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"For that, and many other reasons, we are deeply grateful to Mayor Greg Fischer, the City of Louisville and its residents for their partnership and spirit of in

"For that, and many other reasons, we are deeply grateful to Mayor Greg Fischer, the City of Louisville and its residents for their partnership and spirit of innovation over the past two years." That's why we can't trust Google with anything critical. They view the world as an experiment they can quit anytime. Definitely don't buy a Google self driving car or anything else you expect to work in a few years. There is a good chance that businesses moved to Louisville because of Google Fiber and they are being shown the finger "Thanks for indulging us, we got what we wanted and you can go f... yourself".

Operyl 8y ago
On the other hand, it seriously forced other ISPs to step up their game from what I hear. So not all is lost.
- onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
  And why wouldn't they step back their game if the competition does?
  - Operyl 8y ago
    It’s a bit harder to put the cat back in the bag. I’m assuming (and hoping) it’ll take a few years for that kind of degradation, and some new competition (or municipal service) could make its way in.
    - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
      I doubt they'll roll back speeds. Instead they'll increase the cost of the higher speeds significantly.
      - Operyl 8y ago
        Even price increases can take some time to do, as you have people in 1-2 year contracts. I just hope that’s enough time for competition, or that it doesn’t happen.
        owenmarshall 8y ago
        > Even price increases can take some time to do, as you have people in 1-2 year contracts. It takes a while to do to those customers. It can happen as soon as "let's update the webpage" for new customers. Especially when the only high speed internet game in town goes from three providers to two.
        JustSomeNobody 8y ago
        This. "Our special deal for new subscribers has ended." And they'll sign up all the people who were on Google Fiber and want to continue having those speeds at the new higher price point, which, of course, is only valid for the first 6 mos or a year, after which it increases to the new "normal" price.
      - gowld 8y ago
        Once (multiple) ISPs invested in infrastructure, they have lower marginal cost so can stay and compete. Sure, there are still antitrust risks, but better than nothing.
      - newsoul2019 8y ago
        With wireless 5G coming, people will have a real alternative to something that uses a physical line to the house. Brace yourselves, competition is coming.
        kevin_b_er 8y ago
        Due to the wireless industry's bandwidth cap (or severe service degradation after soft-cap) as a standard feature, I have little hope for 5G.
        JustSomeNobody 8y ago
        Color me unconvinced about 5G. Hope I'm wrong.
- awill 8y ago
  any company that price matched Google will shortly begin raising rates.
  - WorldMaker 8y ago
    In Louisville neither AT&T nor Spectrum bothered to price match because Google never covered enough neighborhoods for them to care. Spectrum raised their rates considerable, with no infrastructure investment at all. AT&T did a modicum of infrastructure investment just to make it appear that they were doing anything at all.
    - space_ghost 8y ago
      I live in Louisville and I've had AT&T's Gigabit fiber product for over two years, in two different residences in different parts of the city. I frequently see new signs that they're deploying to new neighborhoods, including some neighborhoods that made me scratch my head a little. They're definitely making more than a modicum of investment in their infrastructure here.
      - WorldMaker 8y ago
        Much of my neighborhood only qualifies for AT&T's 90s ISDN-era speed DSL, which they've confusingly rebranded Uverse despite not being proper broadband in 2019, and worse priced it to match real broadband Uverse. So you may have to pardon me if I'm deeply skeptical of AT&T's infrastructure investments.
      - Corrado 8y ago
        I also have AT&T Gigabit fiber (through IgLou) and have been pretty pleased with the service. However, I'm fearful that with Google's pull-out AT&T will lose all motivation to improve and will just start raising prices instead.
- owenmarshall 8y ago
  > other ISPs to step up their game Eh. Spectrum (formerly TWC, formerly Insight) upped their max speeds. AT&T did a very limited Gigapower rollout to selected areas. The lasting impact, if anything, will likely be that Google got the metro government to pass a one touch make ready ordinance and defend it in court.
- Dirlewanger 8y ago
  This. Literally overnight, you'd see a 100%, 200%, or even more, increase in speeds. Unfortunately with those market pressures gone, companies will go back to not caring after this...
  - _red 8y ago
    Be that as it may, it doesn't mean its sustainable. Those "100% speed increases" were ISP's willing to lose some money to retain existing customers in select markets, using their other profitable markets to subsidize them. I'm 100% for more competition in the quasi-monopoly ISP arena, however googles entree into the ISP market was just freshman exuberance. They were flush with lots of shareholder money and had young idealistic founders who figured they could "revolutionize the space" because they were smart and cared. Over the past few years, google has been shutting down all their naive money losing ventures and getting into the serious business of making money (ie. selling your personal info to the highest bidder).
fipple 8y ago
Moving to Louisville for Google Fiber would be a pretty reckless decision for a business which wasn’t wholly dependent on it (like a reseller or Google Fiber)
VectorLock 8y ago
Imagine your google self driving car pulling a Revolv.
porpoisely 8y ago
You make a good point, but I think it's a corporate problem, not a google problem. Expecting loyalty from businesses is pointless. Look at NFL franchises. They'll move from cleveland to baltimore or Oakland to Las Vegas or from LA to St.Louis and back to LA without a second thought. Look at the rust belt where companies just left for "greener pastures". Or pharma companies merging and moving their headquarters to europe to exploit tax loopholes. Businesses are in it for themselves despite all the ads and PR talking about how they care about the community.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  I think Google is one step ahead of others in terms of unreliability. GE won't pull out of aircraft engines with 2 months notice.
