Why Google Fiber Is High-Speed Internet's Most Successful Failure 77
Blair Levin and Larry Downes report via Harvard Business Review: In 2010, Google rocked the $60 billion broadband industry by announcing plans to deploy fiber-based home internet service, offering connections up to a gigabit per second -- 100 times faster than average speeds at the time. Google Fiber, as the effort was named, entered the access market intending to prove the business case for ultra-high-speed internet. After deploying to six metro areas in six years, however, company management announced in late 2016 that it was "pausing" future deployments. 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. The story of Google Fiber provides valuable lessons for future network transformations, notably the on-going global race to deploy next-generation 5G mobile networks. It seems, then, a good time to review the story of how the effort came into being, what it achieved, and what it teaches investors, consumers, and community leaders eager to ensure continued private spending on internet infrastructure.
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. The story of Google Fiber provides valuable lessons for future network transformations, notably the on-going global race to deploy next-generation 5G mobile networks. It seems, then, a good time to review the story of how the effort came into being, what it achieved, and what it teaches investors, consumers, and community leaders eager to ensure continued private spending on internet infrastructure.
Thank you Google! (Score:3, Insightful)
Without Google Fiber virtual reality and the Internet of things would clearly never have happened!
We would all still be stuck with no or little choice in ISP if Google hadn't mobilized local governments into rethinking restrictive and inefficient approaches to overseeing network installations!
I don't understand how any one could call it a failure.
Re: Thank you Google! (Score:4, Insightful)
Either you are trolling or you are full of shyte.
Re read the article.
its called sarcasm.
congrats to gp ac for triggering the humorless ignorant.
Site uses a paywall (Score:2)
Re read the article.
I would, but my current subscription package does not include Harvard Business Review.
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Either you are trolling or you are full of shyte.
Re read the article.
If Google Fiber had worked, we would be able to "Whoosh" much faster.
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Without SOCIALIST government money...no internet.
And who wrote the enabling legislation?
Al Gore.
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Cotton is a kind of fiber....
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Google had a change of direction. Alphabet was formed as a place for the dick bags to hide as they went psychopathically insane and wanted total power and total control, control the users, control elections, control the government, control the planet, the big shit went nuts and had to stand down. Too much bandwidth is bad for that, to free a flow of information and so they sided with those who wanted corporate controlled strangleband, where you only get what they allow you.
Google went from being the friend
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Harvard is known to fawn over successful greed, and objectifying businesses, rather than looking deeply into the trails of dead bodies.
Google completed only a small tiny fraction of its goal. It made telcos and ISPs stronger, in terms of monopolistic outcomes. Google is not your friend, unless you're a Google stockholder.
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Ethics forbids me from investing in them. Their "do no evil" mantra was an insidious lie.
You don't need a bundle (Score:2)
As for phone:
Once you have Internet, you can sign up for magicJack or another VoIP provider. Or consider $25/mo wireless home phone service from AT&T or Verizon.
As for TV:
In the United States, you don't need a monthly fee to receive free-to-air TV broadcasts from local affiliates of PBS and the four major commercial broadcast networks unless you live in a remote area over 75 miles from the tower. Unlike some other countries, which fund public broadcasting through a separately assessed capitation, the US
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Phone for 25 a month? How much for unlimited international (free now)?
International calls are free between two PCs running Skype, between a PC running Skype and a smartphone running Skype, or between two smartphones running Skype. The same is true of other VoIP applications: as long as both sides are using the same application over the Internet, calls are free. Which foreign contacts without a PC or smartphone do you call, or call you, regularly?
Got to have cnn,msnbc,foxnews,cnni,c-spans, syfy,fx,fxx,science,elrey,ifc,sundance,tcm, and a few others.
Instead of watching news on TV, you could read news on websites. Instead of linearly programmed movie and scripted series channels,
No it didn't (Score:2)
Seen through that lens, Google Fiber succeeded wildly. It stimulated the incumbents to accelerate their own infrastructure investments by several years.
No, it didn't. If infrastructure investments had accelerated, I would be able to get AT&T U-verse. But I'm still stuck with AT&T DSL with max down speed of 6Mbps.
