Google Fiber Abandoning Louisville Residents With Two Months Notice (theverge.com) 132
stoborrobots writes: Google Fiber is leaving Louisville, as reported in The Verge: "Google Fiber's attempt to roll out its gigabit internet across the city of Louisville, Kentucky has apparently failed so spectacularly that the company has decided to completely shut down the service and leave town altogether. CNET has a report on the news, which Alphabet's Access division confirmed in a blog post on Thursday. 'We'll work with our customers and partners to minimize disruption, and we're committed to doing right by the community, which welcomed us as we tested methods of delivering high-speed internet in new and different ways,' the Fiber team said."
TechCrunch's take: "It's a rare admission of defeat for Google Fiber, though it's no secret that the company isn't exactly bullish on the prospect of the service anymore. Louisville was supposed to be somewhat of a comeback for Google Fiber, which like so many Google services is now under more pressure to generate a profit. Clearly, that didn't work out." The issue apparently has to do with "shallow trenching," a process that involves laying fiber cable two inches beneath the sides of roads in the city and covering them up with sealant. "The company seemed optimistic about this plan until some of the cable started becoming exposed over time, requiring a second cover-up with hot asphalt," reports The Verge. "It seems Access realized it had to go a bit deeper with the cabling; in San Antonio, a similar method is used -- but the fiber is laid at least six inches deep into the ground."
"Unfortunately, things have somehow gone so awry in Louisville that Google Fiber claims it would need to rebuild the entire network to get everything to a satisfactory point, and it seems Alphabet just isn't interested in blowing the cash that would be necessary to do that. So instead, Google Fiber will today alert Louisville customers that their service will end on April 15th." In an attempt to soften the blow, Google Fiber says it will not charge customers for their final two months of service.
TechCrunch's take: "It's a rare admission of defeat for Google Fiber, though it's no secret that the company isn't exactly bullish on the prospect of the service anymore. Louisville was supposed to be somewhat of a comeback for Google Fiber, which like so many Google services is now under more pressure to generate a profit. Clearly, that didn't work out." The issue apparently has to do with "shallow trenching," a process that involves laying fiber cable two inches beneath the sides of roads in the city and covering them up with sealant. "The company seemed optimistic about this plan until some of the cable started becoming exposed over time, requiring a second cover-up with hot asphalt," reports The Verge. "It seems Access realized it had to go a bit deeper with the cabling; in San Antonio, a similar method is used -- but the fiber is laid at least six inches deep into the ground."
"Unfortunately, things have somehow gone so awry in Louisville that Google Fiber claims it would need to rebuild the entire network to get everything to a satisfactory point, and it seems Alphabet just isn't interested in blowing the cash that would be necessary to do that. So instead, Google Fiber will today alert Louisville customers that their service will end on April 15th." In an attempt to soften the blow, Google Fiber says it will not charge customers for their final two months of service.
Hard to take that seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's hard to believe that they thought they could get away with leaving the fiber two inches under the ground.
It wasn't under two inches of dirt. It was under two inches of asphalt.
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Surprising exactly nobody, the issue apparently has to do with "shallow trenching," a process that involves laying fiber cable two inches beneath the sides of roads
Well, OK, surprising nobody but Google.
Re:Hard to take that seriously (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, it surprises me. In areas where you don't have deep freezing, laying utilities a couple of inches down normally works fine; it's actually the normal way of doing installation in much of the Tennessee Valley area. Of course, it might not work if you have very sandy soil, but AFAIK, Louisville is clay soil, much like where I used to live, so I would expect it to work just fine.
For example, they laid the cable TV lines in my parents' neighborhood in Tennessee with shallow trenching, and they've been down for twenty or thirty years. It's how they ran a replacement phone line and a replacement cable line from the boxes by the street out their house last year after rodent damage (mice like the taste of the wires, apparently). And so on.
This story makes me wonder if their contractors did the shallow trenching wrong. IIRC, you're supposed to A. do it during wet months so that the ground is soft (or add enough water to make it soft) and B. have somebody going along behind, pressing the ground back together so that the cable can't come back up. If you don't do either of those things, you're going to have a bad time, particularly when the ground shrinks as it dries or thaws. I've heard stories of such botched installations, though I've never actually seen one.