- simias 8y ago
  I don't think it's really about loyalty, it's more about managing expectations. Some brands use reliability and long term support as selling points, so you expect that from them. They have an incentive to keep offering long term support in order to preserve their reputation. It might not be important if you're buying, say, a smartphone that you expect to keep for a couple of years but it's critical if you're buying something that you expect to work with two decades from now, like some industrial machines for instance. Google clearly is not in this category. They will drop basically anything with very short notice (two months here) if they don't feel like doing it anymore. That may be fine if you're buying a Google phone but that's definitely a problem for anything that can't just be replaced instantly and for (relatively) cheap. Can you imagine if people who manufacture components for industrial designs behaved like Google does? "We have these subway trains with busted brakes, but it turns out that they were manufactured by Google and they dropped the project two years ago. I guess we have to buy new trains then..."
  - shaftway 8y ago
    > Can you imagine if people who manufacture components for industrial designs behaved like Google does? "We have these subway trains with busted brakes, but it turns out that they were manufactured by Google and they dropped the project two years ago. I guess we have to buy new trains then..." Like in the NYC Subway? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mta-why-has-the-nyc-subway-gone-off-the-rails-60-minutes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mta-why-has-the-nyc-subway-gone... > The old-fashioned system requires intensive care. When parts break, which at their age happens often, this busy repair shop springs into action. Like doctors, mechanics examine the patients. Some sound like they're on their last breath. Many of the companies that made these components are long gone. So workers here have to manufacture their own replacement parts. You have to be aware of the potential for the obsolescence of any service you use. Sometimes they drop the project, sometimes they go out of business. The end result is the same. I don't get mad at PageNet for not supporting my pager any more.
abarringer 8y ago
This is why we did not consider GCP when we were looking at moving some of our services to the cloud. Never know when Google will discontinue or drastically change pricing on services.
- markbnj 8y ago
  We're a GCP customer and I definitely cringed in real life when I read the post. We're building cloud portability into our new deployment tooling and moving as many things as possible to kubernetes, so we can be somewhat prepared.
  - typeformer 8y ago
    Oh no, Google is the main supporter of Kubernetes, yikes!
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      There are also Amazon and Microsoft in the Kubernetes space, so it is assured just in case Google gets bored with the project.
      - dankohn1 8y ago
        There are now developers from hundreds of companies contributing to Kubernetes. Google remains the largest contributor, but is less than half and declining as a percentage of the whole, even as their total contributions actually increase. https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/8/company-statistics-by-repository-group?orgId=1 https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/8/company-statistics-by-repos... Disclosure: CNCF develops DevStats
    - markbnj 8y ago
      I assume you're trolling, and already know that kubernetes is open source, has many key contributors outside of Google, and that we can spin it up on bare hardware if for some unlikely reason we needed to do that.
dopamean 8y ago
I'm not sure I can cosign the cynicism toward google in the particular instance. I am a Fiber customer in Austin and I've always been under the impression that this essentially an experiment and that it likely wont be around forever. Perhaps that is not a widely held enough believe however.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Cutting people off within two months is just nuts. One year may be acceptable.
  - joshuamorton 8y ago
    Why? As far as I know fiber isn't the only provider anywhere, and getting internet set up if you're already wired takes hours or less in most places (I left the Comcast store and was using my wifi an hour later last time I moved).
    - dopamean 8y ago
      Yeah this is exactly my point. Fiber is a competing service in every market it serves. Customers do have a choice. Now unfortunately they do not but and they're just going back to the way things were.
  - asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
    No reasonable person will have difficulty making other arrangements in a nine week period.
    - dopamean 8y ago
      You're being downvoted for this but I suspect you're right. The people we're talking about aren't literally random people. They're people who switched to Fiber in the first place.
WaltPurvis 8y ago
>> There is a good chance that businesses moved to Louisville because of Google Fiber It would be astonishing if the total number of businesses for which that's true is more than two. I can't imagine what sort of company would base a decision to move to Louisville on the availability of a Google Fiber Internet connection, nor can I imagine how the loss of Google Fiber would be any kind of serious problem (there are other ways to connect to the Internet in Louisville).
- scrumbledober 8y ago
  businesses may not move to the location for the google fiber themselves, but it certainly makes Louisville a more attractive place to move for developers, and a good population of developers is certainly enough to get companies moving to an area.
  - WaltPurvis 8y ago
    >>it certainly makes Louisville a more attractive place to move for developers I suppose it might be one small factor a developer might put on the "pros" side if her list when deciding where to live, but it's surely a very small factor. Would anyone seriously choose a city to live in based on a marginally faster or cheaper Internet connection? I find it difficult to believe, but maybe it's true for some.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Things like this are often used to attract businesses to a location.
munificent 8y ago
So... you plan to put your trust in Comcast or CenturyLink?

