this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2026
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I always thought this was their plan. I used to work for one of the cable companies when this came out. Most of us in the Operations space saw this as an obvious play to bully the big telecom companies to increase speeds and latency to benefit the tech companies. However the execs freaked out and treated them as an existential threat, which is exactly what Google wanted.
They never had any desire to run an Internet company, it costs a ton of money to build out. So they cherry picked relatively dense middle and upper class neighborhoods that would have a good return in a way that the regulated telecoms would not be allowed to. They normalized high speed internet nationally and now they can sell off the business to recoup some of the cost.
I'm not a fan of Google, but as an internet customer, I appreciate the result of this strategy.
Makes sense but since ISPs are essentially a monopoly in fiber, they get to charge whatever they want, despite the fact that I know AT&T's break even cost for 5G fiber is $10 a month per line.
Yeah some (formerly) local fiber companies started out as a way to get decent Internet in places the big ISPs wouldn't touch. Some are still around, but many are getting sold off to the big telcos