Advancing our amazing bet
googlefiberblog.blogspot.com
googlefiberblog.blogspot.com
> And thanks to the hard work of everyone on the Access team, our business is solid: our subscriber base and revenue are growing quickly, and we expect that growth to continue.
"We're not yet profitable."
> We have refined our plan going forward to achieve these objectives. It entails us making changes to focus our business and product strategy. Importantly, the plan enhances our focus on new technology and deployment methods to make superfast Internet more abundant than it is today.
"Building fiber infrastructure in cities isn't a viable business model."
> For most of our “potential Fiber cities” — those where we’ve been in exploratory discussions — we’re going to pause our operations and offices while we refine our approaches.
"We're not going to build out any more cities using this approach."
> In this handful of cities that are still in an exploratory stage, and in certain related areas of our supporting operations, we’ll be reducing our employee base.
"We're winding down Google Fiber operations and putting it on life support."
> As for me personally, it’s been quite a journey over the past few years, taking a broad-based set of projects and initiatives and growing a focused business that is on a strong trajectory. And I’ve decided this is the right juncture to step aside from my CEO role.
"I'm getting out of this while it still looks good."
--
That's too bad. Google Fiber has put a lot of needed pressure on existing telecommunications mega-corps to improve their services. I really wanted to see it take off well enough to result in some major improvements to infrastructure around the country, but having worked for an ISP in a previous lifetime, I was skeptical that they'd be able to do it profitably. Last-mile fiber is expensive, expensive, expensive.
I'm sure Comcast and Time Warner and friends are all breathing a sigh of relief.
http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/20/google-skews-google-plus-s...
"This post on Google+ statistics is a billion* times better than any other post"
But what concerns me most is that Google is touting these meaningless statistics in the hopes that journalists will misunderstand them and report that Google+ is seeing rapid growth. The bottom line is, those 60 percents, 80 percents and 90 million registered users are just there to mask the fact that Google doesn’t want to tell us how many people are actually using Google+.
(Disclaimer: I helped lift the lid on actual G+ usage numbers.)
There are a few sources which track online social network usage, and my experience has been that G+ trends are down, sufficiently enough that they've fallen off the survey's entirely.
If you wan to trac total posting activity and trends per year, a Google search on "this site:plus.google.com" restricted by year should give a rough idea of how the relative quantity of English-lanugage posts are trending. I'm suggesting this as a nonsemantic, high-frequency, English word not likely to be biased strongly by annual trends. (Alternatively "upon" and "thus" are suggested by another person who's done similar research.)
My informal sense is that people are tending to defect from the system. I'm very hesitant to apply personal impressions though due to the enormous sampling bias implied.
Do people who communicate in spin-speak start to think that way on the inside too?
So when they write that stuff I imagine for an hour they switch to "CEO mode" and think in those concepts, write things down. Then they become themselves [+].
Also the best propaganda is propaganda that is internalized, people often brainwash themselves, because it makes things easier and is much more effective than pretending to speak one thing but think another.
[+] One can argue there is no such thing as "oneself" and we are all just a sequences of such personas or roles we play. But that's for a philosophical aside.
As for programming languages, I myself haven't done functional programming, but I'd imagine if I did, I would temporarily discard any OO programming knowledge I have, while busy coding something in a functional way. Because OO concepts are mostly irrelevant in that case, so why would you be thinking about them?
Like any context switch it takes me time to get back into the right mindset and process meaningfully.
"Linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis or Whorfianism, is a concept-paradigm in linguistics and cognitive science that holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers' cognition or world view."
A friend rose up through the ranks in a Telco to become a Director, and I genuinely think she believed the spin-speak was/is real.
She spent so many years of her life in meetings having it hammered into her head, then spent so many years hammering it into the heads of others, she actually thought it was real life.
Even when we were on vacation out camping away from the office, she would talk about the company using spin-speak. It was not possible to say "cut the crap, let's be frank". She was unaware there was any crap to cut.
The comments also load a lot faster than the article, usually :)
> As for me personally, it’s been quite a journey over the past few years, taking a broad-based set of projects and initiatives and growing a focused business that is on a strong trajectory. And I’ve decided this is the right juncture to step aside from my CEO role.
could mean "I've been fired because although we're spinning this as a market failure, I didn't have any viable plans to make it successful"
Usually if they are voluntarily stepping aside, they've got the next thing lined up.
Corporate-speak is a funny thing. I guess it is in a way a test or a filter for good SVPs and CEOs -- can they speak in this language (they better). Talking honestly and plainly would sound so harsh and negative probably.
https://plus.google.com/+PeterKasting/posts/TJwzGb5dt1W
"We have refined our plan!
"We're going to push technology, remain a leader, enhance our focus, and in general optimize our synergistic long-term 'outside the box' thinking for high-impact de-risking of our core vertical integrations for enhanced customer satisfaction.
"Oh, and practically speaking, all these positive things are happening because we're stopping investment and reducing our headcount, and our CEO is stepping aside."
