Full disclosure: I work at AT&T but not directly on fiber. My views are my own and do not represent my employers.
Scaling fiber is hard and expensive. It’s a labor intensive process to get all the permits and get people to go and dig trenches and wire up homes. In sparsely populated areas you have the cost of laying lots of fiber and not ever having the hope of recovering your investment. In densely populated areas you need to relay cable and rewire apartments and homes. It’s a slow along and the USA is a really BIG place.
I’m not privy to the politics but Google has oodles of $$. They could lobby effectively if they were interested. Lobbying happens - and like anything else its a tool to use. Google would use it against competitors if they were able to. so ISPs use it. They could have bought 5g spectrum. They could have started something like Starlink instead they play around with balloons. They had the $$ to muscle into that. So, the only thing I can guess is that they aren’t / weren’t interested in the ISP business to begin with. The Fiber misadventure was just that - something they thought they could easily scale, tried it and got out when they understood the reality on the ground.
Also- I don’t think working for Google is embarrassing. They deprecate products quickly before they become a ball and chain on your bottom line. Working for Google remains as prestigious as ever.
Scaling fiber is hard and expensive. It’s a labor intensive process to get all the permits and get people to go and dig trenches and wire up homes. In sparsely populated areas you have the cost of laying lots of fiber and not ever having the hope of recovering your investment. In densely populated areas you need to relay cable and rewire apartments and homes. It’s a slow along and the USA is a really BIG place.
I’m not privy to the politics but Google has oodles of $$. They could lobby effectively if they were interested. Lobbying happens - and like anything else its a tool to use. Google would use it against competitors if they were able to. so ISPs use it. They could have bought 5g spectrum. They could have started something like Starlink instead they play around with balloons. They had the $$ to muscle into that. So, the only thing I can guess is that they aren’t / weren’t interested in the ISP business to begin with. The Fiber misadventure was just that - something they thought they could easily scale, tried it and got out when they understood the reality on the ground.
Also- I don’t think working for Google is embarrassing. They deprecate products quickly before they become a ball and chain on your bottom line. Working for Google remains as prestigious as ever.