Google Won't Have the Stomach To Expand Google Fiber

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This guy seems to think that Google doesn't have the stomach to expand Google Fiber to more than two or three more cities. What do you think?

Google could probably take over the broadband industry if they targeted particularly uncompetitive markets, they'll just ultimately lack the willpower to do so. Over the next few years, Google will likely take the inevitable turn from innovator and disruptor to turf protector, and their interest in these kinds of disruptive projects will wane. It would be very surprising to see Google Fiber expand to anything more than three or four cities in total.
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I feel that Google isn't likely to expand much in cities they already occupy let alone blanket the country.
Lots of demand, very slow supply.
 
Well if "this guy" is like the majority of KC residents who don't yet have fiber hookup here on [H] then no kidding he's thinking that :D

Two analysts at Bernstein Research this week estimated that Google has spent around $87 million so far on the deployment, and that it could cost $11 billion to deploy 1 Gbps service to another 20 million homes.
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That's actually not too bad, 20M homes is roughly 1/5th of the entire country, how much did it cost Verizon to do FIOS to a much smaller area. Seriously though Google, get into a big city, not just population wise, one that is dense. KC is like 1500 per square mile, Austin roughly double that, San Francisco has over 10 times the density as KC, NYC even more.
 
As much as I hate it, I can't say I disagree with the guy. Look at what Verizon did with Fios despite how popular it is.

I don't expect to see 100+MB service for at least 10 years. :(
 
I don't think Google's intent was to ever blanket the country. I think it was more of a way to light the fire under competitors. Start the Gb revolution. Sadly, it looks like they may just be the one out there doing the battle cry while the others are sitting back looking at them like they are crazy... Google will come back to the rest, tail between their legs. Personally, I really wish that wasn't true, but it probably is.

I want fast internet, and I think the majority of the country does, too. It's just that the ISP's don't want to build the infrastructure up to support it. If they did, they'd claim that the rates would need to be $600 for 100 Mb, just to cover costs.
 
good will expend more than 3 i believe because they know they have the money to take over the internet still
 
Dekoth-E- said:
As much as I hate it, I can't say I disagree with the guy. Look at what Verizon did with Fios despite how popular it is.

I don't expect to see 100+MB service for at least 10 years. :(
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Part of Verizon's problem was permitting on the local level.

Too many little cities and towns have offered previous cable/internet companies many year sweetheart monopoly deals in exchange for them promising to have coverage in the entire town.

Verizon found out how difficult it can be to navigate the regulatory landscape town by town, negotiating one by one, to be allowed in.

Until states start taking over the cable/internet permitting process this likely will not change, and growth in services like this will be slow.
 
Even if they deploy to 20 million homes, they would get that investment back in a couple years.
 
I'm pretty sure this is why Google fiber was started in the first place. I find it unlikely that Google fiber will be rolled out across the nation. Instead they probably hope to pressure other ISP's into stepping up their shitty service by showing that quality high speed internet is completely feasible/doable at a reasonable price. Take for example how AT&T is responding to Google's announcement to open fiber in Austin:

http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/09/att-1gbps-fiber-internet-austin-texas-official/

This is why competition is needed for ISPs. There is no financial incentive for them to increase bandwidth if consumers are stuck with them anyways. It's a smart calculated move by Google honestly, more bandwidth across the board is a win for not only them but the consumer as well.

The question we should start asking ourselves though is will the other ISP's start budging in the direction that Google wants them to, but as long as they provide quality service where Google Fiber is, ISPs won't have any incentive to improve service in other areas as people use whatever is available.

Time for some theory crafting...

Say they expand to 10 or so cities. ISP's in those cities will have to lower prices in order to compete. Google Fiber will get plenty of publicity from the internet and the media by that time, with everyone talking about "Google taking over the internet subscription business" or something similar. People who AREN'T in those 10 cities will be hearing plenty about Google fiber by that time, and they'll start getting really pissed when they realize people are getting much better speeds at much better prices, even though they have the same ISP. The squeeze will be on the ISP's to do something about it, even if there is no immediate threat to Google Fiber taking over. If they don't do anything about it, I'm sure Google has no problem slowly expanding city by city and taking over the internet, but no ISP is going to let that happen. All ISP's have the power to do what Google is doing, they just never had a reason to. Now they do.

Google should change their slogan to:

"Do better or we will put you out of business, and make a handsome profit while doing so"
 
I wonder how much ~~$11 Billion compares to google's current 'cash on hand'? How much money does Google actually have? They spent what like $2 billion dollars on youtube back in the early 2000s and didn't seem to blink twice about it. Mind you, youtube is still extremely popular and is kind of surviving the test of time when relatively compared to other services with a much shorter lifespan such as 'MySpace' or even 'AOL'.
 
