Google is a whiny, ignorant, wet-behind-the-ears prima donna headed for a reckoning at the hands of the heroic AT&T.
At least that s the story the telecommunications behemoth is telling, in a humorous but pointed poke in the eye to Google, delivered via a blog post.
Google and AT&T have been battling over Google s attempts to access, for its Google Fiber ultra-high-speed internet service, utility poles AT&T and other Google competitors control.
It is amid this high-stakes fight over super-speedy internet that AT&T s blog post comes. Between 2011 and 2015, while Google Fiber was cutting its teeth on fiber, AT&T invested over $140 billion in its network, building to over one million route miles of fiber globally and deploying ultra-high-speed fiber-fed GigaPower broadband services, reaching over a hundred cities, said the post by AT&T vice-president of federal regulatory issues Joan Marsh. Google Fiber will no doubt continue its broadband experiments, while coming up with excuses for its shortcomings and learning curves.
Yet, Google Fiber still complains it s too hard…and costs too much…and takes too long.
The blog post noted that Google Fiber had only rolled out in a few of the more than 1,000 cities that said they wanted it, and has recently put Fiber development on hold everywhere it hasn t obtained access to existing fiber networks or started building its own. Google Fiber (is learning) something we ve known for over a hundred years – deploying communications networks is hard and takes an enormous amount of time, money and skilled labor, AT&T sniped in the post.
At the end of the relatively brief piece, AT&T taunted its competitor: Welcome to the broadband network business, Google Fiber, it said. We ll be watching your next move from our rear view mirror. Oh, and pardon our dust.
To be sure, Google may have the last laugh. According to a theory held by several analysts, Google s haphazard rollout of Fiber is part of a strategy to provoke its competitors into building their own fiber networks, so more users across the country will have super-fast internet and consume more and more of the ads that Google serves.
Photo: A lineman places fiber cable in San Mateo (Eugene H. Louie)
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