Google Fiber has entered the North Carolina Research Triangle and will start connecting homes in the area, and the news is welcome especially in the wake of rumors of layoffs and also disappointing subscriber totals. The triangle marks the eighth area that Google has ventured into with the Google Fiber system together with Atalanta, Georgia, Austin, Texas, Charlotte, North Carolina; Kansas City in Kansas and Missouri; Nashville, Tennessee; Provo, Utah; and Salt Lake City, Utah.
However many are expecting the triangle rollout of the Triangle to be relatively slow, and the company will first enter Morrisville. The company will enter the city which has about 23,000 residents as opposed to going to larger cities which hold many people such as Raleigh and Durham. Writing about their move on Facebook, Google Fiber said that their crews were going to start connecting the customers who signed up for the feature in Morrisville in the coming weeks.
They detailed their plans on expansion on reporters saying that the other fibers of the Triangle were on the agenda and would receive the Google Fiber service. The company was going to build a network that would see them reach 5,000 miles km of high speed cabling, as the Google Fiber operations overseer for the southeast region, Erik Garr, said.
In the interview, Garr went on to say that they had made progress concerning the network and they intended to start servicing customers soon. The users who want the service were also given the chance to start signing up for the program on the website, and Garr noted a lot of work and lay ahead.
The expansion of the Google Fiber service into Morrisville has come at a time when the service has been facing difficult times. The company has delayed their service in other cities such as San Francisco, California, Portland and Oregon as they continue to think of what to do when it comes to the future deployments with the wireless technology instead of the fibre technology.
Familiar sources with Alphabet, Google Fiber’s parent company, said that Alphabet CEO, Larry Page, had ordered the Google Fiber size to half its employee size to 500. Whether the employee layoffs actually took place is still unknown since Google won’t comment on the issue, which has led to more and more rumors.
The Google Fiber service is also reported to have fallen short of the 5 million subscribers it was set. The number of subscribers that the company has at the moment is unknown, but the number of TV subscribers stood at a dismal 68,175 subscribers at the end of June. Google Fibre claimed that the number had grown but would not mention by how much.
The company is also fighting so that they will get faster access to the utility poles which they need in most of the municipalities. However, some stalwarts such as AT&T are standing in the way of that development. AT&T is believed to have recently sued the local governments in Louisville, Jefferson County and Kentucky because they had given permission to Google Fiber to access the utility poles in the municipalities. The telecoms giant also said that they were going to likely sue the Nashville government because of the same issue.
The AT&T fiber service has been available in Morrisville and the other Triangle areas for some time now, and whether Google Fiber will face problems with the utility poles is still unknown.