The shit's not even selling on the inside.
Googlers are quite good at translating executive messages. I wish I could see the internal memes for this.
Not really. I read this as "Google no longer regards wireline providers as an existential threat as everybody is on mobile."
Google fiber was never about profit; it was about preventing Comcast et al. from cutting Google off from users
What they have done and will continue to do is to make it extraordinarily difficult to use other companies services that replace their own. For example, many ISPs today are now putting in bandwidth caps. They claim that they only affect the top 1% of users. This may be true today, but once 4k 60FPS content becomes the norm. those bandwidth caps will affect everyone.
On the second point, the fact is that while bandwidth caps will affect everyone, so will everyone streaming 4K video. That seems like a self defeating argument.
They were never worried in the first place. Their network architects are not idiots or anything; they know the economics of what Google was trying to do and they knew it wouldn't turn into anything threatening unless Google was willing to sink over $20 billion into it. Their attitude has been "worst case, we buy the infrastructure from Google when they lose patience with it".
Problem is, Google's business approach of coming to market with market-leading technology wasn't a novel approach here. Telecoms and cable companies have always worked closely with the innovators in their market -- and the limiting factor is often hard materials science, so Google didn't have the technology advantage they were used to.
> Last-mile fiber is expensive, expensive, expensive.
Last-mile anything is expensive. Maintenance is a bitch because all sorts of crap happens up on those poles -- wind, tree branches, ice, animals chewing the cables (squirrels will chew on almost anything), other vendors breaking your setup on accident... My guess is that Google didn't account for a lot of that crap and their maintenance costs were way higher than they expected.
Google architects aren't idiots either are they? What did Google hope to achieve? Or did they really go into this naively thinking it could be done? Serious question - I haven't followed this very closely.
Was this all a test bed to see what type of apps could be built with ubiquitous high speed access?
And sometimes that doesn't happen. What may have looked like a stodgy and ripe-for-disruption industry may actually be one with huge logistical challenges that force the industry to be stodgy and slow -- not the other way around. Still, it was a good bet for Google as part of a portfolio strategy: if you make 10 of these types of bets and only 2 of them pan out, you're still doing pretty well. It's not always obvious which industries are ripe for disruption and which ones are held back by market forces and product constraints.
I think they saw it as "Maybe we can find a new model that can disrupt the market, maybe not, but at the bare minimum we can force the ISPs to do better which benefits every other service we provide." They never provided Google Fiber with the kind of investment it would have taken to be successful on a large scale -- Verizon spends more money on its network in 3 days than Google Fiber spent in its entire existence -- so I don't think they seriously thought it would end up as a success. It's also a big CapEx investment in infrastructure, which has a pretty good salvage value if sold to other telecoms (so they'll likely get a good portion of their investment in GF back).
At the end of the day if they end up losing $20-30 million on the whole Fiber deal, they'd call it a success for raising the mindshare of what consumer Internet can and should be. It also won Google a lot of points in the court of public opinion against the major ISPs, so as a marketing / PR exercise it was likely a positive contribution to Google.
In this case, I think they were looking at Fiber more as a "model" for other overbuilders (similar to what they did with the Nexus phones). If Fiber was as successful as Google had hoped, they'd probably open source their operational model since it would effectively commoditize the last-mile access business and give Google more negotiating power with ISPs (without having to invest a ton of money). It was never a business they wanted to be in long-term.
Obviously, it didn't work out the way they had hoped. My guess is that subscribers didn't flock to them the way they had imagined. The Internet is a big echo chamber on this issue; and of course anyone commenting on an Internet forum is going to be technologically adept enough to care about Gigabit broadband. If their market analysis was done online, I can see how they might get false signals due to a sample set of "frequent Internet users" rather than "people who pay for Internet access". It's a subtle distinction, but actually quite relevant since the people who pay for but don't use Internet access often are the ones who make the whole model work.
When you get out into the real world where telecom service is measured in homes passed and take rates, you realize that those "vocal Internet users" make up maybe 10-20% of the market. ISPs make the bulk of their profits from Grandma Mabel who pays $70/mo for a triple play bundle and uses 100 MB of traffic a month. Households like Grandma Mabel account for probably half of an ISPs customers, and Grandma Mabel is not going to get any additional benefit from Gigabit Internet -- so she's not going to pay any more for it.
The big ISPs haven't offered gigabit residential service until recently because there was simply not enough demand for it to justify the expense. I think Google assumed that was just a negotiating position, and that there was a larger, unserved demand for high-speed residential connections. But either way, faster Internet is better for Google's core businesses (YouTube, search, etc.) When you own 70%+ of your market like Google does, you become more concerned with growing the market overall than with growing your share. And considering broadband infrastructure is a capital investment that holds its value pretty well, they honestly had very little to lose. But it's telling that they never invested more than a pittance into the Fiber project as a whole.
It should be titled "We are killing Google Fiber for any new cities".
