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When I interned at AT&T a few years ago, I asked a manager I respected whether they were worried about Google Fiber coming in and eating their lunch. "No", he

When I interned at AT&T a few years ago, I asked a manager I respected whether they were worried about Google Fiber coming in and eating their lunch. "No", he said. "We'll sue them for every mile of fiber they lay down". I can understand why they would make that play. It's kind of the only play they have. AT&T and Verizon innovate enough to remain...okay...but they're not exactly Google. The only way they would win is to get dirty and turn fiber laying into Google's very own Stalingrad. And between starting a new, massive, low-margin (by advertising's standards), and capital-intensive business, and keeping salaries high and employees happy, Google chose the latter and bowed out because honestly, dying on this hill isn't a smart move. I doubt Google wants to do this. Pulling out at this stage, when Fiber hadn't actually provided the "nudge" to internet speeds and throughput that would make Google and Internet companies more powerful, would not place Google at a place of negotiating strength. It makes Google look bad and cements the ISP monopolies' notion that Google pulled out because they physically can't bear the pain and so they remain safe, not because Google chose to, can do this whenever they want, and have the ISPs at their mercy. It probably also burned a few bridges, if there were bridges at all, and makes weighing favors in a (hopefully not long-term) post-net-neutrality world swing towards the other major power players like Amazon or Facebook.

