This is really unfortunate. Google Fiber has maintained a low, no-nonsense price for years with near-perfect uptime, and besides the odd upselling email, they have never really pushed upgrades. More importantly, I can use my own hardware without having to engage in a war with technical support on 2 hour long calls.
Maybe I was in denial that Google would behave differently about this product considering their track record.
I'll be sad when Google Fi is eventually killed. It's honestly amazing to have a service that's purely transactional. No notifications, no upsells, no "oops we had a data breach" (except the time it happened upstream), no roaming. Just a monthly payment exchanged for service.
The big thing keeping me from switching from Google Fi is how easy international roaming is. For every country I've been to, I've just had it automatically work within ten minutes of landing, at my regular price, without buying any addons
Except if you happen to travel for more than 45 days, in which case Google Fi will promptly tell you to get fucked and cut off your service without warning, advanced notice, or spelling out anywhere when you sign up. Not my idea of a carrier I can trust. I deleted my account and service with them to move to a carrier that I can trust and actually respects me as a customer.
tbf, that was because a lot of people abused it by being permanently outside of the US and relying exclusively on the roaming for all their data. I know because I was one of those people for 6 years.
I've switched to US Mobile. I haven't used it on an extended basis internationally yet, but I am about to travel internationally, so will find out soon. That said, the reviews are pretty good by people that use it internationally for an extended period of time.
I got bad speed even with perfect signal in malls and any place that is more crowded than a Costco. Google Fi doesn't have that problem. I blame it on T-mobile but I would rather Google Fi survives.
Fi’s customer service has long since turned to shit, but the things keeping me on it are the data sims, simple international roaming, and international calling. That trifecta is pretty hard to find a match for. Especially the data sims. But if you don’t need that, I probably wouldn’t recommend Fi. My wife had endless trouble with multiple bad sim cards and the customer service experience was just as dreadful as every other carrier.
I left fi because the service was bad outside of Metro areas and didn't trust them to not arbitrarily shut down. It felt stagnant as a service which implied it was coasting along with no one at the helm
I'm glad that a farmer utility co-op exists here that offers GFiber-equivalent of 1 GbE symmetric and unlimited data for no contract $99/month with an $65/month intro rate. Also has 500 Mbps for $75 ($40) and 250 Mbps $65 ($30). Municipal broadband and electricity needs to take back community services away from profiteering corporations and private equity vampires, and really benefit from government-assisted grants and loans and templatized processes and governance to bootstrap more of these.
One of the major pluses of GFiber is it largely ignored DMCA requests. Also, the 20 Gbps ONT beta service was rad. A weak point was their mesh routers that didn't work quite right and would refuse to work if "too close together".. 20 ft apart. Their customer service/tech support was pretty awesome.
It really is. You could not pay me to tie my business to Google at this point. I need someone I can trust won't just pull the plug in a year when they get bored, and Google isn't that company.
They sold off Google Domains to Squarespace a year or so ago which was irritating because it was super nice to grant DNS record access using employees' Workspace accounts.
Google Fiber has been aggressively upselling us to a higher plan the last 6-12 months, prior to that in my 6 years with them I don't remember a single upsell. Guess I know why now, trying to grease the numbers for the highest possible sale price.
I'll be sure to take this as a warning sign in the future with other services if aggressive upselling starts happening unexpectedly.
Well, shit. Google Fiber has been the least-bad residential ISP I've dealt with. They put the fear of Competition in all the other ISPs in town, giving us an immediate free speed boost years before Google Fiber actually made it to our neighborhood.
But more than most Google projects, it's always been clear that they could at any time get bored with it and give up.
I was paying IIRC $85 USD to spectrum a month for 300 down and 10 up. Google fiber came to my neighborhood a year and a half ago and offered 1gb symmetrical for $70, so 3x more down and 100x more up for less money.
I’ll actually be optimistic and say we will make it a year before the price hikes start
> They put the fear of Competition in all the other ISPs in town, giving us an immediate free speed boost years before Google Fiber actually made it to our neighborhood.
It sounds like Google Fiber’s underlying mission was successful: to improve the quality of Internet experience nationwide. They didn’t even have to undertake the difficulty and expense of an actual buildout in most cases!
It's because lobbyists have prevented your local community from implementing anything close to what Chattanooga/EPB [0] has done with their city-owned fiber infrastructure. They literally cannot expand outside their power delivery area (by court order), and were only initially allowed to offer internet services because "it helped monitor their smartgrid technologies for power delivery." National ISPs have spent millions campaigning against EPB-like ISP expansion.
It's a racket.
[0] Electric Power Board ISP, is incredible: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPB> 300mbps synchronous fiber, $58.99/month (1gbps is ~$75; 20gps is $250), four-port fiber/copper bridge (supplied) direct to your techshed. EVERY service address gets one power-drop and one 4-fiber service drop, whether or not you use internet(s).
I don't even know why other national ISPs advertise here — they specifically lock certain apartment complexes into EPB-exclusion contracts... and don't tell potential renters this during leasing/contracts. It's shitty.
