Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company
7 months ago by cantankerous_cashew to c/technology
For those who’ve haven’t seen it:
299 entries... That makes it 300! Congratulations!!
Meanwhile SpaceX spends billions launching thousands of satellites into space and wreck the environment just so people can doomscroll their slop. When all we need are governments building some basic infrastructure like fiber internet for a fraction of the money.
My prior city ran a survey on whether they should build out fiber to the homes around the city, since they were building their own fiber infrastructure anyway. Despite the city saying it would be cheaper and faster than the existing 0 or 1 options people had, my fellow residents cried communism and the city government scrapped the idea. Infuriating.
Americans are too stupid to vote in a lot of cases. why even hold a vote on something like this at all? just get it done. why bother asking permission from people who will answer without understanding the question
Look up easement abuse in the US on YouTube, Lehto's Law or Institute for Justice
From rail, to cable providers, to city municipalities, easements in the US have been utilized maliciously to destroy and seize peoples properties
Why bother asking permission?
In the States, enough people have proven uncivilized enough and willing enough to face the consequences that come with utilizing tools easily and cheaply available at their disposal so that trespassers and even politicians think twice before sending people to mess with other people's land without asking permission
"ran a survey", this was the only clue I needed to realize that they never planned to do it in the first place. Surveys are so easy to manipulate that if someone tells you they made a decision based on a survey, that you can immediately assume that what they are really saying is that they made a decision that they knew would be unpopular, obviously biased, or otherwise disastrous, but they wanted to blame the decision on "other people".
"We're too stupid to have better things," cried Society.
Australia almost did this right with the National Broadband Network.
Unfortunately, it was then sabotaged by the government after an election changed the majority party.
It seems to be back on track after wasting an extraordinary amount of time and money by installing copper lines, just to completely replace them with the fiber lines that were in the original plan.
Oz exports/produces copper? So maybe just a backwards mining subsidy?
Maybe but like from a networking perspectice it is harder to getndistance on, requires largwrs ducts, shorted cable drumming. There is no economy in which it makes sense, even the actual product would need heavy.... yeah maybe a government would do tat if they were backwards.
Seriously Man, more junk in orbit
and also help rig elections
starlink isn't bad for the environment
Umm, yes it is.
In 2023, Murphy and colleagues reported the first direct evidence of how satellite re-entries are changing the composition of the stratosphere, based on data from a NASA WB-57 aircraft that flew from Alaska to altitudes of 19 kilometers. Using an onboard laser mass spectrometer, they found tiny droplets of sulfuric acid containing 20 different elements that likely came from satellites and rockets, as they were present in ratios that matched those of spacecraft alloys. The amounts of lithium, aluminum, copper, and lead all exceeded the estimated contributions from meteors.
Those satellites are designed for a 5 year lifespan before they deorbit and burn up all those metals in our atmosphere... it's not great
Ugh.
The service has been quite good for ten years.
Guess it was good while it lasted.
Another one for the Google graveyard.
Locally community owned nonprofit isps are the future. Of you live in an area with that, switch over now. Isps in the next year or so are going to sign Ai data scrapping contracts and allow federal censorship like China's great firewall. You heard it here first.
It'll be the same way the try to force broadcasters from airing late night hosts. Wave money and power in front of Comcast/Spectrum/Google executives and just watch. Any content seen as not favorable to Christian Nationalism will be screened. This administration is too lazy and too dumb to do a full blackout. But many Americans agree to lazy to fight for freedoms so a lot of people will ultimately be unable to access censored content. They could also achieve this by going after access point hardware manufacturers as well. It's all in project 2025 my dude.
Of you live in an area with that, switch over now.
hahaha lol lol lol you're hilarious
When do no evil finally turns to do evil always. I think this leaves the Woz as the only remnant of when tech was the good guy.
Good point. Though even when Woz was involved, he was overruled by one of the model tech narcissists, Jobs. But at least he was in the room.
I think we've just created an unregulated system that almost perfectly incentivizes and reinforces evil, so eventually evil is what we get.
Free market capitalism can only serve good with a tight collar and very short leash held by healthy democracy. Maybe it was a bad idea spending 40 years removing and making all leashes and collars for capitalism illegal, and handing the collar and leash to capitalism to put on democracy. But what do I know.
Checks and balances?
Do you mean check marks on my balance sheet for each billion dollar row?
I wonder if Linus and woz would be friends
Probably more of a "Highlander" scenario
I'm shocked. Totally shocked.
Private equity means rising *prices and dropping quality until it's useless at which point it will be sold off piece by piece. Consumers aren't part of the process except as wallets.