Why do companies do this? Why sugar coat all of this and why make me think your actually going to expand only to let me down. It's terrible double speak and it does not help your cause, it just makes me dislike your company for two reasons now. One for canceling a service I was excited about and two for being, in my opinion, dishonest.
I wonder who will pick up the pieces?
Speeds have changed, but the fundamental issue is still there: It's impractical to have robust competition in the last mile, and nobody wants to wholesale last mile and make competition an option. Google fiber's early press releases included it, but stopped before they started building. The 1996 telecom act included it, but the FCC abandoned it in the last decade.
In the very least be honest with us.
If a company's project/product were failing and/or losing money, then investors would have priced the loss into the stock price long ago.
If a company announces that it is ending a money-losing effort, then investors will value the company more highly.
In theory, therefore, this announcement should raise the stock price. In practice, who knows.
That's a misconception. The investors had done expectations. They were either met or unmet. But unless there is insider info, a project going bad won't get priced before the news is known.
Stuck prices isn't some magical thing that knows all. It's simply an average of what everyone believes. Beliefs are sometimes wrong.
If the price were an average of beliefs, we would have people that believe it's worth more and people that think it's worth less. Those that think it is worth more would, logically, buy Google stock, and then the price would increase until we reached the price where people are somewhat on agreement that it isn't worth more. So, either there is a lack of funds to make the purchases, or the given price reflects the highest price someone is willing to pay for it, right?
Sure. But how far can you infer backwards from that?
I suppose there is a bias in the fact that not all long positions have corresponding shorts, but that seems like it would be pretty minor.
Actually, they can. As a simple example, they can agree on both price and volatility projections, but simply have different utility functions in terms of how much volatility they are willing to accept. Most simply, one of them might be 64 and about to retire while the other is 22 and just starting to invest in their retirement fund.
I expect that a majority of stock purchases/sales are in fact driven by such considerations and not fundamentals analysis...
But my point is that when you see that a stock is trading at a particular price, all that tells you is that one person has a utility function that values that amount of money higher than a unit of the stock, and one person has a utility function that is opposite it. There's no guarantee either of them have a utility function anywhere near your own. Which leads me to conclude that the net information content of a stock trade is, fundamentally, zero. And yet prediction markets work - go figure.
Yep.
> Which leads me to conclude that the net information content of a stock trade is, fundamentally, zero.
It might not be if you have a bunch of trades, averaging over lots of people with different utility functions. Maybe. Depending on how average your utility function is.
In practice people end up with heuristics like "100 - age" and diversification out of stocks or hedging of their stocks to deal with the imperfect matchup between their utility function and the averaged one.
It's hard not to think of the whole thing as a house of cards sometimes.
> And yet prediction markets work
Sometimes they do. As long as everyone involved has broadly the same utility function: that of maximizing their money above all else. If enough people, or more properly enough monetary units, come in with a weird utility function (e.g. valuing a particular prediction more than their money), you get prediction market failures.
Not necessarily--often, money-losing operations are valued by investors because of their potential to be profitable in the future.
Also, the market is likely more efficient with large companies like Google, Apple et al., but short-term price movements still aren't always rational.
Can someone with knowledge of the industry explain to me what the biggest hurdles were for Fiber and what if any mistakes Google made in it's rollout? Am I correct in assuming telco interference or hostility played a part? What could Google have done differently for Fiber to be profitable, or is this simply not an industry that you can hope to be profitable in unless you look 20-30 years out?
Basically I'm curious to learn whether this is a result of mistakes on Google's part, Google just not having the long term wherewithal for the rollout, or market/regulatory forces making such a project impossible at this time?
So Google ends up spending a bunch of money while not being able to capitalize on it.
That doesn't prove anything, but their prices certainly are eerily competitive with Google's in any market that Google entered, while they're... terrible everywhere else.
Most people don't appreciate how long a Google Fiber roll-out takes. I waited nine months to be connected and I was lucky. My parents had to wait two years. Google offered very little visibility into when the install would take place. (We've been waiting two years now for a hookup at my small business, with no end in sight and no way to get an estimate from Google.)
These realities gave Comcast a giant head start to perform customer retention jujitsu. It basically took a steely determination (or an implacable hatred of Comcast) to resist the deals being offered in all the calls, letters, and emails. You could accept their deal -- and be enjoying 12x faster internet within a week -- or hold out for Google Fiber at some undetermined future point.
So many folks were taking the bait that Comcast brought a great many contractors in from out of state to handle the volume of upgrade service calls. For months, nearly every room at a Residence Inn near my home was occupied by out-of-town Comcast crews. Every space in the parking lot was filled with a Comcast van at night (hilariously, each van had its orange cone deployed in front as per company requirements).
When I finally was able to contact Comcast to cancel after our Google installation, the rep had a special script for Provo customers. It centered around questions of whether we were actually achieving gigabit speeds in real-world situations. Though I still proceeded to cancel their service, it was a pretty devastating critique as no one connecting over wifi (which was almost everyone) could even achieve the 250 Mbps speeds Comcast was offering, to say nothing of the gigabit speeds Google had sold you.
