and give a 30 day notice or something scummy like that.

ihsw 10y ago
They will sooner let the Fiber division be acquired than simply cancel them all outright.

samfisher83 10y ago

Building infrastructure is hard. Even 100 years later we still have original AT&T (Verizon and AT&T) as the dominant telecommunications company. Google also seems to just give up on a lot of its products: Google+ Hangouts Project Ara Google Buzz Google video Orkut Talk Meebo etc. http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/visuel/2015/03/06/google-memorial-le-petit-musee-des-projets-google-abandonnes_4588392_4408996.html http://www.lemonde.fr/pixels/visuel/2015/03/06/google-memori...

FT_intern 10y ago
building new infrastructure is much harder now than decades ago. It's been much easier for the companies to retain infrastructure
- ocdtrekkie 10y ago
  But everyone moving to fiber IS building new infrastructure. Sure, they're continuing to cash in on telephone wire and coax, but fiber is new infrastructure. And Google discovered that you CAN'T just make money deploying Gigabit fiber for $60 a month. Getting even a 50 Mbps fiber circuit around here is hundreds of dollars a month.
  - delecti 10y ago
    Much (most?) "new" fiber is just companies lighting up existing dark fiber infrastructure.
    - newjersey 10y ago
      The expensive part is "the last mile". I imagine laying down cable on the side of the I-70 is easier than laying fiber in Manhattan under the pavement, above the utilities, and above the subway system. Or finding space to put up those boxes to "land" the fiber optic cables for a neighborhood.
    - ocdtrekkie 10y ago
      I know in some areas, whole towns are wired up with glass that isn't in use, but around here, I regularly see trenches being dug to run fiber. And nowhere near "to the home" yet even, but along major roads, to industrial parks, etc.

hcayless 10y ago

GF has been tearing up our neighborhood this week and last laying cable (I'm in Chapel Hill). AT&T did the same about 6 months back. I was holding out for Google, but this makes me think even when they get it up and running, the support will be nonexistent. So maybe better to go with the devil we know (we already have AT&T U-Verse, just not gigabit). At least they lasted long enough to force AT&T's hand...

madamelic 10y ago
I was really confused for a second why your girlfriend was laying cable... :)
mdip 10y ago
I'd still switch to Google Fiber. As someone who spent over a year dealing with what AT&T calls "support"[0], concerns that Google could be any worse would be minimal for me. In all likelihood, if they do completely abandon Fiber, rather than finding another way to provide the service that doesn't require digging, they'll sell it off to another ISP (I think TFA mentioned CenturyLink). Their DVR was (is?) based on SageTV's product, which I ran at home and found to be excellent (the extent to which it differs from their original product may change my mind on that assertion, though). [0] I had a problem with my DSL service at my family's home up north that required sending out a tech on 13 different occasions, which required me to drive two hours up north to meet him. I went through four different DSL modems (none of which were broken, but they were basically throwing darts at a wall with a blindfold on). They'd show up, find nothing wrong (on one occasion they offered to replace my interior wiring and decided against it when they discovered I ripped it all out and replaced it with one proper cable run using better cable than they'd install ... and the readings from their test equipment indicated the wire was very clean). They never actually fixed the problem as a result of a service call, it just went away at some point last year.
erikb 10y ago
Honestly. If GF dies you can still take AT&T. Therefore I would risk it if I were you.

gm-conspiracy 10y ago

Anybody know what is going on here? This seems like a page out of Verizon's FIOS rollout. Is Google working on their own cellular network (non-MVNO)? Is this due to the FCC reclassification of internet as a common carrier?

