Google will build 1Gbps fiber networks to the home
After building its own browser, its own operating system, its own mobile OS, its own smartphone, its own DNS service, and what amounts to its own private internet, Google is now building its own ultra-high-speed fiber networks to American homes. With a blog post Wednesday morning, the search giant/world power announced it will …
if Google did a Phorm....
wait - that can't happen... "Do no evil"
I can think of many people that would probably offer up their First Born to Google just to get a 1Gbps fiber to their doorstep. Myself not included, but pretty close! So Google wants to do Deep Packet Inspection and index/datamine all of my Reg comments and figure out what I like to look up on Amazon.com, let them. As long as they only charge a nominal fee for their service. Having a massive datapipe to the home would open up a ton of opportunities for close-to-DVD quality video streaming or the like. This of course would put ENORMOUS strains on content providers, which would be obligated to buy more bandwidth, which will most likely be punted by none other than Google...see the loop?
I, for one, welcome our new Google illuminated dark fiber overlords. I'd trust them with my data more than the Gov't any day.
You already have that today with the likes of youtube and a half decent ADSL2+ connection. If I had 1Gpbs pipe I would be expecting a lot more than that! 1Gpbs should be enough to stream super-HD 3D for all the family (all wathcing different things) with bandwidth left over for some tele-presence and something else we can't imagine yet...
Just because they're not the government, doesn't mean you should trust them any more.
Google as network provider, browser provider, OS provider and content provider. No, that's not at all scary, is it?
Make no mistake. If Google is able to add a significant ISP presence to its business model, there are very few companies who will be able to compete on anything like a level playing field. Most companies 'dominate' in one area. Google is dominating, or attempting to have an influencing presence, in all the important areas of the internet: advertising, search, email, content, mobile devices, operating systems and browsers, the internet backbone and now the connection into the home.
A company that operates across all areas and uses revenues from one to strongarm its way into a dominant position in others - there's a name for that. Ask Microsoft.
Time for action, folks.
I already get some full HD quality content from NetFlix with my Roku over my existing (~3-5Mbps) cable connection -- while playing online games while my wife is browsing the web.
True 1Gbps should allow 3-dimensional* HD at least.
* and I mean fully 3-dimensional, not that bogus stereoscopic crap. 1080**x1080x1080 is what we're talking here.
** yes, I know 2D HD (HD2D?) is 1920x1080, but full 3-D should be cubic, don't you think? Plus if you do the math, 1920x1080x1080 wouldn't work without a major improvement in compression (even 1080x1080x1080 would require some compression improvements -- but I think that's in the realm of possibility because a good part of the additional space will be unused.)***
*** okay, enough with the footnotes already.
They already have plenty of information about me, my browsing habits, what my favourite donkey porn site is etc, etc.
If they were to offer me 1gb connection with some restraints of what data they suck out of it at a very low price I too would worship at the dark (fibre) altar of Google
I wrote a science fiction short story, not so long ago. I set the story in a future where there was no longer an Internet as such. Every electronic device, appliance, communication medium or media product was connected to the "Googlenet". The combination of this interactivity and the emergence of media / communication "devices" of many different form factors that ran as hardware as an application, made traditional PC's and the Internet redundant.
iPhone, Google phone, Google DNS, iPad, Buzz and now the proper roll out of the Googlenet.
God I'm a fecking prophet!
Just what I was thinking. Once anything you want is accessible through a seamless conduit of Google systems, why bother with the rest of the Internet?
But The Onion does:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/google_opt_out_feature_lets_users
So, in theory Google could provide the content (Via Google.com), provide the browser and provide the adverts and of course you can't run NoScript or AdBlock on their browser so suddenly guaranteed eyes on all the adverts!
Perhaps even worse than Sky who "only" provide the news, sport, movies and the distribution network.
It all sounds a bit creepy to me, but of course people will no doubt pay the nominal fee just to get the incredible fast pipe into their house.
At what price freedom? well...not a price, but the speed freedom is given away is about 1Gbps
Yes, yes you can. Please if you're going to bash at least keep up to speed with developments - it's been out over a month.
Sorry, my mistake, I've not used Chrome for so long, does NoScript work now as well?
"Perhaps even worse than Sky who "only" provide the news, sport, movies and the distribution network."
You mean they don't provide you with about 15 tonnes of spam mailouts every year?