Operyl 8y ago

On the other hand, it seriously forced other ISPs to step up their game from what I hear. So not all is lost.

onlyrealcuzzo 8y ago
And why wouldn't they step back their game if the competition does?
- Operyl 8y ago
  It’s a bit harder to put the cat back in the bag. I’m assuming (and hoping) it’ll take a few years for that kind of degradation, and some new competition (or municipal service) could make its way in.
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    I doubt they'll roll back speeds. Instead they'll increase the cost of the higher speeds significantly.
    - Operyl 8y ago
      Even price increases can take some time to do, as you have people in 1-2 year contracts. I just hope that’s enough time for competition, or that it doesn’t happen.
      - owenmarshall 8y ago
        > Even price increases can take some time to do, as you have people in 1-2 year contracts. It takes a while to do to those customers. It can happen as soon as "let's update the webpage" for new customers. Especially when the only high speed internet game in town goes from three providers to two.
        JustSomeNobody 8y ago
        This. "Our special deal for new subscribers has ended." And they'll sign up all the people who were on Google Fiber and want to continue having those speeds at the new higher price point, which, of course, is only valid for the first 6 mos or a year, after which it increases to the new "normal" price.
    - gowld 8y ago
      Once (multiple) ISPs invested in infrastructure, they have lower marginal cost so can stay and compete. Sure, there are still antitrust risks, but better than nothing.
    - newsoul2019 8y ago
      With wireless 5G coming, people will have a real alternative to something that uses a physical line to the house. Brace yourselves, competition is coming.
      - kevin_b_er 8y ago
        Due to the wireless industry's bandwidth cap (or severe service degradation after soft-cap) as a standard feature, I have little hope for 5G.
      - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
        Color me unconvinced about 5G. Hope I'm wrong.
awill 8y ago
any company that price matched Google will shortly begin raising rates.
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  In Louisville neither AT&T nor Spectrum bothered to price match because Google never covered enough neighborhoods for them to care. Spectrum raised their rates considerable, with no infrastructure investment at all. AT&T did a modicum of infrastructure investment just to make it appear that they were doing anything at all.
  - space_ghost 8y ago
    I live in Louisville and I've had AT&T's Gigabit fiber product for over two years, in two different residences in different parts of the city. I frequently see new signs that they're deploying to new neighborhoods, including some neighborhoods that made me scratch my head a little. They're definitely making more than a modicum of investment in their infrastructure here.
    - WorldMaker 8y ago
      Much of my neighborhood only qualifies for AT&T's 90s ISDN-era speed DSL, which they've confusingly rebranded Uverse despite not being proper broadband in 2019, and worse priced it to match real broadband Uverse. So you may have to pardon me if I'm deeply skeptical of AT&T's infrastructure investments.
    - Corrado 8y ago
      I also have AT&T Gigabit fiber (through IgLou) and have been pretty pleased with the service. However, I'm fearful that with Google's pull-out AT&T will lose all motivation to improve and will just start raising prices instead.
owenmarshall 8y ago
> other ISPs to step up their game Eh. Spectrum (formerly TWC, formerly Insight) upped their max speeds. AT&T did a very limited Gigapower rollout to selected areas. The lasting impact, if anything, will likely be that Google got the metro government to pass a one touch make ready ordinance and defend it in court.
Dirlewanger 8y ago
This. Literally overnight, you'd see a 100%, 200%, or even more, increase in speeds. Unfortunately with those market pressures gone, companies will go back to not caring after this...