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Maybe it's time to say good-bye to AT&T (DSL or otherwise). I did about 4 years ago, when my home DSL was down for a whole week (no explanation, no refunds) and I figured out after some calculation that hotspot plans could actually replace DSL now in my area.
Bribing the government? (Score:5, Insightful)
People forgot that the main reason Google Fiber failed was because immediate legislation passed basically everywhere, as local fiber networks not owned by communications companies became illegal. The reason it is a $60 billion dollar industry is because they will do anything not to chew into their profit margins. There's a reason that 3 of the top 5 companies that top lobbying expenditures are in that business.
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Citation needed.
true (Score:1)
I'm literally across the street from the boundary for Google fiber availability, which would be extremely annoying but for the fact that Centurylink has stepped up with fiber to the home for the area.
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Anything from CenturyLink can be stopped with enough cleansing fire...
CenturyLink is a DSL provider in most places. It can be stopped by just being out of sight of the nearest switch.
The Gigs (Score:3, Interesting)
Google never had deployment plans in my area (~35mi outside of Seattle). But ya'know what? As much as I hate em, I'm currently sitting on symetrical gigabit fiber, 100% unmetered, all ports unfiltered, with an entire block of IP addresses from CenturyLink. Prior to this rollout, they only offered 3mbps DLS in my area. We had city provided cable internet before that, but the city cannot get their heads out of their asses. They're STILL debating on upgrading to DOCSIS 3.1 many years later, and their AS only has 1 upstream connection (that has gone offline countless times).
Also, it isn't JUST about total bandwidth, but also about latency. I'm currently sitting at ~2-3ms round trip times to major providers in Seattle such as Google and the new 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver. Previously with cable, if I were lucky I'd get ~16-20ms latency when the routing tables were not fucked up, and over 80ms latency when they decided that Seattle was far away and should route through San Jose instead (sometime it would fuck up worse and route through New York, and on one occasion it even routed through London)
I am in a Google Fiber city, (Score:5, Insightful)
and I've posted this on Slashdot before, but I'll post it again.
This article is spot on.
Before Google Fiber came to town, getting and using broadband in this area was painful. It was the "telephone company utility" model. Everything had to be done by phone, with tons of time on hold. Installation was workmen with a clipboard, scheduled weeks out. You'd get 5mbps for $$ or 10mbps for $$$ or 50mbps for $$$$, no higher tier than 50mbps without paying for "business service" at the level of $500-$1k monthly. And those were your choices from every carrier. You never reached more than 25-40% of advertised speed up or down. Service was terrible and unreliable and if there was an outage you could be offline for weeks waiting for a service appointment. Account changes or cancellations were a by-telephone nightmare that were virtually destined to go wrong each time. And technical questions about configuration, blocked ports, etc.? Good luck. It was all a black box to the customer service lines. Far easier to figure such things out empirically yourself.
Then, Google Fiber came to down. Installations scheduled online. Accounts administered online, everything from payment to plan selection and changes. Transparency in equipment and documentation. And either 5mbps for FREE, 100mbps for $ or 1gb for $$, what had previously been the 5 or 10mbps cost with other carriers. Installations done in just days, rather than weeks out, by friendly people in branded vans. You get 100% of advertised speed, 24 hours a day, sustained. Outages are virtually unheard of, but if a tree does come down and knock out a line, it's fixed in a couple hours, not weeks. A walk-in Google Fiber store where you can actually talk tech details and they understand everything you're saying. It was like we jumped from 1995 to the present in a single month.
And within weeks, every other carrier had boosted their minimum residential offering to 50mbps and were suddenly offering and deploying gigabit residential fast as they possibly could, at (interestingly enough) exactly the same price as Google. Service improved drastically and they suddenly started to talk tech in their ads.
It does basically feel like Google was tired of seeing their growth limited by a bunch of small timers trying to pick the pockets of the public, so they came in and said "OYA? We're Google. FU." and got everyone gigabit. And for the other carriers it became a case of "either play fair or get fucked." So they played fair and then Google was happy to back off. If they hadn't, I wonder if Google would have continued and just put them all out of business. My impression is that Google doesn't necessarily want to be in the broadband business, but that they want to make damn sure the public has access to legitimate contemporary "broadband" pipes.