I'm happy with Google Fiber overall and I certainly don't miss Comcast, but they wound up being a more capable competitor than I'd ever have suspected possible.
We signed up for Time Warner and the rep expressed surprise that we wanted them just for Internet, since Google Fiber is a thing, until we explained the situation. That should give you some idea of how it affected them.
Prices have dropped for other providers, and speeds have gone up, though they're still worse than Google Fiber. It's been great. I'm really bummed that this may mean they won't ever hook our street up, or at least that it'll be delayed until someone else takes over their infrastructure and starts expanding again.
I would add legally and illegally. Also, 'get away with' means everything from strong arming, being sneaky, flat out lies, bribing, etc.
This is why the pure libertarian ideas about a completely free market just don't work for some services. It is a complete waste of human and material capital to run more than two last-mile networks (the second for redundancy and you could argue that is also a waste). When you've got more than 4-5 you simply can't ever make a return on investment.
The physical last mile should be separated from the rest of the business and managed by a public benefit or non-profit. It works just fine for electricity choice in states like Texas. We already know the physical fiber can carry 100GB, probably a lot more. The infrastructure would be suitable for at least the next 100 years.
Leave ONT and central office equipment up to individual vendors who want to offer service, which gives them the maximum ability to compete on provisioning, backhaul, customer service, and features.
If you want to object that it is government regulation ruining the free market... well I have news for you: a completely free market has never existed. Ever. In the history of the world. People use social connections, money, and power to stifle competitors. They've been finding creative ways to do that for thousands of years. To pretend that a limited and weak government will be able to exert any control over huge multinational corporations is laughable. Even Uber and AirBnB had to use social pressure to force through changes.
If the current environment is preventing any and all business from flourishing, in this specific case Google Fiber, this is arguably even more wasteful. There is nothing getting done instead of something getting done. The political & regulatory maneuvering probably costs nearly as much for Google Fiber would as building out more redundant infrastructure. Plus, their business model may have required a large amount of users to really make the business worthwhile, so they wind up in this situation where they can't expand fast enough.
The only way they can lose is if they're forbidden from entering the market at all, which unfortunately is what happened with Fiber. They're still betting big on the space with Loon, Fi, and Webpass, though.
The technology was awesome (1G Internet and HDTV!), the software all worked great, and the economics of hiring contractors to lay the fiber itself actually worked out. The big problem was regulatory capture.
With Uber & AirBnB's success in hindsight, I'd say that the way to crack the ISP business is to provide your customers with the tools to break the law en masse. For example, you could imagine an ISP startup that basically says "Here's a box, a wire, and a map of other customers' locations. Plug into their jack, and if you can convince others to plug into yours, we'll give you a discount on your monthly bill based on how many you sign up." But Google in general is not willing to break laws - they'll go right up to the boundary of what the law allows, but if a regulatory agency says "No, you can't do that", they won't do it rather than fight the agency.
Indeed, Fiber is being phased out in favor of Google's acquisition of WebPass, which does basically exactly that but with wireless instead of fiber. WebPass only requires the building owner's consent, and leaves the city out of it.
This leads me to another question that maybe you or someone else can answer, although I understand if you can't for various reasons. There seems to be a ton of very smart people working at Google and I can't imagine that they would go about trying to set up their own ISP without taking into account the huge pushback they would get from existing telcos, so I would imagine they had plans to deal with all of this. Did Google underestimate the amount of pushback they would receive, did they feel they could effectively lobby for changes which turned out to be unsuccessful? Or has something else changed in the proceeding years since Fiber originally rolled out that makes Google think it is no longer worth the fight?
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Testi...
(From Apr 2011, over a year before Google Fiber actually launched.)
Also, Google got very preferential treatment when it came to pole access in Kansas City: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100008723963904438626045780306... ("The cities are discounting other services, as well. For the right to attach its cables to city utility poles, Google is paying Kansas City, Kan., only $10 per pole per year—compared with the $18.95 Time Warner Cable pays. Both cities have also waived permit and inspection fees for Google.")
There are many other examples of rent-seeking. One of the most common ways of using government to eliminate competition is what is referred to as "regulatory capture." This is the case where regulators end up acting in ways that benefit the industries that they regulate. Many government agencies are generally created with the high-minded notion of protecting the public from rapacious behavior of corporations. However, these corporations can use the government agencies to protect themselves from competition, most frequently by encouraging a set of regulations that makes it very difficult for newcomers to enter an industry. They use the creation of regulations as a barrier to entry.
Why is that depressing? Do you feel any company should be allowed to build a phone line above your street, instead of being a regulated monopoly?
This is what happens when you do that:
http://io9.gizmodo.com/photos-from-the-days-when-thousands-o...
Aboveground cables are easier to repair and much less expensive to string up over thousands of miles.
Lines exposed to the elements wear faster than buried lines and are subject to more outages due to weather and accidents.
