huntsville

Three takeaways from Google Fiber’s announcement that it’s now an active tenant on the Huntsville, Alabama municipal fiber network:

• The customer owns the marketing buzz. Huntsville put up the capital, Google buys access to end users and gets the headlines.
• Google continues to pull back from the capital intensive business of owning and operating infrastructure.
• Competition matters.

Google Fiber’s blog post belongs to the happy, happy, joy, joy school of public relations, but also makes it clear that it’s no longer interested in sinking its own capital into broadband infrastructure…

As an enterprising city, Huntsville explored new ways to connect residents and small businesses and is building a municipal fiber network through Huntsville Utilities.