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> I don't get it. It's a product the whole country wants, rolled out to only 25 cities and they're done growing? Can anyone make a case for why this isn't a hor
by chimeracoder 3y ago
> I don't get it. It's a product the whole country wants, rolled out to only 25 cities and they're done growing? Can anyone make a case for why this isn't a horrible business decision (if true)?
The regulatory and logistical challenges to rolling out in new cities vary extremely widely, and this isn't their core business or core competency. Compare that to telcos, who focus exclusively on these problems, and it's relatively expensive for Google to compete in this area compared to telcos.
Of course, that's assuming telcos are investing at all (which they aren't, at least not when Google or municipalities aren't threatening them with competition), so this argument isn't automatically categorically correct. But that's the gist of it, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Selfishly, I want Google to expand Google Fiber, but I would actually rather have municipalities force existing telcos to deliver on the investments that they've already paid for (with taxpayer money, in many cases). At the end of the day, that's the real problem. Google Fiber is just a stopgap.