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Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company

#21

Post by bigstrat2003 »

tomasphan wrote: post #16

At this point purchasing Google services/products is a real risk for business continuity.

It really is. You could not pay me to tie my business to Google at this point. I need someone I can trust won't just pull the plug in a year when they get bored, and Google isn't that company.

Re: Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company

#22

Post by xingped »

trivialities777 wrote: post #18
Legend2440 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this different from what other prepaid carriers like Mint offer?

The big thing keeping me from switching from Google Fi is how easy international roaming is. For every country I've been to, I've just had it automatically work within ten minutes of landing, at my regular price, without buying any addons

Except if you happen to travel for more than 45 days, in which case Google Fi will promptly tell you to get fucked and cut off your service without warning, advanced notice, or spelling out anywhere when you sign up. Not my idea of a carrier I can trust. I deleted my account and service with them to move to a carrier that I can trust and actually respects me as a customer.

Re: Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company

#23

Post by hysan »

kylecazar wrote: post #4

I remember when it was released and I wished I was in Kansas. I'm smack in the middle of debating Google Fi, this probably won't impact my decision, but I wonder if it will suffer a similar fate.

Fi’s customer service has long since turned to shit, but the things keeping me on it are the data sims, simple international roaming, and international calling. That trifecta is pretty hard to find a match for. Especially the data sims. But if you don’t need that, I probably wouldn’t recommend Fi. My wife had endless trouble with multiple bad sim cards and the customer service experience was just as dreadful as every other carrier.

Re: Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company

#24

Post by burnt-resistor »

I'm glad that a farmer utility co-op exists here that offers GFiber-equivalent of 1 GbE symmetric and unlimited data for no contract $99/month with an $65/month intro rate. Also has 500 Mbps for $75 ($40) and 250 Mbps $65 ($30). Municipal broadband and electricity needs to take back community services away from profiteering corporations and private equity vampires, and really benefit from government-assisted grants and loans and templatized processes and governance to bootstrap more of these.

One of the major pluses of GFiber is it largely ignored DMCA requests. Also, the 20 Gbps ONT beta service was rad. A weak point was their mesh routers that didn't work quite right and would refuse to work if "too close together".. 20 ft apart. Their customer service/tech support was pretty awesome.

Re: Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company

#25

Post by Simulacra »

I remember when Google fiber was all the rage back around 2013, and I so desperately wanted it to come to my neighborhood, anything to offset the Comcast regime. Deeply disappointed that there were so many barriers preventing its expansion. From pole access to just straight up anti-competitive behavior from Comcast, fiber could've really been something great but the law just wouldn't allow it.

Re: Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company

#26

Post by noman-land »

xingped wrote: post #22
trivialities777 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big thing keeping me from switching from Google Fi is how easy international roaming is. For every country I've been to, I've just had it automatically work within ten minutes of landing, at my regular price, without buying any addons

Except if you happen to travel for more than 45 days, in which case Google Fi will promptly tell you to get fucked and cut off your service without warning, advanced notice, or spelling out anywhere when you sign up. Not my idea of a carrier I can trust. I deleted my account and service with them to move to a carrier that I can trust and actually respects me as a customer.

What service do you use now?

Re: Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company

#27

Post by homeonthemtn »

kylecazar wrote: post #4

I remember when it was released and I wished I was in Kansas. I'm smack in the middle of debating Google Fi, this probably won't impact my decision, but I wonder if it will suffer a similar fate.

I left fi because the service was bad outside of Metro areas and didn't trust them to not arbitrarily shut down. It felt stagnant as a service which implied it was coasting along with no one at the helm

Re: Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company

#28

Post by shalmanese »

xingped wrote: post #22
trivialities777 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big thing keeping me from switching from Google Fi is how easy international roaming is. For every country I've been to, I've just had it automatically work within ten minutes of landing, at my regular price, without buying any addons

Except if you happen to travel for more than 45 days, in which case Google Fi will promptly tell you to get fucked and cut off your service without warning, advanced notice, or spelling out anywhere when you sign up. Not my idea of a carrier I can trust. I deleted my account and service with them to move to a carrier that I can trust and actually respects me as a customer.

tbf, that was because a lot of people abused it by being permanently outside of the US and relying exclusively on the roaming for all their data. I know because I was one of those people for 6 years.

Re: Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company

#29

Post by kyle_t »

Google Fiber has been aggressively upselling us to a higher plan the last 6-12 months, prior to that in my 6 years with them I don't remember a single upsell. Guess I know why now, trying to grease the numbers for the highest possible sale price.

I'll be sure to take this as a warning sign in the future with other services if aggressive upselling starts happening unexpectedly.

Re: Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company

#30

Post by Mobius01 »

This is really unfortunate. Google Fiber has maintained a low, no-nonsense price for years with near-perfect uptime, and besides the odd upselling email, they have never really pushed upgrades. More importantly, I can use my own hardware without having to engage in a war with technical support on 2 hour long calls.

Maybe I was in denial that Google would behave differently about this product considering their track record.

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