Submitted by The Mom of all internet companies, Google, has announced today that it will effectively become an internet service provider. The company is planning on building a number of ultra high-speed broadband networks in select locations in the United States, serving anywhere between 50000 and 500000 users.
Further details are that Google plans on offering 1 gigabit per second fibre-to-the-home connections at “competitive prices”. Google calls it a test, and it wants to figure out what “developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds”. On top of that, it wants to investigate new ways of building fibre networks. The network will be open access; in other words, it may be used by competing ISPs to ensure choice among users.
“Imagine sitting in a rural health clinic, streaming three-dimensional medical imaging over the web and discussing a unique condition with a specialist in New York. Or downloading a high-definition, full-length feature film in less than five minutes. Or collaborating with classmates around the world while watching live 3-D video of a university lecture,” write Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly, Product Managers Universal at Google, “Ultra high-speed Internet access will make all this and more possible.”
If you work for your local government, you can sign up as an interested party to partake in Google’s fibre test. Even if you’re not a person of authority or a policy maker, you may still nominate your community.
This is Good for both Google & user. Google can easily get more information on what site you are navigating and what all you are doing.
For users, they get more speed to get more done at lesser time.
This would definitely force every other ISPs to increase the bandwidth at afforadable price, like the way google did for free e-mail storage space.
Yeah, now Google can track everyone even more easily, and store even more data. Not just browsing, but everything you do online!
Maybe then google ads will become intelligent enough that they will realize that I don’t want to “LOSE 100 POUNDS IN 2 WEEKS!” or “RIPPED ABs IN 1 WEEK!!!”…
You’re just not intelligent enough to recognize a good deal.
I’m totally ripped, have a 10″ penis and a great mortgage thanks to Google ads.
First, Google was running successful websites. So, server-side.
Then, they entered the Web browser market and even the OS market. So, client-side.
Now, they are becoming an ISP? I’m skeptical: that looks like too much power for one company, too many potential conflicts of interests and subtle ways to extend market dominance from one market to another.
On the other hand, they’re willing to combat limitations in markets related to the ones they already dominate by providing alternative solutions that spur those markets to actually compete.
When I look at the state of broadband adoption in the U.S., it’s pretty dismal. I only got ADSL at my (semi-rural) location 2 years ago, while people literally around the corner from me are still stuck with dialup.
This is a market that desperately needs a boost here in the U.S., and the big telco’s aren’t moving quickly enough, often choosing to only focus on the solutions that will bring the biggest ROI (limiting their broadband upgrades to the regions with the most population/money). I see nothing wrong with Google moving in and showing them how it’s done, or inventing new ways to do it cost-effectively.
Edited 2010-02-10 21:27 UTC
This isn’t a case of big bad google moving into the poor beleaguered telecoms business. This is google moving in and disrupting a virtual telecom cartel. I welcome Google moving into this space because honestly it can’t get worse than it is right now. If the current players don’t like google moving in on their space then they can actually start competing and offering decent service. The very fact thats its possible for google to walk in and offer 1gb/s speeds when most of the country is stuck with speed 100 to 1000 times less is telling. Google doing this open access and supporting still net neutrality is just icing on the cake.
Let’s not compare apples and oranges. By experimenting on 50000 to 500000 people, they are basically targeting one or more medium size cities. It’s something they can finance with R&D dollars and they’ll probably work with the local government on the project because they will be happy to be one of the first places with such speed. But they will not be expecting to make a profit off the connection itself.
While it’s true that lack of competition is letting ISPs keep speed low and prices high; this move by Google is not likely to make things change. We’ll get to the high speed access either way but it’s probably going to take a while.
I think that they pretty much explained what they were doing: they know we’ll get to such high speed eventually so they’re trying to be the first with services for that faster internet.
Also remember that you might have 1Gbps to your ISP but you’re unlikely to have that much to the rest of the world. If you’re lucky enough to be in the covered zone, you probably won’t get a better internet experience than the many people who are already at 100Mbps.
Edited 2010-02-11 06:23 UTC
This isn’t a case of big bad google moving into the poor beleaguered …
(a) Office Suites that will crush MS Office
(b) Finance page that will crush financial info providers.
(c) Email that will crush Yahoo and all others.
(d) Phones that will crush all telcom providers.
(e) Browsers that will crush MS Explorer.
(f) Video market what will crush Netfix.
…
…
…
and so on and so on and so on…
This story is getting pretty tiring!
End of the day they just an online advertising business with lots of little toys for boys and girls to play with and call themself ‘tech savy’.