It's just that in the USA towns and cities are either too disorganized or too cheap to invest properly in infrastructure. Burying lines seems like such a small thing until you realize how ugly lines strung everywhere are. It makes me feel like I am coming home to a third world country sometimes.
I suspect the major difference is that the power and phone companies in the little town are customer-owned coops while the utilities in my metro area are huge conglomerates.
How would that break any laws? It's essentially doing a commercial mesh-net of sorts, like many are already doing in Europe and elsewhere.
If instead, they gave you a box and a map - and that box supported wifi - then a mesh network or something would be feasible. Wired could be done by running the wires along the fence or trenching inside the property line (neighbor to neighbor - if your neighbor is willing).
Otherwise, point-to-point mesh wifi (or maybe even free-space optical - like the Ronja system).
Not sure where any of that would be illegal as long as no other carrier's TOS was infringed or such...
Look, there are reasons why cities have permitting processes. Those reasons sometimes do include regulatory capture, etc., but generally they have to do with making it possible for large numbers of people to make productive and stable use of shared resources and infrastructure in an organized manner. I'll be the first one to agree that some permitting processes in some areas are imperfect, but that's not a reason to ignore them whole-hog.
I believe—depending on the municipality—if you knowingly and explicitly share internet with others you open yourself up to the sorts of regulation ISPs have to deal with.
But does Google really want to be the one left holding the hot potato in situation like this? Does Google have any success/relevant experience in running a business like a residential ISP? Even established telcos like Verizon can't grow wireline very much.
You mention AirBnB and Uber as successes but those legal battles aren't over yet, with examples such as Austin/Uber and NY/AirBnB just recently. Also I think the value provided by Uber/AirBnB is much larger then Google fiber, which is to serve like 6 US cities with marginally faster internet that most websites can't even take advantage of.
Also I find your statement "they'll go right up to the boundary of what the law allows" as disingenuously painting Google as helpless & innocent. Google has gone to court for a variety of things they felt were worth it for their business 1) Anti-poaching 2) Google books scanning 3) Youtube copyright 4) Oracle Java
Whether or not you believe they were in the right or the wrong, they are a massive multinational corporation who are capable of arguing for their business interests in court. Whether Fiber was ever important enough for Google as a long term real business unit is what I question. They put 4.5 billion on the line for spectrum open access, I don't see the same time of commitment applied to Fiber at all.
Basically what I'm asking what was the successful longterm outcome for fiber if not a quiet drawdown like this? For Google to really be a large US ISP?
* Buildout costs
Google was using the same contracts as everyone else for the fiber infrastructure install. The guys running the trenchers and directional drills where the same guys that do it for AT&T, Time Warner, Comcast, whomever. Google built at such a pace they certainly were not getting any deals, and very likely significantly increased the costs due to the massive amount of work that was being generated vs. available contractors. Capex cost is everything and they were just blindly writing checks to other people to get it done.
Google was innovative in their "fiberhood" signup process where they heavily marketed to their targeted expansion areas to encourage a certain take rate before build out. I suspect this saved them some money (or rather allowed their CapEx to be spread over more subs), but after that initial signup, I'm not sure there were any efforts to promote further subs. (Actually I'm not even sure people could subscribe after the initial buildout).
There was no Google magic about the fiber installs. It is stringing fiber along poles or burying conduit and running fiber through it. If there was some breakthrough that was able to be made here or technology which gave them an advantage on the CapEx required, it would have been huge boon. There wasn't.
* Access or cost of access to AT&T/KCPL utility poles
Unsurprisingly those that owned some of the utility poles here (AT&T and KCPL) were more than happy to smile while screwing Google's fiber effort. The rates and access rules for these things are set at the Federal level and lobbying by telcos/utilities is fierce. Google's blank regulatory check from the cities was worthless on this front (except for parts of KCK where the local government owned some poles). The cost and regulatory burden for utility pole access is drafted to simply make use impossible or uneconomic.
* A gradual mindset transition to a "Wireless is easier than all this ditch-digging" mindset.
Google has been doing a lot of work with licensed spectrum. Maybe they ran the numbers and figure it is cheaper to buy some spectrum and see if they can work some wireless magic (either technology or special FCC regulation perks) and make it their special sauce. I don't think I'm betting on that particular horse.
Regarding utility pole access being handled at the Federal level, is there any lobbying campaign at the national level to rewrite the rules governing access to make the situation less skewed towards incumbent telcos? In my area here in LA county, it seems most utility poles are on public right-of-ways, I would think it would make a lot of sense to have those poles available for any company that wants to compete to offer services. Is there any meaningful reason this isn't done aside from cronyism on the part of the telcos?
That is the law! https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/224
> A utility shall provide a cable television system or any telecommunications carrier with nondiscriminatory access to any pole, duct, conduit, or right-of-way owned or controlled by it.
