Mesa in some news for micro-trenching and fees for underground cable rights-of-way (but that's only after some kind of success for the brethren in Salt Lake City and Provo, Utah)
Google Fiber’s 2016 Expansion Freeze May Be Coming To An End
from the a-little-something-called-competition dept
When Google Fiber launched back in 2010, it was heralded as a game changer for the broadband industry. Google Fiber, we were told, would revolutionize the industry by taking Silicon Valley money and disrupting the viciously uncompetitive and anti-competitive telecom sector.
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Initially, things worked out well; cities tripped over themselves offering all manner of perks to the company in the hopes of breaking free from the broadband duopoly logjam. Google got endless free press for doing something truly disruptive. And in markets where Google Fiber was deployed, prices dropped thanks to this added competition (fancy that!).
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The fun didn’t last.
In late 2016, a new era of Alphabet execs began getting cold feet about the high costs and slow returns of the project, and effectively mothballed the entire thing — without admitting that’s what they were doing. The company blew through several CEOs in just a few months, laid off hundreds of employees, froze any real expansion, and cancelled countless installations for users who had been waiting years.
And while Google made a lot of noise about how it would be shifting from fiber to wireless to possibly cut costs, those promises also remained stuck in neutral.
But there are some faint indications that the Google Fiber freeze might be thawing somewhat. Last year, Google announced it had started working with officials in West Des Moines, Iowa on a potential expansion into the city. More recently, the company indicated it was expanding into Mesa, Arizona. And it’s also pushing harder into select portions of Utah:
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“We’ve expanded to a bunch of new cities around our Utah footprint. We’ve also expanded to Smyrna, for example, around Tennessee, within our Nashville footprint,” Strama told Government Technology. “We’ll continue to be expanding around our existing footprint for the long term.”
To be clear, many of these efforts remain somewhat… modest, and it’s clear Google Fiber’s overall ambitions have scaled back. In a country where 83 million live under a broadband monopoly, and somewhere between 20-40 Americans lack any broadband at all (see our recent report on this), some scattered deployments in limited portions of mid-tier cities can only go so far.
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Still, it’s good to see Google trying all the same. For a while there after the freeze, it seemed entirely possible the company could pack it in and sell the network (much like it sold out its principles on concepts like net neutrality). And while Google Fiber (much like Google) isn’t the same disruptive force it was in 2010, when it comes to mediocre U.S. broadband, every last bit helps.
Filed Under: broadband, competition, digital divide, dirsuption, fiber, google fiber, high speed internet
Companies: google
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Google Fiber sets its sights on Arizona – again
Update 7/14/2022** Members of Mesa city government contacted Fierce Telecom after this story was published. Their perspective is included in an update at the bottom of this story.
Update 7/14/2022**
Ian Linssen, assistant to the Mesa City Manager, said the city’s main goal was to ensure greater connectivity in the city through private-sector investment. “It was never the city’s intent to pick one provider,” he said. The city received a “very robust response” to its RFI and selected the four providers.
The next step is for the providers to contact Mesa’s right-of-way department and begin the permitting process.
Linssen said the RFI did not mandate that new fiber networks be open access. He said SiFi Networks and Generate Ubiquity proposed open access, but the other two providers — Wyyerd and Google Fiber — did not, and that’s OK with the city.
Asked how the four providers will figure out who is building what infrastructure and where, Linssen said, “We never dictate where providers go. That’s the plan here. We really think the market would know best. In some cases there may be overbuilding. It will be up to the providers to make sure their business models work. They might want to think about building together if that makes sense.”
The city council of Mesa, Arizona, voted this week to approve four different providers to build an open access network, or possibly open access networks (plural), to serve its more than 220,000 homes and businesses in the greater Phoenix area.
Fierce Telecom reached out to the city of Mesa and will update this story with any clarification as to exactly what the city council is envisioning. But Bawtree-Jobson indicated that at this point it is open-ended as to who’s going to build what and in what proportions. But he said, “I wouldn’t envision fiber networks overbuilding fiber networks. It will be interesting to see how it pans out."
SiFi Networks
From its perspective, the Mesa contract is a big win for SiFi Networks. Its largest city to date is Arlington, Texas, with fiber passing 174,000 units.
Mesa wants an open-access fiber network, and Bawtree-Jobson said in his view SiFi is the best suited to provide that. It delivers a complete end-to-end solution all the way from the data centers to the residential gateway in the home or business. And it populates the network with, not only fiber, but everything necessary from equipment to cabinets.
After the network is built, it will be used by SiFi to support ISPs that want to offer internet services and smart city applications with speeds as high as 10 Gbps symmetrical. Services will be available at prices from $59.95 per month.
SiFi says the Mesa project could potentially cost it $400 million, which SiFi will privately fund. One of its investors is APG, a large European pension fund.
SiFi’s multi-year construction project will use micro-trenching technology, which buries fiber cables more shallow and in narrower trenches than regular trenching. Bawtree-Jobson said, “There will be other techniques used, but micro-trenching will be our primary method of rollout. We’re probably one of the first to use it at large scale and advocate for it on a large scale. We are very much in the weeds in terms of quality control and making sure the streets are maintained in appropriate condition.”
Rather than paying a license fee like Google Fiber, SiFi Network’s proposed contract states it would provide certain “in-kind” services to the city, including access to up to 670 demand points across the network and discounted broadband to as many as 33,000 income-eligible households.
This isn’t the first time Google Fiber has set its sights on Arizona. Back in 2014, it announced plans to bring its gigabit service to Phoenix and the metro-area cities of Tempe and Scottsdale. While it was able to secure license agreements with all three municipalities, it hit a hurdle when Cox Communications filed a lawsuit in 2015 claiming Tempe had created a new license category that unfairly advantaged Google Fiber. The company ultimately halted its expansion plans for Phoenix and several other cities in October 2016 in order to focus on growing its existing markets.
If Google Fiber does actually make it into Mesa, it will be competing against incumbents Cox and Lumen’s CenturyLink brand.
Micro-trenching
According to public documents, the city council’s vote comes after it put out a request for information from fiber providers in January. After receiving responses from seven providers including Google Fiber, the city said it moved to adopt new policies designed to make fiber deployments there easier. Among other things, it approved construction standards allowing for micro-trenching in the city’s rights of way.
Micro-trenching refers to the practice of digging narrow and shallow trenches in which to lay fiber cabling. Both Google Fiber and SiFi Networks have proposed using micro-trenching for construction of their networks. Google Fiber in particular has talked up micro-trenching in the past as technique which allows it to move faster and cause less disruption to local residents. However, the method has not always worked in its favor.
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