Google Fiber Ends Service in Louisville

AlphaAtlas

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WDRB reports that Google Fiber is ending their service in Louisville, Kentucky. The withdrawal of the ISP comes after customers suffered from serious service outages on Wednesday, and the local news station claims that Louisville is the first city Google Fiber has abandoned. The report also says that the town spent "$382,328 on outside lawyers to defend the ordinance in lawsuits from AT&T and the cable company now called Spectrum" in 2015.

"We're not living up to the high standards we set for ourselves, or the standards we've demonstrated in other Fiber cities," the company said. "We would need to essentially rebuild our entire network in Louisville to provide the great service that Google Fiber is known for, and that's just not the right business decision for us." In cold comfort, Google Fiber said it will use the "lessons" from its stint in Louisville in the other cities it serves, where no changes are planned... Louisville's public works department allowed Google Fiber to try a new approach to running fiber - cutting shallow trenches into the pavement of city streets to bury cables. It led to a lot of problems, including sealant that popped out of the trenches and snaked over the roadways.
 
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How in the hell did a company like Google think cutting a trench 2-3 inches deep in concrete/asphalt would ever work. That is some interesting idea experimentation on something that is constantly shifting and brutalized by vehicles/weather.
Yeah, microtrenching is a very real and useful thing but 2-3 inches is a bit too micro. Almost like the company google contracted out to do this won a bid and then had no clue what they were doing.
 
How in the hell did a company like Google think cutting a trench 2-3 inches deep in concrete/asphalt would ever work. That is some interesting idea experimentation on something that is constantly shifting and brutalized by vehicles/weather.
Probably some AI simulation ( not joking)
 
Yeah, microtrenching is a very real and useful thing but 2-3 inches is a bit too micro. Almost like the company google contracted out to do this won a bid and then had no clue what they were doing.
I don't get it either.. can't be that 6 to 8 inches is such a terrible burden.
 
Yeah, microtrenching is a very real and useful thing but 2-3 inches is a bit too micro. Almost like the company google contracted out to do this won a bid and then because they were the cheapest bid available and the people involved in approving the bid had no clue what they were doing.

FTFY.
 
Yeah, microtrenching is a very real and useful thing but 2-3 inches is a bit too micro. Almost like the company google contracted out to do this won a bid and then had no clue what they were doing.
They must have used home adviser.

This is solely on Google and their botched implementation of this. Sucks for Louisville and all the roads they messed up just to bail. lol!
 
Born and raised in Louisville, I was with Insight in Network Engineering all the way from @home and left when TWC came in. I can only comment on a few factors. One being that Louisville is a really really old, very densely populated but also very forestry heavy. Doing infrastructure upgrades to the city is a nightmare. We still have cobblestone running around. Hell when theres a hurricane in florida all of kentucky loses power just from the residual storms.

I'm speculating here but I also know getting the leasing rights for arial and underground wiring deployments is crazy complicated and very political(corruption? I didn't say that.). Knowing them I suspect the local government made the entire project an uphill battle. I suspect Google would have been better off leasing arial, but I guess that would make their service kind of an oxymoron.
 
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There might be local statutes that make anything deeper require permits or conflict with existing contracts with utility monopolies that would make the entire project too expensive.. in reality Google gave up on this long ago.

I'm just glad to already have it in an area that was designed for under ground cables. Google fiber is amazing.
 
Isn't there any way to break up these utility monopolies? My home town is looking to get fiber going, and not one single company even put in a bid. (Comcast is in town already, and even I have their service a good 4 miles OUTSIDE of town)

Being only 8000 residents or so probably isn't helping.
 

The best part about all of this is that when they first disclosed these plans, just about everyone under the sun knew this wasn't going to work. I don't think there was a news outlet that reported this where the comments weren't full of people saying it was going to fail spectacularly. Here we are a couple years later and it did just that. I really do have to wonder who headed up this project and rubber stamped it though, because clearly they didn't spend much time researching this before they started. The other side of this is it's a bit crazy to me that a town would even let someone "experiment" on their roadworks without even testing these ideas somewhere first. Someone could have at least built a simulated road before they went full scale, and realized long before they deployed everything it was going to come apart.
 
Small towns can be pretty well served by fiber to a few towers and fixed wireless to the home.

Just saw century link rolling out fibe near my neighborhood. My issue is caps. New games are like 60-130gb. You can quickly pay more in overage charges then you paid for the game.
 
Hell when theres a hurricane in florida all of kentucky loses power just from the residual storms.

