15 ms·

Google Fiber Is High-Speed Internet’s Most Successful Failure

281 points by apress 8y ago

walrus01 8y ago
As an ISP: right of way and economics of $ per last mile customer reached are HARD. The incumbents in an area, generally the copper phone line company (ILEC) and cable TV operator (Comcast, RCN, Charter, whatever) were handed the aerial ROW and underground ROW on a silver platter 30+ years ago, when there was no such thing as telecom competition. It was just assumed at that time that those two companies would be installing stuff on the same poles as the power company. They built wherever they pleased, whenever they pleased, at minimal regulatory cost and with minimal additional costs. Because of course nobody would buy a house with no dialtone phone and/or no cable TV. Now in a modern era if a FTTH ISP wants to come along and overbuild the same routes as the phone company, it's a lot more difficult, time consuming and expensive.
- yoshamano 8y ago
  We're in the process of doing that where I live. https://marshallfibernet.com/ https://marshallfibernet.com/ The reasons this is getting off the ground at all is because our city government spent the past 5 years dotting every i and crossing every t to be able to drop the hammer on AT&T and WOW! without retaliation. Also, we own our own electric utility, and on top of their ROW they're also bankrolling most of this operation with a sweetheart loan deal (overpaying for electricity worked out in the end, who knew).
  - walrus01 8y ago
    Having the electrical utility controlled by the local county can be a huge advantage. The counties in eastern WA where the local PUD (public utility district) owns the last mile AC power distribution networks have been generally quite successful building their own dark fiber networks. Because of course they don't need to ask themselves for permission to build, they already own the poles and ROW, they just do it. They already have linemen and bucket trucks, flaggers, insurance, spool trailers, etc. Then ISPs can reach end user customers by paying the PUD for L2 transport across their networks. This new PUD fiber infrastructure exists separately from whatever the local Telco and cable TV operators have built.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      It also has the benefit where citizens can decide their generation supply (ie renewables) vs shareholders in a for-profit electrical utility or generator deciding based solely on profitability.
- js2 8y ago
  Neat story of small independent FTTH ISP that leased dark fiber from the power company to connect a city of 15,000 in rural GA: http://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/appln/FTTH-DIY.html http://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/appln/FTTH-DIY.html
  - walrus01 8y ago
    For those interested, thefoa.org website also has a lot of excellent free training material and reference related to fiber networks (at OSI model layer 1).
- nitwit005 8y ago
  > Because of course nobody would buy a house with no dialtone phone and/or no cable TV. This was sometimes due to a legal requirement, similar to requirements to maintain water and sewer connections: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CIV&sectionNum=1941.4 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
ergothus 8y ago
> But what if the company’s goal was never to unleash the disrupter itself so much as to encourage incumbent broadband providers to do so, helping Google’s expansion in adjacent markets such as video and emerging markets including smart homes? Did anyone think anything else WAS the strategy? Google has a history of such "spurring" efforts. Glass, Fiber, Nexus, heck, even a ton of Android support itself.
- specialp 8y ago
  Yeah I don't understand at all why people think that Google wanted to be in this business. They were forced to. ISPs were starting to lag behind on bandwidth that was important to them, and also started to discriminate on traffic. It is not a failure at all in any way because they never intended on completely taking over. They'd much rather be in their business. The same is true with Android, as they were under threat of locked out of a smartphone boom by Apple. They have stuck with it because it has become more popular than they could have ever imagined. I also think this is their reason behind making Kubernetes. I think they want to commoditize the cloud more to avoid dominance from Amazon.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    > The same is true with Android, as they were under threat of locked out of a smartphone boom by Apple. Nice theory, except that Google bought Android Inc. in 2005, years before the iPhone was announced.
    - walrus01 8y ago
      The evolution of the smartphone market was obvious even in 2001/2002, if you saw a Handspring Treo 180 and used one on a GPRS/EDGE network. I had one. When I saw the first info about Android, it seemed to me like a logical technological advancement in the same field. At the time in 2004/2005, the iPhone OS was a total unknown, maybe a tiny bit of info had leaked from Apple about their secret project, WinCE/Windows Mobile was a joke, palmos was a dead end.
rayiner 8y ago
