Enlarge / Boxes of equipment needed to install Google Fiber broadband network sit on a couch at the home of customer Becki Sherwood in Kansas City, Kansas, U.S., on Tuesday, Nov. 27, 2012. Google Inc. will move a step closer to offering the fastest citywide Internet service in the U.S. when it picks the first neighborhoods in Kansas City to get hooked into a new fiber-optic network. Photographer: Julie Denesha/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Getty Images)

Benoît Felten is a broadband expert and the Chief Research Officer at Diffraction Analysis. His views do not necessarily represent those of Ars Technica.

In the wake of Google Access CEO Craig Barratt’s “goodbye Access” post on the Google Fiber blog yesterday, papers left, right, and center are predicting the end of Google Fiber. Barratt tries to sound upbeat, but in essence he’s announcing that Google Fiber won’t be expanding further (pending a strategic reevaluation), that people will be made redundant, and that he’s leaving. I don’t know Craig and can’t really comment on his tenure as Access CEO, but that doesn’t exactly sound like good news.

For analysts like myself, Google Fiber is a complicated project to track; any infrastructure venture on the scale of Google Fiber as currently announced would have had to disclose numbers by now. Wall Street would have asked for take rates and average revenue per user (ARPU) and all kinds of other metrics to evaluate the validity of the investment. Before the Alphabet restructuring, however, this was just another Google “pie in the sky” project. Now that Access is its own company, we might have expected these numbers to finally come out. So far, though, Google isn’t talking.