
Advancing our amazing bet - stanleydrew
https://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com/2016/10/advancing-our-amazing-bet.html
======
thaumaturgy
This announcement needs a little bit of translation from the marketing
language it's written in:

> 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.

~~~
paulsutter
This is why I read the comments first, just avoided another painful article.

Do people who communicate in spin-speak start to think that way on the inside
too?

~~~
rdtsc
Oh that's an interesting question. When I speak a different languages I switch
to thinking in that language (this goes for human and computer languages). If
I talk with a Russian friend, I think in Russian. When use a functional
programming language I switch to thinking in functional concepts (maps, folds,
list comprehension, closures). When in an OO language think about composition
and so on.

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.

~~~
josephpmay
That's absolutely fascinating, because I personally always think the same
"way." Are you aware of any research on this subject?

~~~
executesorder66
I always think in the language I am currently speaking/listening to. And I'm
pretty sure everyone else does.

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?

~~~
tener
Discarding OO concepts is easier said than done. I'm betting that inability to
discard OO concepts is the main hurdle people have while learning FP.

~~~
smitherfield
The good ones generally map to (pardon the pun) equivalent functional
concepts.

------
fowlerpower
This is terrible corporate speak.

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.

~~~
GavinMcG
It turns out saying "we failed and are canceling a product, again" hurts the
stock price more.

~~~
s8-0913458
No, that's not how the stock market works.

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.

~~~
chii
> investors would have priced the loss into the stock price long ago

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.

~~~
asafira
Thinking about your last statement:

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?

~~~
jameshart
Every stock trade reflects a _disagreement_ between two parties about the
value of the company, not an agreement on what it is worth. The buyer would
rather own that stock than that amount of money. The seller would rather have
the money. They can't both be right about which is more valuable.

~~~
bzbarsky
> They can't both be right about which is more valuable

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...

~~~
jameshart
You're right, of course, they don't just disagree about the value of the
stock, they disagree about the value of money, and the meaning of 'value'.

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.

~~~
bzbarsky
> There's no guarantee either of them have a utility function anywhere near
> your own.

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.

------
Inconel
I won't be surprised if this news is met with the usual sentiment that Google
abandons everything that isn't immediately hugely successful, and while I
often share that criticism of Google, I can't really fault them too much in
this case. Getting a nationwide ISP up and running from scratch just seems
like an almost impossible task. This is disappointing to me nonetheless.

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?

~~~
nostrademons
I worked briefly on the Fiber team when it was very young (basically from 2
weeks before to 2 weeks after launch - I was on loan from Search specifically
so that they could hit their launch goals). The bottleneck when I was there
were local government regulations, and in fact Kansas City was chosen because
it had a unified city/county/utility regulatory authority that was very
favorable to Google. To lay fiber to the home, you either need right-of-ways
on the utility poles (which are owned by Google's competitors) or you need
permission to dig up streets (which requires a mess of permitting from the
city government). In either case, the cable & phone companies were in very
tight with local regulators, and so you had hostile gatekeepers whose approval
you absolutely needed.

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.

~~~
Inconel
It's very interesting that you say the biggest hurdle was regulatory capture,
that is certainly depressing.

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?

~~~
mozumder
> It's very interesting that you say the biggest hurdle was regulatory
> capture, that is certainly depressing.

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...](http://io9.gizmodo.com/photos-from-the-days-when-thousands-of-
cables-crowded-t-1629961917)

~~~
titzer
You know, returning home to the USA a couple times a year, I am really struck
by how many freaking power and phone lines are everywhere. It seems like every
single street, except for the very core of cities downtown, and only the very
wealthiest neighbors, have buried lines. In Germany, almost every town and
every highway is free of these (IMO) ugly poles with lines everywhere. It's
really an eyesore when you finally glance up.

~~~
15charlimit
Germany is also a significantly smaller area with more of the population in
high density zones compared to most of the USA.

Aboveground cables are easier to repair and much less expensive to string up
over thousands of miles.