I understand that Google has an interest in this, but I don't mind at all. I'm happy to let Google profit if I get rock-solid up/down gigabit fiber with online administration for what was previously the cost of flaky 10 megabit down/768k up copper administered by an idiot bureaucracy behind a 2 hour telephone wait.
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Hey, nobody's arguing that Google didn't improve service where they actually deployed. In fact the "over the top" improvement in speed and service might be indicative of them creating a "model service" rather than the blueprint for a widescale rollout. And obviously they did some damage control where they did deploy or announced plans to deploy. But did they really light a fire under the entire market, or did they just "contain" Google and carry on making tons of money elsewhere? I mean the broadband market
No Google Fiber here, unfortunately. (Score:2)
"Before Google Fiber came to town, getting and using broadband in this area was painful."
"Everything had to be done by phone, with tons of time on hold."
"Installation was workmen with a clipboard, scheduled weeks out."
"You never reached more than 25-40% of advertised speed up or down."
"Service was terrible and unreliable and if there was an outage you could be offline for weeks waiting for a service appointment."
"Account changes or cancellations wer
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I work remotely for a company that works with large volumes of data. I routinely have to pass gigabytes back and forth—and having gigabit fiber enables me to do that very quickly, in just a few minutes, rather than having to plan ahead for hours of transfer time.
As far as the interface goes—the fiber.google.com interface is very simple BUT the router itself has a web-based interface on its internal IP address. At least mine does. Did you check yours while you had the service?
Survival and defence (Score:5, Insightful)
Google Fiber, Project Fi - I've always looked at things like these as basically Google telling the telcos that, if they really had to, they could compete directly against them.
A problem for Google (exacerbated with the end of net neutrality) is that the telcos etc. who have the "last mile" to the actual people that Google depends on to survive, could choke off Google's air (this is the same reason why Google decided they needed their own mobile OS and bought Android and causing a break with their previously-happy relationship with Apple).
It's a matter of survival for Google that, if they had to, if all the telcos suddenly imposed fees on Google/advertisers since, hey, "you're making money off OUR customers", they could pour some of the money they have into making Google Fiber, Fi a full-blown competitor, as opposed to a "project".
It's a signal to the telcos "I could kill you if you make me need to, so let's just carry on with the status quo shall we?". Their very existence and the visible ability to scale up if they have to, is all Google really wants - all other benefits (improving internet access overall etc.) are bonuses.
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It's not defense. Google is pushing the market in the direction it wants: With low broadband availability and speeds, people can't and won't rely on the cloud. Google wants people to stop handling their data offline, out of its reach. Chromebooks have minimal storage. Google needs the internet to be faster and ubiquitous and that's why Google is not actually defending the open web but forcing the ISPs to do Google's bidding.
Almost positive (Score:1)
Backfired (Score:2)
Remember this Slashdot story [slashdot.org] from a week ago? Poking ISPs with a stick (e.g. with the One Touch Make Ready push) caused them to fight back, now they're trying to get laws passed that would regulate Google's data in transit (along with other edge providers'.) Maybe don't call it a victory for Google just yet.
No, Google Fiber Failed (Score:5, Interesting)
As much as I want to champion Google's efforts here, I feel like TFA is just trying to find a way to spin a failure as a success. Which is understandable, as that's a very human thing to do.
None the less, Google Fiber was absolutely a failure. Google threw down a ton of money on infrastructure they either never completed (Portland), or they completed systems and will probably never make back their initial investment (Kansas City). With Google's massive bank account it wasn't quite a boondoggle, but it none the less cost the company a lot of money.
And the reason it failed is because the company in turn failed to take into account where the wireless market would be 5 years down the line after they started. Starting in 2012 the big 4 wireless carriers hit the ground running on LTE, and hard. The end result is that while LTE offers a fraction of the performance of a good coaxial cable or fiber system, it covers something like 98% of the US population. It's everywhere, and in most places it's even kind of, sort of okay. And with everyone owning a cell phone anyhow, we're now seeing some cord cutters cut the hardline entirely and work entirely off of wireless. All of which has obliterated the critical mass of consumers required to fund a major new infrastructure build-out.