> But in 2009, no leading carrier was planning a major upgrade of its existing physical plant. That’s not true (and the article doesn’t cite to any support for that idea or any other). In 2009 ATT and Verizon were in the middle of deploying Uverse and FiOS, which were planned since 2005. By that time, Qwest (later acquired by CenturyLink) had already passed a million households and had service in a dozen cities. The article credits Google with these deployments, but makes no effort to show that the pace of these projects, which were already in the pipeline, somehow accelerated after Fiber. This would be an easy assertion to prove: show there was a discontinuity in FTTx deployment after 2010. The article states that there is 30% urban FTTx penetration today, but doesn’t say whether that’s on or off the pre-2010 trend. (The article also gets the cable trajectory wrong. In 2009, everyone was in the middle of deploying DOCSIS 3.0. The pace of DOCSIS upgrades didn’t speed up after Fiber. DOCSIS 3.1, and gigabit cable, came when you’d expect.) What Google does deserve credit for, I think, is making gigabit happen. ISPs likely would’ve held that as a premium tier for market segmention purposes. After Fiber set the gigabit at $70 price point, everyone had to match (or come close). That was something that wasn’t in the road maps before Fiber.
- gm-conspiracy 8y ago
  Not Verizon (it was winding down Fios deployments around that time)... http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/telecom/2010-03-26-verizon-fios_N.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/telecom/2010...
  - rayiner 8y ago
    FiOS was winding down expanding to new markets, but was squarely in the middle of the overall build out. The initial plan was to cover 18 million homes. Of that, about 13 million were complete by 2008. In 2009, Verizon was already in negotiations with New York. After Fiber came out in 2010, Verizon continued the planned build out at a slower pace, ultimately passing 20 million houses. What was the measurable impact of Fiber on that deployment? It probably did spur the gigabit tier, which required more oversubscription than Verizon planned for originally.
- bubblethink 8y ago
mholt 8y ago
One major issue, at least here in Provo, was that their only high-speed offering (at first) was $70/mo. This is a high-proportion college town, and almost no students can afford that (even split amongst themselves). Even if they could, almost nobody wanted to because why pay for that when the free plan works good enough? A speed test at fast.com reveals that Netflix still streams at gigabit speeds even on the free plans. YouTube is similar. (They seem to open the fire hose on those sites!) Now they have a fifty dollar 100 Mbps plan. But students don't pay for that, either, because they don't know about it. It was not a well-thought-out business plan. Their seven-year contract will be expiring soon. Will be interesting to see what happens then.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  $50 for 100 Mbps is still bordering on expensive. Comcast undercuts that, at least in the promo period. They jack it up after the period, but that's the usual thing with Comcast. You need to renegotiate or change accounts. So the less informed as well as cheapskates would still go with Comcast. What you get with GF is symmetric 100Mbps and better quality, but hardly anyone would know that.
goeric 8y ago
I have gigabit fiber internet (up and down) in LA for $80/m from AT&T. It's incredible, and I can't believe they offer it. I can't imagine that would be the case today if Google Fiber never existed.
orliesaurus 8y ago
IMHO this is the fulcrum of the article: Though Google appears to have paused future deployments, the broadband business has permanently changed. Fiber investments by former telephone companies have accelerated or restarted. As someone who lives in Austin, TX and walk past the Google Fiber office every day, I can testimony that thanks to this mindset now there are at least 3 ISPs serving Fiber to the Home. (Grande, ATT, Google and possibly Spectrum?) Even if you can't get Fiber, most gentrified blocks can get 300Mbps (and with offers you can get it for $50ish a month). That's amazing, just because ISPs were afraid of Google's offering. All in all Google's Fiber is super limited (very few blocks can get Fiber to their home) but just like a "grimreaper waiting on your doorstep" ISPs competing with Google had to start offering really good deals to everyone.
- walrus01 8y ago
  It is worth mentioning that grande is now owned by the same capital group that owns Wave, which has been a pioneer in affordable gigabit access in condos and apartments, where they can reach a premises economically (flat rate $60/100Mbps, or $80/1000Mbps), no caps, no quotas, no upstream rate limits.
- chiph 8y ago
  Google also wildly underestimated the cost of burying fiber in Austin's just-under-the surface limestone.
- tasty_freeze 8y ago
  I live in Austin. For two years I waited for my neighborhood to be included in their coverage map. Even after the map showed I was covered, repeated attempts to sign up would get rejected by their automated registration system. For months I watched workmen laying in the orange cables, including right through my front yard. In October 2017 a Google employee walked door to door in the neighborhood signing people up. We signed up, gave a $15 (?) deposit, and then never heard from him or google again. On the other hand, in that span of time my Spectrum speed got bumped repeated from 15/5 Mbps to 200/12 Mbps, without changing my price. So, thanks Google for bluffing so well.
