Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company
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I'd have suggested Consolidated Communications--they'd been great for about 20 years (first as Everest, then SureWest, and admittedly on the KS side of State Line Rd.), with outages exceptionally rare, support local, and rates stable--but PE got them at the beginning of last year...
And now the bill for the copper gigE link comes from a new local biz, EverFast, $80 monthly, but the wife/bookkeeper says that's increasing. Sigh.
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I guess I shouldn't complain too much about having Frontier FIOS and Spectrum as options, but Spectrum is extremely over-provisioned and the upload speeds are abysmal (35Mb up at best, with 1Gb plan) and Frontier FIOS has done nothing but jack up rates every year.
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they tried to expand. telcos kept throwing up barriers till eventually google gave up. i think i read about that right here on ars, tho it could have been elsewhere.
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Ah. The good old “do no evil” days. Imagine if they had stuck with it. I naively thought they would disrupt cable and mobile access with a superior, no bs product.
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Google fiber has unfortunately been quite unreliable for me, with multiple day-long outages per year. This is just more reason not to switch back.
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This gives me strong vibes of the ATi acquisition of ArtX. Even though ATi was the bigger company, it was ArtX people running the show post merger.
Same here, the googleFiber people will be running the show post merger.
There seems to be a STRONG component of an acqu-hire in this operation. The board of astound was not satisfied witgh their upper management. This is a great way to get more competent management, while also increasing footprint and economies of scale.
Same here, the googleFiber people will be running the show post merger.
There seems to be a STRONG component of an acqu-hire in this operation. The board of astound was not satisfied witgh their upper management. This is a great way to get more competent management, while also increasing footprint and economies of scale.
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I am speculating that this is why I got an email in February saying they are updating the payment system for GFiber. With this announcement, it feels more like preparation so it can easily be decoupled from Google Payments.
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They did indeed. In many areas the utility poles are owned by one of the utilities and they decide who they'll allow to place services on their poles. They've been especially reticent to allow competition to use their infrastructure without local or states telling them to knock it off*. In some cases, bought and paid for legislation (like the current BS about forcing age verification into operating systems - literally bought and paid for by Meta) put the finger on the scales to favor incumbents. Google effectively gave up. Dumping on Google is a favorite Internet past time with reason, but in this case it's very hard to blame them given the circumstances.
*In the case of West Des Moines, Google Fiber entered into a public/private partnership that did an end run around incumbents. WDM built and owns the physical conduits below ground, but Google Fiber was picked to run the cables and operations, IIRC. It's one of the cases where a municipality did something right... if you actually lived in WDM anyway. If you lived anywhere else in the Greater Des Moines area you were limited to Century Link or the cable company who was later bought by one of the big incumbents whose name escapes me currently. Neither of which were exceptionally stellar.
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Stull hoping Ting makes it to my neighborhood. Ubiquti is buindling the infrastructure here, but somthing stopped the expansion a few years back, so not sure when they will get going again. But I'm so sick of Spectrum upping the download speed and leaving the upload speed at 20 gbps, I'm actually considering AT&T if they finally get around here with fiber. But fingers crossed Ting gets going again.
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I feel like Google just got bored with Fiber rather than it being too ambitious..
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Thank you. Drives me insane that people act as if PE take companies with no agency of the company being bought.
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As an Astound Broadband user, I hope this means FTTH soon. The fastest service they offer in my area is 1.5Gbps/50Mbps. It's reliable and has been $65 or so for 5 years. Verizon offers 1 Gig Fios. Comcast/Xfinity has 2 Gig/300 Mbps service.
Comcast and Verizon will usually price their Internet in line with Astound. The competition does help. Most of the customer service is US based.
Private Equity isn't great in most cases. Enshittification is a possibility. PE offers a decent choice in between Comcast and Verizon. They always find an excuse to raise prices, lower service quality, and redline in rural and poor areas.
Comcast and Verizon will usually price their Internet in line with Astound. The competition does help. Most of the customer service is US based.
Private Equity isn't great in most cases. Enshittification is a possibility. PE offers a decent choice in between Comcast and Verizon. They always find an excuse to raise prices, lower service quality, and redline in rural and poor areas.
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(If you can’t see the image of Google’s stock price , here’s a representation of it:
)
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True on all counts...
But I'm trying to think of a time where private equity took control of a company--and things actually got better for either the company or the customers or both....and I can't think of one.
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How many people actually had access to Google fiber? I live in THE metropolitan area in my state and for a while I would see Google fiber signs coming soon, I would periodically check their website, but I stopped caring over a decade ago. This will probably be bad for those who have access, but I'd wager most of us do NOT have access to Google fiber.
