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@fibresystemsmag | www.fibre-systems.com


ANALYSIS GOOGLE FIBER


Salvaging Google Fiber’s achievements


Google wanted to revolutionise the roll-out of fibre, and it still could, writes Benoît Felten


I


n the wake of Google Access CEO Craig Barratt’s ‘Goodbye Access’ post on the Google Fiber blog, there are pundits leſt, right and centre predicting the end of Google Fiber.


Barratt’s post tries to sound upbeat, but in essence he’s announcing that Google Fiber won’t be expanding further (pending a strategic re- evaluation), that people will be made redundant, and that he’s leaving. I don’t know Craig and can’t really comment on his tenure as Access CEO, but that doesn’t exactly sound like good news. For analysts like me this is a complicated topic


for a very simple reason: for anyone other than Google, an infrastructure venture on the scale of Google Fiber as currently announced would have had to disclose numbers by now. Wall Street would have asked for take rates and average revenues per user (ARPUs) and all kinds of other metrics to evaluate the validity of the investment. Before the Alphabet reorganisation however, this was just another Google project. Now that Access is its own company, we might have expected these numbers to come out. Te problem is, Google isn’t talking. So we’re leſt to speculate. I’ve been thinking


about this not just for the last few weeks but for a couple of years at least, and now that Google Fiber seems to be at a turning point, I finally want to share these thoughts. So just to be clear: this is not me sharing information, this is me analysing and speculating on what little we know, and trying to think how what’s been achieved might be salvaged and expanded upon.


A schizophrenic project Without going too far back, my impression has always been that Google Fiber was a schizophrenic project. At the very beginning, it


felt like those Google decision-makers who were more interested in achieving important policy goals wanted Google Fiber to be a catalyst, something that would shiſt the market with a bang and then be a shared experience for others (public or private) to take over. Te idea of a blueprint was floated in the early days. But there were also those who seemed to think


that Google Fiber could become a new business for the company, something not just aimed at shiſting market perceptions and shaking the complacency of telco and cable incumbents, but a profitable business in its own right. Tat has always seemed to me to be an unlikely proposition. I am confronted on a daily basis with the paradox of short-term focused telecom


They wanted Google Fiber to be a catalyst, something that would shift the market with a bang


operators considering long-term fibre investment efforts, but their short term is longer than Google’s core business short term by an order of magnitude. Unless there was a long game plan to view this as the ‘pension fund’ arm of Google’s finances, it didn’t really make sense to me. To be honest, I didn’t much care about that


second proposition anyway. Te US market is already plagued by a lack of competition in fixed broadband. Replacing one closed monopoly with another (no matter how sexy) didn’t seem to me like a particularly desirable goal. So, while I fully wanted to believe in the potential for Google Fiber kicking the telecom anthill, I wasn’t convinced by the relevance and likelihood of this becoming a fibre business like every other. Now it looks like there’s some serious soul


searching around the second proposition, I think it’s time to consider whether the first has worked and how things could go from there.


Google’s mindset My take is that there was one fundamental flaw going into this, one that’s probably still floating around: Google believed they could revolutionise the laying of fibre. Tey didn’t just think they could offer a kickass service, they thought they


A Google Fiber installation van made just for the Austin, Texas, roll-out


Issue 14 • Winter 2017 FIBRE SYSTEMS 25


Google


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