dboreham 10y ago
It's due to the fact that building a decent network for residential customers at scale is very expensive and not that profitable unless you have a long-term monopoly.
- coldcode 10y ago
  And the people with the long term monopolies want to keep it that way.
- austinhulak 10y ago
  Ding ding ding! This is exactly it. As a Google Fiber customer in Austin, it honestly wasn't any better than any of the other ISPs. Ironically, the only thing that was better was the DVR and live TV search that came with the TV service.
wrsh07 10y ago
I wonder if they're moving towards something more scalable, like Webpass [http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/22/12009600/google-fiber-webpass-acquisition-gigabit-internet http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/22/12009600/google-fiber-webp...]. There's tons of red tape laying actual fiber, and that probably makes it harder to provide high quality internet to as many customers as they'd like to.
mdip 10y ago
Is this due to the FCC reclassification of internet as a common carrier? I wondered a little bit about this, myself, when Fiber was launched. They have a lot more motivation without network neutrality as a matter of regulation because it'd open up the ability of ISPs to penalize their products[0]. I'm generally of the opinion that government over-regulates, but I was in support of the whole "Network Neutrality" situation because broadband services availability for many/most in the US is limited to one provider and that one company is also usually either AT&T or Comcast, known more for how much they suck than for the services they provide. It's not too hard to believe that if common carrier status were removed, AT&T or Comcast would lower their caps and start offering services that are exempt from those caps (especially Comcast - suddenly Hulu or anything NBCUniversal is all-you-can-consume, but Netflix/Amazon Video/YouTube are not). In a world like that, Google does have more motivation to roll out an ISP that does the opposite with their own services (or more likely just doesn't discriminate with anyone's traffic). Fiber resulted in a sudden expansion by many other ISPs to service with higher performance (and in many areas that are not even on the future Fiber cities list), so they've kind of accomplished the goal that has the greatest benefit to them -- more eyes on their products at a speed that makes them more useful. At the end of the day, though, I'm not so sure that the FCC reclassification is much more than a tiny bullet point in favor of not spending the money required to do a fiber roll out. They are certainly aware that Republicans are itching to dismantle this reclassification and their nominee has promised to do so IIRC. And though the Democrat's nominee has indicated that she'll keep that reclassification, I'm not willing to take her at her word on that. If that were their main reason for allowing fiber to "transition" to whatever new option they're looking at that (hopefully) costs a lot less to roll out but still doesn't exist in the places they want to roll out to, I'd be pretty surprised. [0] I'm not advocating that network neutrality be dismantled to give Google more motivation.

stinger 10y ago

another one bites the dust

fowlerpower 10y ago

See this title about what's happening to Google Fiber is much more direct, honest, and to the point than the corporate PR google Post and title that confused me into thinking I'm actually going to be able to sign up for Google Fiber. Their title: "Advancing our amazing bet" Point being that our ISPs right now need some disruption and I think a lot of people were hoping this Google Fiber would catch on. A lot of folks assumed Google would eat whatever losses to make this a hit. Apperatnly not, apperantly some short term profits trump anything else.

TearsInTheRain 10y ago
Google has been going in a new direction towards "fiscal responsibility" when it comes to their moon shots.
- fowlerpower 10y ago
  I get that but let's be honest and up front about it.

josh2600 10y ago

I wrote about this elsewhere and am pasting my thoughts here as I think they're relevant to this community: 1) Google Fiber is dead. Long Live Google ISP. Google cannot afford to lay fiber in the ground because it's a long game and Google doesn't really want to play the long game (they just want to put pressure on competitors so they can move more bits along the wires, generating more searches and more streams with which to shove ads in your face). Fiber never was the most efficient way to do this, but there's something sexy about "Google Fiber" as opposed to "Google Point to Point Radio Towers". The reality is that wireless delivery of bits is way cheaper than fiber because you don't have to tear the ground up (over the last mile obviously since the arteries must be fiber links). Clarification: "long" refers to 30-year payback periods for physical asset investment. There are a lot of things with higher returns on that timeline than fiber that google can invest in. I don't actually think it's profitable for anyone to build unsubsidized networks. This is why networks should be public and operators should be private, but that's a topic for another day! 2) Fiber is cheap, construction is expensive. When I helped Comcast build out the fiber network in SF, what struck me was the relative cheapness of the assets we were putting in the ground compared to the cost of tearing up the street. The conduit and the glass inside the conduit cost almost nothing, but tearing up the street in SF is $300/sq ft. Crossing cable car tracks was like $50,000. Then there's the actual cost of construction: people. Getting contractors to arrive on time, finish on time, and avoid overtime is fraught with peril. It's actually really hard to move physical atoms around in a manner similar to programmatic systems, and so many models that have real world elements stumble against the harshness of actuality. I suspect Google's cost modeling for building a fiber network was optimistic. 3) Wireless is fast, but does it scale to city size? It's not hard or particularly expensive to deliver gigabit over wireless. You basically need a tall building to rain down radio waves onto the masses. What I wonder about, given that we have no cities running on majority wireless point to points, is what happens when you hit scale? That is to say, point to points have a limited wireless footprint (because using beamforming we don't need to splay the signal everywhere, we just send it in one direction), but one can easily imagine a saturated wireless environment as generating a significant amount of noise. Wireless networks are easy when there's only a few objects on the network but get significantly harder as the physical area reaches device saturation. That is to say, WebPass might be super easy to operate when only a handful of buildings are on WebPass, but it might be much harder if a whole section of the city is online. 4) Google bought WebPass a while back. The writing has been on the wall for a while that the fiber game was killing uncle Google. I can only hope that they don't bow out completely. I think that wireless makes Google significantly less of an existential threat to their carrier partners as well. Overall, I remain cautiously optimistic about Google's future as an ISP. On a final note: Google Fi is not an answer to Google fiber disappearing. The two are tangential, disjointed offerings that cannot, for a bunch of reasons, compete with one another (most notably the wireless data caps).