- _red 8y ago
  Be that as it may, it doesn't mean its sustainable. Those "100% speed increases" were ISP's willing to lose some money to retain existing customers in select markets, using their other profitable markets to subsidize them. I'm 100% for more competition in the quasi-monopoly ISP arena, however googles entree into the ISP market was just freshman exuberance. They were flush with lots of shareholder money and had young idealistic founders who figured they could "revolutionize the space" because they were smart and cared. Over the past few years, google has been shutting down all their naive money losing ventures and getting into the serious business of making money (ie. selling your personal info to the highest bidder).

fipple 8y ago

Moving to Louisville for Google Fiber would be a pretty reckless decision for a business which wasn’t wholly dependent on it (like a reseller or Google Fiber)

VectorLock 8y ago

Imagine your google self driving car pulling a Revolv.

porpoisely 8y ago

You make a good point, but I think it's a corporate problem, not a google problem. Expecting loyalty from businesses is pointless. Look at NFL franchises. They'll move from cleveland to baltimore or Oakland to Las Vegas or from LA to St.Louis and back to LA without a second thought. Look at the rust belt where companies just left for "greener pastures". Or pharma companies merging and moving their headquarters to europe to exploit tax loopholes. Businesses are in it for themselves despite all the ads and PR talking about how they care about the community.

maxxxxx 8y ago
I think Google is one step ahead of others in terms of unreliability. GE won't pull out of aircraft engines with 2 months notice.
simias 8y ago
I don't think it's really about loyalty, it's more about managing expectations. Some brands use reliability and long term support as selling points, so you expect that from them. They have an incentive to keep offering long term support in order to preserve their reputation. It might not be important if you're buying, say, a smartphone that you expect to keep for a couple of years but it's critical if you're buying something that you expect to work with two decades from now, like some industrial machines for instance. Google clearly is not in this category. They will drop basically anything with very short notice (two months here) if they don't feel like doing it anymore. That may be fine if you're buying a Google phone but that's definitely a problem for anything that can't just be replaced instantly and for (relatively) cheap. Can you imagine if people who manufacture components for industrial designs behaved like Google does? "We have these subway trains with busted brakes, but it turns out that they were manufactured by Google and they dropped the project two years ago. I guess we have to buy new trains then..."
- shaftway 8y ago
  > Can you imagine if people who manufacture components for industrial designs behaved like Google does? "We have these subway trains with busted brakes, but it turns out that they were manufactured by Google and they dropped the project two years ago. I guess we have to buy new trains then..." Like in the NYC Subway? https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mta-why-has-the-nyc-subway-gone-off-the-rails-60-minutes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mta-why-has-the-nyc-subway-gone... > The old-fashioned system requires intensive care. When parts break, which at their age happens often, this busy repair shop springs into action. Like doctors, mechanics examine the patients. Some sound like they're on their last breath. Many of the companies that made these components are long gone. So workers here have to manufacture their own replacement parts. You have to be aware of the potential for the obsolescence of any service you use. Sometimes they drop the project, sometimes they go out of business. The end result is the same. I don't get mad at PageNet for not supporting my pager any more.