There was some dispute as to whether Google Fiber counted as a "telecommunications carrier" for purposes of Section 224, but that is probably mooted now that the FCC has determined broadband providers are all "telecommunications carriers" subject to Title II.
So why are you betting against it ?
Additionally, as usage of a particular endpoint increases, capacity for each individual user decreases proportionally.
There was an article some days ago about how we used to get these amazing LTE speeds, but now they are horribly congested and feel like low-grade DSL.
The existing telecom companies definitely used legal tactics to discourage fiber rollout. But nobody manages to deploy telecom infrastructure without dealing with lots of lawsuits. AT&T might have complained about Google moving its fibers on AT&T polls, but at any given time it's facing lawsuits over stuff like fiber cabinet siting.
Even with those lawsuits, Google got a much better deal on the regulatory front than incumbent companies. Every Fiber city granted fast-track permitting, and declined to impose build-out requirements. That's huge. Ordinarily, cities force ISPs to build out to all neighborhoods without regard for probable subscribership. Google totally bypassed that with its "Fiberhood" model, where it built out to neighborhoods with demonstrated interest. Nobody else in the industry gets that kind of preferential treatment. Google got it because of the huge amount of goodwill Google has as a brand.
I tend to be somewhat skeptical of large government programs, although not fanatically so, and even to me this situation seems like it could be much better handled if all, or much of the infrastructure, at least in terms of things like utility poles, would be municipal owned and then leased out to service providers. I wouldn't necessarily want the government running the actual service but if they owned the physical infrastructure and leased it out I feel like we might actually have much more private competition.
Does anyone know how utility pole ownership by telcos or power companies came about in the US? It seems like some are municipal owned while others are entirely privately owned.
Also, when people talk about municipal fiber in the US are they mostly talking about municipalities owning both the infrastructure as well as being the ISP? Are there examples of private/public partnerships were the gov owns the infrastructure but the service is provided by private industry?
Regarding your last point about Google getting preferential treatment, I am not at all disputing this, but I believe even Google had to provide fiber to certain municipal or civic organizations. I could be misremembering that though.
Edit: Apologies if some of my questions are unduly broad in scope.
Re: preferential treatment, Google definitely didn't get away scott free. Building an ISP in any municipality means agreeing to a grab bag of concessions. Build out requirements tend to be the most expensive. Every house you pass that doesn't subscribe means you need to recover $500-1000 from a house that does subscribe. But any municipal cable franchise will be full of stuff like requirements to build fiber to government facilities and schools, payments to support public access TV, etc. Google did get a better deal, though. For example, in KC, it ultimately ended up paying half the pole rent Time Warner does.
Also, doesn't the FCC have the power in certain states to regulate pole attachment rates?
So, where I live, on one side of the street, the electric company owns the poles, on the other side of the street, the phone company owns the poles. The franchise agreement does not have anything about payments to support public access TV, nor anything PEG related.
In a neighboring municipality, the municipality owns the the electric company and thus the poles.
I believe some of the original AT&T telegraph poles were placed by the Union army after the Civil War?
Like, it took me a while to realize that what they were saying is "hey, this isn't working, we need to cut expenses. Also, I quit."
So, good job framing this about investing in R&D. Any clues as to why they're actually doing this? Competition, regulation, ???
But frankly, as this is a surprise, yet one more half-assed Google project that gets killed off within a few years of starting. Add it to the pile.
And to Google PR people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvp97SMZc6M
...just planting seeds...
can be the big company version of
It turns out that delivering gigabit fiber to the home, though a remarkable technical achievement, isn't transformative in the way that all of us living here assumed it would be.
It turns out that almost none of the internet resources commonly consumed in the home are even remotely provisioned for gigabit residential connections. ESPN.com loads about as quickly as it always did. Your Netflix streams don't look any different (the absence of buffering, while nice, is a pretty subtle thing). Even Google services, which you'd expect to be optimized for Fiber subscribers, are no faster than before. Downloads from Google Drive at my home are just as pokey as they are on my Comcast connection at the office.
A few things are amazing (Apple downloads are so fast you feel like you must be on the company LAN in Cupertino) and, if you're the rare person who can make use of it, the fact that Google Fiber also provides 1 Gbps UPSTREAM... well, words don't exist to express what that's like.
But those are the exceptions. And those exceptions are only achievable by the rare person who actually wired the house with Ethernet. Oh, and it turns out that you've also got to upgrade all of your NICs (every technically-inclined person in the city quickly discovered that Ethernet controllers in consumer PC's can't come close to pushing gigabit Ethernet, regardless of what's printed on the box).
If you're on wifi, forget it, especially if you're one of the vast majority connecting solely via the underpowered 802.11n wifi router that Google provided.
It was a source of enormous community pride when Google made the announcement. (And a source of validation for the politicians who years earlier had pushed through the municipal fiber network that Google purchased for a dollar.) Everyone was so excited to sign up, and it was great to celebrate with your neighbors as the blue and white Google Fiber vans slowly moved up your street.
