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Comment by throwaway314155 | Hacker News Reader

> In 2017, basically all the Google Fiber software teams went on hiatus (mine included).

What does a hiatus entail in this case? Did these teams all just stop working on Fiber stuff and sit around all day hoping they would be given something to do?

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They laid us all off. They had huge plans - millions of users! Then they intersected reality in KC where all people wanted was 5Mbit service and free TV... There were many, many people working to perfect the settop box for example. We got fq_codel running on the wifi, we never got anywhere on the shaper, the plan was to move 1+m units of that (horrible integrated chip the comcerto C2000 - it didn´t have coherent cache in some cases), I think they barely cracked 100k before pulling the plug on it all....

and still that box was better than what most fiber folk have delivered to date.

At least some good science was done about how ISPs really work... and published.

https://netdevconf.org/1.1/talk-measuring-wifi-performance-a...

> They laid us all off.

I think you mean "they advanced their amazing bet".

https://fiber.google.com/blog/2016/10/advancing-our-amazing-...

That's fascinating actually. You should consider doing a full blog writeup if that's something you're into.

Too bitter. I referenced a little of that "adventure" here, in 2021... gfiber was attempting to restart with refreshing their now obsolete hardware... https://blog.cerowrt.org/post/trouble_in_paradise/

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