
Google Fiber to pay nearly $4M to Louisville in exit deal - OrgNet
https://www.wdrb.com/in-depth/google-fiber-to-pay-nearly-million-to-louisville-in-exit/article_d4c86640-5f85-11e9-8876-9f013c02d337.html
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deadmetheny
I do appreciate Google's bold and visionary dedication to bringing their model
of starting up a project, half-assedly supporting it, and subsequently
abandoning it when it becomes a little bit hard out of the software world and
to the physical world.

~~~
ordinaryperson
My large regional cable provider recently tripled the cost of modem rental to
$15/month so I bought my own.

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.

------
irrational
Years ago when I thought of Google I thought of their search engine. Then I
thought about them in terms of their successful software like Google Maps,
Docs, Chrome, etc. Then I started to become more aware of what they were up to
and thought of them in terms of their new motto, "Be Evil". Now I mainly think
about Google in terms of a company that kills products and initiatives. I
can't think of a single other company that has less of an ability to follow
through than Google. Their newer motto should be "When the going gets tough,
quit."

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Microsoft is rapidly approaching "When the going gets tough, quit" territory.
Windows Mobile was a vastly superior operating system, but it was dropped
because it was only in third place. Android is still catching up to it's
feature set. They've just more or less abandoned Cortana, relegating it to
Office and an integration for other voice assistants. Edge, which while buggy
beat Chrome on power consumption and performance more often than not, has been
dropped for a reskin of Chrome.

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.

~~~
turtlesdown
>Windows Mobile was a vastly superior operating system, but it was dropped
because it was only in third place

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-...](https://www.recode.net/2017/7/17/15984222/microsoft-windows-
phone-mobile-operating-system-android-iphone-ios)

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,”

~~~
ocdtrekkie
A new operating system has 0% of the market. Which is to say, I would argue
that building for the long haul is almost always preferable to abandoning
ship. And now that we are realizing how badly we need a real alternative, it's
gone.

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.

~~~
turtlesdown
MSFT spent $7.2 billion dollars on Nokia in 2014 to try to increase their
market share, which failed.

>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.

~~~
WorldMaker
Microsoft spent that money to stop the bleeding that their last non-corporate
OEM (HP being the only other OEM making devices, and those only targeted to
big enterprise) was likely to either go bankrupt or switch to Android because
of the race to the bottom of cheap Android (and Android knock-off) hardware
changing the phone market. Microsoft buying Nokia was a much a symptom of the
problem as an attempt to correct it.

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.)

------
metaphor
$3.84mil over 20 months + $150k donation to a local non-profit. Hard to see
how this isn't an easy exit for Google.

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.

~~~
nulbyte
Google certainly did some damage, but road construction has become a norm here
outside of Google.

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souterrain
When I read “exit deal” I tend to think about an agreement being reached to
terminate a contract.

This is an incorrect assumption.

This is only Google making the City of Louisville whole for damage to their
road infrastructure.

~~~
nulbyte
This is a market exit, wherein Google is making Louisville Metro whole for
damage done to our roads while rolling out a service to a tiny fraction of the
metro only to give up and walk out.

~~~
soverance
haha Google seems to do this with a ton of projects. Make it half way and give
up. They do it so publicly so often there's a whole Wikipedia page for every
project they've started and killed.

Just got another one to add to the list.

~~~
notfromhere
They're just trying to find something as profitable as search ads, which will
_never_ happen given that Adwords is a high margin cash printing machine.
Hence why every other product of theirs ends up in a graveyard because it can
never compare to its monopoly on search

~~~
sridca
All of these are assumptions (some cynical). But what is the actual reason
Google is experimenting with projects in this manner? I wonder if Google is
using their data-based approach here.

~~~
notfromhere
For someone like Google, there's no point in pursuing a product line they're
not dominant in. It's all just speculation, but either google is just godawful
at managing acquisitions or side projects, or they don't bother to pursue
product lines where its profitable but not overwhelmingly so

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evancox100
If you look at the map at the end, they really didn't get very far in rolling
it out, just a few neighborhoods (11,000 households). Works out to about
$400/house, which seems reasonable.

