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Google Businesses Communications The Almighty Buck

Google Fiber Is Losing Its Second CEO in Less Than a Year (businessinsider.com) 71

Posted by msmash from the what's-happening dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google Fiber, the high-speed internet service operated by Alphabet, has lost its second CEO in less than a year. Gregory McCray is stepping down from the CEO job of Access, the Alphabet subsidiary that houses the Fiber unit, Google confirmed to Business Insider on Monday. The change is the latest shake-up at Access, which announced in October that it would stop rolling out its 1 gigabit per second wired broadband networks to new cities and focus on newer, wireless options, such as the Webpass wireless service it acquired last year. The Access group also had layoffs towards the end of 2016 and shifted hundreds of other employees to different units within Google earlier this year. Alphabet CEO Larry Page said in an emailed statement to Business Insider on Monday that the company is "committed to the success of Google Fiber" and was looking for new leader for the business.
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Google Fiber Is Losing Its Second CEO in Less Than a Year More

Google Fiber Is Losing Its Second CEO in Less Than a Year

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  • With good reason! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @10:08AM (#54832525)

    This guy didn't have nearly enough fiber in his diet. ;)

  • Where do I submit my resume? (Score:3)

    by Oswald McWeany ( 2428506 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @10:13AM (#54832551)

    Can I be the next CEO please Larry?

    Even if I only last a year I will earn more than I make in a lifetime as a programmer.

    • Also, you might have a better chance to actually get fiber to the home than ever in your lifetime.

  • Just install it (Score:5, Interesting)

    by theurge14 ( 820596 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @10:24AM (#54832633)

    I'm in Austin (the 2nd city served by Google Fiber) and I still can't get it in my home.

    If Google can't get this done, who can?

    • I'm in Austin (the 2nd city served by Google Fiber) and I still can't get it in my home.

      If Google can't get this done, who can?

      Alphabet?

    • City governments. But then people would need to actually pay attention to local government.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        City governments. But then people would need to actually pay attention to local government.

        Doesn't work. Existing duopoly providers (Comcast, Spectrum, AT&T, etc) have bought all the state legislators, and they pass laws saying that cities can't build their own infrastructure.

        • An exaggeration, sure, but the above post shouldn't have been downmodded.

          There are lots of instances of ISPs strangling municipal broadband movements either through lobbying or direct legal action.

        • I don't think a solution requires that cities build and own the fiber. City owned is what the telco/cable co's are complaining about. The companies are competing against government which isn't fair. If the city makes it easy for another company to come in and compete with the other companies, then I don't see how they would have a legal argument against it. The exception to that is if the local cable company has an exclusive franchise agreement with the city and the city is trying to violate that contract.
        • Hence the "people would need to actually pay attention to local government." State legislators are absurdly inept and corrupt because no one pays any attention to them except for special interests. I mean, I don't see that changing any time soon, so not much point in discussing it, but it's not like it's in the US constitution.
        • That's simply untrue. There are numerous cities around the US which have built their own. Generally the issue has been that most tax payers don't want to pay for the creation and maintenance of such systems. Even once they're launched it's unlikely a significant portion of the people in that city will switch, which means that they're still paying to keep the service running while getting no benefit in return. As such, in most cases the successful ventures have been cities picking a contracting company to ta
    • AT&T is already doing it. I have fiber in my house in Leander, and had it in my apartment in central Austin. They priced it to exactly compete with Google Fiber's project price.

    • AT&T. Verizon. Frontier. And a whole host of other player.

      Google was interested in getting fiber with high speed access to more people because access means more google applications (and therefore revenue). Honestly I don't think Google ever cared about Google Fiber being successful as a business. What they cared about was kick starting the the above mentioned carriers into better faster networks so they can generated bigger faster revenue. It is the same reason Facebook is looking to deploy networks (e

    • I told a friend when google first announced we will never get it in our neighborhood. He was a little confused until I described the economics of trenching versus hanging on an existing pole. We never got it. Another friend in a "pole" neighborhood has it though.

  • Did Google expect Fiber to succeed? (Score:3)

    by dysmal ( 3361085 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @10:34AM (#54832697)

    Look at the history of projects that Google has started and killed off when they don't meet expectations. I can't say i'm shocked that Fiber stalled and appears to be dieing. Current Fiber customers should be nervous because if/when Google decides to kill this project i have the utmost confidence in Google to shaft these people.

