Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company

Google Fiber will be sold to private equity firm and merge with cable company(arstechnica.com)

154 points by waits 111 days ago | 40 comments

Mobius01 110 days ago |

This is really unfortunate. Google Fiber has maintained a low, no-nonsense price for years with near-perfect uptime, and besides the odd upselling email, they have never really pushed upgrades. More importantly, I can use my own hardware without having to engage in a war with technical support on 2 hour long calls.

Maybe I was in denial that Google would behave differently about this product considering their track record.

kylecazar 111 days ago |

I remember when it was released and I wished I was in Kansas.

I'm smack in the middle of debating Google Fi, this probably won't impact my decision, but I wonder if it will suffer a similar fate.

AlotOfReading 111 days ago | |

I'll be sad when Google Fi is eventually killed. It's honestly amazing to have a service that's purely transactional. No notifications, no upsells, no "oops we had a data breach" (except the time it happened upstream), no roaming. Just a monthly payment exchanged for service.

Legend2440 111 days ago | | |

How is this different from what other prepaid carriers like Mint offer?

hysan 111 days ago | |

Fi’s customer service has long since turned to shit, but the things keeping me on it are the data sims, simple international roaming, and international calling. That trifecta is pretty hard to find a match for. Especially the data sims. But if you don’t need that, I probably wouldn’t recommend Fi. My wife had endless trouble with multiple bad sim cards and the customer service experience was just as dreadful as every other carrier.

homeonthemtn 111 days ago | |

I left fi because the service was bad outside of Metro areas and didn't trust them to not arbitrarily shut down. It felt stagnant as a service which implied it was coasting along with no one at the helm

burnt-resistor 111 days ago |

I'm glad that a farmer utility co-op exists here that offers GFiber-equivalent of 1 GbE symmetric and unlimited data for no contract $99/month with an $65/month intro rate. Also has 500 Mbps for $75 ($40) and 250 Mbps $65 ($30). Municipal broadband and electricity needs to take back community services away from profiteering corporations and private equity vampires, and really benefit from government-assisted grants and loans and templatized processes and governance to bootstrap more of these.

One of the major pluses of GFiber is it largely ignored DMCA requests. Also, the 20 Gbps ONT beta service was rad. A weak point was their mesh routers that didn't work quite right and would refuse to work if "too close together".. 20 ft apart. Their customer service/tech support was pretty awesome.

tomasphan 111 days ago |

At this point purchasing Google services/products is a real risk for business continuity.

bigstrat2003 111 days ago | |

It really is. You could not pay me to tie my business to Google at this point. I need someone I can trust won't just pull the plug in a year when they get bored, and Google isn't that company.

herewulf 110 days ago | |

They sold off Google Domains to Squarespace a year or so ago which was irritating because it was super nice to grant DNS record access using employees' Workspace accounts.

kyle_t 110 days ago |

Google Fiber has been aggressively upselling us to a higher plan the last 6-12 months, prior to that in my 6 years with them I don't remember a single upsell. Guess I know why now, trying to grease the numbers for the highest possible sale price.

I'll be sure to take this as a warning sign in the future with other services if aggressive upselling starts happening unexpectedly.

caminante 110 days ago | |

Ha!

I checked recent comps and see 6-10x EV/EBITDA multiples. Allegedly Google had been funding with cash and losing money. Go figure...

Every $1 they got out of you with upsell, gave them $10 more for AI.

00zayn 110 days ago |

End of an era: GFiber's brand equity was weirdly valuable because it was one of the few ISPs people talked about almost like a software product.

00zayn 110 days ago | |

Introducing the Google Fiber Bar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re0VRK6ouwI

wtallis 111 days ago |

Well, shit. Google Fiber has been the least-bad residential ISP I've dealt with. They put the fear of Competition in all the other ISPs in town, giving us an immediate free speed boost years before Google Fiber actually made it to our neighborhood.

But more than most Google projects, it's always been clear that they could at any time get bored with it and give up.

SOLAR_FIELDS 111 days ago | |

I was paying IIRC $85 USD to spectrum a month for 300 down and 10 up. Google fiber came to my neighborhood a year and a half ago and offered 1gb symmetrical for $70, so 3x more down and 100x more up for less money.

I’ll actually be optimistic and say we will make it a year before the price hikes start

otterley 111 days ago | |

> They put the fear of Competition in all the other ISPs in town, giving us an immediate free speed boost years before Google Fiber actually made it to our neighborhood.

It sounds like Google Fiber’s underlying mission was successful: to improve the quality of Internet experience nationwide. They didn’t even have to undertake the difficulty and expense of an actual buildout in most cases!

ProllyInfamous 110 days ago | |

>the least-bad residential ISP I've dealt with

It's because lobbyists have prevented your local community from implementing anything close to what Chattanooga/EPB [0] has done with their city-owned fiber infrastructure. They literally cannot expand outside their power delivery area (by court order), and were only initially allowed to offer internet services because "it helped monitor their smartgrid technologies for power delivery." National ISPs have spent millions campaigning against EPB-like ISP expansion.

It's a racket.

[0] Electric Power Board ISP, is incredible: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPB> 300mbps synchronous fiber, $58.99/month (1gbps is ~$75; 20gps is $250), four-port fiber/copper bridge (supplied) direct to your techshed. EVERY service address gets one power-drop and one 4-fiber service drop, whether or not you use internet(s).

I don't even know why other national ISPs advertise here — they specifically lock certain apartment complexes into EPB-exclusion contracts... and don't tell potential renters this during leasing/contracts. It's shitty.

It's a racket.

Simulacra 111 days ago |

I remember when Google fiber was all the rage back around 2013, and I so desperately wanted it to come to my neighborhood, anything to offset the Comcast regime. Deeply disappointed that there were so many barriers preventing its expansion. From pole access to just straight up anti-competitive behavior from Comcast, fiber could've really been something great but the law just wouldn't allow it.

layla5alive 110 days ago | |

I'm getting so tired of seeing "the law doesn't allow" x thing that is good for citizens but bad for corporations. We are supposed to have a representative government by the people and for the people and by gosh what we actually have is so far from that! When will we collectively say "enough is enough!" And rewrite the laws to actually be by the people and for the people!?

htrp 111 days ago |

this will age poorly... and Google will launch a new fiber Network offering in 5 years

alanwreath 111 days ago |

Ah the Google graveyard thrives.

nodesocket 111 days ago |

Well shoot. I have Google Fiber 1 gig, and generally been happy. Hopefully service uptime and price does not change.

dcrazy 110 days ago |

We’ve gone back and forth between GFiber and AT&T in SF. Currently on AT&T because they do FTTP while GFiber is microwave backhaul. Once the drought years ended it was impossible to work from home on rainy days.

Sonic keeps promising they will be lighting up dark fiber in our part of the city but it keeps not happening. They’ll happily resell us the same AT&T service we’re already paying for, though.

scoofy 110 days ago | |

I'm currently on Sonic in SF. It's a quality product even though it's technically more expensive than I could get from Comcast. It's just less bullshit dark patterns like constantly having to re-up your contract.

vivzkestrel 111 days ago |

any ideas why they are selling this?

sounds 111 days ago | |

Didn't they announce they were selling it off a while back? I thought the reason was it's not very much like the other things Google does.

pas 110 days ago | |

someone wants to increase some number in a spreadsheet and this department doesn't have the usual infinite money characteristics that software has (or the compounding network effects that building a cloud platform has)

jsnell 111 days ago | |

Almost certainly so that they can afford more AI data center capex.