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Advancing our amazing bet

googlefiberblog.blogspot.com

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Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#111

Post by nostrademons »

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…

The point of Google's Access businesses is that they win either way. If they go in and compete successfully, they get all the customers and make a profit. If they go in and Comcast et al raise their speeds to match, they've made the Internet faster and they profit off of increased search revenue and more YouTube playthroughs.

The only way they can lose is if they're forbidden from entering the market at all, which unfortunately is what happened with Fiber. They're still betting big on the space with Loon, Fi, and Webpass, though.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#112

Post by dredmorbius »

GavinMcG wrote: post #21
fowlerpower wrote: post #13

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 m…

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

Craig's job-shopping. I suspect he's more concerned about his personal stock price than Alphabet's.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#114

Post by Inconel »

rayiner wrote: post #100
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…

The biggest hurdle is simply the "physics" of building a fiber network. It's not just expensive to run fiber by every household. That expense is effectively multiplied by a factor of three because you can really only ever hope to get about 1/3 of the market. That's about what Fiber plateaued at, and what Verizon FiOS has plateaued at. So if it costs $1000 to run fiber past a house and $500 to connect a house, and you…

Reading your response as well as others' really illustrates to me how depressingly difficult this task is. I honestly have to give Google a lot of credit for Fiber, even if it ends up being a failure, in fact I now have a bit more respect even for the big telcos, its pretty amazing that such a convoluted system functions at all.

I tend to be somewhat skeptical of large government programs, although not fanatically so, and even to me this situation seems like it could be much better handled if all, or much of the infrastructure, at least in terms of things like utility poles, would be municipal owned and then leased out to service providers. I wouldn't necessarily want the government running the actual service but if they owned the physical infrastructure and leased it out I feel like we might actually have much more private competition.

Does anyone know how utility pole ownership by telcos or power companies came about in the US? It seems like some are municipal owned while others are entirely privately owned.

Also, when people talk about municipal fiber in the US are they mostly talking about municipalities owning both the infrastructure as well as being the ISP? Are there examples of private/public partnerships were the gov owns the infrastructure but the service is provided by private industry?

Regarding your last point about Google getting preferential treatment, I am not at all disputing this, but I believe even Google had to provide fiber to certain municipal or civic organizations. I could be misremembering that though.

Edit: Apologies if some of my questions are unduly broad in scope.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#115

Post by bobsil1 »

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…

"Advancing our amazing bet" = "Pausing our struggling bet"

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#116

Post by pjwal »

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…

I can second this to some degree from a fairly nice new construction neighborhood (1.2-1.6M $ homes, all homes cat-5e wired) in San Diego (I know that's considered lower middle class in the Bay Area) that has Cox Gigablast service available (1 Gbps up/down).

Personally, I was super excited to have the service, was literally like the first to sign up, immediately made use of it with five webcams pushing 1080p to the cloud, running dokku for my company projects staging/qa environments, multiple 4k TVs, etc.

However, I was shocked that so many of my neighbors reactions were like "meh." And the neighborhood consists of mostly tech, doctors, small biz owners or some combo thereof...and everyone knows everything going on (whole neighborhood on FB groups together), so it certainly wasn't a market education thing.

Most were simply like, "I don't need that much bandwidth," and were perfectly content with getting a lower tier package at 10-30% of the bandwidth for half the cost.

I think it's going to take a bit more time before 4k and IoT drive the demand...that much bandwidth still does not have the "killer app" for the typical consumer apparently.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#117

Post by [deleted] »

nostrademons wrote: post #39
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…

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…

[deleted]

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#118

Post by Inconel »

rayiner wrote: post #110
nostrademons wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bias in this thread is pretty obvious, but to me, that ArsTechnica article doesn't make AT&T look any better. Their response was basically "Here, you want to be a telecom? Go clear all these regulatory hurdles that we've already done", without at all addressing whether those regulations are worth having in the first place . That's almost the definition of regulatory capture: when regulations exist to create barrie…

I think it's actually the opposite of "regulatory capture." It's not about the incumbent getting special treatment, but making sure a new entrant doesn't get special treatment.

If the regulations only serve to protect incumbents by raising the barriers to entry, ignoring whether this is the case here, rather than the public interest, isn't it still valid to argue that this is regulatory capture? I'm genuinely curious here and not trying to be obnoxiously argumentative.

Re: Advancing our amazing bet

#120

Post by [deleted] »

toast0 wrote: post #87
magila wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]
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