Amen brother!
I’m only about 15 minutes from everything and I can only get either dial-up or satellite. So, naturally, I use a dish to acquire a wireless signal from a 500ft tower that is 10 miles away ( as the crow flies, that is ).
I am lucky to get ping times to my isp better than 30 ms. I normally do about 250-400 ms.
–The loon
hello from dialup land…
They are not becoming the ISP, they are delivery the thing in the ground, not the bits. From the Google Blog:
We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers.
Although I did notice later on that ofcourse Google is one of the possible service providers.
That’s an interesting point and as you pointed out, it’s not really a question of Google moving into other markets, it’s whether they use their dominance in one to leverage dominance in another.
For the moment, there is only one market Google dominates and that’s online advertising. I don’t see how they could use that dominance to force other people to use their many other services.
Of course, that could change if the start to dominate say the mobile space. They could end up forcing users to use their online mail and documents services but the way the Nexus One is setup, they would have to change the firmware so that you no longer could add other software repositories but Google’s own.
At the moment, to my knowledge Google uses open standards and open source for all of their products. It’s highly unlikely that they could start making changes without A) people noticing and B) it subsequently damaging their public image among geeks. Obviously that last bit wouldn’t make a difference if you suddenly have 500k businesses and users relying on you for everything from their mobile to their ISP but you have to remember that Google is well aware it’s being watched by both the DoJ and the EC for anti-competitive behaviour. I doubt Google wants to go through with what MS, and IBM before them, has.
Google’s main product is their search engine and it sure as hell ain’t open source.
The rest are pet projects funded with profits from their proprietary search engine.
Sorry but I just find it strange when people idealize Google as some open source savior. They are after all the company that is using h.264 for YouTube even though they can easily afford to use anything. They have about 20 billion just sitting in the bank.
Wasn’t youtube using h264 before google bought them? And its not like youtube could be changed from day to day to use something else. It’s not like changing an html template. All videos are already enconded. So if it is to change, either the new videos are encoded to the new codec, or the whole library is converted. Either way, its not a mater of days or weeks!
They’ve been using h264 for as long as Flash has supported it which appeared in Flash 9 – before then Adobe were reliant on on2 Technologies IIRC they were using VP6, however, with the buy out of on2 it will be interesting to see what is going to happen with VP8 given that it is comparable to h264 both quality and bandwidth.
If/when Youtube changes th base codec, it’s not likely anything more complicated than a config file change for the trans-coding back end. Uploaded video are already trans-coded so they simply feed them through the new codec. Existing video trans-coding can run as a background thing with heavier batch processing during low traffic times.
After all, Youtube stores and trans-codes video. That’s really all it does. If anyone is prepared for standard codec change, it’s Youtube.
The point is that if they were truly dedicated to open standards they wouldn’t be using h.264 or Flash. People will download anything to watch YouTube so Google is in a very influential position, much more than the W3.
They are clearly not some open source savior when they are supporting h.264.
They’ve been supportive of Flash from the day they purchased YouTube. They don’t care at all the the #1 open source browser objects to using h.264.
But they’re open source supporters because they are making a netbook OS with the Linux kernel. Let’s just ignore the fact that it is a browser OS tied to their applications and hardware and could just as well use any modern kernel.
But is uses the Linux kernel! That means they support open source! If Google tried taking over the earth by building an army of droids we’d probably still get tech press articles about how wonderful Google is for using Linux in the droids that hunt us. The droids send seek and destroy commands through open source protocols! Neat-o!
Edited 2010-02-11 23:08 UTC
That just isn’t true. From wikipedia:
I never have. All I stated is that to my knowledge they use open standards and open source for all their products. What I was forgetting is that their PageRank algorithm is indeed patented and closed source but that does not mean I was evangelizing Google.
I agree that they should be pushing open web standards, especially when it comes to YouTube and HTML5, but saying they can afford to use anything is just a bit too naive for my taste. As Google generates 99% of it’s revenue from advertisements, the last thing they want to do is drive away customers from YouTube, a lucrative source for advert clicks. Let’s say Google could re-encode all of the videos on YouTube by tomorrow morning in Theora and actually switched, there would be a huge amount of people put off. First off, you have all those people stuck on IE, then you have people like the iPhone crowd who no longer get the benefits of hardware decoding from their limited processing power devices.
Driving off customers when all your revenue is generated from add clicks to me sounds like a really dumb idea.
Now, a gradual change over, sort of what Google is doing now, that makes perfect business sense.