I remember when Google fiber was all the rage back around 2013, and I so desperately wanted it to come to my neighborhood, anything to offset the Comcast regime. Deeply disappointed that there were so many barriers preventing its expansion. From pole access to just straight up anti-competitive behavior from Comcast, fiber could've really been something great but the law just wouldn't allow it.
I'm getting so tired of seeing "the law doesn't allow" x thing that is good for citizens but bad for corporations. We are supposed to have a representative government by the people and for the people and by gosh what we actually have is so far from that! When will we collectively say "enough is enough!" And rewrite the laws to actually be by the people and for the people!?
We’ve gone back and forth between GFiber and AT&T in SF. Currently on AT&T because they do FTTP while GFiber is microwave backhaul. Once the drought years ended it was impossible to work from home on rainy days.
Sonic keeps promising they will be lighting up dark fiber in our part of the city but it keeps not happening. They’ll happily resell us the same AT&T service we’re already paying for, though.
I'm currently on Sonic in SF. It's a quality product even though it's technically more expensive than I could get from Comcast. It's just less bullshit dark patterns like constantly having to re-up your contract.
someone wants to increase some number in a spreadsheet and this department doesn't have the usual infinite money characteristics that software has (or the compounding network effects that building a cloud platform has)
As a longtime Google Fiber customer, it’s Google Fiber.
My service has been effectively perfect. My price has barely changed in a long time, though they’ve added faster tiers as options. They let me use my own equipment without any hassle.
They’re not calling me to upgrade to a new plan. They’re not pushing me into their TV service. Or phone service. Or cell phones. Or anything else.
Best ISP I’ve ever had by far. And it’s going to be DESTROYED.
Maybe they didn’t matter much to you outside price pressure, but they mattered a hell of a lot to me.
This is really unfortunate. Google Fiber has maintained a low, no-nonsense price for years with near-perfect uptime, and besides the odd upselling email, they have never really pushed upgrades. More importantly, I can use my own hardware without having to engage in a war with technical support on 2 hour long calls.
Maybe I was in denial that Google would behave differently about this product considering their track record.
I remember when it was released and I wished I was in Kansas.
I'm smack in the middle of debating Google Fi, this probably won't impact my decision, but I wonder if it will suffer a similar fate.
I'll be sad when Google Fi is eventually killed. It's honestly amazing to have a service that's purely transactional. No notifications, no upsells, no "oops we had a data breach" (except the time it happened upstream), no roaming. Just a monthly payment exchanged for service.
How is this different from what other prepaid carriers like Mint offer?
The big thing keeping me from switching from Google Fi is how easy international roaming is. For every country I've been to, I've just had it automatically work within ten minutes of landing, at my regular price, without buying any addons
Except if you happen to travel for more than 45 days, in which case Google Fi will promptly tell you to get fucked and cut off your service without warning, advanced notice, or spelling out anywhere when you sign up. Not my idea of a carrier I can trust. I deleted my account and service with them to move to a carrier that I can trust and actually respects me as a customer.
tbf, that was because a lot of people abused it by being permanently outside of the US and relying exclusively on the roaming for all their data. I know because I was one of those people for 6 years.
We've exceeded that by months on multiple occasions and fully expected them to cut us off after reading similar dire warnings but they never have.
That said, we keep data usage rather low because we're on the metered plan.
What service do you use now?
I've switched to US Mobile. I haven't used it on an extended basis internationally yet, but I am about to travel internationally, so will find out soon. That said, the reviews are pretty good by people that use it internationally for an extended period of time.
I got bad speed even with perfect signal in malls and any place that is more crowded than a Costco. Google Fi doesn't have that problem. I blame it on T-mobile but I would rather Google Fi survives.
Fi’s customer service has long since turned to shit, but the things keeping me on it are the data sims, simple international roaming, and international calling. That trifecta is pretty hard to find a match for. Especially the data sims. But if you don’t need that, I probably wouldn’t recommend Fi. My wife had endless trouble with multiple bad sim cards and the customer service experience was just as dreadful as every other carrier.
I left fi because the service was bad outside of Metro areas and didn't trust them to not arbitrarily shut down. It felt stagnant as a service which implied it was coasting along with no one at the helm
I'm glad that a farmer utility co-op exists here that offers GFiber-equivalent of 1 GbE symmetric and unlimited data for no contract $99/month with an $65/month intro rate. Also has 500 Mbps for $75 ($40) and 250 Mbps $65 ($30). Municipal broadband and electricity needs to take back community services away from profiteering corporations and private equity vampires, and really benefit from government-assisted grants and loans and templatized processes and governance to bootstrap more of these.
One of the major pluses of GFiber is it largely ignored DMCA requests. Also, the 20 Gbps ONT beta service was rad. A weak point was their mesh routers that didn't work quite right and would refuse to work if "too close together".. 20 ft apart. Their customer service/tech support was pretty awesome.
At this point purchasing Google services/products is a real risk for business continuity.
