Google Fiber has many plans under its sleeves but those plans might not materialize anymore as top executive exited the company leaving some employees displaced.
On Tuesday, Alphabet Inc. which is Google's parent re-organizes the project on a more manageable foundation. Head of the Access unit and Google Fiber, Craig Barratt is departing along with 9 percent of the staff. Google Fiber employs 1,500 workers and will need to lay off some of them to at least 130.
During the past two years, Google Fiber has plans of broadening its fast internet service to be taken advantage of 20 cities or more. But now, the expansion has been trimmed down to only eight cities. Within the firm, bigger drives envelop executives wanting them to deliver service nationally and abolish the traditional broadband industry, Bloomberg reported.
According to Barratt's blog, the web company is holding off its original plan of servicing Fiber to homes of eight different cities including key metropolitan locations such as Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Dallas.
One Google former executive said that stepping into big cities was a disagreeable point within Google Fiber. While Barratt and Dennis Kish pursue the huge expansion, others relinquish the idea thinking of the financial means of digging up streets to place fiber-optic cables through some of America's busiest cities.
"I suspect the sheer economics of broad-scale access deployments finally became too much for them," said Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research. "Ultimately, most of the reasons Google got into this in the first place have either been achieved or been demonstrated to be unrealistic."
According to NBC News, Google Fiber is experiencing a lot of pressure on broadband competitors trying to keep up with the pace of technology to stay in the market. The Louisville and Nashville local governments in Kentucky have been filed complaints from AT&T Inc., Charter Communications, and Comcast Corp. to hinder ordinances that would permit unrelated companies to place competitor's equipment on utility poles which mean an easy access that Google said before is important to complete its establishment of Fiber.
Google Fiber might also deal with rivalry in early 2018 in terms of wireless broadband where Qualcomm Technologies revealed last month of 5G NR architecture development. It claims that it will be much faster than Google Fiber.
