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Google Fiber has seen a lot of headlines this year, but recent ones seem to point towards the fact that Alphabet may be getting ready to dump the service. Google Fiber has seen their CEO leave the company, without a replacement being named. They have also seen rollouts in other cities getting delayed or stopped altogether. Which leaves many people to believe that Alphabet may be getting ready to close down the service in the new year. This led to The Information speculating that CenturyLink could be a potential suitor for the Alphabet division. CenturyLink itself is currently working on purchasing Level 3 Communications for around $34 billion. The Information had no source for this, so it’s all speculation at this point.
Just a couple of months ago, Alphabet’s CFO, Ruth Porat praised Google Fiber publicly, on a quarterly earnings call. Stating that Google Fiber was making great progress and that the company remained “committed to growth” in the markets that it has already launched in. A big reason for Alphabet perhaps looking to dump Google Fiber is the fact that laying fiber is not a cheap thing to do. And this is why Google Fiber has taken so long to get to new cities and neighborhoods. Additionally, not everyone in those cities and neighborhoods are interested in getting Gigabit Internet, or are looking forward to switching ISP’s as that can be a real headache.
When Alphabet (and Google before) announce their quarterly earnings, Google Fiber is part of the “Other Bets” section, which also includes a slew of projects in X, like Nest and their Self-Driving Car Project, now outside of X and called Waymo. So it’s tough to see how much money Google Fiber is bringing in, but analysts predictions have shown that they believe Google Fiber has a very small number of users. Which also means that they aren’t bringing in as much money each month, making it harder to expand.
Currently, this is all just rumors and speculation, but the writing seems to be on the wall for Google Fiber, if you look at the events of the past few months. So we could see Google Fiber landing on Alphabet’s Spring Cleaning list in 2017.