~~~
abledon
I bet the owners of those houses could sell them to IT/steaming/gamer minded
folks for a higher price than average.

~~~
dajohnson89
I'm sure it happened several times, and the buyers are now screwed.

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sonnyblarney
Funny to see how hard physical reality hits the Valley types, which is
saddening because G has very smart people, it'd be wonderful for them to
continue working on real world problems maybe it'd change their culture a
little bit as well. Their surpluses have to go somewhere, and the FANGs are
sitting on a lot of cash they might be able to put to better use than simply
by managing it like a hedge fund.

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shmerl
Instead, they should build their network there, as promised. Though $4M are
peanuts in comparison with costs of building it.

~~~
ryacko
“The payments, to be made over 20 months, will cover removing fiber cables ”

WISPs should be allowed access to the fiber network instead of removing it.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
The fiber isn't salvageable. Google did an "experimental" deployment which
turned out to be utter trash. The short summary is they dug tiny little
trenches in the road, and filled the gap above the fiber with foam. Vehicles,
snow plows, and construction happened, which all happens to fairly efficiently
rip the guts of their network out.

That's why Google is leaving: They don't want to redeploy the entire network
from scratch.

~~~
ClassyJacket
This is true - I've seen the pictures and it wasn't pretty.

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.

~~~
StudentStuff
On side streets I heard the quality of workmanship dropped even further, from
micro-trenches with cabling a few inches below the road surface to cables that
were barely covered and eventually becoming tripping hazards.

~~~
C1sc0cat
Possibly Caused by shoddy work by contractors as well - I have heard
documented horror stories of contractors cutting the ends off telegraph poles
to make emplacing new poles quicker.

------
mattsfrey
Why can't they just leave the infrastructure there in case somebody else
decides to utilize it at some point?

~~~
jonathankoren
Because their infrastructure failed. Nature is forcing it out of its tiny
trench and on to the roads, where it’s getting cut by cars. You can see the
state of it in the link below.

[https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-
as-...](https://gizmodo.com/when-google-fiber-abandons-your-city-as-a-failed-
experi-1833244198)

~~~
chrisseaton
Wow that's not what you expect when you think of Google engineering. In some
other photos the actual fibre is now above the ground.

~~~
WorldMaker
It's the new picture of Google Engineering for at least some of us now. It's
very hard to trust a company that failed this spectacularly, doing something
so clearly very dumb.

~~~
noxxten
This. I was thrilled when Google announced Louisville would be getting
service. Louisville is a relatively tiny city in comparison, and not long
after the announcement both AT&T and Time Warner/Spectrum lowered prices AND
raised speeds. AT&T dramatically increased their own fiber rollout too.

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.

~~~
WorldMaker
As I pointed out in another thread, Louisville is in the middle of Karst
country and hugely restricts underground work for very good reasons due to all
the limestone underneath the city. The city was very clear they had to use the
utility poles because more than a century of civil engineering backs up the
city's reliance on its utility poles. Google knew trenching wasn't a viable
solution in the city and they did it anyway.

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notjustanymike
That's not much at all

~~~
OrgNet
better then $47, I guess, if all you think about is money

------
chrisseaton
Isn't there already conduit in these cities to put the fibre in? In my part of
the UK the existing phone lines run in conduits underground and you can add a
new line in there fairly easily. If they don't have conduit I wonder if they
could run the line in the sewers, which already run to most houses and are
large?

~~~
Supermighty
The only reason Google tried the nanotrenching is because AT&T fought them
tooth and nail on using the telephone polls.

~~~
chrisseaton
Why were poles the only other option? What about conduit underground?

~~~
WorldMaker
Among other reasons, the city is in the heart of karst country [0], which is
to say that most of the deep rock under it is water-soluble Limestone.
Everything dug below the city needs to be carefully managed to avoid cave-ins,
sinkholes, water problems, etc.

(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](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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chappi42
Good to see Google spending the money to fix the damage to city streets.
Kudos!

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tungwaiyip
If any utility work need to dig perpendicular to the trench, wouldn't cut the
fiber right away?

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beaker52
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~~~
jrockway
How much should a small local news organization in Louisville, KY be expected
to pay to comply with laws on random other continents? I think they made the
right choice here.

~~~
jstanley
It would cost less to just ignore the foreign law than to "comply" by blocking
foreign users.

~~~
ceejayoz
In the short-term, sure.

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.

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eddieone
Nice looking roads are more important than the internet?

~~~
nulbyte
Google isn't bringing the internet to Louisville. So yes, nice roads are
better than the internet that Google isn't providing us.