zw123456 8y ago
Fiber is great. But... in my view, the key to omnipresent BB is wireless, yes 5G, sorry to grind this ax but, I do believe that is the key, particularly in a country like the USA where there are large geographic areas, it is simply not economic to cover the entire area with fiber. mm-wave is part of the equation but also, lower frequency bands (sub-6Ghz) are key. FCC opening up more spectrum (all bands) is key to wide spread BB access.
- orev 8y ago
  Hoping wireless will solve the B.B. problem is laughable. It doesn’t matter what technology you use, the airwaves are a single shared medium while wires are essentially private sanctums of bandwidth within their own little environment with essentially the same bandwidth in each wire. Wireless companies are still charging per Gb, while wireline companies charge per 100s of Gb. People use streaming all the time, and that’s only increasing. Wireless is not going to be viable for the streaming future of 4K, etc for a very long time, and even when the tech is ready, the providers are still going to charge huge sums for that access. If wireless really is cheaper to build out, then why the huge disparity in price per Gb?
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    i can see that there is a public benefit in having accessible broadband for every citizen. it is important that people out in the sticks still have access to the news, for example. but is it really of critical importance that everyone have access to 4K netflix streams?
  - zw123456 8y ago
    One of the keys here that a lot of people miss is that mm-wave alone will not fill the BB need. It is the combination of sub-6ghz and mm-wave. 5Gnr works in high band, mm-wave and low/mid-band. This is the key, using each in the appropriate situation. mm-wave in dense urban, fiber rich areas, sub-6 in more rural and xburbs.
- madengr 8y ago
  RF guy here doing mnWave circuitry. Don’t count on it. A simple tree will ruin your link, as will rain. 6 GHz doesn’t have near the capacity. One DWDM fiber channel has +100 GHz bandwidth; that’s where it’s at. Leave wireless for what it’s good for; mobility. It sucks for real capacity.
megaman8 8y ago
From the sounds of it, they had plenty of cities lining up to get Fiber from Google. I would assume that, at least in those cities, they wouldn't face too many regulatory hurdles. So, what's stopping Google from expanding into the willing cities? Is it the expense of digging up all that last mile infrastructure? Is that the limiting factor?
- e40 8y ago
  I think they underestimated the amount of cash it would take to do the job right.
  - megaman8 8y ago
    well, they can always come up with a new estimate. If they'r e not doing it, then it means they can't get a good ROI on it. I'm just wondering what they're biggest expense is: I suspect it's last mile digging up all those trenches - i hear that's really expensive.
- CommieBobDole 8y ago
  The limiting factor is Google has undergone the same transformation as nearly all market-leading companies go - their function has changed from innovation and disruption to protecting their markets and rent-seeking. They're too large now to do anything without it being prohibitively difficult and expensive. The day I read an article announcing they'd hired the former CFO of Morgan Stanley, and she would be focusing on "cost containment", I knew Google Fiber was dead.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
BonesJustice 8y ago
I see this a bit differently, and I frequently use the history of Google Fiber as evidence for strong net neutrality regulations. In the areas where it was deployed, Google Fiber was wildly successful. And yet, Google threw in the towel. Why? It _isn’t_ because Google Fiber is was unprofitable. To the contrary, it was profitable _despite_ driving broadband prices way down in its service areas. It’s because the incumbent ISPs simply have too much power. That power comes in many forms: 1. Excessive industry lobbying power; 2. Anti-competitive exclusivity agreements; 3. The ability to stall rollouts indefinitely in the absence of “one touch make ready” policies; 4. Required cooperation with and permission from governments who feel less pressured to move quickly once their residents have at least one incumbent provider; etc. If the incumbents are so well protected that one of the most powerful corporations in America found the barriers to entry too burdensome, then how can anyone argue that there is any semblance of a “free market”? What hope is there for startup ISPs? The incumbents have received hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, so they already had a government-assisted head start. And, despite prices being so inflated that they halved overnight wherever Google Fiber rolled out, they are still able to effectively stave off meaningful competition. Would that be possible in a healthy, competitive marketplace? No. So we need to stop treating it like one, when it clearly isn’t.
- mannanj 8y ago
  I'm a little surprised this didn't have a little more discussion.
  - nickik 8y ago
