Google are moving in to the Fibre broadband market with what they call an 'experiment' which will deliver 1Gbps fibre broadband at competitive prices to at least 50,000 and up to 500,000 people in the US. Google say they are looking to help make Internet access better and faster for everyone and hope that this project will achieve three specific goals.
Whilst this experiment is based in the US, it may still yield benefits for us in Britain if it provides new innovative ways to build fibre optic networks. The main issue holding back a full fibre deployment in the UK is the estimated cost. BT cannot justify it to shareholders and the government has many more pressing concerns, so we are left with a stop gap solution where we are using fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) with VDSL2 which can't meet the speeds the industry thinks we'll need in a few years' time, whilst other countries are racing ahead with fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) deployments. Rolling out FTTC as an interim measure does present a risk of decreasing the marginal returns of full FTTH rollout, which may put back the day when every home in the UK is connected directly onto a fibre optic network. Equally, others could argue that by demonstrating the benefits of faster broadband services, it is more likely that applications will become available that make use of such fast networks, driving demand for faster broadband.
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6 months ago
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Go Google. They can obviously afford such an "experiment" with little risk as they are so loaded. It'll be interesting to see where this goes, the downside of the experiment is the cost, one of the major factors in rolling out FTTH is cost and making a profit out of it because people will want faster but won't want to pay much (if any) more money for it, as Google don't really care about that aspect of it (I doubt they do anyway its an experiment after all that they could just write off) that side of it won't be factored in.