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Wait a sec. I just reread the summary They were dong it in asphalt? Yeah, that won't work. You can't press the dirt back together if you do that. You have to bore under asphalt (or trench and repave).
Re:Hard to take that seriously (Score:4, Informative)
You cut with a circular/wet saw, then fill the micro trench with a sealant.
That’s what Novus does in Vancouver, BC. They microtrench concrete sidewalks with a wet saw, stuff the fiber into the slit, then seal up with some sort of epoxy. Works quite well. That said, they run multiple links to each building so there’s multi-path redundancy built in.
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Sounds like the problem is the sealant that the contractor used, then. Either that or they underestimated how much roadwork would involve grinding off an inch or more of asphalt in freeze-thaw territory.
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ROFL. Down in the ground, without coming back up out of it like a zombie.
Re:Hard to take that seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
It's hard to believe that they thought they could get away with leaving the fiber two inches under the ground.
IKR? Why didn't they just stick with their fiber in sewers [google.com] plan?
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Probably because not all sewers are big enough, are you under the impression that everyone has sewers like the old brick kind in England you can walk through? Sewers in neighborhoods can be extremely small, 4 to 6 inches. You aren't sticking a cable into that because it would take up 10% of the space in the line.
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two inches of asphalt alone is pretty much nothing, it'll get affected by water expansion and other weather effects in some places along the way for sure. which wouldn't be a problem if they had enough shielding on the cable I guess.
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The summary says hot asphalt. Are you sure you're reading the same summary?
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And the word tar doesn't appear in the summary at all, despite your claim. Calling it a "second cover-up" with hot asphalt strongly implies that this is the composition of the first coating
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You're the one who claimed the summary said tar. It still doesn't. You're just as much taking implied meaning from it as you claim I am.
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Re:Hard to take that seriously (Score:5, Interesting)
"You gotta know the territory!"
Two inches of asphalt on Solid Granite Bedrock in an area that has rather consistent temperatures Is more then enough.
In other areas, not so much.
There are potholes over 2" deep. Potholes happen when water seeps into the asphalt, freezes, and unfreezes cracking the asphalt. I don't want to think about the pressures on a tiny strand of glass wrapped in plastic, from this.
However this problem show the problem that a lot of tech companies have. They are too West Coast Centrist. A lot of cultural oddities in America are due to different geography and weather patterns.
Coastal Cities are usually larger and more tolerant to other cultures. Because they have people from all around the world stopping by and living there. While interior cities which are landlocked, are smaller and less diversity in people, who are often more dependent on each other.
West Coast cities have more of a temperate climate, while East Cost Cities are known for their cold winters. This effects building codes, and environmental usages. I am on the East Coast. My home needs a slanted roof, and I have two sources of heat for the winter, it isn't uncommon to have at least one car that is all wheel drive. However if a major earthquake hits us, we are probably screwed.
I wish Google realized the complexity when deploying fiber, the California method just doesn't work in Kentucky.
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I wish Google realized the complexity when deploying fiber, the California method just doesn't work in Kentucky.
The California method is to put it on poles, except for runs between counties which go where there are no poles. California is BIG. Not just in terms of the size of the state, which is third-largest (and twice as big as e.g. England) but also in terms of the distribution of population, which is everywhere. So we have the second-longest road network, and poles all along most of the roads.
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Do you REALLY think this issue here is that Alphabet doesn't have engineers who know this plan would never work? Do you think the Alphabet engineers didn't shout loud enough?
Somewhere in the deep bowels of the Alphabet headquarters a fscking BEAN COUNTER has a spredasheet that show exactly how much digging down ever additional inch would cost along with another one that shows the cost of "sealant" vs the cost of trenching and the expextant life of the buried fiber plus the replacement cost over time.
THE ACC
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Somewhere in the deep bowels of the Alphabet headquarters a fscking BEAN COUNTER has a spredasheet that show exactly how much digging down ever additional inch would cost along with another one that shows the cost of "sealant" vs the cost of trenching and the expextant
That's the part I don't understand, once you've trenched through the asphalt, digging a few more inches isn't that hard, they probably could have buried it 8" down with little additional cost.
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From what I'm reading, it sounds like the did it the way you lay the sensor loop wires for a traffic light. You don't trench at all. Rather, you use a circular saw and cut a straight line two inches deep. Then, you shove the wire down into the resulting gap and put tar on top of it.
