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Google hits pause
Despite the popularity of Google Fiber and the overwhelming number of cities lining up to become the next fiber city (Google expected between 10 and 50 applications and ended up with over 1,000), the project was put on hold a few years later.8
In Louisville, Kentucky, AT&T filed lawsuits against the local city and county governments to prevent Google Fiber from using utility poles, thus slowing down the network’s deployment. These lawsuits halted Google Fiber’s expansion and kept eager potential customers waiting for years for fiber to get to their neighborhood. Although a judge later dismissed the lawsuits as frivolous, the project was severely derailed.9
During this time, Google Fiber experimented with ”microtrenching,” an installation method where, instead of digging a deep, foot-wide trench, a crew could simply carve a narrow groove into a road, only slightly wider than the cable and a few inches deep.
Unfortunately, the experiment in Louisville went poorly, and many fiber-optic cables became damaged or even popped out of the road, tripping pedestrians.10 Google had to pay to repair the roads damaged during the failed installation and eventually pulled out of Louisville altogether.
At this point, the company had announced that Google Fiber was pausing all fiber-optic projects. Not only were potential expansions into new cities canceled, but mentions of network expansion in existing Google Fiber cities also disappeared from the provider’s website.11 For a time, this looked like the end of Google Fiber.