    As a libertarian who argues for government regulation being the problem and not the market a lot, I must say, I'm not surprised. This is basically normal and what you expect. People are just blind to the massive amount of regulation that struggles and often basically predetermines the market and when you try to explain how 3 different regulation combine to make the improvement impossible peoples eyes gloss over. If the regulation is not "THIS GUY HAS A MONOPOLY" its very hard to get anybody exited or even talking about these regulations.
cowmix 8y ago
Here in Phoenix Google announce Fiber and Cox Communications when crazy rolling out their gigabit offering. Google stopped, Cox pretty much stopped too.
jiveturkey 8y ago
Gotta give credit to Google here, regardless what you think about their intentions or competence. They moved the needle in a way that only a disruptor can move needles. (They didn't plan it that way ahead of time, you'll just have to trust me on that.) Remember they've done this before. Usenet. And for a successful success story, how about gmail? Just like no one remembers alta vista, lycos, etc (or myspace in more recent history), no one remembers that when gmail launched and offered 1GB of mail, that was absurd. The previous free tier was more like 5MB -- 3 orders of magnitude lower! Then when Yahoo finally came around (had to stop the bleeding) and also offered 1GB, gmail went unlimited! They are going to write this exact same story in 10 years if electric cars take off (I don't think they will, but leave that aside) and Tesla is dead. Tesla's failure will be the industry's success.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  > Remember they've done this before. Usenet. Are you implying that Google started usenet? (hint: they didn't.)
Animats 8y ago
The two-tiered market of high-speed cable and lower-speed DSL broadband has given way to a free-for-all, forcing adoption of more disruptive strategies by incumbents and new entrants alike. The result is increased competition between providers and among cities and regions eager for game-changing private investment. In which alternate universe is this happening? Certainly not in the United States. How many residential locations have a choice of more than two data providers? Yes, there's wireless, with "Unlimited", "Premium Unlimited", and "Extra Premium Unlimited."
madengr 8y ago
I live in Overland Park, KS where Google Fiber has ground to a halt. About 1/2 the city is wired, but there is no ETA on the rest. AT&T has been deploying fiber where Google was, but that seems halted too. Spectrum is just garbage. While they offer 300 Mbps downstream, the upstream is 20. I at least have 100/5 from CCI, but their infrastructure is going to shit with reliability problems. Fiber is really the only way, with true symmetrical 1000/1000. DOCSIS is shit, as well as DSL variants. I can tell you mmWave is going to be shit too. It’s only useful for line-of-sight, which rules out mostly everywhere here due to trees.
quackerhacker 8y ago
>"The overall goal: to ensure at least 100,000,000 Americans had access to broadband speeds of 100 Mbps by 2020. As it turned out, providers blew past that milestone as early as 2016." First gripe....why oh why could they not make that goal for a symmetrical 100Mbps and not just focused on the DL speed. If the push is to 5G, I'd welcome it, if the mobile carriers opened ports on consumer plans. I've cherished my coveted unlimited iPad data plan with att used in my mifi with a yagi that points right at the service tower. It regularly sees over 250Gigs a month (check my twitter for that pic).
phall 8y ago
There’s also the theory that Google will eventually provide the consumer service for SpaceX’s internet satellite constellation. Laying cable was way too expensive and won’t be used for most of internet traffic in the future, where low latency is not paramount. If I have the timing correct, Google led a large financing round of Spacex around the same time as they stopped expanding their Fiber service
JacobJans 8y ago
I just signed up for Bell Fiber in Toronto 500mbps upload and download. $34.95 CAD a month. (Around $27 USD). Who knew fiber could be this cheap?
- mrybczyn 8y ago
  where'd you get this deal? currently listed on their site is 1GBit for $100 per month (with a 6 month scam discount).
  - JacobJans 8y ago
    Promo code A15173269 No activation fee or any other initial fees.
vertere 8y ago
> The broadband market was experiencing a classic "prisoner's dilemma," where neither cable nor DSL providers felt a competitive threat from the other requiring substantial new investment, trusting in relative peace within their own market segment. Continued expansion of broadband capacity was on the verge of stalling. I don't see how that can be viewed as a Prisoner's Dilemma.
chiefalchemist 8y ago
"But what if the company’s goal was never to unleash the disrupter itself so much as to encourage incumbent broadband providers to do so, helping Google’s expansion in adjacent markets such as video and emerging markets including smart homes?" I don't think it's a what if. If you can think back to the state of broadband (e.g., Verizon, Comcast, and mobile speeds) when Fiber was announced, and the following the subsequent increases, there's definitely a strong correlation to Fiber's influence. Goggle got what they wanted by pretending to do something it had no interest in doing. That's not a failure. It's damn clever.