It works for sensor wire, because
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For long runs, it's better to knife-trench the dirt beside the road, and bore under roads, sidewalks, and driveways — more expensive, mind you, but it avoids problems like this.
And in typical Google arrogance, they couldn't be arsed to hire someone like you who could have told them that up front.
It's not like any of this is new.
Google Fiber is a genius idea. The country needs a second or third wireline provider, nationwide. But it's not software, so Google is culturally incapable of seeing it through.
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> Coastal Cities are usually larger and more tolerant to other cultures.
Well, Google sure as hell isn't. They're some of the most bigoted people I've ever worked with.
Re:Hard to take that seriously (Score:4, Funny)
Besides isn't like google to abandon a lot of their projects and leave users high and dry? Rely on google and good luck? The only mainstay is the search portal. Thankfully these are results we can could on. Fair and balanced.
Re:Hard to take that seriously (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides isn't like google to abandon a lot of their projects and leave users high and dry? Rely on google and good luck? The only mainstay is the search portal. Thankfully these are results we can could on. Fair and balanced.
Good ol' Google, keeping everything in "beta" and abandoning it on short notice after some period of time. Only, you, real physical services that people pay for - like Google Fiber - aren't free-to-use online apps. Is it gonna be like this with Waymo one day too? "Sorry, can't fix that bug that repeatedly crashes cars into lamp posts, your vehicle will become inoperative within 30 days."
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Is it gonna be like this with Waymo one day too? "Sorry, can't fix that bug that repeatedly crashes cars into lamp posts, your vehicle will become inoperative within 30 days."
I think we can cross that bridge when/if Google (Alphabet) ever decides to sell Waymo cars rather than provide a geo-fenced taxi service. They're not under any obligation to keep that operating...
Re: Hard to take that seriously (Score:2)
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What's ironic is that Google needs Google fiber as a check on national ISP's trying to erect tolls. They are also probably the only company in the country that could successfully overbuild if they weren't so short sighted and quick to abandon everything.
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No kidding. They named their parent company by combining the words alpha and beta and that's all they do.
Re: Hard to take that seriously (Score:2)
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Unlike "progressives", at least the Bible teaches REAL tolerance.
That's funny, why don't people that claim to be followers of the book or the jew on a stick actually engage in tolerance to any real degree?
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There has been a lot of interest in shallow trenches lately, with various schemes to make them work. Armour plated conduit, under asphalt or paving slabs, that kind of thing.
If someone can figure out how to get the cost of installing last mile infrastructure down there is a huge opportunity to build not only new data comms networks, but charging for electric vehicles and smart sensor networks. Vast potential profits for decade after decade.
As Google discovered it's not easy, but for places where they can't
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Utility lines are a blight especially in urban areas.
Urban areas have population densities sufficient to justify shared conduit. Suburban and rural areas already have utility lines. So there's really no justification for this shallow trenching BS anywhere.
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2 fucking inches? (Score:1)
I mean seriously, what the FUCK.
Here in California when the local fiber was being rolled out, it was either strung from the phone lines, or put down between 2 and 10 feet deep under the roads. While I have no doubt it was at great expense, given that the non-mountain regions of California *NEVER* freeze more than an inch or two down, this seems extrordinarily sloppy on Google's part. Somewhere like Kentucky I imagine gets much deeper frost and much more rainfall on average than California does, and should a
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Through my yard, i don't think my fiber is more than 4" deep in a plastic conduit and it seems to survive just fine. Obviously it doesn't have cars driving over it, but the shallow trench seems like a reasonable compromise to make installation a bit more manageable. I'm sure some portion of them need replaced every year, but I haven't heard of anyone having reliability issues near me.
I'm in colorado where it's currently 2F
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Sucks to be you. Try moving side to side next time.
Don't rely on Google (Score:1)
It's pretty clear if you'll need something for a while, don't use Google.
Phrasing (Score:2)
We'll work with our customers and partners to minimize disruption
Ain't that the truth.
Not an engineered solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Who, exactly, thought this was a workable idea? Two inches into the asphalt and covered with tar? I can't imagine how one, let alone a group, of civil engineers and the city's own engineers could be okay with this idea. I have so many questions.
1. What happens when the road needs to be resurfaced, nevermind the scoring of the pavement required to dig for and access other buried utilities.
