What happened to Google Fiber?

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What happened to Google Fiber?

They say that we should learn from the best, but often in the euphoria at the beginning of business ventures it is forgotten that the stories of failure are equally educational! Let’s take for example Google, which is still ideal for a successful companies: for an entrepreneur, an aspiring business model, and for the rest of the place where everyone would love to work. After all, what more companies can boast of double-digit annual growth – every year!?

However, even the most successful companies fail to always carry out all of their plans, and this has proved to be true even for corporations such as Google. Mysteriously announced, and equally vigorously greeted by users, Google’s intention to bring super-fast internet and television to every corner of the continental United States is hurt even before it started.

To recall, in 2010, Google announced that it will build a Super Broadband network for 50 to 500 thousand users in one or more US cities. Soon the choice fell to Kansas City, and already in 2012 the construction of optical broadband Internet network infrastructure has been completed. It acted as more than a promising start and the cities competed to offer the best possible conditions and were next in line for Google’s 1Gbps optical fiber (1000 Mbps) – Google Fiber.

Interestingly, Google only came up with a price list after the completion of infrastructure construction. One of the options offered included virtually free broadband internet for certain groups of residents. Special benefits are offered to a small business. Not only did Google Fiber introduce speeds previously unknown to users who rely on the traditional telecoms, but also shocked the market and with (in comparison) favorable prices. “A hundred times faster internet at the same or cheaper price than the telecom offers? We take it! “

It acts as a success story, is not it? However, five years later, it is obvious that the Google Fiber project is a subtract, if not a complete failure. Looking at the Google Fiber page with their expansion map, it’s immediately noteworthy that there is no more single city in the plan to introduce optics. There are only “potential areas” for somebody – time completely undetermined – future expansion. Well, what went wrong?

To begin with, Google may have for the first time in its corporate history met with the right competition – telecom. It’s not hard to imagine that telecommunication giants felt endangered by Google’s entry into their previously well-guarded territory. While some smaller and agile Internet service providers responded to Google’s challenge by offering higher speeds and lower prices to their customers, most were not ready for such moves. Google has faced the resistance of the competition – something that this Internet company has not been accustomed to – and apparently, it did not cope with such a climate.

Surprisingly, Google did not seem to have anticipated and expected the difficulties it faced “in the real world” during its performance. This is the only way to explain Google’s departure by taking deposits to build optics in the areas they eventually had to give up. Perhaps this is the reason that now on the Google Fiber page emphasize the importance of cooperation with city administrations. Indeed, even the most ambitious plans fail in a situation where – for these or other reasons – it is impossible to get all the necessary permissions and consents!

We should not neglect the technical problems that are inevitable in such large infrastructure projects. Respectively: Google has been facing constraints in implementation, while costs have risen steadily at the same time. For a company like Google, which is known for investing in technologies such as vehicles without drivers, it turns out that it is optics that is their most ambitious and most reliable project!

After all, the optics are expensive and its introduction means not an easy job that can be quickly completed. 2016, it becomes painfully visible after Google’s restructuring, with the release of the Google Fiber Project Leader and the CEO request that the acquisition costs of new Google Fiber users be reduced to a tenth and reduce the number of employees in half. Up to that moment, from the planned 5 million subscribers, Google has only purchased 200,000, and spent $ 1 billion on performance.

For a company that is so devoted to growing (perhaps at the core of everything else) such as Google, the whole of this optics story now acts as a wrong step. Cancellations, change of management, further cost cutting, and turning to other projects (among others, perhaps the wireless Internet), which, at least seemingly, have a shorter path to profitability, act as the most obvious epilogue.