I also can't help but wonder... ~20 million homes @ $50ish per month implies a billion dollars a month in raw income. Potentitally, they could get a ROI assuming zero maintenance cost of the system necessary to support these 20 million homes in a mere 11 months and start reaping in profit in the second, third, fourth and subsequent years. Like... you know...every telecomm giant does by raping their customers by charging prices ~100x-200x the cost of bandwidth. Like charging $2.00 per GB that it costs them ~0.001 cents to transmit across the country.
 
WBurchnall said:
I wonder how much ~~$11 Billion compares to google's current 'cash on hand'? How much money does Google actually have? They spent what like $2 billion dollars on youtube back in the early 2000s and didn't seem to blink twice about it. Mind you, youtube is still extremely popular and is kind of surviving the test of time when relatively compared to other services with a much shorter lifespan such as 'MySpace' or even 'AOL'.
Click to expand...

As of Q4 2012, they had $48B cash on hand, according to the shareholders report.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039786753 said:
As of Q4 2012, they had $48B cash on hand, according to the shareholders report.
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Furthermore, a Forbes article last summer suggested that Google didn't have enough ideas for new technology investments, and as such didn't know what do do with all the cash they had built up.

Google fiber could just be the "Fuck it, let's spend it on becoming the best ISP" project :p
 
the country needs less verizon and google, and more small, locally operated providers. what happened when all the high density (most profitable) areas were covered with fiber by verizon? they sold their antiquated copper plants and ditched the states their investors didn't want to pay out the ass to wire up.

rural areas are the real problem for these companies. i live in maine, and didn't expect to see anything other than 10/1Mbit DSL for years as soon as verizon left. guess what? the little guys stepped up. sitting here with fiber to my home thanks to my town and a great local ISP.
 
tacos4me said:
the country needs less verizon and google, and more small, locally operated providers. what happened when all the high density (most profitable) areas were covered with fiber by verizon? they sold their antiquated copper plants and ditched the states their investors didn't want to pay out the ass to wire up.

rural areas are the real problem for these companies. i live in maine, and didn't expect to see anything other than 10/1Mbit DSL for years as soon as verizon left. guess what? the little guys stepped up. sitting here with fiber to my home thanks to my town and a great local ISP.
Click to expand...

Agreed, but this success story hasn't happened everywhere, in fact, in some places intense lobbying from the big ISP's has succeeded in statewide bans on community provided internet service, which is shitty beyond belief. :(
 
Sadly, I have to agree. I'd have more faith if the fiber rollout was done by another, but Google has already shown that their "Don't Be Evil" motto is extremely flexible; in the past few years, they've moved from offering quality services with a reasonable and easily understood price, to an all-encompassing data-mining, privacy-obliterating machine. I wouldn't want Google having complete control of the hardware by which I access the Internet.

The only way to bring true high speed fiber to a nearly universal audience is to make its rollout and hardware a public works project, owned by We The People. Why leave this infrastructure, much of which is subsidized to hell and back already, to the very telecoms that roll out only where profitable, pocket the rest, and tell us then we need to cut back and not download so much etc... ? They are never, ever going to serve our interests - getting the best information infrastructure possible built and upgraded within our nation. We're already paying for it, so why do We The People not retain control of the lines in the ground, and instead let those who have already proven to be protecting their corrupt interests at any cost own what we've paid for? Despite the fact the word may be anathema to some, we also need strong regulations to protect privacy and the common good; "market based solutions" aren't going to work here, only fatten the pockets of those already with the money to buy control and fund their continuing immoral overreach.

If we truly want a next generation fiber (and for that matter, wireless/mobile/tower) information infrastructure, and we want it to be universally available to better our nation, we need to make it happen ourselves, through municipal broadband plans and public infrastructure ownership. Leaving it up to private interests, driven only by what is immediately profitable, isn't going to work. We The People need to own the infrastructure - then we can have true innovation and a universal expansion in affordable access to fiber and beyond.
 
tacos4me said:
the country needs less verizon and google, and more small, locally operated providers. what happened when all the high density (most profitable) areas were covered with fiber by verizon? they sold their antiquated copper plants and ditched the states their investors didn't want to pay out the ass to wire up.

rural areas are the real problem for these companies. i live in maine, and didn't expect to see anything other than 10/1Mbit DSL for years as soon as verizon left. guess what? the little guys stepped up. sitting here with fiber to my home thanks to my town and a great local ISP.
Click to expand...

