Google Fiber to pay nearly $4M to Louisville in exit deal
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Opened the next bill but instead of seeing a $15 drop it was the same. Thought it was an error but no, they just unilaterally raised prices on a bunch of other services.
What can I do? There's no other option for me.
I get there are Byzantine local and state regulations that make last-mile internet unprofitable or a low-margin, commodity business, which is presumably why Ruth Porat and other bean counters at Google killed this effort. But improving America's internet is a social good that Google could invest its massive profits into; instead leadership would prefer to build repression-enabling tools to compete in China.
Which is to say, Microsoft no longer appears to want to compete with anyone in any market where there is a leading competitor that isn't them.
Google on the other hand abandons things that lots of people like and would love to keep using.
Putting aside the claim that Windows Phone was a superior operating system...Windows Phone PEAKED at 3% of market, that was prior to spending $7 billion on Nokia in a desperate attempt to keep going. They dropped to 0.1% of the market at the beginning of the 2017 when they terminated it. It's ludicrous to suggest they could rebound from that. As for superior OS, they shipped Windows Phone 7 in 2010 without the ability to cut and paste text.
https://www.recode.net/2017/7/17/15984222/microsoft-windows-...
From the manager of Windows Phone, paying and even writing the apps for companies wasn't enough for them to want a Windows Phone app...
>“We have tried VERY HARD to incent app devs. Paid money. wrote apps 4 them.. but volume of users is too low for most companies to invest,”
I wouldn't say it had fallen to 0.1% of the market on it's own, Microsoft literally just stopped investing in it for years before it was officially killed. There's dozens of unreleased prototypes and for a while Microsoft just didn't provide ANY hardware options. Much like the death of the keyboard slider form factor on Android, the lack of sales came from consumers having no options to buy than not wanting the product.
Your attempt to criticize Windows Mobile by referring to it's state in 2010, not 2019, mostly renders it an irrelevant argument. (Though Microsoft has regularly launched things too little, too late, I would agree.) Windows 10 Mobile is still superior today to the latest release of Android, and receives security updates faster and more regularly. The next version of Android is planning to introduce features Windows Mobile has supported since launch.
>Much like the death of the keyboard slider form factor on Android, the lack of sales came from consumers having no options to buy than not wanting the product.
I think it is very safe to say that no one wanted a Windows Phone, despite the backing of MSFT and tens of billions of dollars spent.
The platform didn't fail for lack of fans or for lack of merits, it failed as much because hardware is a tricksy game and Android played that game better and didn't anger the US Telecoms while doing it. (Microsoft had the US Telecoms actively avoiding trying to sell Windows phones, which certainly didn't help.)
Glad it isn't my city. Two years of eye sores and random road construction to patch up neighborhood streets sounds like a real pain, to say the least.
This is an incorrect assumption.
This is only Google making the City of Louisville whole for damage to their road infrastructure.
Just got another one to add to the list.
"We would need to essentially rebuild our entire network in Louisville to provide the great service that Google Fiber is known for, and that's just not the right business decision for us."
That's exactly what the shareholders want to hear. Capitalism's myopic focus on "maximizing shareholder returns" will usually choose the cheaper option over doing the Right Thing.
If they manage to get an initial positive result and have some publicity, then the project is basically done. No one has interest in it anymore.
WISPs should be allowed access to the fiber network instead of removing it.
That's why Google is leaving: They don't want to redeploy the entire network from scratch.
But surely the lead ins to the houses (the fibre in people's front yards) is useful still? That is, after all, the costliest part of a fibre rollout.
I don't think the "from scratch" part really matters here when they were a percent or two done at most, and they have to pay to fix the roads anyway.
It's more that they don't want to deploy a network at all.
In return, Google did not use said pole attachment rights, damaged roads and left broken infrastructure & promises.
[1] AT&T did not challenge Google’s right to use the utility poles, only the law allowing Google contractors to relocate AT&T’s equipment and wires in the process. These laws are probably a good idea on the whole, but given the shoddy work Google’s contractors evidently did with the city’s streets, maybe AT&T’s complaint wasn’t so dumb after all.
[2] The whole concept of “fiberhoods” is another concession to Google that other providers do not get. Almost everywhere, franchise agreements require universal coverage of the city, not just build-out in places with demonstrated demand. Moreover, Google wasn’t required to pay for various additional concessions that Charter had to pay in Louisville, like wiring up government buildings and providing public access channels and a studio for government use. Those provisions are routine for cable franchises, but Google Fiber categorically refuses any deal that has them.
Google only lobbied for that law because AT&T was acting with malicious compliance -- intentionally doing the work as late as possible, so as to interfere with Google's rollout.
Google was right to lobby for the law—it’s a good law and there is ongoing work to require similar laws at the federal level. But as far as what happened in Louisville it’s a red herring. It was a theoretical fight over what AT&T theoretically could have done to hold up deployment, had Google theoretically chosen to deploy over poles. (Note additionally that AT&T proposed a compromise in the city council that would’ve allowed Google contractors to do the make-ready work, but they would have to file work plans in advance and give the equipment owners 60 days to object. So the actual fight was narrower than “one touch make ready,” and far narrower than “access to poles” at all, as stated above by OP.)
The city agreed at huge cost to fight for the One Touch Make Ready laws to use the city pole infrastructure. They agreed that would be the city's "beta test". The city has a relatively well dispersed pole grid with only a single clear owner (the power company LG&E).
The city never agreed to the "nanotrenching", but Google's lawyers have made clear that by agreeing to "beta test" anything the city also agreed to "beta test" everything, including "nanotrenching" which would not have passed even a basic civil engineer inspection had it gone through appropriate planning channels.
I agree that incumbent providers were doing anything and everything they could to hinder Google but the fact of the matter is that if nanotrenching hadn't failed Google wouldn't have pulled out.
https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-...
When I first started hearing about the micro/nano trenching issues... I was really shocked Google would be so careless and downright stupid. After being allowed to use the poles, they chose to trench? In a city that not only regularly floods, but has near-constant road construction? Never mind how little quality control they imposed on the contractors to trench the lines, half of them appear to have been laid on the ground and half-ass covered with some dirt. It's an absolute disgrace of civil engineering, particularly from such a large and engineering-centric company.
Also, just as an aside, now that Google has completely abandoned Louisville and we're left with Spectrum and AT&T in most areas... Both have raised prices, and it appears that AT&T is starting to slow it's fiber rollout in some areas.
They found this out pretty early in their deployment, they were only a couple per cent into the deployment before it became a serious issue.
https://www.techrepublic.com/google-amp/pictures/photos-how-...
(This geographical topology is also why for instance Mammoth Cave National Park is nearby, and has one of the largest known and explored cave systems in North America.)
The city has a very robust utility pole grid and almost all of its infrastructure has always been on utility poles.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karst
ETA: Which is also to say that utility poles were not just the only other option, they were the only sustainable option period in this city, with this climate, and this geography. Google knew that going in to the project and still decided to try something different that history should have convinced them was doomed to fail.
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Europe.... its not Antarctica.
In the long-term, that might lead to your staff being arrested for contempt of court the next time they go on vacation to Europe.
If you're running an ad network, or an Analytics service etc, that's something very different. Do they do that?
If they weren't doing anything shady with data collection in the first place, they'd have very little to do to comply.