‘Astound’ed. Google Flips Its Fiber To PE.

I have been a WebPass customer for years. Fast, reliable, founder-run. When there was a problem, you could reach someone who gave a damn. It was the kind of internet service that made you forget you were dealing with a utility.

Then Google bought it.

That should have been the warning sign. Google buys things it should have no business touching. It launches products without a plan. Its decisions to get into new markets are a map of some mediocre executive’s ambition.

I watched the service slowly get worse. More outages, stagnant speeds, the kind of indifference that sets in when a product becomes a line item rather than a mission. Like it was for Charles Barr, founder of WebPass. When Barr was running the show, the speeds went from 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps. All for less than $50 a month. Eventually the speed went to a gig per second. It was one of the fastest in the country.

Since then, as competitors like Sonic were pushing 10 Gbps across San Francisco, my WebPass connection sat frozen at 1 Gbps. The founder used to pick up the phone. Now I was just another entry in a spreadsheet at Alphabet, buried inside “Other Bets,” a division whose name tells you everything about how seriously Google took it.

Google is a company where nobody has real product conviction anymore, just bonus targets and quarterly metrics. It wears a veneer of innovation, but in reality it is a financially optimized extraction machine run the McKinsey way.

Anyway, now comes the news I didn’t want to hear, but knew was going to happen anyway.

Google has sold the whole thing, Google Fiber (including WebPass), to Astound Broadband, owned by Stonepeak, a private equity group. They are calling it a “merger.” It is not a merger. A merger implies two equals coming together to build something. This is a flip. Google wanted off the hook for a money-losing division, and they found a buyer. Customers are just assets in the transaction, transferred like furniture.

Here is the most telling detail. So far, Alphabet has not filed an 8-K with the SEC as part of the announcement. An 8-K is what public companies file when something material happens. Google’s lawyers apparently concluded that losing your internet provider did not rise to that level. GFiber sat inside “Other Bets,” a segment that in 2025 generated $1.54 billion in revenue across everything Alphabet deemed non-core, while losing $16.8 billion. GFiber itself was less than half a percent of Alphabet’s total sales. To their investors, this was a rounding error. To you, it’s your internet connection. That gap tells you everything about where you stood in the relationship.

Then there is Dinni Jain, the CEO of GFiber who will now lead the combined company. His story is presented as reassurance, a steady hand, a cable industry veteran, a man with a Vermont farm who talks about patience and humility. A banker turned cable guy turned Google, and humility. Lolz.

But look at the actual career. He started at NTL, a UK cable company that filed Chapter 11 in New York in 2002. At the time, its $10.6 billion bond default was the largest in US corporate history. He left a year before the collapse. Moved to Insight Communications, a cable operator largely owned by the Carlyle Group, which Time Warner Cable bought for $3 billion in 2012. He became COO of Time Warner Cable, which in turn was acquired by Charter. Every company he has run has been consolidated, absorbed, or flipped. He made enough money to retire to a farm in Vermont in search of humility. And pigs have wings too.

He was hired as Google’s third CEO “out of retirement” to run the fiber unit in 2018.

To stabilize a business in freefall.

He did real work. Under Jain, GFiber cut support calls in half and moved to ten-minute technician appointment windows. In 2024, he hired GFiber’s first-ever CFO. That tomTomed the real plan. You don’t hire a CFO to run an internet service. You hire a CFO when you are preparing to sell. He stabilized GFiber well enough to make it sellable. And now it is being sold.

Let me tell you what Astound actually is, because the name was invented to obscure it. And while we are on the subject of names, notice that Google rebranded “Google Fiber” to “GFiber” before this deal closed. Scrub the Google brand, hide the Astound connection, give customers nothing to search for. That is a classic private equity move. Polish the turd before you sell it.

The only reason I know about Astound is because when I lived in New York I signed up for an upstart called RCN. It wanted to take on Time Warner Cable. And Verizon. And AT&T. I like upstarts. My whole life is betting on the underdog. Monopolies suck, destroy innovation, and throttle progress. RCN convinced me that my apartment needed them just by existing. Sucker, that was me, because in a few months I found that what seemed like startup gold was spray tan on a tin can.

I moved to San Francisco. And because I am like a jilted lover, I kept tabs on that shit show. Being a broadband nerd made it simple. So now you know why I am not “astounded” by Astound. I know the genesis.

