Google's plan to roll out a national ultrafast Internet connections has drawn widespread praise. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski said the planned experiment fits with the national broadband plan. An analyst said Google's broadband experiment will challenge developers and deliver a "kick in the pants to the telcos and cable companies."
Google's announcement Wednesday that it will roll out a high-speed fiber trial in select U.S. locations unleashed a flurry of comments ranging from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski to the telecoms and cable industries to network -neutrality advocates.
Google is asking cities, counties and states to indicate interest in having Google-built one-gigabit-per-second fiber service . The company emphasized it is not entering the Internet service provider business but rather is conducting an experiment to see what happens when truly high bandwidth is available.
"We're excited to see how consumers, small businesses, anchor institutions, and local governments will take advantage of ultra high-speed access to the Net," said Richard Whitt, Google's telecom and media counsel.
Toward the National Broadband Plan
"In the same way that the transition from dial-up to broadband made possible the emergence of online VoIP and video and countless other applications, we think that ultra high-speed bandwidth will lead to many new innovations -- including streaming high-definition video content, remote data storage , distance learning, real-time multimedia collaboration , and others that we simply can't imagine yet," Whitt wrote on the Google Public Policy Blog.
"Big broadband creates big opportunities," Genachowski said. "This significant trial will provide an American test bed for the next generation of innovative, high-speed Internet apps, devices and services. The FCC's national broadband plan will build upon such private-sector initiatives and will include recommendations for facilitating and accelerating greater investment in broadband, creating jobs and increasing America's global competitiveness."
Free Press, a nonprofit group that supports network neutrality, called on the FCC to "adopt these high standards and aspirational goals when it delivers the national broadband plan to Congress in March. The national broadband plan should chart a course to guide the United States in the near term to universal deployment and adoption of high-capacity Internet infrastructure , and in the long term toward one-gigabit broadband and beyond."
Experiment, Not Business Plan
Tim Bajarin, principal analyst with Creative Strategies, said in an e-mail, "This is an experiment that is intended to see what people would do if they have 100 times the current speeds they have in downloads today. It is also a challenge to the third-party developers to get them to think differently about the apps they can create and the content they can deliver as well." (continued...)
But it's more than just a science-fair project. "It is also designed to be a kick in the pants to the telcos and cable companies to get them to be more aggressive in creating faster networks ... on their own or (by) working with Google to get speeds up across the U.S. as fast as possible," he said.
Those telecoms and cable companies also had comments on Google's announcement. "The Internet ecosystem is dynamic and competitive, and it's delivering great benefits to consumers. Google's expansion of its networks to enter the access market is another new paragraph in this exciting story," Verizon said.
A key part of Google's initiative is that it is an open architecture. "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, nondiscriminatory and transparent way," Google said.
The Computer and Communications Industry Association, of which Google is a member, hailed this openness. "The promise that this new Internet capability would operate committed to robust net-neutrality and open-access rules is significant," the association said. "Continued investment in broadband infrastructure does not require ending the open-access and neutral principles that have allowed content to compete on its merits and new applications and innovations to thrive."
