[cletus]

Speaking as a former Google Fiber software engineer, I'm honestly surprised this is still around.

In 2017, basically all the Google Fiber software teams went on hiatus (mine included). I can't speak to the timing or rationale but my theory is that the Google leadership couldn't decide if the future of Internet was wired or wireless and a huge investment in wired may be invalidated if the future Internet was wired so rather than guessing wrong, the leadership simply decided to definitely lose by mothballing the whole thing.

At that time, several proposed cities were put on hiatus, some of which had already hired local people. In 2019, Google Fiber exited Louisville, KY, paying penalties for doing so [1]. That really seemed like the end.

I also speculated that Google had tried or was trying to sell the whole thing. I do wonder if the resurrection it seems to have undergone is simply a result of the inability to find a buyer. I have no information to suggest that one way or the other.

There were missteps along the way. A big example was the TV software that was originally an acquisition, SageTV [2]. Somebody decided it would be a good idea to completely rewrite this Java app into Web technologies on an embedded Chrome instance on a memory-limited embedded CPU in a set-top box. Originally planned to take 6 months, it took (IIRC) 3.5+ years.

But that didn't actually matter at all in the grand scheme of things because the biggest problem and the biggest cost was physical network infrastructure. It is incredibly expensive and most of the issues are hyperlocal (eg soil conditions, city ordinances) as well as decades of lobbying by ISPs of state and local governments to create barriers against competition.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/googl...

[2]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/06/googl...

[WorldMaker]

> In 2019, Google Fiber exited Louisville, KY, paying penalties for doing so

Those mistakes in Louisville were huge. Literally street destroying mistakes that city Civil Engineers predicted and fought from happening in the first place, but Google Fiber did them anyway. Left a huge bill to the city taxpayers. It wasn't bigger news and a bigger upset because of NDAs and other contract protection things involved, but as an outsider to those NDAs/contracts, I can say it was an incredibly bad job on too many fronts, and should have left Google Fiber with a much more tarnished reputation than it did.

[emmanueloga_]

> There were missteps along the way. A big example was the TV software that was originally an acquisition, SageTV [2]. Somebody decided it would be a good idea to completely rewrite this Java app into Web technologies on an embedded Chrome instance on a memory-limited embedded CPU in a set-top box. Originally planned to take 6 months, it took (IIRC) 3.5+ years.

I worked on the "misstep" with a small team, and it’s wild to see Fiber still around and even expanding to new cities. As far as I can tell, the set-top box software had nothing to do with why Fiber was scaled down. Also, usability surveys showed people really liked the GUI!

The client supported on-demand streaming, live TV, and DVR on hardware with... let’s call them challenging specs. Still, it turned out to be a pretty slick app. We worked hard to keep the UI snappy (min 30 FPS), often ditching DOM for canvas or WebGL to squeeze out the needed performance. A migration to Cobalt [1], a much lighter browser than embedded Chromium, was on the table, but the project ended before that could happen.

Personally, it was a great experience working with the Web Platform (always a solid bet) on less-traditional hardware.

--

1: https://developers.google.com/youtube/cobalt

[shadowfu]

+1 to what was said above; the UI didn't take 3.5 years to make - we launched it fairly quickly and then continued to improve on it. Later there was large UX refresh, so maybe that's where OP is getting confused? Either way, that software continued to work for years after the team was moved on to other projects. SageTV was good, but the UI wasn't java - it was a custom xml-like layout.

[throwaway314155]

> In 2017, basically all the Google Fiber software teams went on hiatus (mine included).

What does a hiatus entail in this case? Did these teams all just stop working on Fiber stuff and sit around all day hoping they would be given something to do?

[dtaht]

They laid us all off. They had huge plans - millions of users! Then they intersected reality in KC where all people wanted was 5Mbit service and free TV... There were many, many people working to perfect the settop box for example. We got fq_codel running on the wifi, we never got anywhere on the shaper, the plan was to move 1+m units of that (horrible integrated chip the comcerto C2000 - it didn´t have coherent cache in some cases), I think they barely cracked 100k before pulling the plug on it all....

and still that box was better than what most fiber folk have delivered to date.

At least some good science was done about how ISPs really work... and published.

https://netdevconf.org/1.1/talk-measuring-wifi-performance-a...

[dhosek]

I was thinking the same thing, not to mention that when Google Fiber was first announced, I was happy to be all in on Google for services but now, I’d be hesitant to use them for anything more than I’m already tied to.