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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

> Yeah, google jumped in way over their head with fiber. They didn't know what they were getting into.

They should have known it's a very long term investment. Why were they surprised that it takes time to build up the network? I'm more upset about their reaction, than about the fact that they didn't plan it better. They can make it all successful, but it's long term. Looks like they are affected by short term investors more now.

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That has been a problem for them for some time. How many projects have they killed they folks relied on? Some engineers inside create an app or service and then they must move on internally and the app or service suffers from neglect for years then they kill it. You can't count on them to finish anything.

They are bound to be replaced. They have nothing but ad revenue.

They tried is as a test balloon and, with the new data they got, saw that they can't get the numbers to where they would need to be to be profitable.

The alternative here isn't that they would run something of that size indefinitely, knowing that it will lose them money. It's Google behaving like every single other company currently in existence: deciding up front that it's too risky and not even trying.

At least it created some nice data showing how the legacy ISPs react to competition. Just in case anyone ever needs to prove that this market isn't working.

Legacy ISPs managed it somehow? So I don't see why Google can't. Especially since technology has improved (microtrenching and etc.). If anyone, Google has enough money to pull it off and seriously compete with incumbents.

These "legacy ISPs" have, since they first got started and became entrenched, purchased enough legislation to make it effectively impossible for any real competition to take root. Google Fiber's failure was not a technological failure, it was a political failure.

So, Google could spend the money to purge that political garbage. They kind of tried, with pushing "one touch make ready" policy. The stated goal of GF was to increase competition in ISP market. So far their service was while positive, far from sufficient.

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