~~~
titzer
I hear this argument a lot and it doesn't really hold water. Essentially every
little town, village, city, even along highways, everywhere in Germany, the
cables are buried. Even in low density towns. Even to farms out in the
country. Pretty much the only things that aren't buried are high-tension
lines.

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.

------
hiddencost
That was kinda impressively worded.

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, ???

~~~
mparlane
Money. Specifically infrastructure cost.

------
sgnelson
This may be one of the worst PR releases I have ever read. Others have already
complained/translated/etc. so my comment is redundant. But I'm jumping on the
bandwagon anyway. Because I want Google/Alphabet to know my displeasure at
being treated as an ignorant child incapable of recognizing doublespeak when
they see it.

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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvp97SMZc6M)

...just planting seeds...

~~~
ryandrake
Leave it to PR department to take 50 words of bad news and obfuscate it into
450 positive-sounding words that barely deliver the real message.

------
carsongross
[https://ouramazingbet.tumbler.com/](https://ouramazingbet.tumbler.com/)

can be the big company version of

[https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/](https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/)

------
red_phone
I think my experiences as a Google Fiber subscriber here in Provo might help
illustrate why things haven't gone as well for Google as they (and we)
initially expected.

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.

~~~
toast0
> 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

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?

~~~
red_phone
Macs also do pretty well with stock NICs.

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...

~~~
toast0
I guess most of the iffy onboard NICs I've had weren't 1G. But I do now recall
some issues with speed on an nForce integrated nic, although it was still fast
enough, much faster than 100M anyway.

------
dchuk

      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
    

NOOOOOOOOOOOO. Being trapped with either Time Warner or AT&T with max speeds
of 40mbps had me really excited as a San Diegan for Google Fiber.

~~~
codezero
On the plus side, you'll soon be trapped with just AT&T! Oh wait...

~~~
pbh101
Time Warner Cable is a separate company from the Time Warner AT&T is
acquiring. A previous spinoff.

~~~
codezero
Dang. Good to know :)

------
idlewords
"Google Fiber has been such an unqualified success that we're stopping all
work on it, and also I quit."

------
djrogers
Wow, this blog post feels like a giant nothing-burger. We're going to continue
what we're doing by pausing what we're doing so we can grow. Mumle mumble
marketing speak.

------
1_2__3
At what point does corporate speak become nonsense gibberish? This post is
amazingly close.

------
pasbesoin
As a consumer, the last/most recent product from Google that I "trust" (to be
reliable and to stick around) is Google Docs (whatever the current branding).
Because they are still "dogfooding" it -- using it internally.

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.

------
ajmurmann
There is no good money in delivering bits. That's why AT&T wants to buy Time
Warner and that's why Google Fiber is shutting down. The only way to make
money is price gauging in areas where there is a competitive market. There is
really no way to stand out from the competition other than a better price per
bit. Obviously there isn't much money in that. There also is really no way to
make your customer actively happy other than pricing. Even if you do anything
right the only time you will be noticed is when something is broken which is
often times unavoidable (storms, lighting, broken equipment, incompetent
customers, etc.). Bottom line it's a shit market to be in. The only reason to
innovate is because some competitor was foolish to sink money into better,
faster infrastructure that most customers don't care about and now you gotta
catch up. So there are only incentives to screw customers one way or another
and integrating innovation as much as possible. I'm not sure how this can
possibly be turned into a functioning, competitive market.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
There's enough market in delivering bits to make it worthwhile. The problem is
the challenge from the existing people in that market who do everything then
can to block you.

------
crivabene
A model that seems to work pretty well in Europe (or at least, over here in
Italy) is having utility providers (which are already used to handle
infrastructure at a scale) taking care of deploying fiber everywhere to then
sell access back to the ISPs (bitstream).