The entire block of flats I live in are on cable TV but Sky regularly send out mailshots directly to us (so they know our names and addresses) and also somehow manage to get in the locked stairwell to deliver spam right to our doors.
Not so much Sky my friend, more like SkyNet!
Better get the Connor's on the phone while we still can , we might be needing their help soon.
That's about it. Google will offer direct access to "its" end-users, for a fee. That's its business model, anyway.
<lifts skirt provocatively>
Has the google never heard of the UK?
Wassaup doodicus?
</lifts skirt provocatively>
The only other area google could and should get in to would seem to be the International Bank of google but then I suppose there are always the utilities too?
Paris: because I am sure she too knows the importance of lifting a skirt provocatively?
"Has the google never heard of the UK?"
"THE Google" - similar to "THE Borg" ?
I *like* it
Hello, Google give the UK some of that fibre lovin'
To the door no less, none of this "Mother of all broadband, fibreoptic internets. Oh wait we lied it only goes to the green box around the corner, but thats OK" bollocks.
FFS, cmon VM I can see the box from my front window!
...made the telcos shoot themselves in the foot. Here's Google offering a solution that would save at least half for every carrier's infrastructure by sharing cells, and give local governments virtually free public safety carriage..
It was a slap in the face to Google, so they are turning the other cheek and offering to let the both the big carriers and little Mom and Pop ISP's like me share the fiber they will lay to the end user's water heater and 4G picocell on the roof.
Google can afford to give you that Gig free^H^H^H^advertiser supported. Except for diehard freetards that need to fill hard drive after hard drive with trivia, faster connections dont result in more transfers, though the ability to watch HD at 18MHz quality levels will sure fill the pipes. Unless the carriers have engaged in a program of ripping up conduit and old oil pipelines, the cross country fiber capacity is darn near unlimited. After the Internet bubble burst, the upstrat fiber companies were bought up to artifically support bandwidth prices, today's 10 cents per gig is probably 100 times too much.
Google has the brains and money to bring this off. Watch the carriers pull every trick they know of to stop it.
just good old-fashioned English - go check you dictionary...
Although it probably should behyphenated thus: "search giant-cum-world power"
So where does Google say they are going to do deep packet inspection of internet traffic? Nowhere.
On the other hand, there are several big providers that have such systems in place right now, but they can get away with it because they are not called Google. *sigh*
I's about time somebody offers good internet connection speeds at a good price. I'm sure that the offer Google is preparing will cause the other ISPs to change their offerings too. Can only be a good thing....
Where do I sign in for affordable high speed internet?
"So where does Google say they are going to do deep packet inspection of internet traffic? Nowhere."
So where does google say they are not going to do so-called "deep packet inspection" of internet traffic? Nowhere.
Quite frankly, I don't trust human nature. If google can do it, and make a buck out of it, eventually google will do it. Especially seeing as their current business model isn't sustainable.
google needs to be shunned ... they are a slow-motion accident in progress.
It's not that Google will or will not do DPI.
It's not that it is even Google per se.
It's because ONE ENTITY (Google in this case) is content aggregator, content provider (to an extent), device provider, DNS provider, hosting provider, connection provider etc. this gives them the POTENTIAL to engage in massive invasions of privacy on a scale never before known.
ANY entity given that kind of power needs very careful observation.
Even my government own doesn't have that kind of power over me!
...they have all the other parts of the puzzle.
No more need for TIA.
At 1 Gbps you could download an entire DVD 75 seconds. You could have a house full of 3-D HD streams and still not use 1 Gbps. Maybe if you have a really popular website like el Reg you could use that much bandwidth.
"What's more, if Google controls the net connection, it would have access to data well beyond what gets pumped through its own web services."
Which is why this will never fly. Not even the .fed is likely to look past the obvious privacy and national security issues of a "SuperPhorm" (to coin a phrase). I hope ...
The United States has very low prices for fixed and mobile broadband relative to Europe.
Europe has advantages in speed mostly because of population density and geographic size. It wouldn't surprise me if all of Sweden were on one sonet ring, and obviously it takes a lot more infrastructure to cover the US coast to coast. Especially all those annoyingly low-population areas in the middle.
But sure, sign me up for 1Gbps. I currently use 6mbit DSL because I see no need to go faster, at the cost of $20-40 more a month.
"The United States has very low prices for fixed and mobile broadband relative to Europe."
