On 02/08/2012 02:49 PM, Le_Forgeron wrote:
> Le 02/08/2012 12:23, Invisible a écrit :
>
>> Internet access is different though. You can't just suddenly say "ah,
>> sod it, let's just increase the speed 500x". It requires completely
>> replacing the entire infrastructure of the Internet - a presumably
>> impossible task. So... is this really real?
>
> you only have to change the access part.
> The Internet is already on fiber, excepted for the access part.

Oh, well, sure. Apart from THE LARGEST AND MOST EXPENSIVE PART OF THE 
NETWORK, it's already fiber. No problem. :-)

> Main issue: coverage is low. A study from March 2012 showed that only
> 10% of home were connectable today, with 80% of them by the cable
> operator: i.e. only 2% of the normal country is reachable so far with a
> real fiber.

The technology to access the Internet at gigabits per second already 
exists. The problem is that it will cost a fortune to dig up the entire 
country to lay hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber. Which is why 
nobody is doing this. (Or at least, not very fast.)

This is what makes Google Fiber so surprising. They're not promising 3x 
more speed. They aren't offering 5x more. It even 10x more like BT 
Infinity just did to my house. (Did I mention my mother /works for/ BT?) 
They're talking about 200x more speed. That's epic, right there.

It mirrors what happened with Gmail. Within weeks of Gmail going live, 
suddenly every other provider massively increased the storage they were 
offering. But that was because they had the capacity all along, they 
were just trying to charge lots of money for it. Today, any webmail 
service offering only 2MB of storage would be laughed out of the 
building. Google actually forced an entire market to change. Over night.

Internet access is a little different. All Hotmail had to do was 
/literally/ press a button and everybody got a 500x storage limit 
increase. You can't do that with bandwidth.

Still, Google appears very, very confident indeed. From what I can tell, 
they're only wiring on Kansas. (WTF? Why Kansas?!) And yet, they made 
bold claims such as this:

   "How long will the free package remain free?

   The free package will remain free for 7 years. After that, it will be 
charged at normal industry rates - which, if Google Fiber is successful, 
will be $0."

This throws their ambition into sharp relief. They intend to build a 
next-generation network today, and they expect it to force the rest of 
the telecomms marked to react. They have set out to do nothing less than 
transform the global ISP market.

Wow.

Um, good luck with that...

Post a reply to this message