abarringer 8y ago

This is why we did not consider GCP when we were looking at moving some of our services to the cloud. Never know when Google will discontinue or drastically change pricing on services.

markbnj 8y ago
We're a GCP customer and I definitely cringed in real life when I read the post. We're building cloud portability into our new deployment tooling and moving as many things as possible to kubernetes, so we can be somewhat prepared.
- typeformer 8y ago
  Oh no, Google is the main supporter of Kubernetes, yikes!
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    There are also Amazon and Microsoft in the Kubernetes space, so it is assured just in case Google gets bored with the project.
    - dankohn1 8y ago
      There are now developers from hundreds of companies contributing to Kubernetes. Google remains the largest contributor, but is less than half and declining as a percentage of the whole, even as their total contributions actually increase. https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/8/company-statistics-by-repository-group?orgId=1 https://k8s.devstats.cncf.io/d/8/company-statistics-by-repos... Disclosure: CNCF develops DevStats
  - markbnj 8y ago
    I assume you're trolling, and already know that kubernetes is open source, has many key contributors outside of Google, and that we can spin it up on bare hardware if for some unlikely reason we needed to do that.

dopamean 8y ago

I'm not sure I can cosign the cynicism toward google in the particular instance. I am a Fiber customer in Austin and I've always been under the impression that this essentially an experiment and that it likely wont be around forever. Perhaps that is not a widely held enough believe however.

maxxxxx 8y ago
Cutting people off within two months is just nuts. One year may be acceptable.
- joshuamorton 8y ago
  Why? As far as I know fiber isn't the only provider anywhere, and getting internet set up if you're already wired takes hours or less in most places (I left the Comcast store and was using my wifi an hour later last time I moved).
  - dopamean 8y ago
    Yeah this is exactly my point. Fiber is a competing service in every market it serves. Customers do have a choice. Now unfortunately they do not but and they're just going back to the way things were.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 8y ago
  No reasonable person will have difficulty making other arrangements in a nine week period.
  - dopamean 8y ago
    You're being downvoted for this but I suspect you're right. The people we're talking about aren't literally random people. They're people who switched to Fiber in the first place.

WaltPurvis 8y ago

>> There is a good chance that businesses moved to Louisville because of Google Fiber It would be astonishing if the total number of businesses for which that's true is more than two. I can't imagine what sort of company would base a decision to move to Louisville on the availability of a Google Fiber Internet connection, nor can I imagine how the loss of Google Fiber would be any kind of serious problem (there are other ways to connect to the Internet in Louisville).

scrumbledober 8y ago
businesses may not move to the location for the google fiber themselves, but it certainly makes Louisville a more attractive place to move for developers, and a good population of developers is certainly enough to get companies moving to an area.
- WaltPurvis 8y ago
  >>it certainly makes Louisville a more attractive place to move for developers I suppose it might be one small factor a developer might put on the "pros" side if her list when deciding where to live, but it's surely a very small factor. Would anyone seriously choose a city to live in based on a marginally faster or cheaper Internet connection? I find it difficult to believe, but maybe it's true for some.
maxxxxx 8y ago
Things like this are often used to attract businesses to a location.

munificent 8y ago

So... you plan to put your trust in Comcast or CenturyLink?