No it doesn't and the fact that you think it does shows a profound lack of understanding on how small Telco's operate. Those smaller Telco's with regional monopolies are actually the ones Screwing customers over the hardest. Even after obama passed all those grants to boost the infrastructure of those Telco's, basically all of them put in the absolute minimum effort needed to get the grant and called it a day. As such the government sunk a shitton of money through grants into these Telco's, they barely improved speeds to the bare minimum to be considered broadband (1.5m-3mb) and banked the rest of the money. While we may not like all the practices of the Comcast's and Time Warners, they are doing a hell of a lot more than the local telco's are.
 
WBurchnall said:
I wonder how much ~~$11 Billion compares to google's current 'cash on hand'? How much money does Google actually have? They spent what like $2 billion dollars on youtube back in the early 2000s and didn't seem to blink twice about it. Mind you, youtube is still extremely popular and is kind of surviving the test of time when relatively compared to other services with a much shorter lifespan such as 'MySpace' or even 'AOL'.
Click to expand...

Exactly why they won't go competitive - the other ISPs can start slowing down access to YouTube or other Google sites because they can - we don't have net neutrality so the existing ISPs just have to say - you come into our territory, we block part of the way you make money
 
Dekoth-E- said:
No it doesn't and the fact that you think it does shows a profound lack of understanding on how small Telco's operate. Those smaller Telco's with regional monopolies are actually the ones Screwing customers over the hardest. Even after obama passed all those grants to boost the infrastructure of those Telco's, basically all of them put in the absolute minimum effort needed to get the grant and called it a day. As such the government sunk a shitton of money through grants into these Telco's, they barely improved speeds to the bare minimum to be considered broadband (1.5m-3mb) and banked the rest of the money. While we may not like all the practices of the Comcast's and Time Warners, they are doing a hell of a lot more than the local telco's are.
Click to expand...

well, i guess not all of them did the bare minimum now did they? :rolleyes: i have a completely different perspective of this situation compared to you, obviously, and if i had to guess i'd say you don't live in a rural area with little to no competing providers.

comcast and time warner and the like advance their networks far enough to be ahead of their direct competition.. and that's about it. i don't even have the luxury of that.. and neither does most of this country. my options before local fiber? fairpoint dsl, formerly verizon.

what were they doing for new england? nothing is the correct answer. as such, neither were any of the cable co's.
 
Currently no, however I have lived in rural areas in multiple locations around the country and I have Worked for a couple of these Telco's. People who bitch about comcast don't know how good they have it compared to others.

Currently I am in Western NY, 2 blocks away from FIOS..it makes me so sad. I have 30MB Time warner which isn't terrible, but for whatever reason seems slower than my 20MB charter I had in Atlanta.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
As much as I hate it, I can't say I disagree with the guy. Look at what Verizon did with Fios despite how popular it is.

I don't expect to see 100+MB service for at least 10 years. :(
Click to expand...

My Cox cable internet (in AZ) offers a top-end 150/20 Mb/s internet tier. It's $109.99/month so it ain't cheap. They bumped up the tier right below the max (the one I'm on) to 50/10 that I pay $70/month for. Again not cheap, but at least it's there.

Guess I'm "lucky".
 
tacos4me said:
the country needs less verizon and google, and more small, locally operated providers. what happened when all the high density (most profitable) areas were covered with fiber by verizon? they sold their antiquated copper plants and ditched the states their investors didn't want to pay out the ass to wire up.

rural areas are the real problem for these companies. i live in maine, and didn't expect to see anything other than 10/1Mbit DSL for years as soon as verizon left. guess what? the little guys stepped up. sitting here with fiber to my home thanks to my town and a great local ISP.
Click to expand...
Fuck that.

My ISP is a small locally operated cable operator. They have the shittiest service probably anywhere in the country but charge the same as the Cox and Comcast's of the country with 0 motivation to making their service better or offering state of the art hardware.

I would rather have Verizon or Google operating my internet as they have an interest to compete nation wide and roll out new hardware used in other parts of the country in the small towns vs. the smallest cable companies who just don't give a fuck and keep raking in the dollars while giving you little in return.
 
Google spent years buying up dark fiber. Why would they do that if they didn't plan to expand to more places?
 
tacos4me said:
well, i guess not all of them did the bare minimum now did they? :rolleyes: i have a completely different perspective of this situation compared to you, obviously, and if i had to guess i'd say you don't live in a rural area with little to no competing providers.

comcast and time warner and the like advance their networks far enough to be ahead of their direct competition.. and that's about it. i don't even have the luxury of that.. and neither does most of this country. my options before local fiber? fairpoint dsl, formerly verizon.

what were they doing for new england? nothing is the correct answer. as such, neither were any of the cable co's.
Click to expand...
Comcast and TW aren't Telco's, they didn't get any of that money to build out broadband, the people that got that money are the ones behind that shittastic service known as DSL that everybody loves.
 
