Google Fiber is hitting the pause button on discussion with "potential fiber cities", and will lay off about 9% of its approximately 1,500 employees. Craig Barratt, the CEO of Alphabet's Access division, is also stepping down.
After rolling out its Fiber product in about a dozen cities, Google is hitting pause on its project to deploy superfast Internet across the country. The news may come as a disappointment to those who were hoping the search giant would bring competition and faster speeds to their area.
[...] Even as Google Fiber pays lots of money to lay down cables and secure access to TV programming, a different type of technology is coming down the pike: wireless fiber. [...] There are signs that Google is moving in this direction, too. In June, it acquired Webpass, a provider of wireless broadband. Other acquisitions support this theory. And in its announcement Tuesday, Google Fiber said it would be looking at "new technology and deployment methods to make superfast Internet more abundant than it is today." So even if Google Fiber is on hold in its current incarnation, changes in technology may someday reduce the costs Google faces today.
Comcast and AT&T are still trying to hinder Google Fiber access to utility poles in Nashville. Both ISPs have filed suit against the Metro Government of Nashville for passing a "One Touch Make Ready" ordinance that benefits Google Fiber.
Previously: Google Fiber Gets Rid of "Free" Service in Kansas City
Costly Google Fiber Service Being Scaled Back in Favor of Google Wireless
Nashville Officials Approve Ordinance to Give Google Fiber Faster Access to Utility Poles
Related Stories
Google Fiber's $300 construction fee for unlimited 5 Mbps service plan will be discontinued:
Google Fiber is no longer offering free Internet service to any customer who wants it in Kansas City. While Google Fiber is most famous for its $70-per-month gigabit plan, customers could also get slow Internet—5Mbps downloads and 1Mbps uploads—without paying a monthly service fee. The plan required only a $300 construction fee that could be paid up-front or in 12 monthly installments of $25 each.
But that plan is now gone in Kansas City, Re/code reported yesterday. The free offer was still online as recently as Wednesday, but the current offers now begin at $50 a month for symmetrical 100Mbps service. The move coincides with Google expanding free Internet service for qualifying low-income customers. Instead of providing free Internet to anyone in Google's service area, the company will instead make targeted efforts to bring poor people online.
Alphabet/Google's spending on Google Fiber will be scaled back dramatically, due to high costs and the company falling far short of its 5 million subscriber target (there are around 200,000 customers instead):
[The Information] also reports that CEO Larry Page has demanded that Fiber "reduce the current cost of bringing Google Fiber to customers' homes to one-tenth the current level" That should be interesting. Google Fiber will be scaled back to just 500 employees, half its current staffing.
But wait. Wasn't Google "killing any doubts about its national ISP intentions" just two months ago? Sort of. From now on, Google will focus on selective wireless, rather than wireline infrastructure. It's a lot cheaper. The San Jose Mercury was the first to report the scale-back a fortnight ago.
Also at The Information (paywalled), USA Today, eWeek, and Salon. Ars Technica also has an article about Google Fiber doing battle with AT&T over access to utility poles.
AT&T is fuming at the approval and likely passage of a Nashville, TN, ordinance that would allow Google Fiber to bypass previous obstacles to utility pole access:
Officials in Nashville, Tennessee have voted to give Google Fiber faster access to utility poles, approving an ordinance opposed by AT&T and Comcast. AT&T has already said it would likely sue the city if it implements the new rule. [...] Google Fiber is available in parts of Nashville, but expansion has been slow in part because of how long it takes to get access to utility poles. When Google Fiber attaches wires to a utility pole, other ISPs must first move their own wires to make the pole ready for new wires. The Nashville Electric Service, which owns most of the poles, must also review applications and inspect AT&T's and Comcast's line work before letting Google Fiber attach to any pole. AT&T also owns some of the poles in the city.
