Technology
This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.
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Google isn’t a fair comparison, to be clear. They’ve “failed to enter” a large number of markets they were successful in, just not successful enough to make gobs of money.
They kill successful projects regularly, because the ROI isn’t an obscenely high number.
I think it is fair. They even had a good plan, which would work if antitrust laws weren't rendered toothless. They started with rural areas that seemed to be forgotten by ISPs. They started providing 1 Gbps at an affordable price.
Suddenly existing ISPs that had 1Mbps services could do 1 Gbps too! And they could do it cheaper too, even under the cost to provide the service. They could do it, because they overcharge their customers everywhere else.
They did that in every city Google Fiber entered.
Not only that, they owned communication wells which Google needed access to to run fiber to customer's homes and were actively blocking from using them.
Google tried different ways, around it and it failed spectacularly, for example: https://gizmodo.com/google-fiber-will-pay-3-8-million-to-fix-roads-marred-1834074398
Yeah as soon as Google says they were interested in the Portland market, suddenly Comcast had gigabit available and prices went down. Unfortunately, Google gave up after being blocked so much.