The 15th place for broadband adoption stat comes from the OECD. If you look at the rest of the report you'll see that the average US price for a broadband connection is higher than that of the Western European countries, ranking the US 14th (http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/22/44/39575002.xls) and that the average US price per Mbit is also higher than that of the Western European countries, ranking the US 15th (http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/22/45/39575011.xls). Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's not true.
Oh and Sweden has a lower population density than the US. As does Iceland, FInland, Norway, Canada...
how many webservers (besides those in Google-land, MS-world, and the Amazon universe) have a 1-gig Internet connection? So how is this going to help the average Internet user if their pipe is 10+ times fatter than the pipe of the website they're downloading their pr0n from? It was bad enough when home users moved from 56k dialup to 1meg+ broadband. Moving to 1gig is going to be a major PITA to a lot of providers when their users start complaining about how slow the site is.
I only see this as being really useful to two types of users: those users who completely buy-in to Google's universe and spend all day in Google-Docs, Youtube, and the like where they can actually take advantage of the ridiculous speed by staying "inside" Google's network. And the P2P users. Imagine how badly RIAA/MPAssA will stain their pants when they realize an entire 2-hour DVD can be transported over gnutella in a matter of seconds.
So what you're saying is, most people will get no difference in service and some will get a buckletload of improvement?
Sounds like a good deal to me. Especially with HTML5 in the pipeline (no pun intended).
I agree that for most users a 1Gbps Internet connection is like putting a 5 litre engine into an antique car and expecting it to perform like a Ferrari. Standard browsing is limited (mostly) by the speed of the final link to the server and the latency (Round Trip Time), and the ultimate limit to the latter is the speed of light.
But Google could fix this (for reading, writing is more complicated) by 'merely' replicating all the popular sites (Wikipedia, pr0n, ElReg, ...) in a data centre near to you, Akamai already do this but impose a significant cost on the server owner. All the hops would be under Google control and the round trip is to a server down the road (-ish) instead of the other side of the continent.
I still think 1Gbps would be overkill for most of the uses we currently make, but perhaps it would make new uses possible.
if my home users got this Google connection, they'll bitch unendingly about how they hate connecting to our webservers and email because we only have a 100-meg pipe on our end and it's so slow.
SLAs mean little to home users, but cost us a (comparative) fortune...
...consumes 18G at Default AVCHD compression. Reducing this bandwidth is more or less like moving the quality slider on a JPG, you would need a side by side to really see a difference between 18 or 12. If you have 3 TVs, you only need 60 meg. Netflix does a great job at 3Megs
You do not have a 100 meg pipe if you have 100baseT ethernet, ethernet overhead bites big bunches, 30-70%. We throttle our servers at a meg or so per user, but then i serve mostly photos, and rendering takes longer than the download.
Google will certainly cache, so unless you set nocache flag, the website will be available at hard drive or ram speeds depending on how long it's been since last hit.
This is another PR stunt by the folks in MV.
Let's face it: to get 1 Gbps to your home they need to dig up the street and get the fiber directly to your house (and, if living in an appartment complex, to your appartment). ONLY THEN you will get 1 Gbps.
The investment required to do this for a big number of users will exceed even the financial capabilities of Google. (Guess why none of the existing providers has tried this, despite having been in the business for ages?)
But even if they manage to get 1 Gbps to your home, do not expect the services out there to be able to deliver/support that kind of bandwidth. And while we are at it - which services do need that speed anyway? High-res video can be done with 100 Mbps which is commercially available already in certain markets. How about online backup, file sharing, online editing of files? Only few users will actually want to do this.
Anyway, now even the dumbest ISPs in the world will recognize that Google IS evil. Expect a lot of resistance.
Paris, because "they told me that they have to dig up my lawn to get me the highspeed internet".
"Anyway, now even the dumbest ISPs in the world will recognize that Google IS evil. Expect a lot of resistance."
...errrr... either that or the other ISPs will desperately try to implement their own higher-speed internet - they won't offer any resistance, they'll just offer an alternative provider.
Isn't that how things are supposed to work in the USA? (except where the govt interferes ofc)
Even Google, with all it's megabucks could not possibly afford to roll out fibre to the home for a majority of net users. Simple economics is why this hasnt been done here (as a matter of course), it costs the debt ridden telco's too much.
I can't see BT offering fibre to the home this decade, it will be a miracle if the have fibre to the street cabinet in every area by then!
Most PCs have Gigabit ethernet and it doesn't require fibre.