True. But most of those ads are displayed in searches. Ergo, no search, no ads.
I’ve looked into your claim and although it sounds like that could be the case, I’ve found absolutely no evidence that colludes your statement. It’s seems Google does not publish a breakdown of the percentage of revenue generated by each service. I use quite a few Google apps and all of these applications display advertisements, as does YouTube so either I’m missing something, you have inside information or you are just guessing.
Anyway, just because you think that Google generates most of it’s advertisement revenue from it’s search page does not negate my point. Google does not make anywhere near as much money from search as it does from displaying advertisements. In fact, I don’t see how Goolge could generate any revenue from just it’s search engine unless companies paid them to display their pages first.
They place the advertisements on the search results. The source of their profits is their search engine.
If Google open sourced their search engine their profit margins would be destroyed. Microsoft and a dozen other companies would just incorporate their algorithm and then there would be nothing special about using Google.
Google pushed hard last year to popularize its Google Apps suite of online clerical tools, YouTube and its Android mobile phone operating system. But the vast majority of its sales and profit continue to come from search advertising.
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/techinvestor/earnings/2010-01-21-googl…
You do realize that there are sites other than Google owned sites that use adsense, right? In fact, I think OSAlert uses adsense, at least for some of it’s advertisements.
And who’s to say those other companies wouldn’t use adsense? Just because you have a search engine does not mean you have the capabilities or the will to run an online ad agency.
Yea, Google’s advertisement revenue would take a hit if people suddenly stop using Google search but to say they get all their revenue from there is absurd. they get there revenue from advertisements, full stop. If those advertisements are displayed on search results or somewhere else is academic.
The majority of their profits come from ads displayed on the results of their proprietary search engine.
I know you have an emotional attachment to Google and have a hard time accepting that their core business relies on proprietary software. In case you hadn’t noticed they don’t even make their internal build of Linux public. They flaunt their openness when it suits their public image and people like you eat it up.
No matter how many time I repeat myself, you still don’t want to understand. Well, if you can’t be civil, this conversation is over.
I’m naive because I pointed out that they have 20 billion in the bank and can switch to anything? How is that naive? Google can afford to lay down fiber but couldn’t afford a codec switch? My God take off the heart-shaped Google glasses.
Why would a huge amount of people be put off? People would install a plug-in to watch YouTube. It’s like the BBC of the internet.
It doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. They could encode the HD videos in Theora and encourage adoption that way. Another option would be to maintain Flash videos for iphone users.
You’re the one that is naive. What evidence do you have that Google is preparing a gradual change to Theora? All evidence points to their full support of h.264. They just throw the open source crowd a bone by including Theora support in their browser. It wouldn’t matter if Chrome came with a dozen open source codecs. All that matters is what YouTube uses. Web publishers are not going to keep multiple versions of a video file just to support some open source ideal. They’ll publish in what the vast majority have, and the vast majority will have whatever YouTube uses.
Did you forget what the point of HTML5 video was in the first place? It was to get rid of proprietary codecs like Flash. Now people like you seem to be fine with HTML5 ending up being a wrapper tag for Flash + H.264.
So because Google has 20 billion in the bank they should spend it on doubling the storage capacity required to run YouTube without even finishing their current HTML5 testing? That’s really doesn’t make much sense. Unless you’re a member of Google’s board you have no idea what they have up their sleeve. It’s still early days and the reasons for why they bought On2 is still unclear. Just because I’m being pragmatic I’ve heart shaped Google glasses on? Dude, If you can’t have a discussion without resorting to calling somebody a fan boy you need to brush up on your argument skills.
Maybe because they no longer have hardware acceleration? And in the case of those stuck on corporate systems, because they can’t install a codec without being granted administration access to their work machines? You’d be surprised at many workers watch YouTube from work.
I never said it was an either/or position. If you check out YouTube, they currently have the option to use HTML5, though it still uses h264. As for encoding all of their videos in Theora before the HTML5 trial has even begun properly, like I said above, we have no idea what Google are planning.
By the way, the iPhone doesn’t use flash, it directly displays the h264 encoded file thereby utilizing the hardware acceleration on the iPhone, which, if you read over my statement, you’ll find was my actual point.
What evidence do you have that they are not going to include Theora in Chrome and start using it on YouTube? And again, there still is the question of why they bought On2. Who’s to say that they don’t decide to open source VP8? Or donate that code and help create Theora 1.2?
When did I say I was fine with YouTube using h264? For the record I’m not fine with it but that doesn’t mean Google are suddenly going to change best practices and implement a complete site change without thoroughly testing it first. At the moment they are testing the front end changes, let’s see what comes next before we jump the gun.
