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Comment by owenmarshall | Hacker News Reader

A two inch trench was cut on city streets, that fiber added, and then covered by a flexible rubber seal.[1]

I can't imagine anyone would want to touch that "dark fiber". It was in terrible shape six weeks after they put it down, before winter hit the city. The picture on this article looks like it was taken relatively soon after installation [2] - I've seen streets where the rubber seal has expanded and curled up over top of the groove that was cut.

[1]: https://9to5google.com/2019/02/07/google-fiber-closing-in-lo...

[2]: https://www.wdrb.com/news/google-fiber-announces-plan-to-fix...

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I guess the city will be responsible to remove the fiber then as they repave roads over time? Or will Google pay for it?

Seems horrible if Google tore up roads to put in Fiber and now they decide to pull out leaving the taxpayers holding the bag.

I wonder if a situation like this was in the contract with the city. Maybe a journalist will FOIA them for a copy, but something other cities should think about when they do public-private partnerships - what happens when either partner doesn't want to be involved anymore.

In the best of dark humor, their installation approach was so ridiculously light touch that it appears almost unnoticeable. I'm far from a traffic engineer, but I've driven over potholes in this city that are deeper than the cuts Google made to bury their fiber, so I can't imagine things will be "that bad" in the long run.

The sober light of day makes it pretty clear that Google was attempting a pilot of a very certain type of installation that failed spectacularly.

Does google fiber not work in cold weather? Seems all the cities are warmer than Louisville.

I'm sure Google Fiber works fine in cold weather, but fiber optic cables buried in city roads in a two inch trench covered with a flexible rubber gasket have demonstrably poor resiliency to snow, ice, salt trucks and freezing temperatures.

I'm in Kansas City and have Google Fiber. I don't really know how cold Louisville can get but I can tell you that we got pretty gosh darn cold (10-20 degrees below 0F) last week during the Polar Vortex freeze. And we're going to be flirting with those temps again this week. But to answer your question, I have not noticed any disruption or degradation of my service as a result of the cold temperatures.

EDIT: As others have said, I think the problems in Louisville come more from shoddy installations thus making them more susceptible to extreme weather rather than 'fiber not working in cold weather'.

Not very well.

When it gets cold enough, the water in the ground freezes and expands and basically "squeezes" the fiber. The "1"'s, which are long and skinny, can still slide right through the fiber but the fatter and wider "0"'s sometimes get stuck. This causes the fiber (Internet pipe) to get clogged and, eventually, stopped up completely, similar to how car crashes on the Interstate can quickly bring vehicular traffic to a standstill.

(Source: I was the Senior Network Engineer for a FTTH ISP, until just recently.)

OMG that's hilarious!

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