Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Visible signs left after Google Fiber abandons Louisville

gizmodo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 190 posts

Re: Visible signs left after Google Fiber abandons Louisville

#81

Post by toast0 »

yingw787 wrote: post #25

When I interned at AT&T a few years ago, I asked a manager I respected whether they were worried about Google Fiber coming in and eating their lunch. "No", he said. "We'll sue them for every mile of fiber they lay down". I can understand why they would make that play. It's kind of the only play they have. AT&T and Verizon innovate enough to remain...okay...but they're not exactly Google. The only way they would win i…

I suspect, now that they've started, AT&T is going to continue to build out their GPON fiber through most of their network. In a lot of areas, they do have real issues with the copper wire that's on the poles, and they've figured out how to make rewiring not too bad, at least where the residential wiring is above ground.

They've got a significant advantage over Google here. Where they run DSL, they've got a customer base, and an installer base. They already have rights to the poles. They've already got contacts in the municipalities to add their new equipment boxes. They worked out how to order the fiber spools with connectors placed for the splitters at each pole. It's just a matter of buying and placing the equipment, upgrading their existing customers, and then winning customers from cable.

For customers with underground copper wiring, it's a tougher sell. And there are clearly parts of the AT&T network that AT&T doesn't care to service; places that never got ADSL2 or VDSL (aka U-Verse) likely have pretty low customer numbers these days, and it seems like they'd probably not get upgraded either.

Re: Visible signs left after Google Fiber abandons Louisville

#82

Post by walrus01 »

jrockway wrote: post #78
paxys wrote: post #6

The failure of Google Fiber paints a very bleak picture of the future of internet infrastructure, or even all communication in this country. If Google cannot compete with the status quo, who can?

Google gave up on fiber and this is the version that is running on fumes. I worked on Google Fiber until early 2017. I was informed that it was cancelled and that I had to find another team. I did, and didn't like the new team, so I quit. Many of my coworkers on Fiber did the same. Of the people I've remained in contact with, exactly zero of them currently work on Fiber. I now work at a different fiber ISP. The indus…

Industry perspective here. I work for an ISP that does gigabit class last mile residential access. Google gave up because they couldn't make the ROI numbers work. I doubt whether it was ever intended to be economically viable. It was a PR stunt.

You simply can't promise gigabit class last mile service to every residence in a city, and actually build it with a reasonable dollar-per-house cost, and make a return on investment on it. Not unless you have an incredibly low cost to deploy it, basically a city and local electrical utility that has handed you ROW (right-of-way) on a silver platter. Or unless you are already the incumbent telecom operator, and have ROW literally everywhere, and can overbuild your POTS network with modern GPON stuff, as Centurylink is doing in parts of Seattle.

Or unless you bring the dollars-per-unit cost way down, by focusing on MDU (multiple dwelling unit) such as WaveG and Webpass have done.

It costs a lot less to light up an 85 suite condo building with 1000BaseT to each suite, than it does to build last mile GPON or active ethernet fiber to 85 individual houses.

Re: Visible signs left after Google Fiber abandons Louisville

#83

Post by lizknope »

I live in the Raleigh-Durham, NC area and we heard Google Fiber was coming to the area around 2015.

A couple of months later Time Warner upgraded my cable modem speed from 15Mb to 50Mb download for the same monthly price.

Then 2 years ago AT&T came through my neighborhood installing fiber and turned it on 3 months later.

Google Fiber is concentrated in a few small areas. AT&T Fiber is expanding all over the area. I know 1 person with Google Fiber and about 15 with AT&T Fiber.

I would prefer Google over AT&T but the AT&T Fiber works and is reliable and Google is so slow at expanding that nobody cares anymore.

Re: Visible signs left after Google Fiber abandons Louisville

#84

Post by tedivm »

elliotec wrote: post #55
vb6lives wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They tried to lay fiber in 2in trenches instead of typical 6in trenches. Then left when it didn't work. This isn't Goliath beating David. This is David throwing a rock, missing, and going home.

I’m in Salt Lake City and they have the fiber coming to my house strung up on telephone poles, not sure what this “inches under ground” thing means or why it matters. Google fiber has been fantastic for us since day one and it’s sad they aren’t moving forward with it.

If you read the article that you're commenting on they make it pretty clear what this “inches under ground” thing means and why it matters.

Re: Visible signs left after Google Fiber abandons Louisville

#85

Post by robocat »

At many traffic light intersections, you can see where the trenches are used for inductive loop car sensors, with wire in them.

https://www.traffic-signal-design.com/vehicles_detected.htm

The trench is narrow, cut with a diamond saw, and the filler (tar?) doesn't come out.

The example photo of a failure in the article, showed a relatively wide trench, presumably width required for the microduct for blown/jetted fiber.

So maybe they used a trench that was too wide, and a filler that was unsuitable.

I have also seen microtrenchs used in New Zealand across private driveways (low traffic use).