281 points by apress 8y ago

As an ISP: right of way and economics of $ per last mile customer reached are HARD. The incumbents in an area, generally the copper phone line company (ILEC) and cable TV operator (Comcast, RCN, Charter, whatever) were handed the aerial ROW and underground ROW on a silver platter 30+ years ago, when there was no such thing as telecom competition. It was just assumed at that time that those two companies would be installing stuff on the same poles as the power company. They built wherever they pleased, whenever they pleased, at minimal regulatory cost and with minimal additional costs. Because of course nobody would buy a house with no dialtone phone and/or no cable TV. Now in a modern era if a FTTH ISP wants to come along and overbuild the same routes as the phone company, it's a lot more difficult, time consuming and expensive.

yoshamano 8y ago
We're in the process of doing that where I live. https://marshallfibernet.com/ https://marshallfibernet.com/ The reasons this is getting off the ground at all is because our city government spent the past 5 years dotting every i and crossing every t to be able to drop the hammer on AT&T and WOW! without retaliation. Also, we own our own electric utility, and on top of their ROW they're also bankrolling most of this operation with a sweetheart loan deal (overpaying for electricity worked out in the end, who knew).
- walrus01 8y ago
  Having the electrical utility controlled by the local county can be a huge advantage. The counties in eastern WA where the local PUD (public utility district) owns the last mile AC power distribution networks have been generally quite successful building their own dark fiber networks. Because of course they don't need to ask themselves for permission to build, they already own the poles and ROW, they just do it. They already have linemen and bucket trucks, flaggers, insurance, spool trailers, etc. Then ISPs can reach end user customers by paying the PUD for L2 transport across their networks. This new PUD fiber infrastructure exists separately from whatever the local Telco and cable TV operators have built.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    It also has the benefit where citizens can decide their generation supply (ie renewables) vs shareholders in a for-profit electrical utility or generator deciding based solely on profitability.
js2 8y ago
Neat story of small independent FTTH ISP that leased dark fiber from the power company to connect a city of 15,000 in rural GA: http://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/appln/FTTH-DIY.html http://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/appln/FTTH-DIY.html
- walrus01 8y ago
  For those interested, thefoa.org website also has a lot of excellent free training material and reference related to fiber networks (at OSI model layer 1).
nitwit005 8y ago
> Because of course nobody would buy a house with no dialtone phone and/or no cable TV. This was sometimes due to a legal requirement, similar to requirements to maintain water and sewer connections: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=CIV&sectionNum=1941.4 https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

ergothus 8y ago

> But what if the company’s goal was never to unleash the disrupter itself so much as to encourage incumbent broadband providers to do so, helping Google’s expansion in adjacent markets such as video and emerging markets including smart homes? Did anyone think anything else WAS the strategy? Google has a history of such "spurring" efforts. Glass, Fiber, Nexus, heck, even a ton of Android support itself.

specialp 8y ago
Yeah I don't understand at all why people think that Google wanted to be in this business. They were forced to. ISPs were starting to lag behind on bandwidth that was important to them, and also started to discriminate on traffic. It is not a failure at all in any way because they never intended on completely taking over. They'd much rather be in their business. The same is true with Android, as they were under threat of locked out of a smartphone boom by Apple. They have stuck with it because it has become more popular than they could have ever imagined. I also think this is their reason behind making Kubernetes. I think they want to commoditize the cloud more to avoid dominance from Amazon.
- majewsky 8y ago
  > The same is true with Android, as they were under threat of locked out of a smartphone boom by Apple. Nice theory, except that Google bought Android Inc. in 2005, years before the iPhone was announced.
  - walrus01 8y ago
    The evolution of the smartphone market was obvious even in 2001/2002, if you saw a Handspring Treo 180 and used one on a GPRS/EDGE network. I had one. When I saw the first info about Android, it seemed to me like a logical technological advancement in the same field. At the time in 2004/2005, the iPhone OS was a total unknown, maybe a tiny bit of info had leaked from Apple about their secret project, WinCE/Windows Mobile was a joke, palmos was a dead end.