jgrowl 10y ago

Forgive me if I'm incorrect... The way I understand it is that they are halting planning in cities that they marked as potential locations, but that does not mean they are discontinuing the roll out and service in cities that are already in progress. For example in Nashville, they have been trying to roll out fiber in Nashville for over a year now but have only been able to install on less than a dozen utility poles so far. This is because of the rules that prevented anyone other than the owner of the existing lines to move anything. This meant that if Google wanted to add lines to a pole with existing AT&T and Comcast lines, it would require both companies to move their own lines independently of each other in coordination. This means roads would have to be closed 3 separate times for each vendor. Nashville recently passed the One Touch Make Ready ordinance that allows approved vendors to do all of the work at the same time. Now both AT&T and Comcast are suing the city: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/comcast-sues-nashville-to-halt-rules-that-help-google-fiber/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/10/comcast-sues-nash... I hope that google stills continues to deploy to cities that are already in progress. It took community effort to get the ordinance passed and subjects them a lawsuit. It would be a real letdown.

itake 10y ago
I think what they are saying is they are not profitable with what they are currently doing and at best, they are re-evaluating their business model to try to find profitability and at worst they are going to close up shop all together.
silverlight 10y ago
I live in KC and they are still rolling out here. Next phase ends Nov 3. I assume they are I'll keep rolling out in the metros they are already in as the leg work is done for the most part.
- BatFastard 10y ago
  I am in Atlanta and we are scheduled for it on Dec 15 2016! If there is a god, don't stop now!!!!
deleted 10y ago

yekim 10y ago

So bummed to read this. Even though I wasn't going to directly benefit from Google Fiber, it was sure nice to have a non-entrenched player tackle this market. From the big G's standpoint, it makes good biz sense to exit this market. I sure hope the subtext in the article comes to fruition ie that Google / Alphabet has figured out a better way to get high speed internet to homes in the US sans fiber. In an ideal world, this fast fiber internet ought to be a municipally managed utility, with my tax dollars paying for the fiber in the ground. Then, my take home dollars paying for whatever competing service(s) I choose to light up said fiber to bring me access to the net.

dbg31415 10y ago

The Google Fiber rollout in my neighborhood has been a debacle from the start. They walked around and put up door tags -- really really big ones saying, "Google Fiber is coming!" and immediately after that the 0 crime neighborhood I live in had a slew of break ins. Anyone who didn't remove this massive door tag was an easy target, the crooks knew who was home and who wasn't. Then like a week later... they put the exact same door tag up on all the doors. And we all laughed... but we were like, "WTF, Google..." Then the next day they put the exact same door tag up again... even doubling it up on homes that already had a door tag. They door tags were just promos to sign up; they didn't tell us to mark our sprinkler systems, or who to call in case the construction crew accidentally cut our water lines... The actual cable laying came about a month later... and it's been going on for 7 weeks at this point. Some days the guys work, most they don't. Doesn't appear to be any pattern to it. There are a bunch of expensive drilling and trenching machines parked at the end of my cul-de-sac and along the street in the spots where residents used to park. 7 weeks and counting...

madengr 10y ago
Are you in KC? I am in OP.
- dbg31415 10y ago
  Austin, and I get that it's the construction firm and not Google, but yeah... it not good UX. Ha.
chiph 10y ago
Google really underestimated how hard it was going to be to run cable underground in Austin, with it's limestone ("Austin Chalk") often just inches below the grass & shrubbery.

