How my Austin neighborhood broke Google Fiber and what they will do next
Paul Teich, Principal Analyst
I live in southwest Austin, in one of the first neighborhoods with Google Fiber deployed. I work from home, and so I observed first-hand of most Google Fiber’s deployment process in my neighborhood.
On August 7, 2016, Google Fiber’s installation contractors spray painted utility markers (referred to as “blue staking”) on my street. On December 12, 2016 Google Fiber’s contractor technicians installed a fiber gateway in my house and turned on my service; just over four months after work began. Google Fiber spent another couple of months finishing their build-out in my neighborhood. However, my downhill next-door neighbor missed the “while we’re in the neighborhood” fast installation offer and was just quoted a seven-week wait.
Thus far, Google Fiber service has been great, the price is fantastic, and yet Google Fiber is ramping down its build-out in Austin and delaying their plans across the U.S. Based on the painful time and cost overruns in deploying gigabit Internet service in my neighborhood, I think that Google Fiber will put its plans on hold until it figures out how to deploy gigabit speed 5G fixed wireless services for the “last mile” of service delivery.
My Neighborhood
My neighborhood presented a worst-case scenario for deploying any new utilities: utility companies must bury their infrastructure and my neighborhood’s streets and houses sit on solid rock.
The rock formation is Edwards Limestone. It is a 60 to 350 feet deep Cretaceous era mix of limestone, dolomite, and chert. It is layered; the layers are both variable thickness and variable density. For example, a thin layer of hard limestone may cover a thick layer of soft limestone. In addition, some of the layers are porous and honeycombed, resulting in the formation of karst caves. There are karst caves close to my house.
Developers zoned my neighborhood for underground utilities. Their crews used large rock saw-trenchers to bury the water, sewer, natural gas, and electrical utilities as they built my neighborhood’s roads.
Tech for Burying Utilities
Anyone who wants to bury a new utility must use a different method. Even small rock saw-trenchers destroy a 10-foot wide swath of ground centered on the trench. This is perfectly fine if a developer is clearing land for streets and houses, but not so good for an already developed neighborhood, with sidewalks, driveways, landscaping, lawns, and automatic watering systems.
In early 2016, the state-of-the-art technique for installing new underground utilities in established neighborhoods was shallow horizontal directional drilling. This technique was recently borrowed from resource extraction industries. AT&T and Google Fiber both hired contractor crews with oil and gas extraction experience to drill in my neighborhood. In some neighborhoods, a single team installed both companies’ fiber at the same time, but Google Fiber’s permits for my neighborhood were not granted in time for that.
Burying and Installing Fiber
The process for burying fiber in my neighborhood involved a dozen separate skill sets; there were many of each crew working simultaneously on my street:
- Pull fiber to the neighborhood on existing above-ground infrastructure or through existing above-ground right of ways. I don’t count this crew as an in-neighborhood crew.
- A crew with spray paint, lawn flags and utility maps blue staked streets, driveways, sidewalks, lawns, etc. (anything, really) to notify following crews of existing buried infrastructure so they can avoid it. Blue staking is often provided by a municipality.
- Excavation crews created pits for installing utility boxes of various sizes (see below). The equipment used to excavate the pits were truck-sized vacuum cleaners. Overhead hoses hang down over the ground and suck up grass, dirt, and small rocks into the truck. These excavator trucks are very, very loud. I presume the vegetation, dirt, and rocks are taken to a landfill. Utility boxes and digging holes are major expenses. So is undoing an occasional mistake in cutting off another utility, such as electricity, that was either in the wrong place, poorly marked, or simply in the way of a tired crew.
- Drilling crews drilled holes for conduit between the pits. This requires horizontal directional drilling, also a major expense. I talked with a couple of the crews; the contractor recruited them from oil and gas drilling crews in the U.S. Midwest. The drilling equipment is merely very loud.
- Street cutting crews used small rock saw-trenchers to cut two-inch wide trenches across the street every few houses, as the main fiber runs down only one side of my street. You can’t imagine how loud this process is.
