Alphabet has announced that is has hired Dinesh Jain, former chief operating officer at Time Warner. Jain will be heading up the Access division which includes Google Fiber as well as Webpass. Access’ former CEO, Greg McCray left the company last year. This was all part of Alphabet’s trouble with what to do with Google Fiber. Considering the service is still only available in a handful of cities right now, and it is barely making any money for the company. Which typically isn’t an issue for Alphabet, considering its search and ad business more than makes up for losses in other units. But the future of Google Fiber and Access was unclear, which led to McCray leaving the company.
According to the blog post on the Google Fiber blog, Jain will be starting as CEO at Access today. Jain will be leading the entire team at Access, which the blog post notes includes a team in California, as well as in 20 markets around the country where Google Fiber and Webpass is currently available. Webpass was a gigabit internet provider that Alphabet purchased in 2016, about a year after Alphabet was formed. Its plan was to combine it with Google Fiber and achieve a more aggressive rollout of Google Fiber across the country, but so far that hasn’t panned out.
Google Fiber is an internet provider from Google, which offers up to 1Gbps download and upload speeds. Something that hadn’t been achieved in the US before Google Fiber became available. Now, competing ISP’s like AT&T, Comcast and even Time Warner, have started offering Gigabit speeds (some even going up to 2Gbps) in some parts of the country, with it coming to more in the near future. Which was Google Fiber’s reason for existing. To bring faster internet to more users, and that is exactly what has happened, even if Google Fiber isn’t available in the majority of the US – of course, part of that is due to regulations getting in the way here and there. But Alphabet doesn’t seem to be thinking about getting rid of Google Fiber or even the Access division, with the hire of Jain, who does have a good amount of experience heading up an internet service provider in Time Warner.