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Network Businesses Google Government The Almighty Buck The Internet United States

Google Fiber To Pay Nearly $4 Million To Louisville In Exit Deal (wdrb.com) 74

Posted by BeauHD from the it-was-fun-while-it-lasted dept.
As Google Fiber prepares to leave Louisville, Kentucky, Google has agreed to pay the city government $3.84 million to fix damage to city streets. "The payments, to be made over 20 months, will cover removing fiber cables and sealant from roads, milling and paving streets 'where needed' and removing Google's above-ground infrastructure," reports WDRB, citing a news release from Mayor Greg Fischer's office. From the report: Google Fiber also agreed to donate $150,000 to the Community Foundation of Louisville to support Metro's "digital inclusion" efforts, which include "refurbishing used computers for low-income individuals and the enrollment of public housing residents in low-cost internet access through other companies providing service in Louisville," according to the mayor's office. Google Fiber, a unit of the Silicon Valley tech giant, said Feb. 7 that it would abandon the Louisville market after running into too many problems with the micro-trenching technique it used to install its fiber-optic cables as shallow as two inches below the pavement surface of city streets. Louisville, which lobbied for years to get Google Fiber, has the distinction of being the first city to lose the super-fast internet service. The report notes that Google Fiber only reached a small slice of the city, estimating that the service was only available to, at most, about 11,000 households.
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Google Fiber To Pay Nearly $4 Million To Louisville In Exit Deal More

Google Fiber To Pay Nearly $4 Million To Louisville In Exit Deal

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  • But this just ruined it for me.

  • Microduct (Score:5, Informative)

    by Spazmania ( 174582 ) on Monday April 15, 2019 @05:49PM (#58441976) Homepage

    I've worked with microduct under slots cut in the street. Done properly, it works well.

    Two inches down? That's nuts. You have to pack sand on top of the duct so it stays in place and then seal the sand so it doesn't wash away. And the seal doesn't stay. You have to keep redoing it until the next time the road is paved.

    • I was also wondering why just 2in down, that seems extremely shallow and that any kind of roadwork would mess up the cables.

      • 'As shallow as two inches below'.

        Given it's Kentucky, that would be two inches below the bottom of the pothole, or about three feet below the regular pavement surface.

      • I was also wondering why just 2in down, that seems extremely shallow and that any kind of roadwork would mess up the cables.

        The micro-trenching system was designed by Elizabeth Holmes - she assured everyone it would work flawlessly.

    • Two inches isn't far enough down to mill and repave the roadway surface, you'd need to be 4-6 inches down to make that feasible. That's what's so stupid about what they did. They thought you could cut this slot two inches deep and drop a cable in it and it would stay there with different thermal expansion and everything.

      At least the proved the way not to do it.

    • I've seen it used successfully, but not as shallow as 2 inches.

      But I think what people are missing here is to question WHY Google had to go with the technique in the first place.

      • Why did they have to go with that technique? It doesn't make sense to me. With modern tools, digging a deeper hole isn't the hard part.

        • Hint: For some reason they couldn't use existing infrastructure (like poles) to deploy their fiber...

          • From what I understand, Louisville spent $400k to fight AT&T so that Google could access the poles and then Google turned around and used this unproven 2" microtrenching technique. This problem appears to be entirely Google's manufacture, unless I'm mistaken.
        • Because it is cheaper to do it that way. Alphabet is getting tired of subsidizing this lemon of a company. I expect Google Fiber won't be around in 10 years.

  • Why remove infrastructure? (Score:3)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday April 15, 2019 @05:51PM (#58441984)

    Couldn't the city just have taken over the cables at least? Why do they have to be removed?

    I can see repairing the damage but it seems excessive to go back and remove everything installed.

    • Why keep it? It's just a huge headache that won't last through another winter or survive resurfacing. And it only covers a portion of the city.

    • Re:Why remove infrastructure? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Monday April 15, 2019 @06:26PM (#58442170)

      Well, the problem is that the installation method isn't successful - its a time and money sink that Google wants nothing more to do with, so to leave it in place either means abandoning it in place (which has its own ongoing maintenance problems anyway, to ensure the pavement or roadway is safe) or someone else taking on the time and money sink in maintenance...

      Thats why its being removed - its a costly failure and if left in place its an ongoing costly failure.

    • I wonder if any cities were ever clever enough to require that Google fiber installations be both durable enough to last 20 years without major physical installation maintenance and a salable asset should Google decide they no longer want to run the project.

      My guess is no, they all saw this project as a massive savior and that Google would build it to last forever, because Google and Internet.

  • look like google got off easy. most likely it is going to cost more to fix the problems google caused. it is not cheap to fix city streets. wonder how much it cost google with off the record payments to get off so easy.

    • Cost will depend on street type and paving life cycle.

      On low traffic streets they can go back and pull the cable out and fill the slot with an elastomeric tar. This will work reasonably well until it's time to mill and fill the surface as part of their pavement maintenance as long as they keep re-sealing it every year it should be fine. Given the local climate they probably don't crack seal yearly like the northern states with freeze thaw cycles so this will likely cost the city more than it would elsewhere

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dgatwood ( 11270 )

        Given the local climate they probably don't crack seal yearly like the northern states with freeze thaw cycles so this will likely cost the city more than it would elsewhere where annual crack sealing is common.

        I doubt a year goes by in which Louisville doesn't experience at least two or three freezes. Mind you, it isn't a deep freeze, but it doesn't have to freeze below the ground's surface to cause damage to roads that are sitting on top of the surface. All it takes is water getting into the cracks. :-)

  • I just got cited by an electrical inspector because a circuit that runs through buried PVC doesn't have its PVC buried deep enough between my house and my detached garage. It's probably 8" or so below the ground, with a concrete sidewalk running over the top of it. But the code states it must be buried a full 18".

    So Google thought fiber was ok to just shove 2 inches below the roadway?!

    I sometimes wonder if the Google Fiber project was MEANT to fail - so Google could experiment with a bunch of stuff related

    • I think that the common consensus was that Google Fiber was a tactic to scare the telcos and cable companies to improve their broadband speeds in major metropolitan areas.

      It kinda worked, too, as the upgraded network speeds help other Google products like YouTube and Google Drive work much better than they did earlier. Sure, people in rural areas are still stuck with slow and unreliable Internet access, but let's face it... Google Fiber was never going to get deployed there anyway even if they were taking t

    • If you accidentally nick a fiber cable there is no danger to anyone the same can not be said for electricity, if anyone goes to replace your sidewalk there is a good possibility that the power line will get nicked.

  • The company that makes trillions of dollars is only paying 4 million. They need to pay for everything the inconvenience the promises made. They need to pay 100 million to make it right. Plus the city should keep the infrastructure and build upon it.
  • is not the ISP you're looking for.

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