The One Touch Make Ready ordinance would let a single company—such as Google Fiber—make all of the necessary wire adjustments itself without having to wait for incumbent providers to send construction crews. Google Fiber applauded the vote last night, saying that "Improving the make-ready construction process is key to unlocking access to a faster Internet for Nashville, and this Ordinance will allow new entrants like Google Fiber to bring broadband to more Nashvillians efficiently, safely and quickly."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Friday October 28 2016, @12:32PM
This would be sad news if Google Fiber had been slated to come to my city soon, but it seems they were never going to come to NYC anyway. Verizon and Time-Warner have a lock on the political class here. It must be some free market thing I don't understand.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by NotSanguine on Friday October 28 2016, @01:41PM
And it's not like Verizon is actually *deploying* FIOS on any scale in NYC [theverge.com] either. You'd think that in a city the size of NYC, you should be able to get excellent connectivity. And you can, if you are willing to pay commercial [pilotfiber.com] prices [stealth.net] for it [towerstream.com].
You could always go with These guys [bkfiber.com] but their speeds are pretty weak for fiber and very weak for the price.
Unless I want to pay $20/month per static IPs (I have six) and endure the abusive TOS from TWC or RCN, I'm stuck with DSL myself.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @01:56PM
Dude NYC is probably THE WORST place to run fiber in the country. If you dig one foot down anywhere you probably will hit 4 cables, a pipe, and 2 subway lines. You might do better in the outside boroughs, where you can run wires above the street, but I am more than certain all those poles are at capacity.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Friday October 28 2016, @03:36PM
Dude NYC is probably THE WORST place to run fiber in the country. If you dig one foot down anywhere you probably will hit 4 cables, a pipe, and 2 subway lines. You might do better in the outside boroughs, where you can run wires above the street, but I am more than certain all those poles are at capacity.
You clearly have no clue. There's plenty of fiber, both dark and lit in and under NYC. In fact, there's likely more fiber in Manhattan than there is in the rest of NYC combined.
Most commercial buildings can or do have access to fiber links. That's not the problem. The problem is *residential* access to fiber.
tl;dr: You're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday October 28 2016, @01:47PM
Yes, in the Land of the Free Market and the global leader in technology, we pay twice as much for half the speed of Internet service as customers in east Asia and Europe.
Don't understand, you say? Well, that is of course easily spotted sarcasm. We're not supposed to understand, but we do anyway. I've observed a strong correlation between excessive complexity and bad prices and bad service. Complexity is used to try to hide the lousiness of the deals. Or, more like, since that doesn't fool everyone for long, a source for implausible excuses so they don't have to come right out and admit that it's just price gouging. Turing Pharmaceuticals needed the money for research, right? In the 1990s, schedule D of the US federal tax form got much more complicated when the Flat Tax reformers showed that their real agenda was handing the rich a massive tax cut in the form of lowering the capital gains tax rate to 15% for "long term" investments. Doesn't feel too flat, or fair, when wage earners are still paying 25%.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Justin Case on Friday October 28 2016, @02:00PM
their real agenda was handing the rich a massive tax cut in the form of lowering the capital gains tax rate to 15%
I'm a wage earner. I set aside some of what I earn, and invest it. That's money on which I already paid income tax. But if I am lucky enough (or careful enough) to make a good investment, I get taxed again.
Oh, and the company I invested in, that made me some return? That got taxed too. I'm only taxed 15% on what's left over after the money has been through a car wash of previous taxes.
But to some people, even 100% tax would not be enough.
By the way, there is no such thing as handing someone a tax cut. When a mugger sticks a gun in my belly and takes my wallet, is he giving me a gift if he returns one of my five-dollar bills that he took?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @02:56PM
Justin Case you weren't aware, you are only taxed on the profit you made from an investment, and you can deduct your losses.
It's not free to provide a market and the legal safety for you to be able to consider making investments.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday October 28 2016, @05:22PM
Look our your unbroken window through the non-smog at the non-dirt road on which no Canadian soldier is talking to a non-existent homeless sick elder while no analphabet child scapes a living off cutting your non-exposed copper used to power your obviously-working internet.
Congrats, you paid taxes.
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Friday October 28 2016, @07:02PM
You missed a "non": Non sequitur.