2. How this won't accelerate deterioration of roads due to being a wound in the road that invites moisture, causing things like frost heave
3. How protected is the cable itself as asphalt shoves, slips, and creeps over time in places
4. Is the cable even meant to withstand the mechanical shock of traffic passing 2" or less above it over even 10 years?
The photos look absolutely atrocious given the short amount of time the stuff has been there.
Sounds like an accounting solution (Score:3)
Re:Sounds like an accounting solution (Score:5, Interesting)
It was a test. Everybody is trying to figure out how to make FTTH financially viable. Existing cable infrastructure is ridiculously profitable and can make life very hard for newcomers who need many years of steady revenue to pay off the initial cost of a new network. Comcast et al can undercut any offer. Their networks already exist and bandwidth costs are almost nonexistent. So what do you do if you have no network yet? You try to figure out how cheap you can build FTTH before you run into problems. The experiment in Louisville proved that they can't do it that cheaply.
It was an obviously silly test. (Score:2)
Choosing 2" burial is obviously stupid to anyone but the utterly clueless. I wouldn't bury cable in my yard that close to the surface. It's lawnmower bait.
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It was likely more about avoiding utility mapping and avoidance.
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The city started making them go back and fix it. There was no conduit, no directional boring, and no backfill except for this white foam and/or tar depending on the neighborhood. It was 1 step away from duct tape and bailing wire. The problem is that Spectrum Cable and the LECs (ATT, Windstream) have such a stranglehold on internet services that the city counsel is desperate to bring in new challenging business. Wireless is a real PITA here in Louisville. We do it, but there are many times that even a googl
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Who, exactly, thought this was a workable idea? Two inches into the asphalt and covered with tar? I can't imagine how one, let alone a group, of civil engineers and the city's own engineers could be okay with this idea. I have so many questions.
To their defense, I believe that is now they install traffic signals [dot.gov] all of the time. The question is, why did they think they could do this on such a large scale.
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Lame (Score:5, Funny)
That's what you get when you go ludicrously cheap Google. I am surprised they did not simply glue it to the road.
Coz that. Now that. Would have taken COURAGE.
Google showing what PoS they are (Score:1)
Too bad the name means search, because otherwise it would be tied to premature pulling out. And I don’t mean sex.
It’s a wonder anyone takes google seriously anymore, for anything remotely approaching business critical.
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That's their parent company name, alpha-beta.
What about the environment? (Score:3)
Who's going to pay to dig it all up and remove it? Google isn't just going to walk away and leave it, right?
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Who's going to pay to dig it all up and remove it?
Get some Meth-Heads to do it. They steal copper wire and mesh fencing to sell as scrap metal for meth, so maybe Google can convince them that digging up the fiber would be a good source of cash . . . ?
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Pole fighting to blame? (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering they had to fight for access to the utility poles I guess this was the other option.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20161101/08481735932/fcc-lends-support-to-google-fiber-louisville-fight-to-access-att-utility-poles.shtml
I don't know if that really was the result or not but the incumbents tend to fight tooth and nail to stop access in more ways than just that.
Re:Pole fighting to blame? (Score:4)
One touch make ready (Score:2)
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Net neutrality on your single-source monopoly provider is more important than allowing actual competition.
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Because it is more important to have neutrality on you 10Mbps than to have a competitor that will give you Netflix at 150Mbps and everything else at 50Mbps?
That is quite literally socialist thinking there. "Everybody should be equally poor."
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They (Louisville) won that fight, it was a prerequisite before they even started.
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It makes you wonder if they will be sued when someone trips over an exposed loop and ends up being injured.
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According to the linked wdrb.com article they started (something) back in August.
This illustrates an ENORMOUS problem (Score:2)
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Wait, what's the problem here?
Google tried to get into a new business. They suck at it, so they're pulling out. It's been less than 18 months. What obligation was created?
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Holding them to obligations? When is the government going to take over the communication lines like they should?
Communication infrastructure, like the roads:
- only make sense when everyone is connected
-require the government to use the power of imminent domain to implement
-and provide the venue for holding a market.
