Google becoming an ISP!

[Smith6612]

I'm sure some of the more Tech-oriented people have seen this already, however Google has announced today that they are going to be running fiber optic broadband to 50,000 to 500,000 homes in a community or two in the United States. They state that each home will get up to 1Gbps of connectivity (Yes, Gigabit, meaning 128MB/s of bandwidth!) and that the network will be open to a provider of the user's choice.

http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi

Google is hoping by doing this they will show other private companies what Fiber Optic Internet really means to people, and is also trying to show the government where broadband money would be best spent.

[miguelkp]

It's a great new for my country, since Telefonica has almost a monopoly (completely illegal in my opinion) in net infrastructure terms.

[jtwhite]

I'm sure some of the more Tech-oriented people have seen this already, however Google has announced today that they are going to be running fiber optic broadband to 50,000 to 500,000 homes in a community or two in the United States. They state that each home will get up to 1Gbps of connectivity (Yes, Gigabit, meaning 128MB/s of bandwidth!) and that the network will be open to a provider of the user's choice.

http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi

Google is hoping by doing this they will show other private companies what Fiber Optic Internet really means to people, and is also trying to show the government where broadband money would be best spent.

I can't wait until Fiber Optic is more widely available in the United States. It's taking forever.

[lemon-tree]

I'd really rather not have Google knowing even more about us, they already trawl enough information out of our searches.
They may say "they will show other private companies what Fiber Optic Internet really means to people" , but it is clearly just another route they can use to collect info for their advertising. No company invests that sort of money just to show people, they want a profit out of this and advertising it Google primary income.
Thanks Google, but no thanks.

[wongers]

Go Google

[Danielx386]

I want this in Australia or NZ, I don't think I can move to the US

[wongers]

i like the way the UK is just up to 50mb fibre optic and everyone is like WOW, so much so that everyone has signed up to it and now the ISP (Virgin Media) cant handle all the traffic from everyone joining the service!

in other news, our government thought they were being really clever when they announced that they vowed to get the entire country on to 2mb broadband. lets just say no-one was impressed by this :-P

[Zubair]

I'm sure some of the more Tech-oriented people have seen this already, however Google has announced today that they are going to be running fiber optic broadband to 50,000 to 500,000 homes in a community or two in the United States. They state that each home will get up to 1Gbps of connectivity (Yes, Gigabit, meaning 128MB/s of bandwidth!) and that the network will be open to a provider of the user's choice.

http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi

Google is hoping by doing this they will show other private companies what Fiber Optic Internet really means to people, and is also trying to show the government where broadband money would be best spent.

Thats a great news for US. but sadly not for us

[Smith6612]

i like the way the UK is just up to 50mb fibre optic and everyone is like WOW, so much so that everyone has signed up to it and now the ISP (Virgin Media) cant handle all the traffic from everyone joining the service!

in other news, our government thought they were being really clever when they announced that they vowed to get the entire country on to 2mb broadband. lets just say no-one was impressed by this :-P

That's what happens when you have a "Fiber Optic" provider which happens to be a cable provider providing 50Mbps speeds to everyone through fiber to the node with Cable Modem. You get severe over subscription. Add in the fact I'm sure Virgin Media doesn't even have a global network and you have yourself a nice little way to make some money fast but cause problems down the road. My ISP has one of the largest global fiber networks, so they could probably give a ton of people 100Mbps connections if they really wanted to without having to pay a lot for peering with other networks. They can do this given they keep the last-mile and middle-mile networks upgraded which they've been doing a lot just for FiOS.

I'd really rather not have Google knowing even more about us, they already trawl enough information out of our searches.
They may say "they will show other private companies what Fiber Optic Internet really means to people" , but it is clearly just another route they can use to collect info for their advertising. No company invests that sort of money just to show people, they want a profit out of this and advertising it Google primary income.
Thanks Google, but no thanks.

I guess we'll have to see what they use this network for other than a proof-of-concept, if anything.

I can't wait until Fiber Optic is more widely available in the United States. It's taking forever.

Tell me about it. I've been waiting for FiOS to get here for over four years now! It's two miles away and they haven't built any more infrastructure yet. I'll certainly know when they start to upgrade the CO for FiOS though as from what I've seen around the Internet, Verizon's DSL hits the fan in a FiOS-enabled CO after some time.

[wongers]

Lol Smith, this is very true :-P and no BT have the global network, i think virgin ran out of money in their budget when trying to cable the whole country.