dbg31415 10y ago

The Google Fiber rollout in my neighborhood has been a debacle from the start. They walked around and put up door tags -- really really big ones saying, "Google Fiber is coming!" and immediately after that the 0 crime neighborhood I live in had a slew of break ins. Anyone who didn't remove this massive door tag was an easy target, the crooks knew who was home and who wasn't. Then like a week later... they put the exact same door tag up on all the doors. And we all laughed... but we were like, "WTF, Google..." Then the next day they put the exact same door tag up again... even doubling it up on homes that already had a door tag. The actual cable laying came about a month later... and it's been going on for 7 weeks at this point. Some days the guys work, most they don't. Doesn't appear to be any pattern to it. There are a bunch of expensive drilling and trenching machines parked at the end of my cul-de-sac and along the street in the spots where residents used to park. 7 weeks and counting...

josh_carterPDX 10y ago

They backed out of Portland after spending a ton of money and time with city officials. Sad to hear this is not happening and hope Google finds a way to get back into this because the options today are a joke. This will just embolden companies like Comcast to charge more for horrible service.

kyledrake 10y ago
Portland spent a lot of time and resources (during a serious housing crisis), bent over backwards to give them everything they wanted... and they decide to just punk out, lay off their operations team and walk away from years of planning because they can "do fast wireless for some apartment buildings". Thanks, guys. There's a tiny ISP (US Internet) in Minneapolis that's already wired half of the city with fiber with some loans as capital, they're not a public company and they don't have billions in CoH and they still figured it out. They've already started offering 10Gbps to home users. Yes, ten gigabits, that's not a typo. And they're profitable. Laying fiber is impossible for a megacorp with billions of CoH and access to the overflowing "talent" of Silicon Valley like Google perhaps, but not for a small business like US Internet. Let's hope Portland gets a US Internet of it's own. We're all better off if the future of the web is built by smaller decentralized companies anyways.
- josh_carterPDX 10y ago
  That's awesome. I absolutely hope they come to Portland as this city loves to support the underdog. :)
- 2trill2spill 10y ago
  > There's a tiny ISP (US Internet) in Minneapolis that's already wired half of the city with fiber with some loans as capital, they're not a public company and they don't have billions in CoH and they still figured it out. They've already started offering 10Gbps to home users. Yes, ten gigabits, that's not a typo. And they're profitable. That's not entirely correct they have about a quarter of the city wired with plans to finish in 6 or 7 years[1]. The linked image is pretty small but it's all I can find. Note the linked map only shows 40% or so of Minneapolis. Also they have been providing Business services like dark fiber for the last 20 years, so it's not like they are completely dependent on home fiber income or new to the business. I just recently got US Internet fiber, we have the 100 Mbps plan for $39.95 a month and it's great! I noticed that when I ping 8.8.8.8 latency went down from 33ms to 22ms. Also we have more bandwidth and cheaper internet than when we had Comcast. Of course the best part of US Internet is not having to deal with Comcast anymore! Finally US Internet forced Century Link and Comcast to launch their own fiber services[2]. [1] https://fiber.usinternet.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Screen-Shot-2016-09-19-at-3.02.22-PM.png https://fiber.usinternet.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Scre... [2] http://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/comcast-fires-back-at-centurylink-us-internet-2-gbps-launch-minneapolis http://www.fiercetelecom.com/telecom/comcast-fires-back-at-c...

dmalvarado 10y ago

That was fast. Give it 5 years before the infrastructure and service is sold to ATT/Time Warner/Spectrum/WTF

exabrial 10y ago

Sensationalist headline... My analysis: They're realizing big cities are not profitable and installation costs a ton of $. My guess is they'll try to go for smaller towns with better utility pole infrastructure.

nickysielicki 10y ago

I think it's hilarious how many people think it's consistent to simultaneously hold the opinion that this is a tragedy and that Google Fiber was the ISP that they wish they could have, while also supporting federally-imposed "net neutrality" and the implicit claim behind it, which is that all ISPs are just dumb pipes that are moving bits, and that consumers are agnostic about who does it. All the sheep on Reddit who got behind FCC mandated "net neutrality" are directly responsible for this. Urbanites get a warped view of this country and vastly underestimate the amount of places where satellite internet is their only option. Yet they have the nerve to bitch and moan about what a tragedy it is that they can't stream 4k video without buffering. The government must fix this! To hell with the rural schoolchildren and their lack of access to wikipedia, I want to watch high-def cartoons! There was so much innovation taking place behind the scenes to provide a decent web-browsing experience via satellite internet and WISPs. And it's all for naught. I'm still excited for this next year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViaSat-2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViaSat-2