I can't say as I'd trust Google as an ISP. It'd most likely end up being another resource for data mining and pumping targeted advertising. They'd suck the users into using all the tied in services, then leave them high & dry when they drop it like every other Beta program.
 
It all depends on their relationship with the city/counties/state. Google is still feeling out the market. ATT, Verizon, Comcast, TWC, Windstream better start lobbying against them. Given the right deals, Google could take off if they commit to it.
 
Maybe google fiber won't be in every city but...I'm still hoping they make it to Jacksonville eventually.
 
email mailboxes in the mid 2000s didn't get huge immediately.
 
stevejg61 said:
Exactly why they won't go competitive - the other ISPs can start slowing down access to YouTube or other Google sites because they can - we don't have net neutrality so the existing ISPs just have to say - you come into our territory, we block part of the way you make money
Click to expand...

While that may be possible, I don't think it's ever likely to happen. It would take the largest ISPs to block/slow traffic to Google's sites to have any effect on their profits, and if that ever happened and word got out to the public, I would imagine it would be a huge backlash for that ISP and they would lose more customers then it would be worth. Think of how some other countries around the world have reacted when the goverment has restricted their internet access.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Verizon did that because they figured out they made a BOATLOAD more profit with the wireless side of things, and it was a ton cheaper.
Click to expand...

Yep. I personally enjoying paying $40/month for 2GB of data @ 1Mbit. I hate the idea of 100's of GB's of data @ 50 Mbit...for $40/month. Just seems so unamerican.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039786721 said:
Part of Verizon's problem was permitting on the local level.

Too many little cities and towns have offered previous cable/internet companies many year sweetheart monopoly deals in exchange for them promising to have coverage in the entire town.

Verizon found out how difficult it can be to navigate the regulatory landscape town by town, negotiating one by one, to be allowed in.

Until states start taking over the cable/internet permitting process this likely will not change, and growth in services like this will be slow.
Click to expand...


The other half is shareholders who wanted better dividends than try to fund something they saw as unnecessary.

AT&T's shareholders are similar, and Google's will start to become that way if it becomes clear that expansion is significantly lowering profits. It's kind of what Dell was trying to get at by going private. Shareholders want their profit now, not a promise for it years from now.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
No it doesn't and the fact that you think it does shows a profound lack of understanding on how small Telco's operate. Those smaller Telco's with regional monopolies are actually the ones Screwing customers over the hardest. Even after obama passed all those grants to boost the infrastructure of those Telco's, basically all of them put in the absolute minimum effort needed to get the grant and called it a day. As such the government sunk a shitton of money through grants into these Telco's, they barely improved speeds to the bare minimum to be considered broadband (1.5m-3mb) and banked the rest of the money. While we may not like all the practices of the Comcast's and Time Warners, they are doing a hell of a lot more than the local telco's are.
Click to expand...

this is what happened in WV. They got boat loads of money to get faster broadband into the state and they blew it 100% and did absolutely nothing with it. We have one option out here, Frontier, who took over from Verizon and hasn't done anything to upgrade the long aged infrastructure out here it is overloaded all the time to they point of traffic not moving.

Comcast out here is expanding, although, really slowly.
 
BladeVenom said:
Google spent years buying up dark fiber. Why would they do that if they didn't plan to expand to more places?
Click to expand...

Most of the dark fiber buys were before they decided to be an ISP; and was intended fortheir server work. They have a natural desire to get their data between their datacenters (wherever they are) on connections they own. It's also in their interest to get data from their datacenters as close as possible to users on connections they own; regardless of who owns the last mile, there are lots of people out there who want their data, so it benefits them to have fiber to every major city.
 
Zarathustra[H];1039786777 said:
Agreed, but this success story hasn't happened everywhere, in fact, in some places intense lobbying from the big ISP's has succeeded in statewide bans on community provided internet service, which is shitty beyond belief. :(
Click to expand...

it's what's happened in my state (NC)... our public works commission was spending a bunch running fiber along with the city water system and electricity for meter monitoring, with the plan of allowing internet service to it's customers...

laws passed (i have no idea how) shut them down... typical politicians being bought off my large corps i guess...

instead we got a TWC monopoly.... awesome....
 
I know we keep talking about getting broadband to rural areas, but cities are not in any better shape. Demographics show people are moving back into large cities, and expanding infrastructure in cities is WAY more difficult and expensive. Plus in really dense areas your speed can really take a hit during heavy usage periods.

I'm in D.C. and the two options are Comcast and Verizon DSL. When I first moved into my house it was not wired for comcast, and it took me 6 months to get them to bring a cable from the pole to my house 50 yards away. I finally got it, and i've been very happy with my service since. I have Blast (50MB) on a promotion for $40 for 12 months. It would be hard to get a better deal on it.
 
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