Ultimate Proof That Google Fiber Is Not Serious

[SteelCrysis]

http://gizmodo.com/what-happened-to-goog...1792440779
A puff piece that seeks to scapegoat Google Fiber's continental drift-slow rollout on obstruction and costs, and ignores the following facts:

1. Google Fiber is nothing but a good PR machine for Google, and therefore
   
2. there's no interest in rolling out fiber faster than continental drift, and
   
3. no interest in weeding out their massive inefficiencies.
   

But it also has this:

But that leaves the question: why is this shift happening now? A former Google Fiber employee told Gizmodo that he was surprised by what’s happening and that the company perhaps shouldn’t have been so thrown by incumbent providers like AT&T’s attempts to slow them down, saying these providers “always tried to block the process, which is why Google had spread itself out across a small number of metro areas. These are not new issues.”

Ultimately, for all the Silicon Valley talk of values and the benefits of expanding high-speed broadband, it’s likely that Google’s reasoning lies at least partly in a calculation about profitability. Fiber was always one of Google’s “other bets,” which are just that—bets, not guaranteed to pay off. Google is happy to keep sending its Project Loon internet balloons into the sky, announcing a breakthrough in deployment today, but it’s suddenly less committed to laying more cables in the ground. Was the focus on deploying this infrastructure just no longer worth the hassle and cost of fighting these protracted battles with incumbent internet providers? With the company seemingly seeking to get more serious about some of its “pie-in-the-sky” bets, maybe those big investments in laying the cables just didn’t seem worth it when the wireless alternative is right there.