Disruptive nudge: Google fiber
The only news to pay attention to today in my world is Google’s announcement that they’ll be putting money into experimenting with open-access fiber-to-the-home 1Gps networks at some point soon. They’ll open up an RFI - they want to hear from mayors.
This is a truly significant announcement.
- We’ll learn so much about how much it really costs to bring high speeds to communities. We won’t have to rely on the carriers’ doomsaying about these expenses (”Hundreds of billions of dollars!”).
- We’ll learn what applications people want to use. Right now the network providers can say that the market isn’t clamoring for high speeds - but that may be because high speeds aren’t available.
- We’ll learn how easy it is to have competitive providers attach to these fiber networks. Until just a few years ago, all of our general purpose networks were required to allow this kind of attachment. Then the US abandoned this approach at the behest of our incumbents while other countries moved down this path with great success.
- We’ll see this model supported by a great brand. Several municipalities are doing this, but the Google move will get more attention.
- We’ll stop being content with minimal baseline speeds for America.
It’s a tremendous move. Even if Google ends up serving just 50,000 people, the game in the US will have been forever disruptively nudged.
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7 Responses to “Disruptive nudge: Google fiber”
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I’m glad to see this — competition is good.
The roadblock (literally and figuratively) will be right-of-way issues, and plowing up streets to lay more fiber, or access to available ductspace.
The flipside of carriers complaining about costs is public outcry over the exorbitantly high profits carriers are allegedly making. To those folks I ask: if there’s so much money in it, why isn’t everybody doing it?
I guess we’ll soon have our answer, and for everyone’s sake, I hope Google can make this work.
Dr Crawford, There is a serious privacy issue I worry about here. This looks more like a sample than a roll-out. Why those specific numbers? Why not wire specific “types” of communities like rural, urban or suburban? I think they want the click-data to improve their advertising algorithms. All they need is a sample of the population to model that behavior. Deep packet inspection from Google here we come.
Chris
Chris? If you’re worried about privacy I’m pretty confident that Google already knows a lot about your online behavior. I don’t think they’re motivated to get even more data - what they want to do is commoditize high-speed Internet access. They’re saying they will open these experimental fiber rings to competitive ISPs.
Susan
the major ISPs warned for years of a coming sky-is-falling biblical exaflood of content and congestion caused by bandwidth hogs and an all-you-can-eat pricing model, coupled with latent carry over of common carrier rules
give them partial credit for the first part with a correction - the exaflood of content includes an exaflood of capacity when Google does it - perhaps we can thank Ed Whitacre for helping move this along, when he was at AT&T and accused Google of free-riding off his network, and should pay additional surchages for the privilege
Google could get the kind of use data they want without spending tens of millions on new infrastructure by partnering with communities that already have done this–fiber in place and connected customers. Places like Danville, Virginia (www.ndanville.net), The Wired Road (www.thewiredroad.net), and New Hampshire FastRoads (www.newhampshirefastroads.net), or Utopia are good places to start.
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ASheville NC has a lot of dark fiber in the ground. We are seeing this as the seedbed for innovation on a scale not seen since broadband was widely deployed. We will be a contender for this network. Our thought leaders are posting on it here http://googleavl.com/
Good luck to everyon.