Quote:"To Cable & Satellite investors, Google Fiber is a bit like ebola: very scary and something to be taken seriously," telecom industry analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a research note to investors this week. "But the numbers are very small, it gets more press attention than it deserves, and it ultimately doesn't pose much of a risk (here in the US at least)."

While his choice of metaphor might be a little tasteless, Moffett's not really wrong. Despite the endless hype given Google Fiber in the media, the actual number of Google Fiber remains quite low in context, and most of the nation's broadband providers don't have to worry about Google Fiber coming to their neck of the woods anytime soon.

While Google Fiber doesn't reveal subscriber numbers, Moffett believes the company ended 2014 with less than 30,000 total video subscribers: 194 in Stanford, California; 7,026 in Kansas City, Kansas; 20,140 in Kansas City, Missouri; and 2,507 in Provo, Utah. Those numbers, Moffett notes, are a "testament to how hard, and how slow, it is to build scale as an overbuilder."