The communication infrastructure is a poster child for something that the government SHOULD be doing. Government is the grease of society. It should come into play when members of society must
Internet from an ad company (Score:3)
Always funny (Score:4)
It's always funny to watch a major corporation think they figured out a great new way to revolutionize an industry by doing something no one else does - in this case, build a high-speed data network buried a whole 2" under city roads.
There's a reason the wizards of the major telcos never went out and did this, and it wasn't because they were too dumb to think of it. Places like Bell Labs, Western Electric and Bellcore invest millions of dollars developing industry standards to avoid just such a costly mistake. Doing something right the first time is always cheaper than going back and fixing it... In this case, Google found it cheaper to walk away than to fix their infrastructure.
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It's always funny to watch a major corporation think they figured out a great new way to revolutionize an industry by doing something no one else does - in this case, build a high-speed data network buried a whole 2" under city roads.
Of course we laugh also the other way around, when a newcomer upends the competition because they keep doing things the way they've always have done and can't imagine doing it any other way. Hindsight is easy.
Typical Google I'm afraid (Score:1)
Like so many products and services, they don't stick them out for the long term. Unless it makes a gazillion $$$ very quickly, they close it down. They also give little or no thought for the people who increasingly can be viewed as rather foolishly signed up for the service.
And they get away with it.
If this was Apple then there would already be half a dozen class actions filed against them but like Microsoft only the very, very rich sue Google (as in Oracle) and get away with it.
FU Google and all who work f
What were they drinking? (Score:3)
Who would have thought the Burbon Belt had wild temperature swings? We just had -5f and 70f in the same week, which is probably what solidified their plan to pull out now. That temperature swing is higher than normal, but not by much. I don't know what they were drinking when they came up with this plane, but it obviously wasn't from Kentucky.
It's not just the weather... (Score:4, Interesting)
The biggest problem with shallow trenching most likely isn't just weather or other natural phenomena, but rather clueless construction crews who cut corners with little to no oversight.
I've got a gigabit fiber run to my office building that covers about a half mile from the central office of a local ISP here in Texas. The first half comes over pole. The last 800 feet is shallow-buried (8-12 inches). The first year it was in place, a construction crew came through and was doing utility cuts along the road for a new building going in right where I know the fiber line is buried (I watched it going in).
I stopped by the site and asked for the foreman (in Spanish because none of the crew on site knew English). They said the foreman was on another site and wouldn't be back until the next day. I explained to the workers that they needed to stop trenching and check for buried cables, because I was absolutely sure that the fiber line was there.
After I got back to the office, I was informed that our internet was down...I knew exactly what had happened. I called the ISP immediately and explained the situation. They, in turn, contacted the utility they had used to install the last mile and informed them that they suspect that the line had been cut by construction workers. True to form, a utility truck showed up in the next half hour, and the technician wasn't making any headway with the construction workers until I walked down and translated for him. He got the construction company's number and called them up, asking for the foreman. I spent four years in the Navy, so I'm pretty salty...but this technician laid into the foreman using language that made me blush even.
So the utility had to run a new fiber line to the building, and this time they kept it all on the pole. I'm sure the construction company ended up footing the bill one way or another.
Google: Don't Be Evil. (Score:2)
This move by Google harms the entire country, not just the city of Louisville.
I understand that In Kentucky, public schools often don't teach evolution. It's "just a theory". What if pervasive internet access could provide better education, and better opportunities to the people?
I think that without fast internet access, Kentucky's economy will continue to struggle to reach the 21st century, and its people will continue to be subject to the tensions of inequality that are driving authoritarian populism.
You
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Yes, I realize my initial comment was a stretch, and may come off as insensitive.
Though I'm not getting my information from TV. I worked with an otherwise very smart software engineer from Kentucky, who happened to also believe that global warming is a lie and evolution isn't a real thing. He was literally taught that in public school. Granted, he didn't grow up in Louisville with fast internet access, so there's that. ;-)
I recognize it's a double-edged sword. The same internet that keep peoples in politica
Good news for me! (Score:2)
I'm in San Antonio, and hearing that they do not plan to abandon it (yet, at least) is good. Two-inch burial sounds really stupid, and Louisville is farther north, where they presumably get freezing weather much more than the handful of nights a year, with all-day freezing less than once a year on average, that happens in central Texas. I also live in a neighborhood with a back alley, so hopefully that will be cheaper to trench properly if they don't get to use the poles. But the ATT wires are underground a