> My guess is that the biggest thing preventing this kind of thing from happening more often is exactly the amount of red-tape and government regulation involved.
I was briefly and directly involved with the Google Fiber rollout here in Austin. Here's the thing: anyone with firsthand information is unlikely to drop in to set things straight in a way that gives away any amount of detail, purely because in the professional world it would be unbecoming to say the kinds of things that would necessarily come out.
I don't expect that local government intervention and red-tape could be called the major contributing factor here.
From someone involved at the end I was working from, dbg31415's comments are exactly what I would expect the other end to feel like.
The thing you have to understand is this: generally speaking, the people involved with the labor on this kind of project inhabit a completely different world than the one that you or I or the rest of a site like HN lives in. That applies to the boys in the field doing the work, to the boys in the office shuffling paperwork and signing off on their checks.
It's unsurprising to me to hear that the labor costs are out of control, and to hear that Google was halting expansion to other cities this past fall was like hearing someone say that they smashed their fingers in the door and it hurt.
I was briefly and directly involved with the Google Fiber rollout here in Austin. Here's the thing: anyone with firsthand information is unlikely to drop in to set things straight in a way that gives away any amount of detail, purely because in the professional world it would be unbecoming to say the kinds of things that would necessarily come out.
I don't expect that local government intervention and red-tape could be called the major contributing factor here.
From someone involved at the end I was working from, dbg31415's comments are exactly what I would expect the other end to feel like.
The thing you have to understand is this: generally speaking, the people involved with the labor on this kind of project inhabit a completely different world than the one that you or I or the rest of a site like HN lives in. That applies to the boys in the field doing the work, to the boys in the office shuffling paperwork and signing off on their checks.
It's unsurprising to me to hear that the labor costs are out of control, and to hear that Google was halting expansion to other cities this past fall was like hearing someone say that they smashed their fingers in the door and it hurt.
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