    Did Google leadership really expect Fiber to succeed? Or did the most recent CEO step down because he realized that Fiber (like almost every other product) is "beta" and they'll kill it on a whim when they decide to go in yet another direction?

    • They built a lot of hype in the first few markets and got cheaper deals from the town to use the utility poles. Then the ISP's wised up and fought their sweetheart deals they shouldn't have received in the first place.

  • What do they expect? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Chas ( 5144 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @10:41AM (#54832747) Homepage Journal

    Laying fiber is a time and labor intense job. Hence, EXPENSIVE.
    And they found out just HOW expensive.

    So now they're going to "concentrate on wireless". Yay. "Google FIBER is concentrating on WIRELESS".

    Basically it sounds like they did a cost projection and figured out that they weren't going to have ANYTHING close to the penetration they'd initially planned. So Alphabet yanked most of their funding. So the company is running in maintenance mode. Working at supporting the few markets they have and flogging a small group of techs for ideas on how to expand coverage in those areas so they don't have to do anything more than maybe spend a few million on upgraded wifi access points.

    It's depressing. But the mere threat of them moving into Chicago prompted my cable company to offer gigabit service at a reasonable price. So I guess they accomplished SOMETHING.

    • IIRC google realized that their ability to remain on top forever could be threatened by the fact that comcast was a middleman between google and users. Spending money to get rid of that middleman makes sense. With the death of net neutrality looming especially. "We're sorry, google and youtube are not available on your plan, but comcast-nbc-bing search with motionview is!"

      I guess though google realized that will take a longer time than they need to be concerned with and they have enough money they can ju

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      It makes you wonder just what the business model was to begin with and whether it was ever anything more than a feint to goad incumbent ISPs to enhance their service offerings, especially in light of all the public speculation they around "who's city is next?"

      "Focusing" on wireless may be just another attempt to re-create the same situation with wireless, although this seems harder as anyone can lay fiber, but not everyone has spectrum and arbitrarily building out wireless networks is more difficult because

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hnjjz ( 696917 )

      Laying fiber is a time and labor intense job. Hence, EXPENSIVE. And they found out just HOW expensive.

      Laying fiber is actually not that time and labor intensive if you can get unfettered access to the utility poles/tunnels. Google was able to lay fiber very quickly in initial pilot areas where the local governments allowed Google such access. However, the phone and cable companies sued to only allow Google to do work on utility poles/tunnels when work crews from the incumbent providers are present. One can guess how helpful the phone and cable companies have been in making their work crews available for

      • of course they sued, if you allow one company access like this then you need to allow everyone access. but then you need to figure out who's going to pay the costs in stringing the wire back up in case of a big storm.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by thule ( 9041 )
          Exactly! Why don't people understand this? Of course the cable/telco's had grounds to complain about this.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          of course they sued, if you allow one company access like this then you need to allow everyone access. but then you need to figure out who's going to pay the costs in stringing the wire back up in case of a big storm.

          Everybody. Each company is responsible for repairing its own lines in the event of a big storm, just as has always been true. Your question doesn't make sense.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      A fiber company came to my mid-sized midwestern university town and the cable/phone companies squealed like pigs trying to stop them. The commissioners narrowly gave them the goahead and people swapped to the fiber company as they rolled out so fast they literally couldn't field enough techs to do the installs at reasonable times. People will crawl over broken glass to get rid of Comcast.

      They're still expanding here and Comcast started literally running ads against them, mentioning them by name when they're

    • Is most cases the fiber is already there. There's dark fiber all over the place across this country. Usually they simply purchased the existing fiber around the city and only had to lay the last mile service.

  • Fiber is dead, all hail our cableco masters! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by elrous0 ( 869638 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @10:41AM (#54832749)

    I knew when Verizon stopped pushing FIOS that fiber was dead. Google loves splashy launches, but they quickly grow tired of anything involving day-to-day maintenance and long-term commitments. Google has the attention span of a methed-up squirrel.

    On the upside, cablecos are now the only option for high speed internet for most people in the U.S. And they have pretty much unbreakable monopolies. Isn't that WONDERFUL?
     