???.
I've never heard of this before.
I moved from Florida to Kentucky about 3yrs ago, and have never experienced a power outage that lasted longer than 3mins (not during a storm) where I live (Ashland).
And during the last 3 hurricanes that Florida had, I was in touch with my parents who live in Deltona. Have I not lived here long enough to experience this?
 
Small towns can be pretty well served by fiber to a few towers and fixed wireless to the home.

Just saw century link rolling out fibe near my neighborhood. My issue is caps. New games are like 60-130gb. You can quickly pay more in overage charges then you paid for the game.

We have a local WISP that evolved from the original dial-up provider from the mid-90's. They top off at 20Mbps at $150 a month. Their owner is on the city broad band committee.

I'm sure he's helping to bring in 1000/1000 at $60-$80/month no caps.
 
15+ years ago it must have seemed like an amazing idea to have Google as your ISP. Now Google already has *WAY* too much control over every aspect of the internet and I really would not want them as my ISP.
 
What? You mean a bunch of 20-something Google kids who have probably spent little to zero time outdoors much less any level of physical construction come up with a laughably idiotic idea for deploying fiber? And it didn't work? Sitting on piles of immoral, unearned cash does not prove that you know what you are doing. Like I have mentioned before I know the guys that run fiber, and they are dying laughing at this "plan".

Of course those same kids, who know nothing of ISP's past their demarc, will be on here screaming that Comcast had something to do with it, when it fact it was just incompetent fools who have no real world experience in the field. Gaming search algorithms and censoring political opponents does not translate to fields where you have to build from scratch.
 
???.
I've never heard of this before.
I moved from Florida to Kentucky about 3yrs ago, and have never experienced a power outage that lasted longer than 3mins (not during a storm) where I live (Ashland).
And during the last 3 hurricanes that Florida had, I was in touch with my parents who live in Deltona. Have I not lived here long enough to experience this?

well louisville metro specifically, youre way out there. The last big one I remember being home for was ike, most of kentucky was out.
 
How in the hell did a company like Google think cutting a trench 2-3 inches deep in concrete/asphalt would ever work. That is some interesting idea experimentation on something that is constantly shifting and brutalized by vehicles/weather.

Yep, esp in a area where you have cold winters and water/freezing tears up the roads...
 
City should go after them for something. This smells like BS....

Go in, rip up the streets, say "Whoops, sorry, this is harder than we thought, we are out".

WTF

This is why I don't like Google ... they have no qualms about depreciating services with next to no notice. It's unfortunate when it's a software service that was otherwise free, but understandable. It's a shame when it comes to hardware that had a sunk cost, and unfathomable when it comes to metro infrastructure.
 
well louisville metro specifically, youre way out there. The last big one I remember being home for was ike, most of kentucky was out.


The one from back in 2008 I think, had a wind storm in the KY/IN area (I live just north in Sellersburg) and it tore up my roof good.

Yep, just looked it up and it was 2008 and remnants of hurricane Ike.
 
So Google would rather pull out than try to actually get this solved? Not inspiring confidence.
 
well louisville metro specifically, youre way out there. The last big one I remember being home for was ike, most of kentucky was out.

True, being 15-20min from Ohio and 10-15min from West Virginia does put me way out there I guess. Thx for the clarification.
 
The thing is they are trying to install the fiber on the cheap......Google has given up on specific areas in the cities they serve when it gets to an area they have to invest in real work to install the fiber. They've done it in every city.
 
So Google would rather pull out than try to actually get this solved? Not inspiring confidence.

There's a sex joke in this statement somewhere.

with google not really expanding much it seems to have been something they thought would be a lot cheaper to deploy and maintain.
 
As someone who works on fiber all the time, that looks like a complete pain in the ass to fix. Where the hell are you supposed to put the splice cases?
 
Just lost a little more respect for Google. Abandoning those customers like that is plain wrong. Fix the mess you made damn it!
 
To all those who are hating on Google for pulling out... could it be that that is the only thing they could get approved to do?

Kinda sounds to me like somebody in the town has a stake in the other providers and did what they had to to make it go south for Google.

Anybody know the whole story behind why they went with these laughable micro-trenches?
 
No... They already have that. It's called satellite and it's shit. WISP isn't any better.
lol, no.

First, there's nothing "fixed" about satellite. Second, yeah satellite internet has been crappy and likely always will. With actual fixed wireless, you can get gigabit and it's a non-issue. I'm on fixed wireless here at the office, yup totally shit. Oh wait, we've averaged 1 outage per year or less since we've had it for 5 years, and the outages that we did have were resolved within a couple of hours.
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It's fine so long as you have LoS to the tower. Doesn't have the latency issues of satellite, we could get far more bandwidth if we wanted to, and I'd say is far more reliable than my home connection.
 
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