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Neutron Jack Welch caused GE's stock price to go to the moon, for 20 years, too.View attachment 130452
(If you can’t see the image of Google’s stock price , here’s a representation of it:
Of course...Jack Welch was asked to leave because he was cooking the books of GE...and he didn't leave a moment too soon--all his decisions promptly sank the company within a few years of his forced exit. He took a US national darling everyone wanted to work at and support...and made it a finance bro's dystopian workplace and created a managerial cult that still haunts Wall Street.
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Really lucky to have Everfast available on the Kansas side of Kansas City, but I've been on Google Fiber for home integration + their 1TB cloud storage for years. This news sucks!
https://www.everfastfiber.com/
https://www.everfastfiber.com/
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Tell me about it. I worked there — what a fall from grace. I wonder if Google will eventually follow a similar path.
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We have a clever acronym for the "President" quitting as soon as the fight starts. I think we need one for Google. I doubt a company has ever existed and thrived like Google while abandoning so many products. I've had Gmail since beta (now my junk email bucket), but every other product has been subject to the corporate axe.
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Somehow you missed the many articles in here about their impossible uphill battle to access the utility poles to deploy their fiber lines?
Hell, its a miracle that it survived this long and reached so many people.
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We were happy with Wave, but then Astound came along. Now we get multi-hour outages. I doubt this will will improve anything for anyone but the investors.
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Is there an antitrust angle to this?
I just can't see Google becoming the largest ISP not becoming an antitrust matter at some point.
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If it's like here, the T-Mobile is 5G wireless. I don't know that it's related. That said, it works surprisingly well if you have a window with line of sight to a cell tower. The built-in WiFi is vastly better than what those cable boxes have. It's not perfect, but in general it's better than cable and it's relatively cheap by comparison. They also promise not to raise prices for 6 years. If you want me to say more, just follow on to this post.
We had all the fiber laying last year. Good (for a given value of good) Internet stops right at the city limit, with everyone outside on DSL or cable if they're lucky. I'm hoping these people get better service.
I hope it means more redundancy. Last year, we had a backhoe outage a few miles out of town that not only took down the wired internet for the entire town but also the cell service.
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Hopefully this won't go the way of their old TISP offering. https://archive.google/tisp/install.html
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To be fair google fiber's goal was never to be a nationwide isp. The original plan was to show what was possible t try to get isps to actually build out fiber and if that didnt work they would threaten or begin to build out in a new city. I guarantee a ton of the places that at&t built fiber only happened because they were worried google would build at fiber in that city and steal all their customers.
The majority of their profit would come from people with better internet using internet more and feeding even more into the ad revenue search machine. The crazy part is internet is so overpriced they probably made a decent profit on the plans as well even undercutting monopoly isps.
In fact had they ever launched in any sort of nationwide large scale rollout I can almost guarantee at&t and comcast and the like would've found a way through their lobbying to get google looked at by congress for having a monopoly lol.
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They did, yes. But also, I think had nano trenching worked out for Google, they would have fought the telcos, but when they discovered cheap, shoddy work didn't last over time at all, they decided it wasn't worth fighting the telcos.
I think they are wrong in that assessment, bit basically they were looking for a cheap shortcut to massive profit and that failed. IMO.
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T-mobile bought a fiber company called Lumos.
At&t bought some of quantum fiber's (century link) residential fiber business
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Indeed. Sacrificing Google's long term in favor of quarter-to-quarter results has definitely yielded short term gains.View attachment 130452
(If you can’t see the image of Google’s stock price , here’s a representation of it:
And Google may very well be "too big to fail" but then anyone in his place would have had similar results. I don't think he's been particularly impressive in his strategy or (lack of) vision.
Keeping AI in the lab long enough for OpenAI and others to gain a significant hold, risking Google's long term cash cow is malpractice enough that he should have been replaced a few years ago, IMO.
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MilanKraft
Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
First reaction: holy crap, we might get some actual competition for the local cable monopoly!
Second reaction: Oh yeah, I forgot what world I'm living in. Competition in this industry is called "Divide and Collude"... no doubt turned up to eleventy under Trumpenfuhrer.
Third reaction: "Hey Gemini, is Google 'not evil' yet?"
Second reaction: Oh yeah, I forgot what world I'm living in. Competition in this industry is called "Divide and Collude"... no doubt turned up to eleventy under Trumpenfuhrer.
Third reaction: "Hey Gemini, is Google 'not evil' yet?"
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