I admire Google's intentions, and I really wish I had some fiber myself. But they started building a fiber network right when consumers started switching to wireless. So it was just a good old fashioned failure: they built something that not enough people wanted.
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I also think they underestimated costs. Software companies do that alot. I am in Austin and told a friend, fiber is NEVER coming to our neighborhood. Why? 3 reasons. All utilities are underground, houses are spaced about 100' apart, ground is rock. So trenching is going to cost a fortune for not many customers. They never came. In Austin, they picked off exactly what I expected, poles in fairly dense parts of the city. Color me surprised.
Google announced their goal ahead of time (Score:2)
Prior to building out any fiber, Google announced what the goal was for the project. Their announced goal was to give the industry a kick in the pants so that more people would have better internet service in order to make use of Google services like YouTube and Google Docs. They never said they planned to make a bunch of money from the project directly. The success of the project should be measured against its goals.
Since Google's stated intent was spur other companies to get off their butts and make impro
Verizon home LTE cap is still ridiculously low (Score:2)
Google, aka YouTube aka Google Docs aka Android doesn't care too much whether the fast, reliable service you use for watching YouTube is wired or wireless. They only care about how much time you spend watching YouTube
But the 10 GB/mo cap typical of wireless home Internet (source: Verizon LTE Internet (Installed) [verizonwireless.com]) won't allow for much YouTube time.
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Specifically:
1080p at standard frame rate is 8mbps.
That's 1MBps, so 10GB is 10,000 seconds.
10,000 seconds is 2.8 hours per month, at 1080p.
Nah (Score:2)
Excuse me? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
What in the world did gigabit internet have to do with IoT or VR? The only thing gigabit did for IoT was allow massive DDoS of never before seen sizes when someone connected their unpatched refrigerator or lightbulb.
We were lucky enough... (Score:2)
At first, we didn't want to connect to their fiber. We were getting 120 Mbps down and 15 Mbps upstream from Comcast, and we had ended our home phone service with Verizon when we took Comcast's bundle.
Then, we started having reliability problems with Comcast, just as my increasing workload from home was hampered by their slow upload speeds.
So, I went with 150 Mbps Fios
Most places did it wrong (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm typing on my Google Fiber in Huntsville, Alabama. Rather than let Google Fiber be just another company digging up people's yards and running another privately-owned infrastructure, the local city-owned utility company is building out the fiber plant to the curb (useful to them to allow smart metering and such). Google Fiber then just runs from the curb to the house. The infrastructure is open access; any company that wants to build into the fiber huts is able (and there are other companies getting into the game).
This is the perfect model IMHO; I don't really want my government running the Internet access, but I also don't want 27 different companies digging up my yard to run their fiber/wire down the street. The city-owned utility will deliver fiber past every address in town, so Google Fiber will be available to everyone, not just pockets here and there. And if they don't succeed/stick around, the hardest part of building a competitor (the last mile) will be done, so others can come in and compete with much lower start-up costs.
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That's the utility-common carrier model for deployment, which is how it will probably all shake out in the end.
Imagine the potential of a national backbone of exceedingly high capacity fiber, run along Interstate Highways. Telecom companies and municipal services would lease connections to it at their local freeway exit.
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It all depends on use cases. Being in the gaming media scene, upload bandwidth for live streaming on sites like Twitch simply wasn't possible with services like Comcast Cable, because their upload was so fucking horribly slow. Yeah, 150mbps down is plenty for most, but having like 5mbps upload when you're trying to stream and game at the same time is total hell. Have more than 1 streamer on that connection, and you're screwed. The main point is this: with the internet service now available, these other serv
Stimulating competition did work (Score:2)
While Google Fiber was not exactly a success in its rollout, it did force the legacy large-scale Internet providers to substantially speed up their download speeds. For example, it forced Comcast to accelerate its rollout of DOCSIS 3.1 gigabit Internet service over cable lines, which is already available in many areas Comcast services. At gigabit speeds, true streaming of ATSC 3.0 video (ATSC 3.0 includes a streaming video standard) now becomes practical.
FiOS anyone? (Score:1)