You need Fibre to the kerb (FTTK) not Fibre to the Home (FTTH) to deliver this sort of speed into the home.
You will need to dig up pavements, getting fibre to the kerb may indeed need some digging (or erecting along with electricity cables).
My PC has a gigabit interface, but still I am limited to 6 Mbps downstream by my ISP. Shall I now return the PC to the dealer?
Unfortunately, you DO need FTTH if you don't wanna share it with someone else, and that's the big deal, right? Having 1 Gbps for you alone.
If you share the connection with your neighbors (i.e. fiber-to-the-building, or FTTB) in the same appartment complex, then you won't get 1 Gbps. You'll get a share of the bandwidth. Expect congestions in the evenings. (Simple calculation: 20 families in your complex, and you get 1 Gbps/20 = 50 Mbps when all the folks are online.)
And with fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) things get even slower because you still have copper between the curb and the house.
Truth is - if you want to have 1 Gbps in your home, you need to have all-fiber infrastructure from the core to your home. Good luck with getting that anytime soon (without digging up the garden). Get over it. It is a PR stunt.
"Anyway, now even the dumbest ISPs in the world will recognize that Google IS evil. Expect a lot of resistance."
...errrr... either that or the other ISPs will desperately try to implement their own higher-speed internet - they won't offer any resistance, they'll just offer an alternative provider.
====
Or maybe ISP's will roll-over, cuddle up to Google and say thank you very muchly for taking over the cabling infrastructure, here, have some money.
Exactly like Virgin Media are currently doing in passing all email services over to Google.
If you live on a road with 50 houses, and 20% of those take this up, that't 10 houses at 1Gbps. That exceeds STM-64.
You are NEVER going to get 1Gbps from your house to the interweb. Perhaps to your ISP but even then bandwidth will be shared between the street cabinets to the exchange and there will be further sharing along the path.
Dream on. Fibre to the Kerb - where each house migh get a 1Gbps ethernet connection (to a switch in the kerb cabinet that's served by fibre) is the most likely option.
The exploits of John Law in France and also the South Sea Bubble come to mind. Google are soon going to hit the Creditability Event Horizon.
Now the next thing would be to implement a "Please Cache" header in IPv6 which tells routers to please try to cache the connection, if they can.
Then, If I was Google, I would design and build lots of small routers with built-in harddisks which then simply cache every http request which has the "Please Cache" header in it's packets. The router would then have wireless and wired interfaces. Maybe Google would even pay you a bit of money for the traffic you route and the traffic you cache to motivate you to connect your router.
This would mean a lot lower traffic and power costs for google as much of the content distribution would then be done in the network itself. And if done right, the whole net could profit from that.
BT is planning to open up the possibility for others to lay down cables in their ducts, hopefully google will take the oppurtunity to drag this country out of the middle agews regarding Internet speed/quality!
I welcome our cable laying internet providing geek overlords
shirley knot?
Anyway my reading is that BT has been threatened that it will have to open up their ducts.
Having created high super-high-speed demand, would this effectively force most high bandwidth applications to host with Google?
Would those that can work it out please comment on things like backbones, clouds and SSDs.
Backbones are typically connected by DWDM technology. This allows links of 10, 40, and soon 100 Gbps to be transmitted over a single fiber between network nodes. For traditional networks (i.e. for those with traditional DSL speeds for the subscriber), the bandwidth offered by a single 40 Gbps card is sufficient for 2500 users downloading 16 Mbps each.
And this is were the problem begins when we think about having 1 Gbps to each home. Suddenly, that same 40 Gbps card will only be good to support 40 subscribers (at peak time when all subscribers are online). Even the new, expensive 100 Gbps equipment will just support 100 subscribers (again, not considering that there will be some slack because not everyone is online at the same time and maxing out the connection). That 100 Gbps card would be able to serve 6250 subscribers at 16 Mbps.
In other words: the investment to get that traffic from and to the subscriber will be tremendous, also in the backend.
Apart from the practicalities of this (like digging up the road and your garden), the financial investment for the network infrastructure will be massive. I think it could easily exceed Google's abilities.
I hate to point this out but 1Gbps = 1024 Mbps, a blue ray is rated at 36.55 Mbps, you can stream quite a few full HD streams down a 1 Gbps link i.e. 1024 / 36 = 28... Obviously getting 1Gbps is the *real* problem as must gigabit links I know of max out at around 55-60 MB/s or ~480 Mbps.
I still want one!!!!
JD
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