Google Fiber – let’s keep kicking that can down the road, closing out 2022
This amuses me greatly. I’m not lying when I say that. This is the continuing story of my botched Nashville Google Fiber install and everything that’s happed the past… 7 years trying to get this service.
I mean this started for me in 2015, they hit my area destroying the roads, sidewalk, water mains, in 2018 and left unused fiber for the next two years.
It’s the end of 2022 and they’re still unable to provide service after aggressively peddling it. I’ve got a T-shirt and a broken Google Fiber mug… it was broken when it got here… fits perfectly. I’ve got an office building with multiple tenants who would love their own fiber connection from Google, and they can’t provide it.
We had an initial deadline/turn-up date of Feb 2020. Their current hope is we’ll have it by January 14, 2023. I have no hope, I really don’t.
Now, to be fair after they missed the deadline by 7 months we stopped talking to them. They’d installed all the equipment, and it didn’t work, and when it finally supposedly would work five months after it was installed … well, I was told in August 2021 I’d get a call in a couple of weeks and I just left it to Google to call me back. <<crickets>> Also, I don’t think the equipment worked.
About 52 weeks later I got a call and we decided to go ahead with the install as a backup for our main fiber. Price was right now. Equipment was here. We were never going to trust them as a primary after everything that happened, or didn’t happen, but as a backup it seemed an ok choice. I actually preferred a trenched backup as our primary fiber is on a pole and poles go down in storms.
114 days ago was the first turn up attempt. Fiber was dead of course, same as it has been as far as I know since 2020, They once again started the repair team working on it. They claimed to have fixed it a bit later, three people showed, nope. Rescheduling continued.
Now, at this point I sort of assume nothing is going to happen – it feels like a game because no business would ever operate this way. I think we’re at the fourth install date re-schedule and all I hear from my google contact is words of hope that some day things will be fixed but no ETA. The install date keeps being put as far out as possible and there are never, ever, any signs that things are happening.
There’s someone frothing at the bit to tell how great their Google Fiber is. Go for it, and let us know what happens when you get a fiber cut how long it takes to repair. Any fiber is great if you maintain it, or it doesn’t break.
I am at the point that the only reason we’re even still on the install list is to see if anything whatsoever happens. Morbid curiosity at this point if the company and product we all rooted and fought for is ever going to step up to bat, and keeping a log of exactly how bad an experience they could provide and hope that either someone is spared having to deal with this or that the company takes notice and makes some changes.
Run on sentence … it’s 80f today due to boiler issues.
When the next month-out reschedule is offered we’re probably going to hop off and ask Google to remove their equipment – they installed 50+ smart jacks and two large boxes to support them for a building that at most will ever need 8. Have a wall in a phone room taken up by Google equipment they can’t get to work.
