Tag Archives: company news

Our team is growing – join us!

As Head of Market Operations for GFiber, my team has a responsibility for everything that’s happening in our cities and across the country, from putting the fiber in the ground to making sure our customers have the exceptional experience they deserve. We take that job very seriously, and have been working not just to build out our network but also upgrade it to meet the ever increasing demand and to ensure it’s even more reliable. Because we know that you don’t want to think about your internet — it should just be there when you need it for whatever you need it to do.That’s why my team and I spend so much time thinking about it. We’re obsessed with improving every part of our delivery system to ensure that we meet our promise to our customers, from connecting more people in more places to providing the standard for customer service.  

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We’re growing rapidly in all of our markets — this includes building out our networks to areas within the existing cities and also connecting surrounding communities.  As we expand our footprint further, we’re growing our team to help us achieve our goals. If you have a passion for connecting people to what they need and think you’d be a good fit for GFiber, consider joining our team - we’re hiring for many roles on our local and central teams. We’re also hosting Direct Sales Representative recruiting events this month in several of our cities:  

Austin: 

              Location: 3601 South Congress, Austin, TX 78704 
      Date: Tuesday, July 16, 2024
              Time: 9:00 AM till 5:00 PM 
              Register for a time slot here.

Nashville: 

              Location: 1101 McGavock St Ste 200 Nashville, TN 37203 
              Date: Tuesday, July 23, 2024 
              Time: 9:00 AM till 5:00 PM 
              Register for a time slot here.

Charlotte: 

              Location: 1801 North Graham St, Suite 300 Charlotte, NC 2820  
              Date: Tuesday, July 9th, 2024 
              Time: 9:00 AM till 5:00 PM
              Register for a time slot here.



In addition to taking steps to make sure that our network is ready for whatever is coming next as we grow to new spaces and demand continues to increase, we are also upgrading our network to XGS PON (and even incorporating 25G PON). And we're constantly working to improve the resiliency of our fiber optic infrastructure, proactively addressing potential issues. There’s never been a better time to be at GFiber. We’re very excited about what’s coming next. We hope you’ll join us! 

Posted By Darrel Hegar, Head of Market Operations

John Abbot joins Google Fiber as first Chief Financial Officer

Google Fiber is pleased to announce John Abbot has recently joined our team as the company’s first Chief Financial Officer (CFO). In this role, John will oversee GFiber’s Finance, Strategy & Analytics, and  Accounting teams, bringing over three decades of experience in  media, technology, infrastructure, telecom, and finance to his role. 

“John brings a wealth of experience as a CFO and deep industry knowledge to help guide GFiber during this pivotal time for our company,” said Dinni Jain, GFiber CEO. “He understands this business from many angles and his expertise at helping companies grow and scale along with his exceptional brand of leadership are exactly what we need to take the next step in our development.”

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Prior to joining GFiber, John served in CFO roles for multiple companies, most recently Dataminr, a leading AI business. He also held these roles at Datto, which he led through their initial public offering, as well as at Cumulus Media, Telx Holdings, and Insight Communications. John has deep knowledge of the finance industry, spending time at both Morgan Stanley in their Media & Telecom group and at Goldman Sachs in their Global Energy & Power group. A graduate of the US Naval Academy, where he earned a BS in systems engineering, John also holds a Masters in Engineering from Pennsylvania State University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. 


Posted by the GFiber Team.




The FCC’s "Broadband Consumer Labels” put customers in control, and that’s a good thing for ISPs

We’re living in the age of broadband internet — internet service providers (ISPs) are announcing major infrastructure investments, committing to fund significant network upgrades and building new high speed service in communities across the country. At the same time, the federal government is also investing unprecedented amounts to support the deployment of broadband in underserved areas. Given the ubiquity of the internet in our daily lives, these efforts are both long overdue and not enough to give customers what they really need from their ISP — yes, fast, reliable internet, but also a redefined customer experience that is both easy to navigate and to understand.


As part of its effort to improve broadband service nationwide — not just in terms of speed but also in terms of customer experience — the federal government is requiring all ISPs to provide broadband “nutrition labels” on their websites when purchasing service. The point of these labels is similar to the nutrition label on a cereal box (or any other food). They are designed to help consumers make clear comparisons between broadband plans based on key factors such as price and speed and to help them understand what they get for their money. 