- Conduit crews ran conduit through the drill holes and in the street trenches.
- Construction crews sank the in-ground boxes, inserted the buried boxes, and terminated the conduit in the boxes. They poured concrete to fill in the street trenches and put lids on the in-ground boxes.
- Cable crews ran fiber optic cable through the conduit.
- Cable tech crews spliced and terminated the fiber optic cable as appropriate for each box. They also put doors on the pedestals.
- Clean-up crews covered and filled-in above the buried boxes and they filled-in around the in-ground boxes. They also removed remaining construction materials and cleaned up concrete mishaps, etc. They brought in sand and fresh dirt to fill in all the holes.
- Lawn crews tidied-up yards and laid down sod where appropriate around in-ground boxes and covered filled-in holes.
- A home installation lawn crew dug a trench from the in-ground box at the front of my next-door neighbor’s yard to the side of my house. They laid conduit in the trench and buried it, and did a credible job of repairing my yard.
- Google Fiber hired local cable technicians for the final in-home installation (see “But Wait, There’s More!” below).
Top left: horizontal drill, business end facing left and angled down
Top right: large dirt vacuum (overhead boom hidden by tree)
Bottom, from left: dirt vacuum, horizontal drill, truck with supplies and another horizontal drill
All holes are not equal. Google Fiber excavated:
Big holes for pedestals and/or large in-ground boxes at major street intersections
Medium holes for medium buried and in-ground boxes scattered throughout
Small holes for small in-ground boxes in front of every second house
More small holes on tight curves to make sure that conduit can take sharper turns than directional drilling will allow
Can You Dig that Limestone?
Steps 2 and 3 killed the profitability of Google Fiber on my street.
My street has a thin layer of topsoil on top of that Edwards Limestone. The excavation crews found the limestone quickly. While the excavation vacuums can suck up fist sized rocks, they can’t dig a pit in bedrock. The excavation crews had to bring in backhoe mounted jackhammers, a lot of them. Backhoe mounted jackhammers are too big for humans to operate. These large jackhammers are not only loud, they occasionally knock things off shelves in nearby houses. How far the impact shock from the jackhammer travels depends on how hard a layer of limestone they are hammering through — very hard layers can transmit the shock several houses away.
The backhoe in the foreground has lowered the jackhammer into a deep hole, the tip of the jackhammer is three or four feet under the curb. Another backhoe is visible behind the truck to the right. After the jackhammer pulverizes enough rock, its operator pulls the jackhammer out of the hole and the second backhoe scoops out rock fragments. Then the jackhammer is lowered to pulverize more rock. The truck carts off the rock fragments.
It took weeks to jackhammer the first pits into the limestone down the length of my street. Then the horizonal directional drilling started, and went sideways. Literally and figuratively. Steerable drill bits became trapped under layers of harder limestone and occasionally broke there. Differences in density between layers steered drill bits in wrong directions (up, down, and to either side). Several extra pits were excavated out of solid limestone by backhoe mounted jackhammers to find broken drill bits or to intercept the holes they’d drilled that ended up too deep to connect with the first pits. Some of those pits were eight to ten feet long, wide, and deep. Each new pit took days to excavate.
A standard 4 x 8 foot sheet of plywood partially covering a hole jackhammered into limestone bedrock. The hole was created to find the bore hole the conduit is inserted into. And to recover the broken drill bit in the bore hole. The bore hole was only supposed to be two to three feet underground at this location. It was about six feet down.
At What Cost?
I estimate that Google Fiber is likely to have spent over $200,000 installing their infrastructure solely on my street, and I have probably underestimated Google Fiber’s costs. Equipment purchase and amortization and/or equipment leasing had to be a nightmare in my neighborhood.
With 34 houses on my street and maybe a quarter of those households signing up due to competitive pressure from AT&T and Spectrum (previously Time Warner Cable), that yields possibly nine subscribing households. Perhaps Google Fiber signed up a few more because of pent up demand to move away from Spectrum, who has been my only high-speed broadband choice for over 25 years.