MagnumOpus 10y ago
What is the contradiction here? > "net neutrality" and the implicit claim behind it, which is that all ISPs are just dumb pipes that are moving bits, and that consumers are agnostic about who does it This is consistent with wanting a dumb ISP that moves more bits for less money and with fewer outages. Nobody wants Goog Fibre because it comes with #"google prime video library" or whatever tie-in. They want it because it moves more bits more reliably as a big dumb pipe ought to.
- nickysielicki 10y ago
  That's a fair point, maybe some people don't care about the added services... but Google Fiber comes with a lot of added extras: * 1TB of Google drive * A Google-made 802.11AC WAP that doesn't suck. * Cable box has built-in chromecast and is built on top of SageTV. * Bill management through a Google website. Maybe I'm just a pessimist but I don't believe that Google put ~$100MM into Fiber simply because they wanted to be a dumb pipe and put pressure on other telecoms to compete. How do you rationalize that to shareholders? Maybe they have some people in the public convinced that they entered this market out of the goodness of their heart. But it's pretty clear to me from Fiber and from Project Fi and OnHub and NEST that they believed that they could succeed as an ISP because of the frameworks they would put around their internet services, not simply by outperforming in performance.

cargo8 10y ago

The title of this post is pretty deceptive — it clearly implies that the Fiber project altogether is being halted. My understanding from this article amongst others is that they are simply rethinking their approach to, rather than laying down fiber throughout all target cities, beam high speed internet from local way points to the roofs of high rises (like WebPass does in SF, which they acquired). It is pretty reasonable to, if this seems a viable approach, halt expensive infrastructure operations to lay down hard wired fiber and cut the jobs associated with these logistics and operations.

draw_down 10y ago
If you think this is deceptive try reading the original announcement.

shmerl 10y ago

They should have known it's a long term investment and ROI happens only when certain scale is reached. Why change their mind now?

mdip 10y ago
I think there are two big reasons: The market changed. When they launched Fiber, they're announcement was reminiscent of GMail when it launched. Back then, getting a 15-30MB free web mailbox was normal and Google announced a start at 2GB. Memory may not serve me perfectly, but I believe when they launched Fiber, there wasn't a single ISP offering residential service at 1Gbps and very few at even 100Mbps. I live in a city that is neither Fiber available or even on the list of future Fiber cities, but I can get multi-gig service for the price that I think the 100Mbps service was offered when Fiber launched. Most of this happened because of Google Fiber -- these companies were not terribly interested in increasing their capacity and service before, but knowing that a huge company like Google, who realistically had the funds to do a roll out, was potentially going to invade their monopoly territories was enough to get the market to move. This also, unfortunately, reduced the need for them to do it. Market-wise, they'd have to fight harder for customers since their service may not be so much faster/better/cheaper to get people to endure the hassle of switching. The reality of what the market is was discovered. They had hoped they'd be able to do the roll out cheaper, with the involvement of local regulatory bodies itching to have their cities added to the program and paving over regulations that historically made doing a roll out like this very expensive, time consuming and difficult. The incumbents, who already had networks and had to deal with and work through those same regulations cried foul, started suing and made this all more costly and difficult. Back to point #1, with other ISPs offering service at a similar speed and at a far reduced price from when Fiber launched, this took some of the motivation to pave over those regulations away from the regulatory bodies. And this is all without the reality that many of those elected officials who make the laws that caused these problems have their re-election paid for by the AT&Ts, Comcasts and Verizons to a far greater extent than they do Google, so they're even less motivated to help them out.
- shmerl 10y ago
  But now that GF is slowing down, incumbents will fall back into their monopolistic slumber. Without threat of competition, they won't be motivated to spread their upgrades wider. So in a sense, yes, spreading more Google Fiber makes monopolists compete, which makes spreading it harder, but that was the whole point for Google, wasn't it? So if they back down now, their goals will be compromised.

ukyrgf 10y ago

This news comes out one week after Comcast informed me they'd be enabling an arbitrary 1 TB data cap. I have to get out of Florida, I guess.

mtw 10y ago

And here I was hoping the service would be extended to Canada :/

client4 10y ago

In Montana we're having success installing fiber, but we aren't outsourcing construction and using cheap electronics. I do wish we could use Google's set-top ONT though.

