Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Some Kansas City residents who have been waiting years for Google Fiber to install service at their homes recently received e-mails canceling their installations, with no word on whether they'll ever get Internet service from the company.
KSHB 41 Action News in Kansas City, Missouri, "spoke to several people, living in different parts of the metro, all who have recently received cancellation e-mails," the station reported last week. "The e-mails do not provide a specific reason for the cancellations. Instead they say the company was 'unable to build our network to connect your home or business at this time.'"
Further Reading Google Fiber division cuts staff by 9%, "pauses" fiber plans in 11 cities
While Google Fiber refuses to say how many installations have been canceled, KSHB said, "there is speculation the number of cancellations in the metro is as high as 2,700."
"The company says it has slowed down in some areas to experiment with new techniques," such as wireless technology, the report also said. Google Fiber is still hooking up fiber for some new customers in parts of the Kansas City area.
One resident who had his installation canceled is Larry Meurer, who was seeing multiple Google Fiber trucks in his neighborhood nearly two years ago, in the spring of 2015. "I'm left wondering what's going on," he told KSHB after getting the cancellation e-mail. Meurer lives in Olathe, Kansas, one of the largest cities in the Kansas City metro area. Residents only five houses away and around the corner have Google Fiber service, the report said. But Meurer said he and several neighbors who never got service were "terminated."
The entirety of the cancellation letter is quoted in the original article, but is pretty vague.
-- submitted from IRC
Related Stories
Why Google Fiber Is High-Speed Internet's Most Successful Failure (archive)
In the Big Bang Disruption model, where innovations take off suddenly when markets are ready for them, Google Fiber could be seen as a failed early market experiment in gigabit internet access. But what if the company's goal was never to unleash the disrupter itself so much as to encourage incumbent broadband providers to do so, helping Google's expansion in adjacent markets such as video and emerging markets including smart homes? Seen through that lens, Google Fiber succeeded wildly. It stimulated the incumbents to accelerate their own infrastructure investments by several years. New applications and new industries emerged, including virtual reality and the Internet of Things, proving the viability of an "if you build it, they will come" strategy for gigabit services. And in the process, local governments were mobilized to rethink restrictive and inefficient approaches to overseeing network installations.
[...] Google went about announcing locations, and incumbent broadband ISPs, including AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable, would quickly counter by promising improved pricing, faster speeds, network upgrades or some combination of the three. A "game of gigs" had erupted. In the end, Google announced plans to build in 34 cities, playing a kind of broadband whack-a-mole game. Incumbents, who initially dismissed the effort as a publicity stunt, accelerated and reprioritized their own deployments city by city as Google announced follow-on expansion.
As the game of gigs played out, city leaders were forced to offer the same administrative advantages to incumbents as they had to Google Fiber. Construction costs fell, and the speed of deployments increased. Only six years after Google's initial announcement, according to the Fiber Broadband Association, 30% of urban residents had access to gigabit Internet service.
Related: Movie Studios Fear a Piracy Surge From Google Fiber
Google Files Letter with FCC Showing Positives of Title II for Broadband Providers
Google Fiber Announces Next 4 Cities to Get 1Gbps
AT&T Charges $29 More for Gigabit Fiber that Doesn't Watch Your Web Browsing
Austinites Outraged as Google Fiber Tears Up Texas Capital
Google Fiber Buys Webpass ISP
After Years Waiting for Google Fiber, KC Residents Get Cancellation E-Mails
FCC Gives Google Fiber and New ISPs Faster Access to Utility Poles
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday March 23 2017, @02:51AM (5 children)
Not that any ISP is likely to be non-evil, especially the big ones, but I'd be a bit disturbed to have google as my ISP.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @03:24AM (3 children)
Why? It means there is one less company in the stream getting to see everything you do.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday March 23 2017, @03:36AM
Exactly. They can't be worse than Comcrap.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Thursday March 23 2017, @06:34AM (1 child)
A person can choose to not use google, unless google is the ISP
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 27 2017, @10:10PM
There may exist the option of using another ISP, or of not using the Internet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @04:12AM
The terms of service are actually very pro-privacy.
They don't track user browsing anymore than they do people using other ISPs.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @06:51AM (3 children)
I don't think it's unfair to say Google Fiber has been a failure. After about 6 years of operation they ended up with less than 500k [wikipedia.org] broadband installations and a tiny fraction of that in television subscriptions. Their potential market was in the millions. And now, prior to this, they'd already quietly announced their intentions to start minimizing if not rolling back their efforts in this industry.
People blame the lack of competition on regulations, but I think it's something far more simple. Once telecoms infrastructure is setup the overhead is extremely low. Time Warner obfuscates their profit margins but they are extremely high. An article [technologyreview.com] from MIT Technology Review cites another source putting Comcast and Time Warner's profit margins at 97%. Whatever the exact number, it's extremely high. What this means is that they could lower their prices almost arbitrarily if "necessary." Why does this matter? Imagine I want to setup a telecoms competitor. Well I spend the millions to billions of dollars it takes to lay out my infrastructure, setup a local presence, market myself, and yes of course get through all the regulatory hurdles. People, itching for an alternative to the long established coercive monopoly, claim they'll sign up by the millions. The day I before I flip the switch and go live with signups, the monopoly announces, "Oh yeah - we'll price and service match everything that new upstart is offering." Most people don't swap over. I can lower my prices more, but the established monopoly can easily match that as well.
In fact there is no win condition for me. Given the monopoly's economy of scale and install base, their costs as a percent of revenue are a fraction of mine. I'm millions to billions in the hole - they're long since in the deep green. I lose. Capitalism works great when companies agree to grind each other to a pulp, but there's vastly more money to be made by not competing. And in fields where there are substantial barriers to entry, which as technology advances is becoming more the standard than the exception, it becomes difficult if not impossible to disrupt the monopolization even for the few actors capable of actually managing to compete in the first place.
And this is why there is no competition. It's also why the telecoms companies are merging at a rate that makes Ma Bell look prudish.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @08:43PM (1 child)
Easy solution!!!
Anything using public right-of-way becomes publicly owned, and companies rent to use. If a company spends their own money for upgrades / maintenance they can discount that from their rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @10:37PM
Brilliant! Why hasn't anyone thought of that?
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 23 2017, @10:12PM
In other words, it is a Natural Monopoly [wikipedia.org]... which "free market is always universally good, remove all regulations" libertarians always seem to forget, ignore, or disregard.