rayiner 8y ago

> But in 2009, no leading carrier was planning a major upgrade of its existing physical plant. That’s not true (and the article doesn’t cite to any support for that idea or any other). In 2009 ATT and Verizon were in the middle of deploying Uverse and FiOS, which were planned since 2005. By that time, Qwest (later acquired by CenturyLink) had already passed a million households and had service in a dozen cities. The article credits Google with these deployments, but makes no effort to show that the pace of these projects, which were already in the pipeline, somehow accelerated after Fiber. This would be an easy assertion to prove: show there was a discontinuity in FTTx deployment after 2010. The article states that there is 30% urban FTTx penetration today, but doesn’t say whether that’s on or off the pre-2010 trend. (The article also gets the cable trajectory wrong. In 2009, everyone was in the middle of deploying DOCSIS 3.0. The pace of DOCSIS upgrades didn’t speed up after Fiber. DOCSIS 3.1, and gigabit cable, came when you’d expect.) What Google does deserve credit for, I think, is making gigabit happen. ISPs likely would’ve held that as a premium tier for market segmention purposes. After Fiber set the gigabit at $70 price point, everyone had to match (or come close). That was something that wasn’t in the road maps before Fiber.

gm-conspiracy 8y ago
Not Verizon (it was winding down Fios deployments around that time)... http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/telecom/2010-03-26-verizon-fios_N.htm http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/telecom/2010...
- rayiner 8y ago
  FiOS was winding down expanding to new markets, but was squarely in the middle of the overall build out. The initial plan was to cover 18 million homes. Of that, about 13 million were complete by 2008. In 2009, Verizon was already in negotiations with New York. After Fiber came out in 2010, Verizon continued the planned build out at a slower pace, ultimately passing 20 million houses. What was the measurable impact of Fiber on that deployment? It probably did spur the gigabit tier, which required more oversubscription than Verizon planned for originally.
bubblethink 8y ago

mholt 8y ago

One major issue, at least here in Provo, was that their only high-speed offering (at first) was $70/mo. This is a high-proportion college town, and almost no students can afford that (even split amongst themselves). Even if they could, almost nobody wanted to because why pay for that when the free plan works good enough? A speed test at fast.com reveals that Netflix still streams at gigabit speeds even on the free plans. YouTube is similar. (They seem to open the fire hose on those sites!) Now they have a fifty dollar 100 Mbps plan. But students don't pay for that, either, because they don't know about it. It was not a well-thought-out business plan. Their seven-year contract will be expiring soon. Will be interesting to see what happens then.

bubblethink 8y ago
$50 for 100 Mbps is still bordering on expensive. Comcast undercuts that, at least in the promo period. They jack it up after the period, but that's the usual thing with Comcast. You need to renegotiate or change accounts. So the less informed as well as cheapskates would still go with Comcast. What you get with GF is symmetric 100Mbps and better quality, but hardly anyone would know that.

goeric 8y ago

I have gigabit fiber internet (up and down) in LA for $80/m from AT&T. It's incredible, and I can't believe they offer it. I can't imagine that would be the case today if Google Fiber never existed.

orliesaurus 8y ago

IMHO this is the fulcrum of the article: Though Google appears to have paused future deployments, the broadband business has permanently changed. Fiber investments by former telephone companies have accelerated or restarted. As someone who lives in Austin, TX and walk past the Google Fiber office every day, I can testimony that thanks to this mindset now there are at least 3 ISPs serving Fiber to the Home. (Grande, ATT, Google and possibly Spectrum?) Even if you can't get Fiber, most gentrified blocks can get 300Mbps (and with offers you can get it for $50ish a month). That's amazing, just because ISPs were afraid of Google's offering. All in all Google's Fiber is super limited (very few blocks can get Fiber to their home) but just like a "grimreaper waiting on your doorstep" ISPs competing with Google had to start offering really good deals to everyone.

walrus01 8y ago
It is worth mentioning that grande is now owned by the same capital group that owns Wave, which has been a pioneer in affordable gigabit access in condos and apartments, where they can reach a premises economically (flat rate $60/100Mbps, or $80/1000Mbps), no caps, no quotas, no upstream rate limits.
chiph 8y ago
Google also wildly underestimated the cost of burying fiber in Austin's just-under-the surface limestone.
tasty_freeze 8y ago
I live in Austin. For two years I waited for my neighborhood to be included in their coverage map. Even after the map showed I was covered, repeated attempts to sign up would get rejected by their automated registration system. For months I watched workmen laying in the orange cables, including right through my front yard. In October 2017 a Google employee walked door to door in the neighborhood signing people up. We signed up, gave a $15 (?) deposit, and then never heard from him or google again. On the other hand, in that span of time my Spectrum speed got bumped repeated from 15/5 Mbps to 200/12 Mbps, without changing my price. So, thanks Google for bluffing so well.