By the way, you are making a vast amount of assumptions about me and what I think and don’t think.
Look, I’m all for Theora but I know how corporate cultures move and one thing you can say about ’em is, although they’re faster off the mark than Public institutions, they still don’t move all that fast.
Whoever said they should it do it for economic reasons? If they were actually dedicated to open source like Mozilla they would just write the check.
You seem pretty blind. The droid has h.264 support, it’s safe to assume they will be supporting it.
I already pointed out that it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. They could push Theora in HD videos or maintain legacy Flash support.
Huh? I already noted that they have Theora support in Chrome. It’s highly unlikely they will use in it in YouTube given that they
1. Have stated they don’t want to use it
2. Use h.264 in the droid
3. Have moved closer to h.264 partners
4. Their experimental HTML5 youtube uses h.264
Is that enough for you?
So what if they open source VP8, it’s just like supporting Theora in Chrome. It’s a piecemeal effort. Everyone will install what YouTube uses, and web publishers will use whatever is commonly installed.
An inability to be civil is a sign of immaturity. Just like the other one, this conversation is over until you’ve learned some manners, son.
Edited 2010-02-12 06:42 UTC
Google, like any corp or large company, shouldn’t be trusted by default but it may be worth having evidence of wrongdoing before passing judgement also.
In the case of Youtube, the html5 version is in early testing. If the video tag is finalized with only h.264 or Youtube html5 goes to production forcing h.264, then we can get all up in arms about how the do-no-Evil company is the end of the intertubes as we know it.
Absolutely be suspicious of all actions. Just try to hold out evidence before that becomes final judgement.
… server-side. Check.
… server-side. Check
What about WiFi infrastructure provider (working both sides of the client-server street), wireless phone system seller and business partner to wireless carriers, international politics and security player with their involvement in firewalling and/or opening network access in China and coordinating with the NSA regarding both specific and generalized threats to end user and corporate security?
We’ll forget about their monetary clout and any intended or unintended shaping of opinion, habits or cultural influences or side-effects that result from their search business for now.
You sound a little too laid back in terms of assessing how much influence they actually as well as potentially have. Don’t sleep tonight ; it’s not safe.
I wouldn’t be surprised in the future we start seeing Google using this fibre optic as their backbone and use WiMax used to read the last mile where it is not economical to roll a fibre optic out to a house in the middle of nowhere as well as catching those on the go – which would explain Google buying up spectrum on the now freed up low frequencies that were once used for analogue television.
…can’t be evil.
How long before this forms a ‘google network’ subtly replacing the internet. With google offering faster internet and additional functions to its network customers at a loss leading price.
On this network all your information and behaviour is stored, from your location (android phones + latitude) through to medical information (Cleveland Clinic). This behaviour will then be sold for profit in a manner that suits them. Mainly advertising.
I know I am being a bit orwelian about all of this but I do feel that knowledge is power and its a LARGE amount of power to put into the hand of those who are not accountable to anyone except shareholders…
Thats only true if Google has no competition, and in the isp area Google certainly has competition. Google has its hands in a lot of pies but its really only dominates in search and parts of internet advertising. Everywhere else Google is up against large companies with just as much power as it. ChromeOS is up against Microsoft and Apple, Android is up against Apple, Nokia, and Microsoft and their current move in up against the entire US telecom industry, all huge companies. And Google isn’t bringing anything special into this fight either they don’t have any magic technology that lets them do this cheaper than their competitors they are just the only ones who want to do it cheaper.
Once these companies get tired of getting their asses kicked by Google and get their heads out of their asses they are perfectly capable of competing with Google, and so long as that competition exists Google can’t overstep its bounds.
I understand the argument about competition keeping it ‘in line’.
What worries me is we (as consumers) have allowed a private company to develop with access to personal information on a scale never before seen in history.
A scale that I personally would be in the streets protesting against if it was my Government doing these things.. yet, because its a private company we seem happy to gift it more and more information, hardly asking a question…
The difference is that you can very easily make the choice to not use Google services, again because of competition. Lets say you decided that Google is evil and you won’t use them anymore. So you change your default search to Bing or Yahoo. Can’t use Gmail anymore so you could switch to a desktop mail solution or another web mail provider there are a ton. You can take your pictures down from Picasa and use firefox instead of Chrome. Alternatives for all of Google’s services are plentiful and thankfully they have not instituted some sort of lock-in to prevent you leaving. If they did I would be out as soon as I could, but currently I can leave Google anytime if I wanted and that is very important. There is not such thing as a free lunch and if the cost of using my favorite web apps is getting served ads based on my search history and habits, thats something I can deal with. Is there any evidence that Google uses the data it collects for something other than serving targeted ads?