This type of transparency is a part of Google Fiber’s origin story. Google was built on the idea that information is powerful. And finding the information you need when you need it can change the game. In fact, doing this made the internet navigable — a digital world where information was readily and easily accessible to anyone online. Historically, easy and transparent are not words that many people would associate with ISPs, and that has to change. Nutrition labels are a start in the right direction for our industry.


Choice, and even more importantly, understanding that choice, benefits customers. Informed customers are happier customers. Since the very beginning, ISPs have played confusing games when it comes to price and speed. From that mysterious 13-month price bump to incurring extra fees for everything from equipment to data usage, it can be impossible to know what you are actually getting for your monthly payment (or even what that monthly payment will be). 

 

That’s why GFiber has been fully supportive of the FCC’s broadband labels from the very beginning, and why we launched them early last October — six months ahead of this month’s deadline. These labels empower the consumer and set up a strong foundation for what will hopefully be an extremely long term & satisfying relationship for customers. 


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And that’s a big change. As an industry, when it comes to customer trust and satisfaction, we’re only beating gas stations. We have a lot of work to do. Internet access isn’t a luxury — it’s a basic need in a world where more and more of our lives are online. Helping customers understand what they are paying for, not only in terms of speed, but also the additional information on the broadband label, like additional charges for equipment rentals, installation fees and/or data caps, has the potential to change the ISP industry’s behavior radically. (Note: GFiber does not have these types of additional fees.) GFiber aspires to be a big part of that change — it’s what we’ve been working towards for the last twelve years and what we bring more places as we grow.  


The FCC’s broadband labels put all the information out there, giving customers control so they can make the decision that works best for their households. Everything is on the table, so there’s nowhere for disingenuous tactics to hide. 


As a country, we’re making a huge investment in our internet infrastructure. Initiatives like this one will help make sure that customers are getting a return on that investment, improving the overall customer experience and ensuring more transparency across the industry. And that’s a very, very good thing for all of us. 


Posted by Dinni Jain, CEO

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Looking to stay up-to-date on the latest from Google Fiber? Starting today, you can sign up to get each blog post emailed to you when the post goes live. You’ll never miss a new city, new product, or community program, and you’ll hear the latest from our team on what GFiber is up to now and what’s coming next.

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Sign up here or on the GFiber blog any time by clicking on the email icon in the top right corner or the link at the bottom of the page. Happy reading! 

Posted by Sunny Gettinger, Head of External Communications


Google Fiber names John Keib Chief Technology & Product officer

Google Fiber is proud to announce John Keib as the company’s first-ever Chief Technology & Product Officer (CTPO). As CTPO, John will continue to drive our product, engineering, and supply chain efforts, along with overseeing the innovative projects coming out of GFiber Labs.

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Since joining GFiber in 2019 as Vice President of Product, John has been building a next generation Internet service focusing on groundbreaking speeds and enhanced quality of Internet service for all customers.  At GFiber, he has pushed the boundaries on speed and led the effort to take us from 1 Gig as a foundation to the multigig future the internet is increasingly demanding. Under John’s leadership, GFiber rolled out 2 Gig, 5 Gig and 8 Gig products and developed relationships with companies across the internet ecosystem to upgrade not just our network, but also work to ensure that customers have the latest hardware necessary to harness that speed for all customers. These efforts have made services like 20 Gig + Wi-Fi 7 a reality and a roadmap beyond those speeds attainable. John’s vision for the internet is both abundant and revolutionary to how we live our daily lives.

John with his leadership team

Previously, John oversaw a team of 40,000 employees as Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for Residential Services at Time Warner, where he spent almost two decades working in roles spanning sales, marketing, product, customer service, technical operations and supply chain. He also spent time at both DirecTV and Thompson Media earlier in his career.

“In my time working with John, his leadership has always been grounded in maximizing potential for customers and setting an ambitious agenda to both address weaknesses and harness strengths,” said Dinni Jain, GFiber CEO. “John’s visionary leadership is critical to GFiber’s ability to truly push the boundaries of what ISP can be. With product, engineering, and GFiber Labs under his guidance, we’re very lucky to have him setting both the path for where we’re going and the bar for what we need to be as a company.” 