In February 2017, private equity firm TPG bought RCN, a cable operator in New York, Boston, Chicago, and DC, for $1.6 billion, and simultaneously bought Grande Communications in Texas for $650 million. A year later, TPG added Wave Broadband on the West Coast for $2.36 billion. Then came the bolt-ons. enTouch in Texas, Digital West in California, WOW!’s Chicago and Maryland markets for another $661 million, Harris Broadband in central Texas. In January 2022, they stapled all of it together under a new name, Astound. The name came from a small Bay Area provider Wave had previously acquired.

In August 2021, before the rebrand, Stonepeak bought the entire platform from TPG for $8.1 billion, $3.6 billion in equity plus $4.5 billion in assumed debt. That is a leveraged buyout. The debt sits on the balance sheet and has to be serviced from operating cash flow, which means it has to be extracted from customers.

Last July, Astound had to refinance. Stonepeak injected another $400 million, pushing debt maturities out to 2029 and 2030. They called it good news. What it actually was: a company under pressure, buying itself more time.

Now add GFiber and WebPass to that debt stack.

The playbook is not complicated. Low introductory pricing, step-function rate increases after twelve months, retention discounts for customers who call to cancel, and underinvestment in everything that doesn’t show up on a cash flow statement. The BBB and Trustpilot reviews are a graveyard of billing complaints and broken promises.

Astound makes the old Comcast look almost saintly. At least with Comcast you knew what you were getting. Astound is as dodgy as there are angles in a tapeworm. Google Fiber’s reviews on Yelp are already failing grades on billing, customer service, support, and performance. Under a PE regime, it is only going to get worse.

Game is the game.

And debt is the game PE plays. Stonepeak has billions in debt to service. That debt requires predictable and increasing cash flow. The easiest way to get more cash flow from a captive broadband customer is to raise prices. There is no mystery here.

What angers me most is the language. The GFiber email I received, and I suspect you got one too if you’re a customer, promised that “nothing is changing about your service.” Not the speed. Not the price. Not the “extraordinary customer experience.” This is the kind of sentence that only gets written when everything is about to change. Companies actually keeping their promises don’t need to make them this explicitly.

“Nothing is changing” is corporate for: we need you to stay through the deal close.

The regulatory picture offers little comfort. The FCC under Chairman Brendan Carr views consolidation favorably. The current commission is not going to save you. California’s Public Utilities Commission is the one real lever. The CPUC has actual teeth. It forced Verizon to make concrete commitments before approving the Frontier acquisition.

Citizens can engage that process. Advocacy groups can push for price locks, service standards, build-out requirements. It won’t block the deal, but it might constrain the worst impulses of a PE-owned operator trying to wring cash from a captive customer base. Given the demographic profile of WebPass customers, none of the consumers are going to complain. They will just pay-up.

Here is the worst part. There is a better option in San Francisco. Sonic.net. And no, it’s not available in my building. A lot of tech people are soon going to find out that Google has sold their internet experience to a terrible company, with a patchwork infrastructure and a poor customer track record.

Let me be specific about that infrastructure. Astound is not one network. It is five or six different networks, built at different times, by different operators, using different equipment, stitched together under a single brand with a management layer on top. As of today, 86% of Astound’s footprint is still HFC, the old hybrid fiber/coax cable architecture from the 1990s. Only 14% is genuine fiber-to-the-home.

Their broadband upgrade path runs through a Harmonic virtualized platform that can theoretically be migrated to fiber someday. Notice the word “theoretically.” Their mobile service rides T-Mobile’s network. Their TV runs on TiVo, distributed through a DirecTV streaming partnership. Their WiFi hardware is Amazon eero. None of these are bad choices individually. Together they describe a company that has outsourced every layer of its stack to someone else.

Google Fiber changes the mix somewhat. GFiber brings about 2.8 million locations passed across 15 states, approaching 1 million subscribers, all on genuine fiber. Markets include Kansas City, Austin, Atlanta, Nashville, Salt Lake City, and a recent expansion into Las Vegas. WebPass adds fixed wireless and ethernet connections in dense urban markets. That is a real fiber asset being dropped into a predominantly HFC platform. Whether the combined company upgrades the HFC side to match, or lets the GFiber advantage erode to fund debt service, is the question that determines what kind of company this becomes. History suggests the latter.

The founding promise of WebPass was simple. Fast internet, honest pricing, people who answer the phone. Google broke that promise through neglect. Astound will break it by design. These are two different kinds of failure, but the customer ends up in the same place.

In the shit.

March 27, 2026, San Francisco