First, I have to say my personal experience with Google Fiber (GF) since getting it a few years ago has been great. The speed is consistent and, if there is a problem I may not have noticed, it will be reflected as a discount on my monthly bill. My install process was uneventful in part due to my prep work to run a pull string from the back of my home, through the crawl space, up the corner of the garage to my office where I needed the connection. The install team was super appreciative of the pull string and said it was their easiest install ever. I already had a good mesh network and ended up not using to the Google provided equipment and connecting my equipment was easy as the fiber drop in the office is just a a gigabit Ethernet connection. I find there are no restrictions on the traffic to and from my network but I don’t run a mail server any longer, so, that could be an issue for some.
The one puzzling piece about the installation of GF in my neighborhood was the initial install method was to cut away a two inch slice of asphalt next to the concrete curb and drop the fiber in the channel before covering the channel with concrete. Then, about two months ago, GF came back an installed the fiber in a traditional manner in front yards. Within a couple of weeks of the fiber relocation, which did introduce some outages, the asphalt in the neighborhood was ripped up and repaved. I don’t hold an MBA but I have to think installing twice is a financial loss. It wasn’t like GF beat AT&T to the neighborhood with the cut asphalt install. AT&T was already in the neighborhood for at least a year. Just seems a little strange.
Fast forward to this fall and realizing my father-in-law was paying almost $300 for Spectrum Internet, Phone and TV, we added him to our Google YouTube TV family plan to see if he could handle the change from a set top box to the YouTube TV interface. He did well and decided to replace Spectrum services with our YouTube TV and Google Fiber, including the phone. Total cost for him is now $80 for Internet and phone. As of today, he has full functioning GF and his phone was finally ported from Spectrum today. The largest fail of Google Fiber on his migration was the install. The fiber was ran from the curb to the opposite end of the house from the location of his office and where the Spectrum connection was installed. When the installer came to complete the inside work, they took the the easiest option possible. They ran the fiber up to the second floor, drilled a hole into the bedroom wall and installed all of the equipment at the opposite end of the home and wrong floor for where the main computer sits in his office. I did the survey for the install giving all 1’s and opened a ticket with Google to get the fiber ran where it should have been ran to begin with. Google called my father-in-law and said everything was working and he did not understand that he was never going to get the gigabit speed he was paying for only using the WiFi installed by Google. He is not one to demand something get fixed by the provider and I finally got him to understand he needed the fiber ran to the office to get the Gigabit speeds. I offered a solution to run some Ethernet cable from the bedroom to his office. I am 61 and think I am 30, but after running the cat-6 cable yesterday I know I am 61. Between the fiberglass and a very low crawl space along with dead vermin, I will reconsider such an offer in the future. My cable end in the bedroom had an issue which meant I had to redo that RJ-45 connector, but that fix got the signal to a little five port Gigabit switch in the office and speed tests indicated full speed where he was only getting like 200Mb on the Wifi. The next issue was the phone connector. It was connected to the GF device in the bedroom and not where he wanted to have his cordless phone base station that includes his answering machine. I have not told him he now has Google Voice and doesn’t need the answering machine. I may tackle that one later. I have Ooma and it supports feeding a dial tone to all of the rj-11 jacks my house by connecting the Ooma Telo device into an existing phone jack. I ended up taking the little phone connector black box that has an Ethernet connection along with a rj-11 port and power supply and connecting the rj-11 to the phone jack in his office. But it did not work to send dial tone to all of the jacks. He wanted to relocate the answering machine from his office to the kitchen where it was before he had to move it to his office when he added the phone to his Spectrum connection. I thought about doing something with an access point Wireless Distribution System (WDS) which would use WiFi and provide a remote Ethernet port. I tried to setup WDS on his old TP-Link router, but it confused the little Wifi AP Google provided to the point it lost connectivity. But that gave me an idea, I took the Google AP and moved it from the living room to the kitchen and plugged in the phone connector to the LAN Ethernet port on the back of the AP and the cordless base station into the rj-11 port and had a dial tone in the kitchen. This may not be the recommended set up, but it’s working.
To summarize, the contract installer (Prince Telecom) for Google Fiber here in the Triangle not doing Google any favors with installs like this one for my father-in-law. Why would any GF customer only want WiFi connectivity and not take advantage of the Gigabit speed? I think the installer saw the customer was an elderly man and thought he won’t know the difference. The last few days has me wishing I would have ran a pull string for my father-in-law and then there would be no excuses. If you are going to get Google Fiber for an elderly relative, be present for the install. The fact that Google refused to address the issue resulted in this post which I will share directly with Google at some point.