The GFiber Team

Melani Griffith appointed as Chief Growth Officer for Google Fiber

Google Fiber is proud to announce Melani Griffith as the company’s first-ever Chief Growth Officer (CGO). In this role, Melani will continue to set the course for GFiber’s continued customer growth, overseeing the entire customer lifespan from brand and marketing, sales, digital, customer service, and public relations.

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Melani’s strategic leadership and customer advocacy set the stage for GFiber to be one of the most awarded internet companies ever — most recently from JD Power as the top internet service provider in the South Region, with a score of 839, which significantly outperformed any other company in any region in the survey. As Vice President of Customer Engagement, her organization has more than doubled our customer base over the past five years, and established a standard for customer service that is unparalleled in our industry.

As CGO, Melani will continue to lead this charge for GFiber, reshaping the customer experience to provide truly differentiated services that make it easier for them on every front. These efforts include innovative self-driven, real time options; AI integration for more personalized interactions; an upgraded, engaging app experience; and continued focus on the human side of the customer service experience as well. GFiber doesn’t want our customers to ever HAVE to call us, but when they do we want to make sure that it’s notably easy and seamless. This will continue to drive our approach to customer engagement under Melani’s ongoing leadership.
Melani and her leadership team

Melani has over three decades of experience in the telecommunications industry, serving in senior leadership positions at Rogers Communications, Time Warner, Insight Communications, and AMC Networks among others, in a number of different departments including sales, marketing, and content acquisition. She has served on the board for CTAM (Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing) and the national board of directors for Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT). 

“Our goal at GFiber is to redefine customer experience — providing customers with service that’s not just different but unparalleled,” said Dinni Jain, CEO. “Melani is exactly the right leader to bring that vision to life. Her pursuit of operational excellence is matched only by her dedication to our customers. It’s that tenacity that will lead to the type of operational excellence and continuous improvement that our customers should expect from us.”

Posted by the GFiber Team

Google Fiber officially names Rocco Laurenzano Chief Operating Officer

Google Fiber is proud to announce Rocco Laurenzano as Chief Operating Officer. In his five and a half years with GFiber, Rocco’s leadership has been instrumental in establishing the operational excellence that has set the stage for our current expansion and growth. Rocco has been serving in the role unofficially for some time now. In his role as Vice President of Operations, he was already overseeing expansion, build, customer operations, and project management.


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The results of these efforts have fueled GFiber’s incredible growth over the past few years — creating a construction organization that has almost tripled build volume over the last four years and increased our service footprint by almost 2x over the same period. A key architect of the company’s expansion strategy, Rocco has led our expansion to new states and more fully building out our existing cities. He’ll continue to lead all of these efforts in his new role as COO.


Prior to joining GFiber, Rocco served in senior operations leadership roles at Altice USA, Time Warner Cable, Charter Communications, and Insight Communications. 


Rocco with his leadership team


“I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of working with Rocco over many years and in many capacities,” said Dinni Jain, CEO. “What he brings to any team is operational excellence, balanced with a clear appreciation for the people he works with, and the understanding of how to create a culture of accountability and constant improvement with a strong foundation of trust. This is truly a case of the right leader at the right time for a company.”


Posted by the GFiber Team

Introducing GFiber Labs. . .future internet up next

Google Fiber was founded on the idea that everyone should have access to Gigabit internet and that it should be priced accordingly. In 2010, this was a pretty audacious idea and GFiber played a leading role in making that idea mainstream. 

But when we slowed down our expansion, our pace of product innovation slowed down too. In the last three years, we’ve made tremendous strides, upgrading our products, services and network. We’ve focused on not just keeping up, but going beyond — being one of the first to offer 2 Gig, to roll out Wi-Fi 6 and whole home Wi-Fi 6E, to bring 5 Gig and 8 Gig to whole cities at affordable rates, and to offer 20 Gig in a home setting.  And we don’t intend to stop any time soon.

While the last few years were productive, we’ve been asking some fundamental questions about where the internet industry needs to go next:   

What if we are just scratching the surface? Is 100G really fast enough for what the future demands? Are we positioned to deliver a world of connectivity powered by cloud applications, AI and even someday quantum computing services? Have we developed advanced network services that can deliver the best content experience for customers today?  And what if we invest in infrastructure and services that can lead to groundbreaking evolution for education and commercial applications that can fuel the US economy and provide economic opportunities for all?


