Google's parent company Alphabet has scaled back its Google Fibre project, with about 9% of the staff of the Access unit that includes the Fibre project to lose their jobs.
The unit has about 1500 staff so this means more than 130 jobs will be cut, according to a Bloomberg report.
At about the same time, Craig Barratt, head of the Access unit, has announced that he would be making his exit.
Curiously, Barratt announced his departure in a blog while simultaneously claiming that "Our business is solid: our subscriber base and revenue are growing quickly, and we expect that growth to continue. I am extremely proud of what we’ve built together in five short years".
{loadposition sam08}Barratt said that he had been asked, by Google co-founder Larry Page, to stick around as an adviser.
He wrote that that company would not be going through with plans to roll out fibre in eight cities, including Dallas, Los Angeles and Phoenix, for which it had announced rollout plans.
In the last two years, Google has said it would expand its fibre service to more than 20 cities.
So far, it has been rolled out to Atlanta, Austin, Charlotte, Kansas City (Missouri), Kansas City (Kansas), Nashville, Provo, Salt Lake City and The Triangle (Carrboro, Cary, Chapel Hill, Durham, Garner, Morrisville, and Raleigh in North Carolina).
Jan Dawson, an analyst with Jackdaw Research, told Bloomberg: "I suspect the sheer economics of broad scale access deployments finally became too much for them. Ultimately, most of the reasons Google got into this in the first place have either been achieved or been demonstrated to be unrealistic."