But now, a couple of years in, no one really talks about it anymore. It's definitely nice. The Google folks are great to deal with if you ever have an issue (which, in any case, is exceedingly rare). The pricing is straightforward and easy to understand. But, to your average household here in Provo, on an average evening doing average things on the Internet, it just doesn't seem very different than what we had before.
Really? I have a chromebox (CPU is Haswell Celeron 2955U, NIC is Realtek 8168), running Windows and can hit about 950M down/833M up on dslreports speedtest when my ATT fiber is having a good day. I thought Realtek nics were considered poor, but getting to 95% of theoretical over the internet seems pretty ok to me. In a browser and going through my NAT box, plus ATT's mostly useless residential gateway.
What are good examples of junky gigabit nics that don't cut it?
This is well outside my area of expertise, but I think it may have been as much a chipset or bus issue as anything (e.g. other limitations presented by the motherboard), as all the issues I've observed or heard about have been with onboard NICs. Even the cheapest add-on cards performed loads better...
Personally, I was super excited to have the service, was literally like the first to sign up, immediately made use of it with five webcams pushing 1080p to the cloud, running dokku for my company projects staging/qa environments, multiple 4k TVs, etc.
However, I was shocked that so many of my neighbors reactions were like "meh." And the neighborhood consists of mostly tech, doctors, small biz owners or some combo thereof...and everyone knows everything going on (whole neighborhood on FB groups together), so it certainly wasn't a market education thing.
Most were simply like, "I don't need that much bandwidth," and were perfectly content with getting a lower tier package at 10-30% of the bandwidth for half the cost.
I think it's going to take a bit more time before 4k and IoT drive the demand...that much bandwidth still does not have the "killer app" for the typical consumer apparently.
For most of our “potential Fiber cities” — those where we’ve been in exploratory discussions — we’re going to pause our operations and offices while we refine our approaches
I don't have current cloud app deployment needs -- and until this year, the Google "cloud" seemed to be kind of marginal, anyway, as an impression based upon "osmosis" from various articles and commenting.
I've tried to stick it out with Android, but support and consistency.
Google pushes these projects for a while, to meet or explore its own objectives.
But I don't count on them, anymore.
As an individual consumer, I'm just the product.
P.S. Removing the + operator from search. Still missing it.
P.P.S. Yes, the nature of this comment is a bit rhetorical. But in a serious sense. The occasional comment on HN is the only way I feel I have any maybe effective feedback -- at least, to some individuals at Google who happen by.
Although, after months and months and months, including repeatedly using the error reporting feature within Android to report instances... And finally, shortly after a comment about the behavior on HN, the crashing of the Google Camera app upon "zoom out" on my Nexus 5x, appears to finally be fixed.
In this way you have an entity who is solely focused on building and managing the infrastructure, which is able to make investments that single ISPs would not be able to do (while trying to still be profitable). I have no data but I am also quite sure that those companies are receiving funds from both the Government and the EU.
Anyway, they're building the digital highways that we miss and the result for the consumers is not bad: here in Milan, as an example, multiple operators started offering 1 Gb/s FTTH connections for 20 EUR/month.
Such fees are only possible if you do not have to try to be profitable while having to absorb the hit from deploying your own infrastructure.
Although I have to say these new platforms are kind of awesome. The city I live in has a city-wide (and beyond) network where you can choose from 1-1000 Mbps service from several ISPs. And it has "local peering" which means if you send data to/from your neighbor, no matter which ISP they have, the data will only hit your local router in the basement/close by. No need to send data via the internet, or even an IX. In practice though, that performance is not much different from just sending the data on a much longer roundtrip, which makes me sad.
> Google winds down its fiber operations
Google Fiber, like Android, is a moonshot to keep their line of business alive. Failure doesn't mean that Google doesn't profit off a new line of business. Failure means that Google can be shut down.
Google lives off open internet. Their profit is primarily off:
1. Android 2. Search 3. AdSense, AdWords.
A closed internet means that 2 out of 3 is dead. All they have in Android.
If AT&T and Cable monopolize the internet (which they are close to doing) without strong net-neutrality laws, they can (and will) slowly migrate to the internet being limited to the top 100 sites (curated by them).
In such an internet, search and AdWords/AdSense is useless.
>In such an internet, search and AdWords/AdSense is useless.
That doesn't make any sense. Hits to 25 KB Wordpress blogs are trivial for ISPs to serve, nor is there usually any practical or economical way to bill the owners for serving them. It would cost many orders of magnitude more to create a blacklist and/or to track down and attempt to collect payment from the owners than just to continue serving them as before. It's the 25 GB 4K 6-hour Netflix binge-watching sessions they'd want to be subject to throttling/charges.
Whether that's a good thing for the consumer is debatable — it probably isn't — but there's no reason for fearmongering. Many countries, including the US for most of the past several decades, have no or have not had "strong net-neutrality laws" without "migrat[ing] to the internet being limited to the top 100 sites (curated by [ISPs])."