Asking audacious questions got us to this point, and we aren’t stopping now.  That’s where GFiber Labs comes in — asking the next generation of hard, exciting questions to bring a new level of innovation to our industry.

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GFiber Labs will serve as an innovation hub dedicated to exploring what’s possible for the internet —  major efforts focused on speed to the home and speed in the home are already underway, paving the way for a whole new internet experience for customers that will touch every part of our business. 

And we won’t just be doing this by ourselves. We’ll collaborate with other companies working to push the internet forward. This isn’t about a single ISP — the entire internet ecosystem — from those working on deployment to those working on content and everyone in between has a role to play in getting us to next.

So what kind of challenge are we talking about? When it comes to the Internet, we’re setting no limits. Let’s push speed to the home and in the home to 100 Gig and beyond, using Wi-Fi 7 and 8 to make home networks truly multi-gig. Let’s reimagine what’s possible with advanced content becoming commonplace (3D, Augmented VR, 16K video and beyond).  Let’s create a network that can self heal in real time. Let’s offer bespoke customer experience, designed for and by our customers, at scale. Let’s use technologies like photonics, millimeter wave wireless, and others to bring high quality internet to more people, in more places at even faster speeds. And just as importantly, let’s drive digital equity and make Gigabit internet the baseline of service in the US.

We have so much to do. As an industry, we need to kick innovation into high gear. We should be trying new things faster, finding out what works in the real world. GFiber Labs will do this by bringing these emerging technologies to early adopters. We’re actually already doing this — we rolled out 20 Gig to UMKC late last year, and we’re testing it with consumers today.  These projects fall under GFiber Labs, and they are just the beginning. 

We love what we do, and we believe in what we do. We are playing for the right things - bringing the full potential of the Internet to consumers to improve their lives.  This is an incredible privilege and a huge responsibility. We won’t always get it right, and we definitely won’t do it alone. But with our learnings from GFiber Labs, we can build the foundation for the Internet of today, and tomorrow. So stay tuned — much, much more to come here.

Posted by John Keib, Vice President, Technology, Operations, and Product






What’s next for Google Fiber

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If you’ve been following Google Fiber, you know we’ve been pretty busy lately.

We’ve been steadily building out our network in all of our cities and surrounding regions, from North Carolina to Utah. We’re connecting customers in West Des Moines - making Iowa our first new state in five years - and will soon start construction in neighboring Des Moines. And of course, we recently announced that we’ll build a network in Mesa, Arizona.

And that's just the stuff we've been talking about. For the past several years, we’ve been even busier behind the scenes, focusing on our vision of providing the best possible gigabit internet service to our customers through relentless refinements to our service delivery and products.

At no time in Google Fiber’s history has that ever been more important than today. We’re living in a world that has finally caught up to the idea that high-speed, reliable internet — at gigabit speeds — is no longer a bold idea or a “nice to have.” The experience of the last couple of years has certainly taught us that.

As communities across the country look to expand access to gigabit internet, I’m happy to say that we’re ready to grow alongside them. Our team has spent many months traveling across the country, having conversations with cities looking for the best way to get better internet to their residents and business owners as quickly as possible.

So, yeah, it’s about to get even busier at Google Fiber. We’re talking to city leaders in the following states, with the objective of bringing Google Fiber’s fiber-to-the-home service to their communities:

These states will be the main focus for our growth for the next several years, along with continued expansion in our current metro areas.

In addition, we'd also love to talk to communities that want to build their own fiber networks. We’ve seen this model work effectively in Huntsville and in West Des Moines, and we’ll continue to look for ways to support similar efforts.

We're thrilled to be expanding our geographic reach once again — bringing better internet to more people in more places. Stay tuned in the coming months as we fill in this picture with more details about our new cities, even faster speeds and redefined customer service.

Posted by Dinni Jain, CEO




Connect with Google Fiber

Welcome to Connect! The official Google Fiber blog has a new look, but remains the place to get the latest news and information on what’s happening with Google Fiber and our products, meet our team, and get an inside look at each of our cities, along with anything else in the GFiber-sphere.


Connect is what we do in the real world — bringing fast, reliable internet to more people and businesses in our communities every day, so we thought it was a fitting title for how we tell our stories online. We hope you’ll check in regularly and you can also follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram for updates. 



Posted by Sunny Gettinger, Head of External Communications