anonymous5133 8y ago
It did have a positive impact though because AT&T and Verizon started actually building out their fiber networks more aggressively when they saw google entering the space. I live in Orange County, CA and AT&T out here started building out fiber when they saw Google building in Irvine, CA. AT&T knows that if they could just "rope off" google to a small area then their initial investment wouldn't really be worth it.
- yingw787 8y ago
  My concern is whether the ISPs will find expanding and maintaining their fiber infrastructure necessary if Google continues to pull out of the market, or whether it'll end up crushed like the EV-1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1). Is there enough demand already generated in industries requiring significant network throughput (e.g. e-sports, industrial IoT, or elsewhere) that ISPs will shoot themselves in the foot if they collapse the market? I personally don't use enough data to justify a Gigabit connection. My friends who stream video and game online might. Hopefully the latter will pull us into the future, but I don't know for sure.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
    > My concern is whether the ISPs will find expanding and maintaining their fiber infrastructure necessary if Google continues to pull out of the market. I can answer that: they won't. ISPs showed they have the capacity to expand and improve and bring better service to people when they're challenged to do so, but it is equally obvious that they give not two fucks about anywhere they have no competition, which is basically everywhere. The Google of the past that did cool stuff was our one ticket to disrupting this bullshit and getting it fixed, and Google the corporate big business machine of today killed that hope. And if you think it'll get better as other parts of the world continue to pass us by, all you have to do is look at our health care system to see how that works out.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  AT&T and Verizon started actually building out their fiber networks more aggressively when they saw google entering the space That doesn't seem to mean anything when all the company cares about is next quarter's stock performance. When I moved to Seattle, Verizon had recently abandoned its fiber network there, and my neighbors were so mad about it that they didn't trust any ISP. I tried to Google it, but Big G disappoints. Perhaps someone who lived in Seattle (especially the East Side) and remembers this can shed some light on it.
  - StudentStuff 8y ago
    Frontier bought said fiber network, I'd hardly call it abandoned. Additionally, none of that fiber was ran in Seattle proper, but rather in the far suburbs and ex-urbs of the north & eastside, starting at Lynnwood on the north end and staying north of Bellevue on the eastside. If anything, Verzion plowed a ton of money to run fiber to most homes, then saw poor uptake and a small telco they could dupe into taking on massive debt (Frontier). This has forced Frontier to offer good deals like 200Mbps/200Mbps for $40 a month. Centurylink in the city proper starts at $45 for 40Mbps/5Mbps via fiber, and Comcast is $30 plus fees for 60Mbps with a 1TB cap.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
yingw787 8y ago
I do think the significance of this is cities realizing there is no Disney prince riding in on a white horse to save them, and taking their own futures into their own hands. I'm hoping there's enough "anchor cities/regions", like Nashville/RTP/Kansas City, that have contingency plans and referendums ready for an infrastructure push at the local level if Fiber pulls out there, to prevent all white-collar talent from drifting towards the coasts and leave a complete vacuum everywhere else. It'll take a lot of organization, money, guile, and community trust to push through ISP brainwashing, but the cities that succeed will hopefully become the few "shining cities on a hill" that could save an entire state from economic irrelevance. Hopefully, when the pendulum swings the other way on urban centralization, they'll emerge as good alternatives to raise children, work remotely, and live a good life.
- Balvarez 8y ago
  Sadly I don't see Nashville creating a municipal ISP. Google fiber has been such a disappointment here. It's only available to a very small area.
  - JonathonW 8y ago
    Even if there were the (local) political will for municipal fiber in Nashville, it would get blocked at the state level-- too many state politicians in AT&T and Comcast's pockets. Same thing happened when EPB tried to expand their fiber network in the Chattanooga area.
- sesutton 8y ago
  I think people here in Raleigh would hardly notice if Google Fiber pulled out. They only ever offered it in a very small area and AT&T has been offering gigabit to to large parts of the area for several years now.
  - dwighttk 8y ago
    Yeah, in Durham, I've seen a lot of AT&T guys running fiber... I've only gotten a Google T-Shirt and seen an apparently empty office space downtown with a Google Fiber sign in the window.
toast0 8y ago
I suspect, now that they've started, AT&T is going to continue to build out their GPON fiber through most of their network. In a lot of areas, they do have real issues with the copper wire that's on the poles, and they've figured out how to make rewiring not too bad, at least where the residential wiring is above ground. They've got a significant advantage over Google here. Where they run DSL, they've got a customer base, and an installer base. They already have rights to the poles. They've already got contacts in the municipalities to add their new equipment boxes. They worked out how to order the fiber spools with connectors placed for the splitters at each pole. It's just a matter of buying and placing the equipment, upgrading their existing customers, and then winning customers from cable. For customers with underground copper wiring, it's a tougher sell. And there are clearly parts of the AT&T network that AT&T doesn't care to service; places that never got ADSL2 or VDSL (aka U-Verse) likely have pretty low customer numbers these days, and it seems like they'd probably not get upgraded either.
- scarface74 8y ago
  My parents lives in a smallish city - 77K population and shrinking. They’ve had AT&T DSL for years. AT&T hasn’t sold DSL for years there but for some reason keep it active for their few existing customers.
  - toast0 8y ago
    Yeah... those are exactly the kinds of places I don't expect AT&T to roll out fiber to. As long as the equipment keeps working, they'll probably continue to offer the service to existing customers. But they're not likely to fix line quality issues if they don't affect voice service; and they're not likely to stop voice service if you have a strong state regulator.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      They also have the cable internet. My parents wanted to keep both. She got cable internet one summer when I stayed with them and I needed to work remotely. Cable sucks about as badly. The speed and the price is about what you would expect (35/5) but the 300Gb data cap is ridiculous. I’m surprised that AT&T doesn’t just try to transistion their few remaining DSL customers to the cable company. I’m sure that the cable company would offer a bounty for them and keeping the internet backend must cost AT&T something.
rayiner 8y ago
People focus on Louisville because Google created a legal issue there by asking the city to pass a “one touch make ready” law that would allow Google’s contractors to move AT&T’s lines and equipment. I’m sure AT&T didn’t file that law suit out of principle, but it’s hard to blame AT&T for not going along with that plan. But what about all the other cities where there was no such law suits? What about cities like Baltimore, that offered to roll out the red carpet for Google, but which Google turned down? Did law suits in two cities actually halt Fiber expansion, or is that just a fig leaf for Google abandoning a business line that will never make the kind of money it demands of its business units?
- scarface74 8y ago
  Why rollout the red carpet for Google? AT&T is more than willing and able to expand its fiber gigabit internet. I hate to admit it, but we haven’t had any issues with AT&T gigabit ethernet service. It’s $70 a month with no additional fees, rock solid and unlike Comcast, we actually get great (900Mbps) upload speeds.
  - krageon 8y ago
    You're paying a lot of money for a gigabit connection and you don't get full speed. You are apparently happy about that, I'm afraid I don't follow.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      You mean 940Mbps up and down isn’t “full speed”? So did you sneak into almost any room in my gigabit wired house and do a speed test? I have a wired computer in my office and two 4K AppleTVs and they all report 900Mbps+ up and down. My son’s wired PS4 reports around 600Mbps. I also bet that AT&T won’t abandon my neighborhood and become uninterested like Google does for basically everything in three years.
      - heavenlyblue 8y ago
        Do they keep that speed 24/7?
debatem1 8y ago
I worked with the fiber team and I have to say this assessment is super accurate. We fought for every fucking mile, but Google is soft. It just doesn't have the pain tolerance for this fight.
- itronitron 8y ago
  Do you know why they didn't run fiber on the poles? Since they got special accommodations to do that it is unclear to me why they didn't use that route.
  - debatem1 8y ago
    Fiber had all kinds of institutional beliefs that were never revisited, and this one was acquired before my time. I have no idea why that decision was made, and honestly I can't say whether it was a good one or a bad one.
josteink 8y ago
> No", he said. "We'll sue them for every mile of fiber they lay down". When companies can sue other companies for providing them with actual competition, you know customers are getting so utterly screwed. I don’t even understand how this can be legal. So glad I don’t live in the US.
- acct1771 8y ago
  Because the politicians have sold legislation making it legal, and nobody stopped them.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    A lot of legislation that benefits large and somewhat conservative conglomerates is created by ALEC, one of the most evil and destructive groups in the US. If you want more middle men and want to reduce competition on companies like AT&T, they are your friend. They write 'model laws' and give them to clueless conservative legislators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...

