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Advancing our amazing bet

googlefiberblog.blogspot.com

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Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#81

Post by red_phone »

Guest98123 wrote: post #31
scarmig wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My totally non-professional opinion is this: the problems of there not being good ISPs in the USA isn't a technical or infrastructure problem, where Google excels. They are instead political and organizational problems. Existing ISPs give as little as they can legally get away with while extracting as much money as possible from customers, by hook or by crook. If Google enters a market to provide a better service, Co…

Google Fiber was never in my city, but can those with Google Fiber in their area weigh in on the above? When Fiber came to town, what happened with the existing ISPs in the area? If you called to cancel and explained moving to Fiber, did they give you an offer you couldn't refuse to stay with their services, and if so, did you take it?

Here in Provo, Comcast was astonishingly effective at preserving market share. As soon as Google Fiber was announced (and long before the first hookups took place), Comcast started dropping all kinds of deals in our laps -- things like 250 Mbps download speeds for the price you were currently paying for 20 Mbps. But they were all contingent upon your signing a new 3-year service agreement.

Most people don't appreciate how long a Google Fiber roll-out takes. I waited nine months to be connected and I was lucky. My parents had to wait two years. Google offered very little visibility into when the install would take place. (We've been waiting two years now for a hookup at my small business, with no end in sight and no way to get an estimate from Google.)

These realities gave Comcast a giant head start to perform customer retention jujitsu. It basically took a steely determination (or an implacable hatred of Comcast) to resist the deals being offered in all the calls, letters, and emails. You could accept their deal -- and be enjoying 12x faster internet within a week -- or hold out for Google Fiber at some undetermined future point.

So many folks were taking the bait that Comcast brought a great many contractors in from out of state to handle the volume of upgrade service calls. For months, nearly every room at a Residence Inn near my home was occupied by out-of-town Comcast crews. Every space in the parking lot was filled with a Comcast van at night (hilariously, each van had its orange cone deployed in front as per company requirements).

When I finally was able to contact Comcast to cancel after our Google installation, the rep had a special script for Provo customers. It centered around questions of whether we were actually achieving gigabit speeds in real-world situations. Though I still proceeded to cancel their service, it was a pretty devastating critique as no one connecting over wifi (which was almost everyone) could even achieve the 250 Mbps speeds Comcast was offering, to say nothing of the gigabit speeds Google had sold you.

I'm happy with Google Fiber overall and I certainly don't miss Comcast, but they wound up being a more capable competitor than I'd ever have suspected possible.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#82

Post by magila »

toast0 wrote: post #71
fowlerpower wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ISPs need to be disrupted so badly. This was actually one of the few initiatives that I thought would really force everyone to change.

ATT is rolling out new fiber (and running fiber they already had at decent speeds), Comcast has their 2G offering and a 1G doccis offering. Speeds have changed, but the fundamental issue is still there: It's impractical to have robust competition in the last mile, and nobody wants to wholesale last mile and make competition an option. Google fiber's early press releases included it, but stopped before they started bu…

While Comcast does offer higher speeds, it's prohibitively expensive. In a typical market where Comcast has an effective monopoly the 2Gb service is $300/month and even just 250Mb is $150. Their upload speeds are also pathetic, the 250Mb service is only 30Mb up.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#84

Post by maxxxxx »

paulsutter wrote: post #80
thaumaturgy wrote: post #5

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 busine…

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?

I sometimes wonder about that too.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#85

Post by kaspm »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #5

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 busine…

It's possible that

> 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.

could mean "I've been fired because although we're spinning this as a market failure, I didn't have any viable plans to make it successful"

Usually if they are voluntarily stepping aside, they've got the next thing lined up.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#86

Post by toast0 »

red_phone wrote: post #68

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…

> 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?

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#87

Post by toast0 »

magila wrote: post #82
toast0 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ATT is rolling out new fiber (and running fiber they already had at decent speeds), Comcast has their 2G offering and a 1G doccis offering. Speeds have changed, but the fundamental issue is still there: It's impractical to have robust competition in the last mile, and nobody wants to wholesale last mile and make competition an option. Google fiber's early press releases included it, but stopped before they started bu…

While Comcast does offer higher speeds, it's prohibitively expensive. In a typical market where Comcast has an effective monopoly the 2Gb service is $300/month and even just 250Mb is $150. Their upload speeds are also pathetic, the 250Mb service is only 30Mb up.

Yes, the 2G service is expensive (it's also delivered over 10G fiber, rate limited on the required router), but their 1G service is more reasonable (i saw $140 on http://www.xfinity.com/gig-offer ), not sure what the upload is, and availability is meager, of course.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#88

Post by wmf »

Guest98123 wrote: post #31
scarmig wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My totally non-professional opinion is this: the problems of there not being good ISPs in the USA isn't a technical or infrastructure problem, where Google excels. They are instead political and organizational problems. Existing ISPs give as little as they can legally get away with while extracting as much money as possible from customers, by hook or by crook. If Google enters a market to provide a better service, Co…

Google Fiber was never in my city, but can those with Google Fiber in their area weigh in on the above? When Fiber came to town, what happened with the existing ISPs in the area? If you called to cancel and explained moving to Fiber, did they give you an offer you couldn't refuse to stay with their services, and if so, did you take it?

That's exactly what happened in Austin. As soon as Google Fiber was announced Time Warner increased speeds by 5x for the same price and AT&T announced gigabit fiber for the same price as Google (and I think they are installing it much faster). They probably just increased prices in other cities to make up for lower profits from Austin.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#89

Post by NotSammyHagar »

ajmurmann wrote: post #67

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 o…

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.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#90

Post by xenadu02 »

scarmig wrote: post #28
Inconel wrote: post #14

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 e…

My totally non-professional opinion is this: the problems of there not being good ISPs in the USA isn't a technical or infrastructure problem, where Google excels. They are instead political and organizational problems. Existing ISPs give as little as they can legally get away with while extracting as much money as possible from customers, by hook or by crook. If Google enters a market to provide a better service, Co…

> If Google enters a market to provide a better service, Comcast et al. can easily pretty much flip a switch in that market to start providing a better service to hold onto their disgruntled customers, depriving Google of much of the market it needed to make Fiber profitable.

This is why the pure libertarian ideas about a completely free market just don't work for some services. It is a complete waste of human and material capital to run more than two last-mile networks (the second for redundancy and you could argue that is also a waste). When you've got more than 4-5 you simply can't ever make a return on investment.

The physical last mile should be separated from the rest of the business and managed by a public benefit or non-profit. It works just fine for electricity choice in states like Texas. We already know the physical fiber can carry 100GB, probably a lot more. The infrastructure would be suitable for at least the next 100 years.

Leave ONT and central office equipment up to individual vendors who want to offer service, which gives them the maximum ability to compete on provisioning, backhaul, customer service, and features.

If you want to object that it is government regulation ruining the free market... well I have news for you: a completely free market has never existed. Ever. In the history of the world. People use social connections, money, and power to stifle competitors. They've been finding creative ways to do that for thousands of years. To pretend that a limited and weak government will be able to exert any control over huge multinational corporations is laughable. Even Uber and AirBnB had to use social pressure to force through changes.

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