Google flamed by AT&T over its fibre 'investments'

Google talk versus Google action. Compare and contrast, suggests AT&T

US telecoms giant AT&T has mocked Google's investment in broadband technology, publishing a blog posting that compares the company's words on fibre and other broadband rollouts with its actions - and, unsurprisingly, finds Google wanting.

It's not the first time that one technology company has mocked another in this way, but they usually involve Microsoft and Google, and Apple and Samsung. We had imagined that AT&T, an older, more staid company, would be above such things, but apparently not.

The company kicked off by asserting that "broadband investment is not for the faint-hearted" before cataloging Google's progress over the past few years, hinting that the company has promised a lot more than it has delivered.

"February 2010: Google announces its intention to build ultra-high-speed fibre-fed broadband networks with plans to serve around five million subscribers in five years. 1,100 cities respond to Google's Request for Information in an effort to become a Google Fibre City," said the AT&T blog post.

"Today: Google Fibre has deployed a fibre network in parts of seven out of the 1,100 interested cities, but otherwise hit the pause button as Google Fibre learns something we've known for over 100 years: deploying communications networks is hard and takes an enormous amount of time, money and skilled labour."

AT&T's high, and elderly, horse has learned a lot of lessons, then, and has enough fibre to put out stuff like this. The post ignored the rest of Google's work, and suggested that whatever the firm does is nothing in comparison with AT&T's achievements in around nine times as much time.

"Building reliable, ubiquitous high-speed broadband connectivity is tough. It takes an enormous commitment of capital and resources and a highly skilled and capable workforce. Yet AT&T has been at it for over 140 years," the firm said.

"Between 2011 and 2015, while Google Fibre was cutting its teeth on fibre, AT&T invested over $140bn in its network, building over one million route miles of fibre globally and deploying ultra-high-speed fibre-fed giga-power broadband services, reaching over 100 cities."

Google, meanwhile, is reportedly planning to slash the costs of its Google Fiber unit by some 90 per cent. It has a well-established tradition of ruthlessly canning anything that doesn't make a decent return and it's therefore not out of the question that Fiber will go the way of Motorola Mobility, Sketch-up, Orkut, Picassa, Sparrow, Google Answers, Google+* and many, many others.

* only joking, Google+ is still going, for some reason