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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Maybe I was in denial that Google would behave differently about this product considering their track record.
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 sure to take this as a warning sign in the future with other services if aggressive upselling starts happening unexpectedly.
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.
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’ll actually be optimistic and say we will make it a year before the price hikes start
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.
It's a racket.