It really is. You could not pay me to tie my business to Google at this point. I need someone I can trust won't just pull the plug in a year when they get bored, and Google isn't that company.
They sold off Google Domains to Squarespace a year or so ago which was irritating because it was super nice to grant DNS record access using employees' Workspace accounts.
Google Fiber has been aggressively upselling us to a higher plan the last 6-12 months, prior to that in my 6 years with them I don't remember a single upsell. Guess I know why now, trying to grease the numbers for the highest possible sale price.
I'll be sure to take this as a warning sign in the future with other services if aggressive upselling starts happening unexpectedly.
Ha!
I checked recent comps and see 6-10x EV/EBITDA multiples. Allegedly Google had been funding with cash and losing money. Go figure...
Every $1 they got out of you with upsell, gave them $10 more for AI.
End of an era: GFiber's brand equity was weirdly valuable because it was one of the few ISPs people talked about almost like a software product.
Introducing the Google Fiber Bar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=re0VRK6ouwI
Well, shit. Google Fiber has been the least-bad residential ISP I've dealt with. They put the fear of Competition in all the other ISPs in town, giving us an immediate free speed boost years before Google Fiber actually made it to our neighborhood.
But more than most Google projects, it's always been clear that they could at any time get bored with it and give up.
I was paying IIRC $85 USD to spectrum a month for 300 down and 10 up. Google fiber came to my neighborhood a year and a half ago and offered 1gb symmetrical for $70, so 3x more down and 100x more up for less money.
I’ll actually be optimistic and say we will make it a year before the price hikes start
> They put the fear of Competition in all the other ISPs in town, giving us an immediate free speed boost years before Google Fiber actually made it to our neighborhood.
It sounds like Google Fiber’s underlying mission was successful: to improve the quality of Internet experience nationwide. They didn’t even have to undertake the difficulty and expense of an actual buildout in most cases!
>the least-bad residential ISP I've dealt with
It's because lobbyists have prevented your local community from implementing anything close to what Chattanooga/EPB [0] has done with their city-owned fiber infrastructure. They literally cannot expand outside their power delivery area (by court order), and were only initially allowed to offer internet services because "it helped monitor their smartgrid technologies for power delivery." National ISPs have spent millions campaigning against EPB-like ISP expansion.
It's a racket.
[0] Electric Power Board ISP, is incredible: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPB> 300mbps synchronous fiber, $58.99/month (1gbps is ~$75; 20gps is $250), four-port fiber/copper bridge (supplied) direct to your techshed. EVERY service address gets one power-drop and one 4-fiber service drop, whether or not you use internet(s).
I don't even know why other national ISPs advertise here — they specifically lock certain apartment complexes into EPB-exclusion contracts... and don't tell potential renters this during leasing/contracts. It's shitty.
It's a racket.
I remember when Google fiber was all the rage back around 2013, and I so desperately wanted it to come to my neighborhood, anything to offset the Comcast regime. Deeply disappointed that there were so many barriers preventing its expansion. From pole access to just straight up anti-competitive behavior from Comcast, fiber could've really been something great but the law just wouldn't allow it.
I'm getting so tired of seeing "the law doesn't allow" x thing that is good for citizens but bad for corporations. We are supposed to have a representative government by the people and for the people and by gosh what we actually have is so far from that! When will we collectively say "enough is enough!" And rewrite the laws to actually be by the people and for the people!?
this will age poorly... and Google will launch a new fiber Network offering in 5 years
Ah the Google graveyard thrives.
We’ve gone back and forth between GFiber and AT&T in SF. Currently on AT&T because they do FTTP while GFiber is microwave backhaul. Once the drought years ended it was impossible to work from home on rainy days.
Sonic keeps promising they will be lighting up dark fiber in our part of the city but it keeps not happening. They’ll happily resell us the same AT&T service we’re already paying for, though.
I'm currently on Sonic in SF. It's a quality product even though it's technically more expensive than I could get from Comcast. It's just less bullshit dark patterns like constantly having to re-up your contract.
Well shoot. I have Google Fiber 1 gig, and generally been happy. Hopefully service uptime and price does not change.
any ideas why they are selling this?
Didn't they announce they were selling it off a while back? I thought the reason was it's not very much like the other things Google does.
someone wants to increase some number in a spreadsheet and this department doesn't have the usual infinite money characteristics that software has (or the compounding network effects that building a cloud platform has)
Almost certainly so that they can afford more AI data center capex.
[flagged]
As a longtime Google Fiber customer, it’s Google Fiber.
My service has been effectively perfect. My price has barely changed in a long time, though they’ve added faster tiers as options. They let me use my own equipment without any hassle.
They’re not calling me to upgrade to a new plan. They’re not pushing me into their TV service. Or phone service. Or cell phones. Or anything else.
Best ISP I’ve ever had by far. And it’s going to be DESTROYED.
Maybe they didn’t matter much to you outside price pressure, but they mattered a hell of a lot to me.
It's wild how instantly recognizable AI generated text is in any context.