Google to Offer Superfast Broadband to Homes
The experimental fiber network will deliver gigabit-per-second speeds to up to half a million homes.
Erica Naone 02/10/2010
- 8 Comments
Google's expansion beyond software continues with plans to build an experimental fiber network, announced today on the Google blog. The company wrote:
We're planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We'll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.
The company is currently looking for responses from interested communities.
Google lists several reasons for the move, including enabling bandwidth-intensive apps, learning better ways to deploy high-speed Internet, and its desire to allow users to choose from multiple service providers.
It's a classic case of "what's good for the Internet is good for Google." But it also looks like Google wants to get more people addicted to what really high-speed Internet can do, thereby winning over more customers for Google's many online services. It's also possible that the company has software in its lab that requires this type of connection, and it's building itself a testbed.
Google's rhetoric around the new broadband offering also brings to mind its efforts in the mobile world to break up the link between specific mobile devices and specific service providers. It's in Google's interest for everyone to have access to the same hardware and infrastructure, and for service providers to compete on other features and services.
It'll be interesting to see how Internet service providers react to this news. Verizon, for one, has made huge investments into its FiOS product, which offers only 50 Mbps--nowhere close to the speeds Google is proposing.
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flared0ne
395 Comments
Paradigm quake alarms going off all over
"So I hear the 800-pound gorilla is now asking for pie?" has serious implications of "pie for everyone!"
We just have to hope that they're serious -- it would be a colossal waste of credibility and momentum for them to publicly posit such a goal and then fumble it.
It IS interesting to imagine how such a thing might play out -- among other things realizing that the boundary effects (between "inside we HAVE bandwidth" and "outside, well -- ooops") are going to be truly obnoxious, at least until multiple enclaves are established and get some synergy going. I would also predict development of some heavy multi-threaded traffic plexer algorithms to un-bottle-neck those boundary conditions... plexer: not the word games, but rather short for multiplexer, leaning toward multi-pipe concentrator/compressor functions, bridging between one or more gigundo-bandwidth pipes on one side and many many many much slower pipes on the other side.
And all THAT says nothing at all about what might be IN the surprise package that warrants such a test bed. Kinda like enabling a small scale "Singularity", if you know what I mean...
Unfortunately, once the gorilla gets big enough that "significant shifts in position" involve measureable gravity waves, "do no evil" becomes a chaotic predictor function...
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