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
I'm glad that a farmer utility co-op exists here that offers GFiber-equivalent of 1 GbE symmetric and unlimited data for no contract $99/month with an $65/month intro rate. Also has 500 Mbps for $75 ($40) and 250 Mbps $65 ($30). Municipal broadband and electricity needs to take back community services away from profiteering corporations and private equity vampires, and really benefit from government-assisted grants and loans and templatized processes and governance to bootstrap more of these.
One of the major pluses of GFiber is it largely ignored DMCA requests. Also, the 20 Gbps ONT beta service was rad. A weak point was their mesh routers that didn't work quite right and would refuse to work if "too close together".. 20 ft apart. Their customer service/tech support was pretty awesome.
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.
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 remember when Google fiber was all the rage back around 2013, and I so desperately wanted it to come to my neighborhood, anything to offset the Comcast regime. Deeply disappointed that there were so many barriers preventing its expansion. From pole access to just straight up anti-competitive behavior from Comcast, fiber could've really been something great but the law just wouldn't allow it.
We’ve gone back and forth between GFiber and AT&T in SF. Currently on AT&T because they do FTTP while GFiber is microwave backhaul. Once the drought years ended it was impossible to work from home on rainy days.
Sonic keeps promising they will be lighting up dark fiber in our part of the city but it keeps not happening. They’ll happily resell us the same AT&T service we’re already paying for, though.
40 comments
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.
One of the major pluses of GFiber is it largely ignored DMCA requests. Also, the 20 Gbps ONT beta service was rad. A weak point was their mesh routers that didn't work quite right and would refuse to work if "too close together".. 20 ft apart. Their customer service/tech support was pretty awesome.
I'll be sure to take this as a warning sign in the future with other services if aggressive upselling starts happening unexpectedly.
But more than most Google projects, it's always been clear that they could at any time get bored with it and give up.
Sonic keeps promising they will be lighting up dark fiber in our part of the city but it keeps not happening. They’ll happily resell us the same AT&T service we’re already paying for, though.