Also I do think your panic is a bit premature, Google hasn’t taken over the telecom industry yet and I doubt they ever will, they just have to be good enough to force the current incumbents to compete. Just like with the Chrome, its purpose is to push the current incumbents on the path that Google wants, and actual success is just a bonus.
Exactly. Google uses “good citizen” methods to attract customers and keep them. They provide products that people want… that other businesses even want to use for their customers. They provide standard offerings that can interoperate with others.
They’re damn good at what they do, and they know that while their products are highly desirable, people will use them. They will view more ads, creating more revenue for Google.
Google doesn’t need to charge exorbitant prices for services like fiber, email, maps, etc. They just need to attract users who will view their ads.
All the “free” products they create are just honey to attract more ad viewers
Edited 2010-02-11 00:18 UTC
If that’s what it takes to finally switch to IPv6, a secure DNS and spam-proof SMTP, then on the whole I might see it as something positive.
AOL?
Wow, now google can have access to every single part of your e-Life.
It seems to me that the focus of most peoples discussion is around the privacy concerns. In the official google blog post it states that they are only building the network to :
‘Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:
* Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.
* New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks, and to help inform and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.
* Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.’
It seems to me that any organisation which is looking to provide and research means for future improvements to the internet/application delivery is a welcome more. At the end of the day if your worried about privacy over the network setup a simple ipsec/ssh/ssl vpn which can be purchased very cheaply over the internet. For the vast majority of users the improvement in service speed is something that they will be eagerly awaiting. I think the area with the biggest worry would be the cable network providers.. who needs cable if IPTV takes off as many people expect it to over the next few years. Additionally google maybe able to offer services like multicast properly which so many providers fail to offer at this point.. could be a great thing for many services.
It seems that Google is using very pleasing words, but the fact is that by doing this they get access to even more data on you. Not just your browsing, but everything you do online.
They may not be doing it to be evil, but it sure is scary if any single entity knows everything about you.
It’s hard not to think that a company with so broad a coverage of the internet to track you with isn’t up to something sneaky. Especially when their bread and butter come from one tiny corner of that coverage. But the fact is, the internet allows people to communicate so well that the more areas people communicate via google’s software/hardware the more chances they have to make money.
They don’t care what you’ve been up to or where you are going next, as long as you’ve been there and continue to go there via their software/hardware. They have no intention of stopping you from doing anything or sabotaging your efforts or turning you in to the thought police.
Fiber is in. Long live fiber.
Dear Google,
Please start in Australia. Our “tin cans connected by pieces of string” technology has enough trouble without a bunch of Americans sucking up all the available internet bandwidth on the already inadequate overseas links…
Yours Sincerely…
Google has been planning this for years : http://www.google.com/tisp/install.html
Edited 2010-02-11 06:59 UTC
The identity of Skynet…
I would say this is a plus for the consumer in the
long run. Google is going to install giga speed
networks in select areas. If it works out and the
consumers like it. This is going to force other
ISPs to increase the bandwidth to the consumer.
Having good download speeds are good in some areas,
but most have poor upload speeds. They need to
increase the upload speeds … I would like to
have a good 7 mbps / 7 mbps over 20 mbps / 2 mbps.
An a price tag around $50 …
It’s about time.
It seems there’s primarily 2 providers:
telecom and cable.
They make the most money by selling phone/premium television/internet together. If the internet is too good it’ll cannibalize their television service, they have no incentive to up the rates. For them having internet available is just another checkbox.
google on the other hand, has much more to gain by customers having as high a bandwidth as possible. google’s search, email, phone, video and map services all would benefit with the better user experience. Who knows what else they have in mind that would need the extra bandwidth? gaming perhaps??
That’s a good point… phone companies have shown they are afraid of the VoIP ability to make long distance calls “free”, chewing into their long-standing pricing structure… while cable companies are realizing that streaming internet video is greatly reducing their ability to charge for premium channels and “on-demand” content…
Adapt or die!
[fun] The next step I expect from Google is to start building laundry machines, along with cars, clothes and some medications for the very poor people. Then, the appliance will connect via wireless to http://laundry.google.com and will submit information to the DB on how much exactly your socks are dirty
[/fun]
It’s good to have a more competitive market, especially if they will consider world reach.