anonymous5133 8y ago

It did have a positive impact though because AT&T and Verizon started actually building out their fiber networks more aggressively when they saw google entering the space. I live in Orange County, CA and AT&T out here started building out fiber when they saw Google building in Irvine, CA. AT&T knows that if they could just "rope off" google to a small area then their initial investment wouldn't really be worth it.

yingw787 8y ago
My concern is whether the ISPs will find expanding and maintaining their fiber infrastructure necessary if Google continues to pull out of the market, or whether it'll end up crushed like the EV-1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_EV1). Is there enough demand already generated in industries requiring significant network throughput (e.g. e-sports, industrial IoT, or elsewhere) that ISPs will shoot themselves in the foot if they collapse the market? I personally don't use enough data to justify a Gigabit connection. My friends who stream video and game online might. Hopefully the latter will pull us into the future, but I don't know for sure.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  > My concern is whether the ISPs will find expanding and maintaining their fiber infrastructure necessary if Google continues to pull out of the market. I can answer that: they won't. ISPs showed they have the capacity to expand and improve and bring better service to people when they're challenged to do so, but it is equally obvious that they give not two fucks about anywhere they have no competition, which is basically everywhere. The Google of the past that did cool stuff was our one ticket to disrupting this bullshit and getting it fixed, and Google the corporate big business machine of today killed that hope. And if you think it'll get better as other parts of the world continue to pass us by, all you have to do is look at our health care system to see how that works out.
reaperducer 8y ago
AT&T and Verizon started actually building out their fiber networks more aggressively when they saw google entering the space That doesn't seem to mean anything when all the company cares about is next quarter's stock performance. When I moved to Seattle, Verizon had recently abandoned its fiber network there, and my neighbors were so mad about it that they didn't trust any ISP. I tried to Google it, but Big G disappoints. Perhaps someone who lived in Seattle (especially the East Side) and remembers this can shed some light on it.
- StudentStuff 8y ago
  Frontier bought said fiber network, I'd hardly call it abandoned. Additionally, none of that fiber was ran in Seattle proper, but rather in the far suburbs and ex-urbs of the north & eastside, starting at Lynnwood on the north end and staying north of Bellevue on the eastside. If anything, Verzion plowed a ton of money to run fiber to most homes, then saw poor uptake and a small telco they could dupe into taking on massive debt (Frontier). This has forced Frontier to offer good deals like 200Mbps/200Mbps for $40 a month. Centurylink in the city proper starts at $45 for 40Mbps/5Mbps via fiber, and Comcast is $30 plus fees for 60Mbps with a 1TB cap.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

yingw787 8y ago

I do think the significance of this is cities realizing there is no Disney prince riding in on a white horse to save them, and taking their own futures into their own hands. I'm hoping there's enough "anchor cities/regions", like Nashville/RTP/Kansas City, that have contingency plans and referendums ready for an infrastructure push at the local level if Fiber pulls out there, to prevent all white-collar talent from drifting towards the coasts and leave a complete vacuum everywhere else. It'll take a lot of organization, money, guile, and community trust to push through ISP brainwashing, but the cities that succeed will hopefully become the few "shining cities on a hill" that could save an entire state from economic irrelevance. Hopefully, when the pendulum swings the other way on urban centralization, they'll emerge as good alternatives to raise children, work remotely, and live a good life.