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.

~~~
sandos
We have a lot of those networks here in Sweden. The thing is though, it is
much more expensive than simpler networks where you have a "group connection"
to an ISP. I think its usually double the price to use a service platform
fibre network, and sometimes the group connections can be had for 1/4 the
price!

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.

------
asperous
The title should be:

> Google winds down its fiber operations

~~~
richdougherty
I think Hacker News would be improved if there was a way to add a subtitle for
submissions. The title could be unedited from the original, and the subtitle
could be a brief note explaining what the link is _really_ about.

------
sakopov
If Fiber does shut down it's going to be pretty devastating for Google's
reputation going forward. We're talking about upsetting a whole different
demographic of people that fall outside of typical Google users. These are
going to be average Joes and Janes most of whom probably don't even use other
Google products. They simply jumped on the internet deal because most of their
neighborhood did. You abandon these people and they'll never buy any other of
your products again. If Google thinks this is going to go over similarly to
the shutdown of Reader than i think they'll be in a for a surprise.

------
nixos
Again Google is shooting themselves in the foot.

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.

~~~
smitherfield
_> 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._

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])."

~~~
nixos
>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

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.

------
flyosity
Quick story: here in Apex, NC, Google announced they'd bring Fiber here and
everybody was really excited. A few months later when the website went up,
everyone I know entered their address to check availability and it turns out
that Google decided to draw the "line" just outside our town, stopping short
of including Apex (a suburb of Raleigh) but including other suburbs like Cary
and Morrisville.

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.

~~~
Desustorm
That sounds like it was deliberately orchestrated by AT&T to me...

------
yalogin
The weird thing is no one will buy it and every media company out there will
lead with "Google fiber is dead". So why be so convoluted at all?

------
stomato
I was a big supporter, however now I wonder whether the cities that they've
started rolling out to will get half-assed because their budgets are cut or
morale has dropped. It's freaking Google- I don't understand how they didn't
do the due diligence ahead of time to prepare budget for costs adequately.

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...](http://www.attpublicpolicy.com/fcc/broadband-
investmentnot-for-the-faint-of-heart/)

~~~
jpalomaki
I believe the intention of Google Fiber project was not to make money
directly, but to put pressure on other ISPs by showing that Google can
actually enter the market and act as viable competitor if they don't behave.

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.

~~~
stomato
Understand that they would have assumed some loss in the front of nationwide
rollout, but they seem to have overestimated adoption and underestimated the
costs required to rollout.

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.

------
ryao
It is a shame that Google Fiber did not build a EPON network like the ones
that major ISPs in South Korea, Japan and China either have built or are
building. The equipment is cheaper because it is free of legacy cruft. They
could have opted for 10G-EPON to have been able to put more users on each node
too.

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...](http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r30519466-PON-EPON-or-GPON-or-
GEPON)

------
josefdlange
This sounds like Gavin from Silicon Valley.

"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."

~~~
hyperbovine
Except the CEO is also leaving.

------
spullara
This is very similar to Verizon. They also stopped their FIOS roll out when
they realized it was a bad business.

[http://www.timesunion.com/business/article/Verizon-says-
FiOS...](http://www.timesunion.com/business/article/Verizon-says-FiOS-roll-
out-stopped-because-of-6591620.php)

------
8ig8
NY Times article is a bit easier to parse...

[http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/technology/google-curbs-
ex...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/26/technology/google-curbs-expansion-of-
fiber-optic-network-cutting-jobs.html)

------
askafriend
What alien language is this written in? I can't make sense of this soul
sucking prose.

------
jeffjose
Associated reading - [https://www.theinformation.com/inside-the-battle-over-
google...](https://www.theinformation.com/inside-the-battle-over-google-fiber)
(Aug 2016) (paywall)

~~~
WillPostForFood
Since it is paywalled, you want to share a few of the key points that didn't
show up in the other stories?

------
olegkikin
I feel like Google set the wrong goal. Most people don't need symmetric 1Gbps
connections, and won't need them for decades. They could have started with
something like 200Mbps down / 50 Mbps up, and covered way more customers for
the same cost.

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.