Applying 75% of my monthly bill to paying off my share of my street’s build-out, I calculate a 35-year straight payback period, not adjusting for interest, inflation, or net present value of that build-out investment.
A 35-year time to profit is completely unacceptable.
Adapting to the Terrain
Google Fiber and their contractors worked out a new strategy for the rest of my neighborhood based on spending two months digging on my street. Although they continued step 2 — excavating holes for the fiber utility boxes — they started using rock saw-trenchers to embed conduit along the side of the roads. They cut the trench next to the concrete curbs. Google Fiber’s crews simply ran the rock saw trenchers down the length of the road, then dug under the concrete curb to route conduit into the in-ground boxes.
Top left: the blade
Top right: cutting a trench next to the curb
Bottom: cutting a trench across the street
Even this tool had a vacuum attachment. Saw and vacuum combined were quite loud.
Cutting a trench at the edge of a street at a rate of a couple of feet per minute is cheaper, faster, and less error prone than using horizontal directional drilling. It uses simpler equipment and fewer, less skilled operators for the equipment. It meets requirements to not trash potential customers’ yards.
From left:
Trench across street with conduit
Trench next to curb with conduit
Trench with freshly poured concrete
Trench after cleanup
However, Google Fiber still needs to install roughly one small in-ground box for every two houses.
Left: a reel of fiber optic cable
Bottom right: medium in-ground box with conduit terminated, fiber cable run and in test
Top right: small in-ground box in my neighbor’s yard, where my fiber cable terminates
But Wait, There’s More!
After the fiber was tested to my curb, a trenching/lawn crew ran conduit from the in-ground box to a demarcation box on the side of my garage and pulled fiber through it. Then the home install techs took most of a day to install my service, about six hours. They strung a second cable on the side of my house to my living room, drilled through the wall, and installed an in-wall box in my living room, where they terminated the second cable. Cabling consumed most of their time at my house.
In my living room, the home install techs installed a fiber jack, which terminates the fiber to a gigabit Ethernet port. They ran CAT6 Ethernet from the fiber jack to my entertainment system and installed a “network box”, which is the equivalent of a cable box. The install techs tested their installation at the network box and left; a quiet end to four months of hellish work on my street.
Left: home demarcation box terminates fiber cable (in vertical grey conduit) from small in-ground box, second black fiber cable is attached to the bottom board of siding and runs to living room
Top middle: view inside the demarcation box and close-up of the fiber cable
Top right: fiber jack terminates fiber cable from demarcation box, converts photons to electrons in the form of gigabit Ethernet and CAT6 cable
Bottom right: Google Fiber network box sits at the other end of the CAT6 cable and is where I attach my network and other gear to Google Fiber’s service
What About Above Ground Utilities?
Google Fiber rapidly figured out that there are two ways to string above ground fiber (in neighborhoods that allow above ground utilities) — buy or lease rights from companies who already own the poles, or go through a lengthy process of approval to pay to install new poles that Google Fiber will own the rights to.
If Google Fiber puts up new poles, that still requires digging a lot of pits, plus paying for the poles and a different set of installation crew skills. They don’t have to bury conduit, but It doesn’t change much of the complexity of the installation process or reduce costs. Paying for aerial rights to string fiber on other companies’ existing poles incurs an ongoing operational expense that drags down profitability forever.
Some neighborhoods don’t allow new infrastructure build-out, which is an entirely different challenge.
5G Fixed Wireless
Fixed wireless access in the U.S. has historically been unencrypted and limited to line of sight applications, primarily to extend cable TV reach in rural areas. The difference with emerging 5G technologies is that they do not require line of sight and standards call for default encryption.
5G fixed wireless will be based on the “millimeter wave” portion of the microwave spectrum. Millimeter waves are radio waves that are only one to ten millimeters long — in the 30 to 300 gigahertz (GHz) range.
