Google Fibre proving itself costlier even for itself

Google Fibre may have started off as an experiment in the US, but it has gained quite a bit of support over the years and the gigabit internet service has slowly expanded to more cities. However, all of that fibre optic cabling and infrastructure is expensive and now, Fibre is the second most expensive part of Google, second only to the main search engine. Goldman Sachs estimated it would cost $140 billion to cover the entire country back in 2013. According to a report from The Information, Google Fibre isn’t doing too well in terms of its subscriber count at the moment, on top of that, it reportedly costs around $1 billion for Google Fibre to expand into new cities.



Google Fibre only has 200,000 subscribers at the time, and knowing that it set a goal of five million by the end of 2015, it's obviously not enough. These high costs have led to Google co-founder and CEO of Alphabet (Google’s new parent company), Larry Page, to cut the Google Fibre team in half, from 1,000 down to 500.

Instead of fibre, the company will shift its focus towards wireless technology, as it's much cheaper. Google recently acquired WebPass, a service that used a combination of WiFi and Fibre to deliver high-speed connections. Perhaps switching over to a mix of WiFi and Fibre will help lower the overall operating costs. It will be interesting to see how successful Google Fiber gets, now that one of its hands has basically been severed.