zw123456 8y ago

Fiber is great. But... in my view, the key to omnipresent BB is wireless, yes 5G, sorry to grind this ax but, I do believe that is the key, particularly in a country like the USA where there are large geographic areas, it is simply not economic to cover the entire area with fiber. mm-wave is part of the equation but also, lower frequency bands (sub-6Ghz) are key. FCC opening up more spectrum (all bands) is key to wide spread BB access.

orev 8y ago
Hoping wireless will solve the B.B. problem is laughable. It doesn’t matter what technology you use, the airwaves are a single shared medium while wires are essentially private sanctums of bandwidth within their own little environment with essentially the same bandwidth in each wire. Wireless companies are still charging per Gb, while wireline companies charge per 100s of Gb. People use streaming all the time, and that’s only increasing. Wireless is not going to be viable for the streaming future of 4K, etc for a very long time, and even when the tech is ready, the providers are still going to charge huge sums for that access. If wireless really is cheaper to build out, then why the huge disparity in price per Gb?
- leetcrew 8y ago
  i can see that there is a public benefit in having accessible broadband for every citizen. it is important that people out in the sticks still have access to the news, for example. but is it really of critical importance that everyone have access to 4K netflix streams?
- zw123456 8y ago
  One of the keys here that a lot of people miss is that mm-wave alone will not fill the BB need. It is the combination of sub-6ghz and mm-wave. 5Gnr works in high band, mm-wave and low/mid-band. This is the key, using each in the appropriate situation. mm-wave in dense urban, fiber rich areas, sub-6 in more rural and xburbs.
madengr 8y ago
RF guy here doing mnWave circuitry. Don’t count on it. A simple tree will ruin your link, as will rain. 6 GHz doesn’t have near the capacity. One DWDM fiber channel has +100 GHz bandwidth; that’s where it’s at. Leave wireless for what it’s good for; mobility. It sucks for real capacity.

megaman8 8y ago

From the sounds of it, they had plenty of cities lining up to get Fiber from Google. I would assume that, at least in those cities, they wouldn't face too many regulatory hurdles. So, what's stopping Google from expanding into the willing cities? Is it the expense of digging up all that last mile infrastructure? Is that the limiting factor?

e40 8y ago
I think they underestimated the amount of cash it would take to do the job right.
- megaman8 8y ago
  well, they can always come up with a new estimate. If they'r e not doing it, then it means they can't get a good ROI on it. I'm just wondering what they're biggest expense is: I suspect it's last mile digging up all those trenches - i hear that's really expensive.
CommieBobDole 8y ago
The limiting factor is Google has undergone the same transformation as nearly all market-leading companies go - their function has changed from innovation and disruption to protecting their markets and rent-seeking. They're too large now to do anything without it being prohibitively difficult and expensive. The day I read an article announcing they'd hired the former CFO of Morgan Stanley, and she would be focusing on "cost containment", I knew Google Fiber was dead.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

BonesJustice 8y ago

I see this a bit differently, and I frequently use the history of Google Fiber as evidence for strong net neutrality regulations. In the areas where it was deployed, Google Fiber was wildly successful. And yet, Google threw in the towel. Why? It _isn’t_ because Google Fiber is was unprofitable. To the contrary, it was profitable _despite_ driving broadband prices way down in its service areas. It’s because the incumbent ISPs simply have too much power. That power comes in many forms: 1. Excessive industry lobbying power; 2. Anti-competitive exclusivity agreements; 3. The ability to stall rollouts indefinitely in the absence of “one touch make ready” policies; 4. Required cooperation with and permission from governments who feel less pressured to move quickly once their residents have at least one incumbent provider; etc. If the incumbents are so well protected that one of the most powerful corporations in America found the barriers to entry too burdensome, then how can anyone argue that there is any semblance of a “free market”? What hope is there for startup ISPs? The incumbents have received hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars, so they already had a government-assisted head start. And, despite prices being so inflated that they halved overnight wherever Google Fiber rolled out, they are still able to effectively stave off meaningful competition. Would that be possible in a healthy, competitive marketplace? No. So we need to stop treating it like one, when it clearly isn’t.

mannanj 8y ago
I'm a little surprised this didn't have a little more discussion.
- nickik 8y ago
  As a libertarian who argues for government regulation being the problem and not the market a lot, I must say, I'm not surprised. This is basically normal and what you expect. People are just blind to the massive amount of regulation that struggles and often basically predetermines the market and when you try to explain how 3 different regulation combine to make the improvement impossible peoples eyes gloss over. If the regulation is not "THIS GUY HAS A MONOPOLY" its very hard to get anybody exited or even talking about these regulations.