Dodged a bullit today. Pretty lucky
Every ISP is pretty shit to be fair. Doubt whoever they sell to is worse than the other options.
(fuck spectrum)
For real. Last year we finally got some competition against Spectrum and their customer service is actually worse than Spectrum. I didn't imagine that was possible
All I do is bitch at Spectrum on the phone once a year and they barely increase my bill.
It will take at least a year for full on enshitifcation to ramp up, so you could always just switch once it goes to shit.
I'm on former Centurylink fiber which was similarly sold off to private equity. Other than the name changes and wonkiness with accessing my account in their system, its been...fine actually? The connection is more stable than it ever was under Centurylink for one thing, and my bill hasn't changed at all in the years since
Everything Google touches turns to ash.
So all of the easement agreements got pushed through by google, and are being taken over by entities who wouldn't have been able to get those easements due to commujity distrust of their company
I'd sue to have the easement revoked as a community, and for punitive damages hefty enough as a punch to Google's nose to prevent that type of bad behavior from happening in the future
Not chump change, not cost of operations. Actual punitive damages enough to cut out any profits from the transaction and then some
Can I get an ELI5? My understanding is that easements are the fees that customers (either individual or community) pay to get the equipment/infra run to their property for service.
Are you saying that customers wouldn't have paid those easements if it was the normal telecom company doing it, as opposed to Google? If so, what are the "damages" in this case? I'm not understanding for what you could sue.
Theres really no eli5, this is a purposely convoluted topic
Best I could offer you is recomemend you go look up the channels Lehto's Law and The Institute for Justice on YouTube
In the US, easements have a history of being abused to render large areas of privately owned land useless/unusable, to legally trespass, and to harass landowners
There's a reason for example that American Tribes fight especially hard to prevent easements from oil or rail or really any companies
Cable companies in particular have a reputation of destroying peoples properties, have numerous times now been given insane payouts to build the very infrastructure with taxes that they just bought and in those instances pocketed the money without even a slap on the wrist. Further their involvement indicates that any further infrastructure projects expanding that fiber are basically dead, and for any that exist they're going to be on life support
Those same bailout companies just got their hands on the easements that were allowed to go to a group who at the least didn't have that history of abuse, and precedent of the that deal going through so it is more likely to start happening in more places
All of those easements should be considered as dead space and new ones will have to be allocated when expansion is taken up by yet another company on 10 or 20 years when they prove they won't upgrade or properly maintain theirs to modern needs, that means further encroaching on people's property
Think of it like sidewalks that moved another 3-4 feet into people's yards every 10 or so years which you as a homeowner are not allowed to alter or use or complain when their representatives do so
Great explaination, thanks a lot!
As for damages
Say you have a old masonry structure like a masonry brick fence in the way of the easement
They can tear it down and will, and will not replace it with one of comparable quality if they bother to at all
Ive seen some beautiful 1950s work like that where it goes from amazing tradesmen quality masonry and iron fencing to jank 4x4's and basically chickenwire on the easement, even 2 sections of the masonry/iron fence would take thousands to fix properly from what they did and there's the likelihood they'll do it again in the future.
Those are homes of people on fixed incomes or investments. They usually can't keep fixing the damage. And those fences aren't really decorations, its not even slightly uncommon for people to die from dog maulings in my area. Happens a few times every single year
Say you have a road, driveway, etc? At some point you will have a massive random pothole or speedbump because they'll cut a trough right through it and fill it with asphalt not repour expensive concrete. I can in my neighborhood point out four locations where cable and fiber easement companies have done just that
I call bullshit at least as far as Gfiber is concerned. I live in a multi family building. For mine they had to run it under a driveway, sidewalk, and fence. They didn't touch any of them. Then when my neighbor had theirs installed they just had to go under the driveway. It wasn't touched again but unfortunately they had cut my line. So they ran mine again and like the first time they didn't touch any of the three. I don't know if my other neighbors in the building have Gfiber or not as I was affected at all and they didn't touch any of the three if they did get it installed.
Great. Can't wait for price increases or data caps or both.
I always thought this was their plan. I used to work for one of the cable companies when this came out. Most of us in the Operations space saw this as an obvious play to bully the big telecom companies to increase speeds and latency to benefit the tech companies. However the execs freaked out and treated them as an existential threat, which is exactly what Google wanted.
They never had any desire to run an Internet company, it costs a ton of money to build out. So they cherry picked relatively dense middle and upper class neighborhoods that would have a good return in a way that the regulated telecoms would not be allowed to. They normalized high speed internet nationally and now they can sell off the business to recoup some of the cost.