I'm responding to someone saying 15% tax is too low for money that has already been taxed multiple times.
You're responding as if I said nothing should ever be taxed at all. So if we're going to play absolutist games, can I put you down for supporting 100% tax on all money, moving or static?
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday October 28 2016, @07:42PM
The point is that the money that was taxed multiple times still does not yield enough for a government running a giant deficit.
So, either you can list which expenses the government should stop making, or you need to point out where the money should come from instead.
For a given amount of required tax revenue, if you tax actual work more than you tax the profit of investments, you shift the burden of paying for government onto the poorer people and advantage the rentier class. Which is not the best plan for long-term stability and overall country health.
It's not as simple as "this has already been taxed, it shouldn't be double-taxed". It's revenue which someone can use as they use their labor's revenue, and should therefore be taxed equally.
Trust me, I come from a place which had the amazing idea to tax Assets over a certain threshold. If you have a few millions stashed, you have to pay up to one percent of it yearly in rich-person taxes. The stated goal being that you have to put that money to work for a return above that 1% (plus the taxes on that return), creating value for the country. Since rich people are not trapped in castles anymore, it encourages them to hide their cash elsewhere. Politicians seem to know that removing that tax would not be conducive to a great future, in a place where the privileged are fairly discrete because they've read history books.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @10:08PM
I'll take that one:
Militarism. Estimates range between 54 percent and 59 percent of the USA's discretionary budget.
(Note that, when ALL related expenditures are counted, -none- of the totals are below 50 percent.)
That could easily be cut by 40 percentage points and leave a more-than-adequate defense of the homeland.
...of course, it bears mentioning that *defense* is NOT what the USA military is for.[1]
Properly named, it would be called The Department of Aggression.
During WWII, it was still called The Department of War, which was more accurate.
[1] ...and the only armed service which -does- serve in an actual **defensive** role is the Coast Guard.
...which has been under the departments of Treasury, Commerce and Labor, Commerce, Treasury again, Transportation, and Homeland Security.
The only times it has been under The Department of War was during WWI (2 years) and WWII (4 years and 2 months). [uscg.mil]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday October 28 2016, @10:52PM
> could easily be cut by 40 percentage points
And cause one hell of a recession in the process... The main advantage of being paranoid about building weapons is the amount of domestic work it creates, typically in good stable jobs.
Should it be cut? Sure, but the only reasonable approach would be to trim over a couple decades (deny overall growth, trim political-related expenses).
Oddly, we should thank Duterte, Trump, and a few Japanese-teen-rapists for their contribution to reducing excess overseas deployments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 29 2016, @01:09AM
In recent days, I've mentioned how militarism actually has a poor Multiplier Effect.
Since I first posted here, I've been mentioning how The New Deal had an excellent Multiplier Effect.
When militarism is cut, you put those folks to work on INFRASTRUCTURE, rebuilding the nation's crumbling roads and bridges and water systems and schools and all the other stuff that's falling to pieces.
While we're at it, put unemployed IT workers to the task of securing our poorly secured online infrastructure.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @09:13PM
I'm a wage earner. I set aside some of what I earn, and invest it. That's money on which I already paid income tax. But if I am lucky enough (or careful enough) to make a good investment, I get taxed again.
Oh, and the company I invested in, that made me some return? That got taxed too. I'm only taxed 15% on what's left over after the money has been through a car wash of previous taxes.
But to some people, even 100% tax would not be enough.
By the way, there is no such thing as handing someone a tax cut. When a mugger sticks a gun in my belly and takes my wallet, is he giving me a gift if he returns one of my five-dollar bills that he took?
I hate this argument, because it misrepresents taxes. Everything gets taxed. This idea of double taxation is silly.
For example, you buy a hamburger, and that sale gets taxed. The hamburger stand pays the meat distributor, and that sale gets taxed. The meat distributor pays the factory, and that sale gets taxed. The factory pays the farm, and that sale gets taxed. Etc.
