Government fiber fools still rush in where Google fears to tread?

[Commentary] The recent downscaling of Google Fiber’s ambitious network rollout shows that appetite for these projects is waning, even among the shareholders of the most highly-valued firms in the internet sector. Hence, governments relying on taxpayer money appear to be the last resort for underwriting such ventures. However, even gung-ho governments – such as Australia’s, with its infamous $43 billion National Broadband Network (NBN) – are pulling back.

Following political fallout and a change of government in 2013, the ambitious project to provide fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) to over 90% of Australian residences by 2018 was scaled back to a much more modest initiative, the Multi-Technology Mix (MTM). New Zealand’s Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) project now remains the sole OECD survivor in the nationwide fiber deployment experiment.

[Bronwyn Howell is a faculty member at the School of Management, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.]