Google held an event at its corporate headquarters this week, rolling out its big-gun talking heads — including Internet pioneer Vint Cerf — to talk about cloud computing, the future of search and net neutrality, among other topics of the day. But what stood out for us was some light-shedding on Google’s fiber communities project — it’s attention-rousing yet still slightly inexplicable plan to wire up one or more communities — and between 50,000 and 500,000 users — for fiber to the home. Could it all be one big science project?
GigaOm reports from the event, including the section we found intriguing:
Finally Cerf and Huber explained why Google is building out its experimental fiber network to bring 1-gigabit-per-second speeds to 50,000-500,000 Americans. Simply put, Google needs data. “What does [a fiber network buildout] take technologically, and what does it cost not only to deliver it but to maintain it?” Cerf said. “Our business model isn’t to replicate that all over the world, but to understand it.” Later he added that Google might be able to bring new knowledge to the table, something that could help drive innovation in broadband.
Connected Planet’s take,
Rich Karpinski:
There’s a good deal of hubris in this statement but also a good view into Google’s approach to business. When the company doesn’t understand something, it goes out looking for data to help it learn. The idea that it has something to teach about network deployment to the entire broadband industry by dabbling in an FTTH deployment is ludicrous. But the idea that it can learn something from this effort for itself and apply that to its own business is not.
One interesting way in which Google has done this before was, I believe, with its Goog411 service. If you’ve never used it, its basically completely automated — and completely free — directory assistance. You call in, ask for your directory listing, and the service returns what it believes are the closest results. I’ve used it — sometimes the service works remarkably well, other times it’s a disaster. Did it kill service providers’ 411 businesses? Hardly. But it allowed Google to learn many things it can usefully apply to its evolving mobile business, including insights into location-based search patterns even before it launched its first Android device, not to mention providing it a database of speech recognition inputs, problems and outputs it probably used to launch the speech-to-text conversion now available in the latest version of Android as well.
Will Google’s fiber communities project go the way of its LTE open-access bid — a threat and then a pullback? It might. But if it does launch, it will be interesting to watch if for no other reason then to learn what Google itself learns from the effort. That’s an insight that someday actually could “help drive innovation in broadband.”
That’s our take on this. Let us know what you think in the comments section below: