What happened to Google Fiber anyway? It's not like Google doesn't have the money to do whatever necessary to make it work.
They found out that doing things in real world is hard. So they took their ball and went home. Pretty usual for them.
A good internet provider, though living in a snowy city, the signal can deteriorate a bit when you get heavy snowfall. Still usable, but slow in those cases. The symmetrical gigabit is damn nice 99% of the time.
As for the experiment... I guess the answer was not much? More high definition streaming, some few companies attempting the streaming of games. It certainly hasn't been the panacea of innovation, but it is also still early days I suppose.
It is now at the point where you can't commit to a new google thing and would rather use the competitor instead because you know they will likely outlast Googles corporate attention span...
They also found that when you light a fire under the butts of incumbent telcos, they can deploy modern infrastructure really quickly. And the telcos already know how to get lines on poles and how to site equipment boxes.
They are alive, and they use no opt-in for their marketing emails. I know that because my old gmail account has been getting those mails for over a year already. They keep trying to sell me fiber, but unless they also sell me an address is in the US, it’s not very useful.
(Yes, I could unsubscribe. But I prefer to report every opt-out mail like that as spam and also look at what kinds of opt-out spam I get. Some are even more interesting, unsubscribing requires logging into an account I don’t have access to.)