Google Fiber Returns From The Dead To Deliver Actual Broadband Competition To Iowa

Back in 2016, Alphabet executives made it pretty clear they had grown tired of trying to disrupt the U.S. broadband industry with Google Fiber. Executives were fired, hundreds of employees were laid off, and any real expansion in the project was effectively frozen. Alphabet and Google Fiber executives then just pretended none of this had happened and nothing had changed.

For a while there it seemed like bored Alphabet executives would eventually sell the project off. But more recently there have been increased signs of new life at the company, with modest but meaningful fiber deployment efforts in parts of Utah as well as Council Bluffs, Iowa, and Huntersville, North Carolina:

The Council Bluffs City Council has granted a license for Google Fiber to build the network in that market. The project is an offshoot of the company’s project in Omaha, which it announced last September. At that time, Google Fiber said that it would explore nearby communities. Council Bluffs is less than five miles away and just over the Iowa-Nebraska border from Omaha.

While not at the scale of what Google Fiber originally promised, these smaller deployments are still doing some significant good. West Des Moines, Iowa is making steady progress on a $60 million open access fiber-optic conduit with Google’s help. Once completed, any ISP can come in and compete on the finished open access network, notably boosting broadband competition and ultimately lowering rates.

Regional cable broadband provider Mediacom recently sued to kill the network. While the lawsuit was a self-serving bid to kill competition, it wound up having an ironic benefit. As part of its lawsuit, Mediacom complained that the City Council had originally made an exclusive deal with Google Fiber. After the lawsuit, the city was forced to open the network more broadly to any competitor that wanted in.

In other words, a regional telecom monopoly that routinely obstructs such projects (Mediacom has a long history of spreading lies about community broadband efforts) tried to destroy the project, but wound up creating a network that should ultimately have a far greater competitive impact. Fun stuff.

With federal broadband policy leadership effectively lobbied into dysfunction and apathy, these community broadband networks (whether municipalities, cooperatives, city-owned utilities or public/private partnerships like this) are doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to expanding access to affordable fiber to underserved regions (see our recent Copia study on this very subject).

Google Fiber may not be having quite the impact at scale originally hoped, but it does seem to be positioning itself to take full advantage of the continued, organic growth of community broadband, itself a direct response to decades of concentrated telecom monopoly power and federal apathy to it.