When Google Fiber abandons your city as a failed experiment (2019)

Brisbane seems to be decent.

> How do those untrenchable locations receive water and sewer? If water and sewer can be installed underground, why not fiber?

I am not a civil engineer, I only drink with them occasionally. I'd imagine there are some big differences between heavy pipes in various states of liquid internal pressure above the frost line and bundles of relatively lightweight cables, but I'm very much just guessing at that point. I do know that there are lot of processes in place to plan that sort of work and it can get very expensive. (I see some of my sewer bills. Though the city is also unfortunately in the middle of several huge combined-sewer-overflow rework projects.) So yes, cost would be a big factor, but I think the cost is partly such a big factor because of the physics of all of it and planning it in safe ways that don't damage the neighborhoods, at least that is my very lay understanding of it.

> Google apparently didn't even want to spend the expense running it on utility poles, which frankly, I would naively think would be the cheapest option.

That's the part that still most boggles my mind. That was by far the cheapest option than a bizarre R&D for "exotic new epoxies" and all the money spent in digging up and then replacing asphalt. At one point (after the epoxies failed) they pawned a lot of that cost of the replacement part off on the city by picking up the city's normal pothole/repavement maintenance plans and dredging their nano-trenches just before, which was "smart" cost cutting in an evil sort of way.

Not only was using the utility poles the cheapest option, it was the planned option for years. It was the option that the city spent millions of tax dollars litigating for free for Google's part to make it even cheaper, about as cheap as it could possibly legally be. Google didn't pay a dime for those legal challenges. The city won those court cases! They had the go ahead to Google to do "just about whatever they wanted" with city utility poles and Google decided to do "Plan B" at the 11th hour after the go ahead.

I guess some impatience comes in to play, because it did take years to get that "go ahead" and I guess Google thought a "productive" use of those years was to experiment with silly glues and then they accidentally sunk cost themselves with R&D money into going with that Incompetent Plan B even though Plan A was still on the table and extremely viable and cheap. It's still hard not to also call that impatience its own form of incompetence, though, because that R&D didn't seem to take much reality into account. (Glues? In streets? Streets that experience weather? Streets that Americans drive heavy cars, trucks, and SUVs on? Really? They wasted how much money on that?)

I was a network engineer at a large Tier 1 ISP, and let me tell you it is not all that great.

Europe as a whole has a fuck ton of congestion and reliability problems because ISPs don't want to build out fiber and these fiber companies are very slow to roll out and increase capacity, because they don't have an incentive to be fast or build fiber to the same places multiple times like in the US. If anyone remembers the Hetzner-DTAG fiasco you'll know what congestion I'm talking about where unless you are directly peering with someone on an internet exchange you can forget about having a good experience.

In Europe outside of the incumbent carriers, most ISPs build a local network and just peer at an exchange while buying the crappiest and slowest IP transit link they can get, meaning most Europeans reading this could just run a speed test to a network not directly connected to your ISP and see how bad their network speeds really are to most of the internet (you also probably don't have IPv6 either). Big ISPs also have zero incentive to peer with anyone because all of those small ISPs can usually only buy Transit from them (transport is out of the question for most small ISPs in most of the continent), unlike in the US where even Comcast has to appease their customers somewhat as there's a lot of competition these days from TMO and VZ.

In the US ISPs build their own transit and transport networks, meaning large ISPs have an incentive to build fast and reliable networks with lots of capacity and redundancy so they can sell access to said networks. This doesn't happen in places like Europe where there might be a single transport network for an entire geographic area. It also means that unless you are as big as Netflix, you can pretty much assume everyone in the lower 48 will have a good experience connecting to your server since congestion is only a hyper-local thing out here, but in Europe congestion is such a big problem the EU had to step in and ask American tech companies to voluntarily lower bandwidth usage so they could keep up.

That's also why you see so much shit from those same telecoms who cry about having to upgrade their network because of said big tech companies, when in reality it was those same telecoms who sat on their asses not building fiber and not upgrading capacity.

When the pandemic hit and ISPs realized they were resting on their laurels, a lot of fiber building companies were unable to handle the request for more capacity because every other ISP in Europe is asking for the same thing, and most ISPs can't build their own fiber as they never invested in their own equipment and training as, again, the government gave that job to someone else.

Plenty places to not have fiber. I am using Ziggo (cable) with 600Mbit down and 60Mbit up. It's sufficient but since they have a monopoly they can set the price however they want. I can lower my cost by switching over to Odido with 1Gbit fiber (up and down) for €30 less a month...

This is fine as long as:

- the government doesn’t use any tax revenue to do this nor impose any debt on the government

- the government doesn’t get any special privileges for access to lay fiber

Then it’s no different than a regular competitor. This is often not the case though and it makes it very difficult for anyone to compete.