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Shatrat ( 855151 )

      Fiber is not dead. AT&T and VZ slowed their deployments, but they're both in the middle of upgrading their GPON network hardware and they'll be supporting what they still have. Their main obstacle to deploying more is that they're betting on 5G and wireless fixed access, and don't want to invest money in their wireline plant when they can invest that money in a network that supports both homes and mobile phones. Personally I think that wireless with never be as good as fixed, and it won't even be 'good

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thule ( 9041 )
      And who made that happen? LOCAL CITIES. Their regulation allowed a single company to come into the city and have exclusive access for years. It worked in so far as that cities have infrastructure, but backfired because cable companies' coax turned out to be the best option for high speed connectivity. Copper pairs didn't cut it. Verizon tried to do fiber, but get too much on making money on video around the time that video is getting squeezed (cord cutters drive up content prices while demand continues to d

    • Also, why deal with having to run fiber optics into the home when Comcast is just about ready to do the national rollout of DOCSIS 3.1 gigabit-speed cable modem service? Comcast recently changed the video compression of their HD channels nationally from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4, which frees up enough bandwidth to start implementing DOCSIS 3.1. In short, a swap from a DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem to one supporting DOCSIS 3.1 will get you Internet speeds you normally see in South Korea and Japan.

  • With Net Neutrality dying (Score:4, Interesting)

    by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Tuesday July 18, 2017 @11:09AM (#54832933)
    they might start showing some more interest. Originally Google Fiber was probably a hedge against the ISPs. They lost interest when the Obama admin sided with them. Kinda like how Valve dropped the Steam box when the Microsoft Store flopped.
  • Clearly, they need more fiber in their diet to stop the runs.

  • other telecommunication lines in the ground. Especially those that were paid for by the American Public (just about every line laid by Ma Bell/AT&T and most other phone companies). -- you know, one of those tacked on extras on every phone bill since the creation of Ma Bell. Not to mention right of way grants from the government(s) because the phone system was considered necessary for the growth of the United States.

    It will have to be set up such that the entity responsible is its own company (like the U

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thule ( 9041 )
      That is extreme. Wasn't Bell Systems nationalized for a short time in US history?

      Consider an alternate idea. At the local-level (cities), grant infrastructure-only licenses. Cities already regulate right of ways and pole access. Traditionally cities would grant long term franchises to cable companies in exchange for them building out cable. Continues with that, but any new agreements require that the cable company cannot offer video (no money in that anyway) and Internet. This would be closer to how it wa

    • Why not just force the existing cable and telephone companies lease the last mile. I'm with a third party ISP but they didn't have to dig up my lawn to install any lines. They lease the line from the cable company and have a switch in the nearest data centre to me. My data is only on the cable company's network for the short part and from after that data centre it's on the ISPs network.

      This is all guaranteed by the CRTC. The cable company gets paid to maintain the line with a modest amount of profit and peo

  • For those commenting that Google is discovering that laying fiber is just "too expensive", that is flat out incorrect.

    The truth is, laying fiber is the cheap and easy part.
    The difficult, time consuming and expensive part is dealing with all the politicians and regulations.

    It used to cost $3k to deploy fiber to a home, its now down to $500. With a $100/month service, that is a very attractive business model. However, when you spend years arguing with entrenched competitors over right of way on poles and po

    • Maybe in your area, but the solid limestone in mine says it will cost > 2K/house just to trench. And don't forget when you trench, you may hit something else by accident if somebody missed a gas line, water line, sewer line, power HV or LV line, telco line, cable line, irrigation pipes on and on. There is alot of stuff under that ground. And I'm in a residential neighborhood. As you get into more urban, you have all the traffic control wire/sensors and on and on. And don't say its easy. When I had my fen

      • as long as you had the locate done and its still valid, it's the locating companies fault and they have to pay for it.

  • Rather than laying down fiber, why not offer satellite based internet service. Right now, there are only two existing providers which offer up to 25 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up. If Google wanted to invest in it, they could start their own service with higher transmission speeds and higher data caps compared to the two existing providers.

    I'm not sure how much the investment would cost compared to laying down fiber though.

  • I live in San Francisco and Web Pass (acquired by a Google Fiber) is my internet provider. Web Pass is wireless. I get upload and download speeds of about 700 Mbps (advertised at 1,0000 Mbps) for $44 per month. It's awesome. I hope Google Fiber stays alive and well for many years to come.

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