Would you agree if McDonalds said "the farmers already paid tax, so we should be tax exempt?" Or how about the argument that "I founded Apple with my own money 30 years ago, so all of that profit grown since then should be tax free?"
Are you really proposing a "first-tax doctrine" where only the first distribution of money from the Federal Reserve gets taxed and nothing else?
(Score: 2) by Justin Case on Friday October 28 2016, @01:53PM
Verizon and Time-Warner have a lock on the political class here. It must be some free market thing
I think you nailed it, but by contradiction. Political !== free.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by jelizondo on Friday October 28 2016, @05:07PM
Allow me to illustrate you on this matter. As you probably know, the market is ruled by offer and demand: greater offer, means the lower prices; higher demand, means higher prices.
Given that there is a small number of politicians in positions of real power, their price goes up and then only the rich can afford to buy them.
See? Easily explained by the rules of the market.
.
Jesus H. Christ! I can't believe I wrote that as sarcasm and it actually sounds like the real truth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @01:54PM
I guess their UTILITY became FUTILITY! You really showed those ISPs huh Google?
The silver lining in this is that we now see what arm-chair quarterbacking nets you. Everyone likes to talk shit how easy something is even thou they have no fucking clue about it. I hate the current ISPs as much as the next guy but they are the result of the landscape. The system is more convoluted and complicated than even the geniuses at Google could ever imagine. You can't just say you will run a piece of wire from point A to point B and expect to just incur the cost of the wire plus $10/hour you pay some shlop to sling it.
(Score: 5, Informative) by art guerrilla on Friday October 28 2016, @03:13PM
don't be daft...
it isn't 'complicated' and 'hard' because of technical or physical limitations, or someone just can't do the super-difficult calculus problem: it is 'complicated' and 'hard' because of the interference, regulatory capture, complicit municipal pols, and TOTAL OBSTRUCTIONISM of the monopolistic big boys who you are trying to nip at their OBSCENELY PROFITABLE extortion racket...
wise up, kamper...
(or, foad, shillbot)
(Score: 2, Informative) by Arik on Friday October 28 2016, @02:18PM
Uh, no they don't, this is clearly something some idiot in marketing came up with, and no one with a geek card (or any love for the English language) would utter such a monstrous bit of nonsense.
Point to point over wireless is not new, it's been used for years. It has both advantages and disadvantages, but it does not involve fiber in any way, shape, or form. Marketing just can't stop lying, they really can't, it's well beyond their capability.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Friday October 28 2016, @04:08PM
A quick googling didn't bring up any articles other than this one that even refer to it as "wireless fiber." I did see many references to optical wireless, but this article is so lean on technical details they may be talking about RFC 1149 [ietf.org] for all we know.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday October 28 2016, @05:27PM
Which mean bastard fed fiber to the pigeons? As if they needed better transit times...
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @09:51PM
something some idiot in marketing came up with
ding ding ding! we have a winner.
I sat in a few 'rollout' meetings where terms like this come up. We all looked at each other like 'wtf is that? oh marketing'.
So glad I no longer work at that telecom. The BS is too much. They honestly 100% do not understand what their business is. They want to be like google. But have no idea why google is what it is. They honestly think if they imitate their development cycle they will turn themselves into google.
Google on the other hand tried to go it alone. That works on a small scale. But on a large scale AT&T and Verizon will crush you like a bug in the telecom areas. They have an army of lawyers ready to make it wildly harder for you to enter the market. The laws are written to favor them. They have 100+ years of doing it. If google had teamed up with Apple and MS they could have given the two big telecoms a run for their money. Hubris, is not seeing you need help against 52 legislatures, FCC, and thousands of cities and counties. All of which is stacked against you to build new.
Google sounds like they are trying to imitate the baby bells. Bad idea. The baby bells have no idea what makes them incumbent, yet they use it masterfully. If google was serious about smashing prices down and speed up they were going down the right path. Imitating the baby bells is like Ferrari trying to make ford escorts.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 28 2016, @04:19PM
Just not with the product or service they rolled out a year and a half ago. Or six months before that, or a year before that, etc.