Animats 10y ago

This is discouraging. I thought that Google Fiber was over-hyped for the number of users actually connected, but didn't think they'd just give up. Perhaps Sonic, which provides gigabit Internet service to parts of San Francisco at a lower price than Google [1], will take over Google's operation there. [1] https://www.sonic.com/sanfrancisco https://www.sonic.com/sanfrancisco

dragonwriter 10y ago
There is some indication in the article that they aren't giving up on providing broadband, but halting expansion of the current Fiber offering and business model as a vehicle for that, preferring other approaches.

izzydata 10y ago

I had just signed up for it in Overland Park, Kansas. Hopefully they still do the construction here where they already said they would.

davesque 10y ago

Well this is some pretty depressing news.

windlep 10y ago

Fiber the way the US does it is rather lame. Consider that where Google has put in fiber the houses now have: - Copper telco lines - Coax cable lines - Google fiber There's zero reason for anything other than fiber in an area being updated to it. States/municipalities should solicit bids for a company that wants to maintain the fiber infrastructure, and other companies wishing to provide phone/tv/internet over the fiber can all compete on their service over the one fiber line. We only have one telco and one cable line because states blessed monopolies for this, they should do the same for fiber, and open access to it for competition from service/content providers. It'll never happen, but I can dream...

ryao 10y ago

People in the technology community should start organizing the construction of local government owned municipal fiber networks in their communities. I am abroad right now, but I have decided to start speaking up in mine when I return to the United States because I finally believe that I know how such a thing can succeed. Local communities could use municipal bonds to pay for a 10G-EPON build outs where multiple providers can provide transit, VoIP and IPTV over the same cables using PPPoE and VLANs. Then a per subscriber fee could be assessed to make pay back the bonds. This would be an ILEC/CLEC model, except with local government ownership much like they own the roads. The situation where incumbents drop prices could be handled by having a default CLEC that offers free ITU broadband service at 256Kbps. People would switch for that and then switching to a better CLEC could just be a phone call. The incumbents could not compete with free service over a 30 year period and the municipal government owned ILEC + private CLEC model would win.

consultutah 10y ago
Provo Utah did something like this which failed and was bought by Google which now has also apparently failed. Fun times.
- ryao 10y ago
  Did Provo handle the fiber to the premise while requiring people to purchase internet service from CLECs to use it with the exception of a crippled free tier to get people to bite? If not, they did not do this. Furthermore, they did not stick with it over 30 years, which is the time frame required for such an endeavor to be a success. The entire point of the idea is to divide responsibilities so that no one organization takes on too much and do so in a way that fosters competition. That includes funding via municipal bonds where pay back is expected to take ~3 decades. Had they done this, Google could have just been one CLEC among many and Provo would still be at it. Local governments ought to focus on building roads while businesses focus on building the services that are provided through them. Having each business build its own network of private roads is infeasible. It sounds absurd when stated in this way, but that is what is happening. We need the local government to do the one thing it is good at doing, which is enabling transportation for private industry. Private industry can do the rest. That includes IP transit in such a way that tier 1 ISPs like Hurricane Electric would have a very low barrier to becoming CLECs. If each subscriber pays a fee dedicated to repaying the municipal bonds over a 30 year period, this would pay for itself. If people operating it mess up, they can be replaced. The CLECs are interchangeable from the customer's standpoint. The contractors running the infrastructure are interchangeable from the community advisory board's standpoint. The members of the community advisory board overseeing are replaceable from the local politicians' standpoint. The local politicians are replaceable by the public. It is very different than what we have now where if people are unhappy, they cannot replace the incumbents and have little ability to voice grievances. This is the sort of system that I want in my community. I am abroad right now, but when I get back to the US, I intend to start gathering people to discuss how this could become a reality in my area.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I understand the legal and other difficulties of dealing with local governments and incumbent providers. However, it may also be that Google is going to be more careful where it spends its money. Hoarding cash may be protection against interesting changes in the economy.

sidgup 10y ago

Oh google, at least see through on one of your bold ideas?

jcoffland 10y ago

> Because Google runs most of its business on the internet, analysts have suggested that its entry into the costly world of fiber optic internet was an attempt to motivate existing internet providers to accelerate the introduction of faster web connections. Hasn't Google said before that one of their reasons for starting Google Fiber was to push other companies to expand high-speed Internet access in the US? Has this happened or has Google Fiber just run out of steam? I know Sonic is rolling out fiber in the Bay Area. I'm sure Google Fiber has put some pressure on them to up their game.

askopress 10y ago

In Estonia I get 500mbps up and down with unlimited bandwidth for 35 euros, monthly. I think it has a lot to do with the ability to roll out newer, faster stuff much easier than with a big country - and we do have quite a few ISPs, each of them fighting to provide even faster speeds. Wonder why in U.S they don't really try to do anything to be better, and if they do increase speeds, the bandwidth is still stupid low.