I'm not a fan of Google, but as an internet customer, I appreciate the result of this strategy.
This will enshittivize profit over quality of service.
I'll never understand the fanboys who glaze google.
Edit: You guys sound like cultists wishing for an older mystical time. "Nah bro you just had to be there" Yeah I was there, and you guys are just as crazy today glazing these evil fucks.
When Google Fiber came here every ISP shat themselves and dropped prices, and raised speeds. And Google Fiber has been by far the most reliable ISP.
by the time fiber appeared, SONIC appeared just before, and others was also appearing at the same time in the bay area, fiber was in for a big competition already.
Google only does two things.
Roll out a product REALLY well then ignore it forever leaving it an amazing state that everyone loves and is insanely consumer friendly before randomly deciding to axe it with no reason.
Or roll out a product REALLY well then promptly over monetize it forever ruining everything good the engineers did in the first place. Thus making it very extremely unconsumer friendly.
They have no middle ground.
Luckily OSM has matured considerably.
google fiber was a special case where they were introducing much needed competition to the nearly monopolized ISP market.
Google started bringing fiber to neighboring towns and all of a sudden the cable company started offering speeds 3x faster for less money and AT&T built out a fiber network including in our town, which didn’t get Google for another ten years, and then only a franchise that was paying for the Google name.
For those of us who are old enough to remember peak Google, it is understandable.
They revolutionized and opened up so many things that were grossly monopolized before they got involved. Android broke the telecoms insane grip on cell phone designs and features. Several people have already mentioned how Google fiber changed things in local connectivity, but Google dramatically changed global connectivity way before Google fiber. There used to be only a few international (under sea) connections, and not only was it slow and congested, but entire continents could just drop off the internet for weeks or even months at a time. They broke MS Office's death grip on basic productivity tools. There was a time where private individuals, even grade school students were required to buy an entire professional productivity (Office) in order to deliver basic school work like writing essays. I can think of almost a dozen ways right off the top of my head that they revolutionized the world and really did take the "Do no evil" slogan to heart.
But, as with every company that "goes public", they slowly changed from "Do no evil' to "Do know evil" and now they are exactly the soul and life destroying parasites that they used to free us from.
That is true.
If only companies were allowed to just do what they wanted without rules and regulations... What a beautiful distopian nightmare we would live! Also the line would go vertical! One can only dream
We'll all be hyperlooping around Mars here soon! 🤞
What are you talking about man! Wow
which just to happens to be today's sponsor!
I've been using NameCheap since well before 2009, but since 2009, it'll take me a lot to switch away after they helped protect me from Glenn Beck. heh.
They are pretty free from bullshit and pretty straightforward.
route 53 in AWS is even easier.
There are essentially only three major cable providers in the United States. They have blocked Google Fiber at nearly every turn. I have been unable to get Google Fiber at any address I’ve lived at since it launched.
It is oddly entertaining to watch monopolies that the federal government failed to break up, largely due to their own lobbying, fight each other in an attempt to prevent the others from becoming even more monopolized.
I always thought the 1Gbps was awesome and perhaps a good incentive for other companies to upgrade (probably more the reason since they're Google and their ad bucks). Recently saw a reason to switch for 2.5, did it then was told by the installer they don't even have cable that does it. Mean. I did it myself and my stream downloads are quite fast, but it'd have been nice if my provider mentioned that in the first place so I knew who had to run the wires. It was only through some holes, behind the sink / dishwasher so not awful but you td have been nice to understand 2.5 was higher than their techs supported.Also needed a switch / router upgrade. Which was actually quite fun to do and minimal cost now can get a mesh wifi going.
Still if your techs can't provide what is needed in cables for your upper end least tell the customer first.
Yeah fuck everything Google.
Webpass used to be great. The instant it became Google Fiber, it seemed to be totally abandoned; no rollout to new buildings/neighborhoods, no speed improvements (most locations still top out at 1Gbps and local favorite Sonic has rolled out 10Gbps fiber throughout the Bay Area), and prices are stubbornly high ($70/mo for 1Gbps versus $40 from competitors). Oh, and there's still no IPv6.
I'm sure Astound will be even worse but Google has been an awful steward of this service.
i always wondered if fiber is going anywhere, like most google venture it fails poorly, because they couldnt expand, i suspect waymo will go the same way.
we currently have sonic for like 10 years and it was great. and there are other GSP ISP? that is equal or greater than fiber. ISP being a potential new revenue source, is something google dint capatalize on, likely because of AI taking all thier resources on developing it?
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