I wonder how good the trials were of the filler? I sometimes see paint tests on the road (multiple lines of different product and different thicknesses, being tested by heavy, real traffic use).

Re: Visible signs left after Google Fiber abandons Louisville

#86

Post by jrockway »

walrus01 wrote: post #82
jrockway wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google gave up on fiber and this is the version that is running on fumes. I worked on Google Fiber until early 2017. I was informed that it was cancelled and that I had to find another team. I did, and didn't like the new team, so I quit. Many of my coworkers on Fiber did the same. Of the people I've remained in contact with, exactly zero of them currently work on Fiber. I now work at a different fiber ISP. The indus…

Industry perspective here. I work for an ISP that does gigabit class last mile residential access. Google gave up because they couldn't make the ROI numbers work. I doubt whether it was ever intended to be economically viable. It was a PR stunt. You simply can't promise gigabit class last mile service to every residence in a city, and actually build it with a reasonable dollar-per-house cost, and make a return on inv…

If you have to borrow money, it's expensive. If you just have the money sitting in your treasury, it's a lot more viable.

I never saw the Google Fiber cancellation as a cost issue. It felt to me like more of a scale issue. You have to live in Kansas City to pay Google for fiber, but you can buy an Android device from anywhere in the world. Thus, one of those things is going to make more money than the other, and it makes sense to focus on that.

The economics of ISPs, the way I see it, depend on:

1) Cost of money. (Free if you're Google, 18% a year if you're some guy using your credit card.)

2) Expected lifetime of wireline Internet. Wireless internet isn't getting _worse_ every year. While a lot of us here won't be giving up our wired connections any time soon, many people already have. Their phone is their computer. They can't even plug an Ethernet cable into it if they want to.

If your fiber is going to be good for 50 years... after you've paid off the loan, it costs basically nothing to provide Internet service over. And yet, people will pay more than $0/month to have Internet service. So economically it works out... if fiber continues to be relevant. That is the if that scares people. (The other issue is that it's hard to find free money unless you are, say, Google.)

Re: Visible signs left after Google Fiber abandons Louisville

#87

Post by subway »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #41
duxup wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any chance some form of wireless can increase competition?

The "wireless competing with broadband" thing is mostly ISPs trying to claim that the two services compete with each other in order to claim that they have more competitors than they do. Wireless is slower, has higher latency, is less reliable (interference/obstructions), etc. But you can put in one tower and service every customer for miles under those conditions, which is much cheaper than wiring every building. It…

Wireless is slower, has higher latency, is less reliable

This all varies based on the wireless tech used. My apartment in Seattle is serviced via point to point wireless with another building across the neighborhood. Currently I see under 2ms RTT to google.com, and can max out the 100mbit port on my router both up and down. (Gigabit is available, but requires an account with WaveG. 100mbit is free with my rent, and on the landlord's account).

Aside from a misconfiguration on my building's switch that allowed a neighbor to act as a rogue dhcp server, I've yet to see an outage in the two years of living here.

Wireless doesn't have to suck.

Re: Visible signs left after Google Fiber abandons Louisville

#88

Post by kasey_junk »

tptacek wrote: post #65
paxys wrote: post #6

The failure of Google Fiber paints a very bleak picture of the future of internet infrastructure, or even all communication in this country. If Google cannot compete with the status quo, who can?

The current telecom providers, who compete with each other? If you compare similarly dense areas in the US and Europe, we're doing pretty well on high-speed Internet access. I have multiple gigabit options in Chicago, and only got them in the last couple years. What's not working?

It’s rare in Chicago to have multiple fiber options and lots of the city has none.

I don’t necessarily disagree with your point but your experience may be on the rare side.

Re: Visible signs left after Google Fiber abandons Louisville

#89

Post by dang »

dgacmu wrote: post #48

This was announced a month ago: https://fiber.googleblog.com/2019/02/louisville_7.html?m=1 And discussed here at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19106998 (207 comments)

Good catch. But the current article has new information. I've attempted to give it a more specific title.

If anyone suggests a better one (i.e. more accurate and neutral), preferably using language from the article itself, we can change it again.

Re: Visible signs left after Google Fiber abandons Louisville

#90

Post by KennyFromIT »

esmi wrote: post #13

I wish they provided some details on why the San Antonio and Nashville small trials didn’t scale to Louisville. If the issues were really so glaring and obvious it seems those efforts should have revealed them. Edit: Looks like it didn’t actually work in those cities either. One wonders why the Louisville representatives missed this. https://www.wsmv.com/news/repaving-streets-reveal-google-fib...

Louisville's representatives likely missed that because they were wearing rose-colored glasses. They were thinking "big picture" about would a successful project could mean for the city and were ignoring the details. They were probably (rightly?) assuming that an organization like Google would be able to learn from their mistakes and "this time would be different". Really, it's hard to fault them for thinking this way, but just like every other situation in business, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.
Post reply on HN