Balvarez 8y ago
Sadly I don't see Nashville creating a municipal ISP. Google fiber has been such a disappointment here. It's only available to a very small area.
- JonathonW 8y ago
  Even if there were the (local) political will for municipal fiber in Nashville, it would get blocked at the state level-- too many state politicians in AT&T and Comcast's pockets. Same thing happened when EPB tried to expand their fiber network in the Chattanooga area.
sesutton 8y ago
I think people here in Raleigh would hardly notice if Google Fiber pulled out. They only ever offered it in a very small area and AT&T has been offering gigabit to to large parts of the area for several years now.
- dwighttk 8y ago
  Yeah, in Durham, I've seen a lot of AT&T guys running fiber... I've only gotten a Google T-Shirt and seen an apparently empty office space downtown with a Google Fiber sign in the window.

toast0 8y ago

I suspect, now that they've started, AT&T is going to continue to build out their GPON fiber through most of their network. In a lot of areas, they do have real issues with the copper wire that's on the poles, and they've figured out how to make rewiring not too bad, at least where the residential wiring is above ground. They've got a significant advantage over Google here. Where they run DSL, they've got a customer base, and an installer base. They already have rights to the poles. They've already got contacts in the municipalities to add their new equipment boxes. They worked out how to order the fiber spools with connectors placed for the splitters at each pole. It's just a matter of buying and placing the equipment, upgrading their existing customers, and then winning customers from cable. For customers with underground copper wiring, it's a tougher sell. And there are clearly parts of the AT&T network that AT&T doesn't care to service; places that never got ADSL2 or VDSL (aka U-Verse) likely have pretty low customer numbers these days, and it seems like they'd probably not get upgraded either.

scarface74 8y ago
My parents lives in a smallish city - 77K population and shrinking. They’ve had AT&T DSL for years. AT&T hasn’t sold DSL for years there but for some reason keep it active for their few existing customers.
- toast0 8y ago
  Yeah... those are exactly the kinds of places I don't expect AT&T to roll out fiber to. As long as the equipment keeps working, they'll probably continue to offer the service to existing customers. But they're not likely to fix line quality issues if they don't affect voice service; and they're not likely to stop voice service if you have a strong state regulator.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    They also have the cable internet. My parents wanted to keep both. She got cable internet one summer when I stayed with them and I needed to work remotely. Cable sucks about as badly. The speed and the price is about what you would expect (35/5) but the 300Gb data cap is ridiculous. I’m surprised that AT&T doesn’t just try to transistion their few remaining DSL customers to the cable company. I’m sure that the cable company would offer a bounty for them and keeping the internet backend must cost AT&T something.

rayiner 8y ago

People focus on Louisville because Google created a legal issue there by asking the city to pass a “one touch make ready” law that would allow Google’s contractors to move AT&T’s lines and equipment. I’m sure AT&T didn’t file that law suit out of principle, but it’s hard to blame AT&T for not going along with that plan. But what about all the other cities where there was no such law suits? What about cities like Baltimore, that offered to roll out the red carpet for Google, but which Google turned down? Did law suits in two cities actually halt Fiber expansion, or is that just a fig leaf for Google abandoning a business line that will never make the kind of money it demands of its business units?

scarface74 8y ago
Why rollout the red carpet for Google? AT&T is more than willing and able to expand its fiber gigabit internet. I hate to admit it, but we haven’t had any issues with AT&T gigabit ethernet service. It’s $70 a month with no additional fees, rock solid and unlike Comcast, we actually get great (900Mbps) upload speeds.
- krageon 8y ago
  You're paying a lot of money for a gigabit connection and you don't get full speed. You are apparently happy about that, I'm afraid I don't follow.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    You mean 940Mbps up and down isn’t “full speed”? So did you sneak into almost any room in my gigabit wired house and do a speed test? I have a wired computer in my office and two 4K AppleTVs and they all report 900Mbps+ up and down. My son’s wired PS4 reports around 600Mbps. I also bet that AT&T won’t abandon my neighborhood and become uninterested like Google does for basically everything in three years.
    - heavenlyblue 8y ago
      Do they keep that speed 24/7?

debatem1 8y ago

I worked with the fiber team and I have to say this assessment is super accurate. We fought for every fucking mile, but Google is soft. It just doesn't have the pain tolerance for this fight.

itronitron 8y ago
Do you know why they didn't run fiber on the poles? Since they got special accommodations to do that it is unclear to me why they didn't use that route.
- debatem1 8y ago
  Fiber had all kinds of institutional beliefs that were never revisited, and this one was acquired before my time. I have no idea why that decision was made, and honestly I can't say whether it was a good one or a bad one.

josteink 8y ago

> No", he said. "We'll sue them for every mile of fiber they lay down". When companies can sue other companies for providing them with actual competition, you know customers are getting so utterly screwed. I don’t even understand how this can be legal. So glad I don’t live in the US.

acct1771 8y ago
Because the politicians have sold legislation making it legal, and nobody stopped them.
- Latteland 8y ago
  A lot of legislation that benefits large and somewhat conservative conglomerates is created by ALEC, one of the most evil and destructive groups in the US. If you want more middle men and want to reduce competition on companies like AT&T, they are your friend. They write 'model laws' and give them to clueless conservative legislators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_...