In July 2017, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) specified the Upper Microwave Flexible Use service in the 28 GHz (27.5–28.35 GHz), 37 GHz (37–38.6 GHz), and 39 GHz (38.6–40 GHz) millimeter wave bands, plus spectrum allocation to upgrade fixed and mobile allocations in the 40.5–42.5 GHz band, and for wireless services in the 46.9–47.0 GHz band. 5G fixed wireless can be deployed by current cellular network providers and by new market entrants, like Google Fiber.
The theory behind 5G fixed wireless deployment is to:
- Run fiber down main streets about a mile apart
- Deploy 5G cells for fixed access (stationary clients, not mobile) along the fiber
- Position the 5G cells for about half a mile, perhaps a kilometer (six-tenths of a mile) of high bandwidth signal reach to either side of the fiber
Pre-commercial trials of 5G fixed wireless have already started in the U.S.
- Verizon and Samsung have already demonstrated multi-gigabit service at half a kilometer distance using the 28 GHz band. Verizon has been rolling out 5G services with partners Cisco, Ericsson, Nokia, and Samsung in 11 U.S. cities during the first half of 2017, including Dallas and Houston.
- AT&T completed its first 5G fixed access trial in Austin in 2016. AT&T recently deployed its second Austin trial, to one of Intel’s Austin offices, with partners Ericsson and Intel. In addition, AT&T plans to team up with Qualcomm Technologies and Ericsson for more fixed wireless trials in 2H2017, based upon the 3GPP 5G New Radio specification. The new trials will be deployed in the 28Ghz and 39Ghz bands to achieve multi-gigabit speeds.
I’ll note that Verizon’s Fios broadband Internet service grew only 7% 2014 to 2015 and 4% 2015 to 2016 (ending 2016 with 5.7 million subscribers). I get the sense that Verizon is also waiting for new deployment models to resume broadband Internet growth.
AT&T reports that 30% of its four million fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) customers are purchasing gigabit Internet service. However, AT&T’s IP broadband subscriber growth has been similarly stalled for the past two years.
The good news for Google Fiber is that the standards, equipment, and spectrum for large-scale deployment of 5G fixed access infrastructure and services appears to be only a couple of years away.
Where to From Here?
I believe Google Fiber is stalled waiting for 5G fixed wireless products. The above list will then look like:
1. Pull fiber along main thoroughfares on existing above-ground infrastructure or through existing above-ground right of ways. Bury fiber where below-ground is the only choice, but use the rock saw-trencher technique and not horizontal drilling.
2. through 10. These only happen along main streets. They will not affect most neighborhood streets at all. This will save much time and cost for deploying gigabit speed broadband.
11. There is no need to dig up any part of a residential yard to run a physical cable from curb to house, so this step is eliminated.
12. Home installation simplifies dramatically. There will be no access box on the outside of the house, nor fiber jack inside. The network box will host the fixed wireless modem. A tech will walk the network box into a house, plug it in, configure it, and walk out. There will be no need to string wire or drill through walls.
Deploying 5G fixed wireless access will cost Google Fiber far less than current broadband deployment techniques. I don’t think Google Fiber is giving up, I think they are going dormant for a couple of years, and when fixed access 5G is ready to deploy, you will see renewed interest and investment from Google Fiber.
End Note
Google Fiber’s network box is a Wi-Fi access point and has four gigabit Ethernet ports. It is very easy to manage from anywhere through a web browser via Google Fiber’s portal.
As with all broadband installations, if you want to keep your existing wireless router, you must configure that yourself after the home install techs finish installing the service and leave. I found it to be a painless experience, but I have a lot of technical experience. I did attach my Amazon Fire TV directly to Google Fiber’s network box. My streaming video is now very high quality. As I mentioned, I work from home — I use many different video calling and conferencing apps and they work very well with Google Fiber’s gigabit up- and down-stream bandwidth. I am very happy with my Google Fiber service.
— TIRIAS Research tracks and consults for companies throughout the electronics ecosystem from semiconductors to systems and sensors to the cloud.
