Google Fiber Exit Said to Show Downside of 'Micro-Trenching,' Untested Solutions
Google Fiber's departure from Louisville carries both direct and larger lessons for innovators, CCG Consulting President Doug Dawson blogged Thursday. The company cut tiny slits in roads, but the buried fiber "is popping out of the micro-trenches all over the…
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city," probably due to "ice heaving," he said. He said both AT&T and Charter "fought tooth and nail to block" Google Fiber from attaching lines to utility poles in the city, leading to the micro-trenching alternative. "The AT&T suit was resolved in Google’s favor, with the Charter one is still in court," he said. "Perhaps Google Fiber should have just waited out the lawsuits ... Unfortunately, the big ISPs are being rewarded for their intransigence." An "obvious lesson" is "not to launch a new network using an untried and untested construction technique," he said. "The micro-trenches didn’t just fail, they failed spectacularly, in the worst way imaginable. Google Fiber says the only fix for the problem would be to build the network again from scratch, which makes no financial sense." More broadly, several small ISPs say they're "ready to leap into the 5G game and build networks using millimeter wave radios installed on poles," another "new and untested technology," he wrote. "I’m not predicting that anybody pursuing that business plan will fail -- but I can assuredly promise that they will run into unanticipated problems ... I can’t think of a single example where an ISP that took a chance on a cutting-edge technology didn’t have big problems."