Also it pushed the broadband industry forward by providing competition. AT&T and Comcast stepped up their development of Gigabit Internet in the US.
And they stopped doing that in the same week Google announced that it would stop pushing Fiber.
Maybe. AT&T started deploying FTTN to major cities like Houston and Chicago in 2005-2006 (four years before Fiber). Their gigabit buildout was based on that original plan (which dates to SBC). Comcast has been on the DOCSIS upgrade treadmill for years. In the 7 years before Fiber they went from 8 to 100 upgrading to DOCSIS 2.0 then DOCSIS 3.0. Gigabit is another 10x jump over a similar time frame, based on DOCSIS 3.1.
There was also Verizon FIOS, which started in 2005, expanded to 5 million customers, then stopped expanding much after 2010. It apparently cost Verizon more than they'd expected.