I didn't miss it. But it doesn't provide any financial info. And quotes like "Larry Page got tired of it" which were floating around the time that article came out, weren't really helpful. What I want to understand, is Google Fiber profitable or not? Just being "tired" because it grows slower than they expected, isn't a good reason to gut it.

> What I want to understand, is Google Fiber profitable or not? Just being "tired" because it grows slower than they expected, isn't a good reason to gut it.

Why is it not a good reason? Even if Google Fiber is profitable, it can still be a bad idea after you consider opportunity cost.

Because it shows they they didn't really mean it. If it's profitable, and they really wanted to disrupt the stale ISP market, they should have persisted. Otherwise they just showed that they aren't any better than incumbents.

It can be profitable on paper but be a net loss after opportunity costs are factored.

If it makes $500 million a year in profit, but the resources devoted to it could be used on a project that is reasonably believes to offer (for example) $700 million a year in profit, it makes financial sense to kill Fiber.

That's what incumbents say about not upgrading their users to better network, and instead spending crazy money on buying media companies. Later offer more profits, and greed drives their decisions.

The whole point Google Fiber was trying to make (at least Google hyped it this way), was that it's possible to have a profitable ISP that offers cutting edge network. But if Google think the same way as incumbents, then they didn't just fail to prove the point, they proved the opposite. I.e. that greed stops progress.

So no, it doesn't make sense to kill Fiber if Google's intentions and declarations were true. If they lied, then yeah, it's easy to understand what happened.