~~~
cobookman
its really the same cost. the actual fiber itself is cheap compared to the
costs of laying it.

~~~
olegkikin
Yes, that's what I said. But you can hook up 5 times the customers at that
same cost.

~~~
toast0
I'm sure 100 mbps (or whatever) fiber has cheaper equipment on both sides, so
if you ran that instead of 1g, you'd be spend the same money and build out to
more customers, but I would be shocked if that was five times the customers.
Most of the time, expense and headache is spent in getting sites for your
equipment, surveying and planning the runs, and getting access to run the
fiber near the homes (poles or underground). Running the drops to the homes is
also time consuming.

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.

------
sergiotapia
Well, RIP another Google product I guess.

I'm certain that Google Fiber is what spurred At&T to offer Gigapower fiber in
Miami though. So thanks for that.

------
dredmorbius
Posting as rampant speculation: The thought occurs to me that Google may be
finding that achieving its aim of improved broadband service through
regulatory mechanism might be cheaper than building their own. Armed with the
data from the response of entrenched broadband monopolists, making the case to
the FCC of a market and/or regulatory failure seems plausible. That _could_
actually cast this as a win.

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.

------
codecamper
I think the basic problem is that people do not need 1000 Mbit connections at
home. What would your average joe need that for?

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.

------
duck
A lot more details here: [http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/10/google...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2016/10/google-fiber-laying-off-9-of-staff-will-pause-plans-
for-10-cities/)

------
mholt
It still boggles my mind why they didn't offer a mid-range service level, say
50Mbps for $15-20/mo. I know more than a handful of students here (including
myself) who would pay for that.

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.

~~~
mark-r
It doesn't cost any less to offer a lower speed, so all they'd be doing is
losing money by offering it.

------
sytelus
TLDR; Google Fiber is closing down.

------
Jedi72
[http://cdn.leanblog.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/07/IMG_0136-...](http://cdn.leanblog.org/wp-
content/uploads/2015/07/IMG_0136-540x304.jpg)

------
atomical
A nation-wide rollout would have been one of the most transformative things
Google could have done. Growing their profits now depends on a thirty year bet
on unproven technologies.

------
stephenmm
I live in Austin and they literally just yesterday marked up my yard where the
fiber is supposed to go. Does anyone know if they will finish the job or am I
left out to dry here?

------
nodesocket
Dang, I've been waiting and crossing my fingers here in San Francisco for
Google Fiber. I despise Comcast XFINITY (not to mention my bill has soared to
nearly $180 a month).

------
a-no-n
So when will Google Fibre fix the embarrassing Starbucks WiFi at:

    
    
        247  reviews$$$$
        3605 El Camino Real
        Santa Clara, CA 95051
    

It's slower than communicating with smoke-signals in a hurricane, or boxing up
each bit and sending via the post.

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, ...)

~~~
a-no-n
IOW... They're going to make all Starbucks' WiFI slooower, just like they did
with the city of Mountain View.

Thanks for almost nothing, Google.

------
sparky_
In other words, no new Fiber cities.

------
brooklyndude
Have been seeing a lot of dead LinkNYC kiosk's in Manhattan. What's up with
that?

------
orliesaurus
so when he says he steps aside, what will he be doing as CEO cause clearly
this didn't work out - a tons of mistakes were made at least here in ATX where
they keep pushing flyers through my door but...all killer no filler.

------
basicallydan
This post is a masterclass in buck-passing and spin.

------
jsudhams
Another google product abandoned halfway

------
hossbeast
How can you be both an SVP and a CEO?

~~~
jpm_sd
He was/is an SVP of Alphabet and a quasi-CEO of Access, which is (in the
process of becoming?) a "separate" company under the Alphabet umbrella.

------
bawana
@thaumaturgy Did you translate that yourself? Is there a website that offers
such bidirectional translation? I want to be a CEO too!!

------
rasz_pl
>it’s been quite a journey

Boom, headshot. There it is, google fiber will be closed down soon.