Or you create a white-list (which is slowly being made). Your average Wordpress site counts against data. Want it to be "free"? Pay AT&T some money? Can't because it's too complicated for anyone but CNN? Too bad.
Oh, you only get 200 MB per month? Not a big deal, because CNN/BBC/YouTube pay money not to be counted against data limits.
We didn't have this for decades. Really, it started about a decade ago when dial-up died.
Under dialup, one could switch providers on a dime, so you could switch from anyone pulling such shenanigans.
The whole town was pissed. We were excited for Google Fiber and then had it taken away from us when they had previously said Apex would be included.
Fast forward another few months and we heard rumblings that AT&T might be debuting their GigaPower fiber service in Apex. Soon after, AT&T verified this rumor then started running fiber lines all over. My neighborhood (and others in Apex near me) all got gigabit fiber for under $100/mo, AND it turns out Google dragged their feet with the surrounding suburbs and they didn't get Google Fiber till months later, but by then everyone had just signed up for AT&T GigaPower and forgot all about Google.
But, if they ever come, I'll probably buy in, because I can't believe that AT&T is saying things like this- do they actually understand that PR 101 is you don't gloat?: http://www.attpublicpolicy.com/fcc/broadband-investmentnot-f...
For me this sounds like somebody just made a high-level decision that this thing is no longer important for Google's mission. As we have seen, they have been trying quite hard to focus on fewer things. It's not necessarily even about money. Each individual business requires some attention from the (top) management and they are competing on talented people inside the company.
The one thing they did right, imo, were t-shirts. Compared to billboards, TV commercials, etc. a well-designed t-shirt lasts a really long time and gets more attention.
That said, the biggest advantage that fiber seems to have in those countries is that the government is pushing for it. In China for instance, I have heard that all new construction must have fiber available. It is possible to order 200Mbps down and 20Mbps up fiber service in Shanghai even in old constructions. I have only seen the situation in Shanghai firsthand, so I cannot comment much on South Korea or Japan. However, I do know that they deployed EPON technology and are migrating toward 10G-EPON. 10G-EPON is superior to the GPON that we use in the US:
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30519466-PON-EPON-or-GPON-o...
"Today, effective immediately, I, Gavin Belson, founder and CEO of Hooli, am forced to officially say goodbye to the entire Nucleus division. All Nucleus personnel will be given proper notice and terminated. But make no mistake. Though they're the ones leaving, it is I who must remain and bear the heavy burden of their failure."
http://www.timesunion.com/business/article/Verizon-says-FiOS...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/technology/google-curbs-ex...
That would still be very disruptive.
It would also be great if some high speed / high bandwidth wireless tech took off to eliminate laying fiber altogether. Like that Japanese terahertz 5G 100Gbps.
Now if you do what webpass did in sf, you'd avoid the cost of laying fiber to those 5 customers, but still provide them internet connections albeit at a lower speed.
I think google found out, why would you lay fiber to the home. And is re-thinking their plans.
You might as well spend a bit more on equipment and run 1G, so you you're competitive with what the incumbents will upgrade to next.
Edit to add: The bandwidth out to the internet from the wherever the access goes to really isn't a major cost factor. Access from a decent exchange point isn't that expensive, and you can oversubscribe by a significant factor.
I'm certain that Google Fiber is what spurred At&T to offer Gigapower fiber in Miami though. So thanks for that.
Background: With Google's strong ties to the Obama administration, the exceptionally high likelihood of a Clinton administration (also with strong Google ties), another item today of the resignation of the (now former) head of the US Copyright Office under the Library of Congress (seen as a loss by old-guard copyright interests, especially Hollywood, the RIAA/MPAA, and possibly book publishers -- which would also include Apple and Amazon among thsoe affected), a current and sustained (for at least 4, and quite probably 8 years) favourable regulatory inclination to Google's goals of widespread, high-speed service might be expected. This would serve Google's general interests (serving more ads, surveilling more data, running high-speed and omnipresent services such as Google Now), and as noted, put several of Google's major competitors back on their heels (though I'm not sure how big books are for Amazon any more).
Another theory is that Google have worked out a fiber-to-wireless concept which removes much of the need for last-mile connectivity.
Again: no source other than my own fevered brain.
Interesting times. We seem to have reached a point of peak everything. Almost nothing that is very technological has much more growth left.
All growth seems to come from not all that technologically amazing things: uber, snapchat, airbnb.
I have to admit, it's weird that they came here with such a big hoorah and now they're almost nowhere to be found.
247 reviews$$$$
3605 El Camino Real
Santa Clara, CA 95051
Alphabet/Google needs to work on finishing an actual business that they start and scaling faster. Search, email, maps are mobile are pretty good, but the million other areas lack business drive, passion, hustle and focus, competing in areas with much deeper pockets (ATT+DirecTV+Time Warner+..., Verizon+AOL+Yahoo+XO+..., Level3, ...)
Thanks for almost nothing, Google.
Boom, headshot. There it is, google fiber will be closed down soon.