4 ms·
I used to work on Google Fiber. It still makes me sad that it essentially has been abandoned (to the point that it almost certainly won't expand beyond the curr
by cletus 6y ago
I used to work on Google Fiber. It still makes me sad that it essentially has been abandoned (to the point that it almost certainly won't expand beyond the current cities).
Eric Schmidt liked to say that more revenue is the solution to all problems at a company (give or take). I think Fiber is proof that that isn't strictly true.
High capex projects like this demand fiscal discipline. They demand the ability to plan, cost and estimate how long things will take. Fiscal discipline just isn't in Google's DNA. This is unsurprising given how insanely profitable AdWords is.
I also describe something like running an ISP as a hyperlocal national business. Think of these issues:
- Can you string up lines on poles?
- If so, who owns the poles?
- How do you get permissions to string things up?
- How can competitors delay and hinder that process (believe me, they do)?
- Do you dig trenches?
- What's the soil composition? I can tell you that digging trenches doesn't work well when there's a ton of small limestone rocks in the soil.
- Do you employ some form of micro/nano-trenching?
- Etc
And all of these issues vary from region to region, city to city and even within a city. The entrenched players have become very good at navigating this process, impeding competitors and capturing regulators and legislators through exclusive agreements, lobbying, protective legislation and so forth.
How Congress, the DOJ and the FTC continues to completely ignore what a shit show broadband is in the US is beyond me.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago> more revenue is the solution to all problems at a company (give or take). I think Fiber is proof that that isn't strictly true. Revenue is still a solution, but you have to use it differently. People who just see all the technical problems their current ISP has assume that running an ISP is a technical problem; if you dig a little further (pun intended), it looks like an infrastructure problem, but that's not the root of it. Google Fiber is proof that running an ISP is fundamentally a political problem: how do you work around the many many things all trying to stop or kill you? (Hypothesis for one reason why ISPs are mostly terrible: the ones that exist were not optimized for good technology or good customer service, they were optimized for surviving politics, or built by companies who already had.) There was a broader spectrum of decent ISPs when modems were cutting-edge, because then you "just" need to run a dial-in service. There were at least some decent ISPs when DSL was cutting-edge, because in theory you can buy your service from anyone. But now that fiber is cutting-edge, there's no solution anymore, because fiber wasn't treated as infrastructure from day 1. There's a major reason why many "technology first" companies look into wireless and satellite to reach people. Not because those provide fundamentally better experiences or technologies, but because they can dodge the vast majority of local politics. In an ideal world, we'd have fiber to every home as infrastructure, connected to a local meet-me room, and you could contract any ISP you like to light up that fiber, with a tiny flat fee going to cover the infrastructure. And then we'd have a spectrum of ISPs again, from budget to full-service to tech-friendly.
- stainforth 6y ago- When there's a hurricane, who strings them back up?