cowmix 8y ago

Here in Phoenix Google announce Fiber and Cox Communications when crazy rolling out their gigabit offering. Google stopped, Cox pretty much stopped too.

jiveturkey 8y ago

Gotta give credit to Google here, regardless what you think about their intentions or competence. They moved the needle in a way that only a disruptor can move needles. (They didn't plan it that way ahead of time, you'll just have to trust me on that.) Remember they've done this before. Usenet. And for a successful success story, how about gmail? Just like no one remembers alta vista, lycos, etc (or myspace in more recent history), no one remembers that when gmail launched and offered 1GB of mail, that was absurd. The previous free tier was more like 5MB -- 3 orders of magnitude lower! Then when Yahoo finally came around (had to stop the bleeding) and also offered 1GB, gmail went unlimited! They are going to write this exact same story in 10 years if electric cars take off (I don't think they will, but leave that aside) and Tesla is dead. Tesla's failure will be the industry's success.

craftyguy 8y ago
> Remember they've done this before. Usenet. Are you implying that Google started usenet? (hint: they didn't.)

Animats 8y ago

The two-tiered market of high-speed cable and lower-speed DSL broadband has given way to a free-for-all, forcing adoption of more disruptive strategies by incumbents and new entrants alike. The result is increased competition between providers and among cities and regions eager for game-changing private investment. In which alternate universe is this happening? Certainly not in the United States. How many residential locations have a choice of more than two data providers? Yes, there's wireless, with "Unlimited", "Premium Unlimited", and "Extra Premium Unlimited."

madengr 8y ago

I live in Overland Park, KS where Google Fiber has ground to a halt. About 1/2 the city is wired, but there is no ETA on the rest. AT&T has been deploying fiber where Google was, but that seems halted too. Spectrum is just garbage. While they offer 300 Mbps downstream, the upstream is 20. I at least have 100/5 from CCI, but their infrastructure is going to shit with reliability problems. Fiber is really the only way, with true symmetrical 1000/1000. DOCSIS is shit, as well as DSL variants. I can tell you mmWave is going to be shit too. It’s only useful for line-of-sight, which rules out mostly everywhere here due to trees.

quackerhacker 8y ago

>"The overall goal: to ensure at least 100,000,000 Americans had access to broadband speeds of 100 Mbps by 2020. As it turned out, providers blew past that milestone as early as 2016." First gripe....why oh why could they not make that goal for a symmetrical 100Mbps and not just focused on the DL speed. If the push is to 5G, I'd welcome it, if the mobile carriers opened ports on consumer plans. I've cherished my coveted unlimited iPad data plan with att used in my mifi with a yagi that points right at the service tower. It regularly sees over 250Gigs a month (check my twitter for that pic).

phall 8y ago

There’s also the theory that Google will eventually provide the consumer service for SpaceX’s internet satellite constellation. Laying cable was way too expensive and won’t be used for most of internet traffic in the future, where low latency is not paramount. If I have the timing correct, Google led a large financing round of Spacex around the same time as they stopped expanding their Fiber service

JacobJans 8y ago

I just signed up for Bell Fiber in Toronto 500mbps upload and download. $34.95 CAD a month. (Around $27 USD). Who knew fiber could be this cheap?

mrybczyn 8y ago
where'd you get this deal? currently listed on their site is 1GBit for $100 per month (with a 6 month scam discount).
- JacobJans 8y ago
  Promo code A15173269 No activation fee or any other initial fees.

vertere 8y ago

> The broadband market was experiencing a classic "prisoner's dilemma," where neither cable nor DSL providers felt a competitive threat from the other requiring substantial new investment, trusting in relative peace within their own market segment. Continued expansion of broadband capacity was on the verge of stalling. I don't see how that can be viewed as a Prisoner's Dilemma.

chiefalchemist 8y ago

"But what if the company’s goal was never to unleash the disrupter itself so much as to encourage incumbent broadband providers to do so, helping Google’s expansion in adjacent markets such as video and emerging markets including smart homes?" I don't think it's a what if. If you can think back to the state of broadband (e.g., Verizon, Comcast, and mobile speeds) when Fiber was announced, and the following the subsequent increases, there's definitely a strong correlation to Fiber's influence. Goggle got what they wanted by pretending to do something it had no interest in doing. That's not a failure. It's damn clever.