Maybe I was premature in dissing Google’s experimental gigabit effort. The search company’s Washington counsel late last week said the company could spend “hundreds of millions dollars” to get the experimental gigabit-speed broadband networks off the ground. Of course, when a lobbyist speaks, which is what Google’s Richard Whitt is, the message they send is often meant more to influence policy than to truly address business strategy (which was our first take on Google’s plans anyway). But the fact that Google appears to be pledging more dollars is significant.
Whitt provided the following take on Google’s gigabit plan in an interview with Business Week:
“This is not a small thing. We’re trying to advance the ball on open networks. We’re hopeful this is one way to do that…It’s an open test bed. We will be providing regular reports back to the FCC and others interested in it. So we’re hoping that the learnings that we can generate from the engineering side and on the business model side can be useful.”
The dollars that Google is throwing around are certainly getting the attention of the local communities that Google says it will partner with to deploy its experimental networks. Every day, another local newspaper seems to have a report on local politicians scrambling to pull together an RFI. See: Prince George, Washington; Ithaca, New York; Lehi, Utah; Topeka, Kansas; Bellingham, Washington; Rancho Cucamonga, California; Newburyport, Massachussets; and on and on.
So what’s the mindset of these local communities? A lot of this:
“We want the opportunity to put fiber throughout the city, period,” said Doug Meldrum, economic development director of Lehi, Utah, in one of the local press stories we read. “This is an opportunity we’ve been looking for for quite some time.”
And this:
“It became very very clear that there were lots of upsides and very few downsides to exploring the possiblity. With everyone fully congnisant that there’s a lot of communities that are going to be interested in this, it’s going to be a longshot for anybody to get it,” said Dan Pike, mayor of Bellingham, Washington.
Google is accepting RFI responses from local communities until March 26.
Rich,
More than a dozen years ago on a panel about the Internet at COMNET I made the statement that the phone companies were beginning to look like the \\"railroads of the 21st century.\\" When programs to provide broadband to the home started, I began to wonder if I was premature in my assessment. Then they started abandoning whole areas like New England and rural areas. Then they started fighting to control content, exactly the opposite of what Internet users want and expect. Maybe I was right in the beginning and companies like Google are the telecommunications companies of the 21st century. Certainly the users are voting for Google.
Regards,
Jim Hayes