14 DAY TRIAL // Google is now building its own phone, albeit with more than a little help from HTC, so there’s not much it can do that will truly be surprising. Just like the mythical GDrive, talks about Google offering its own internet connections have been around for years, but they are only now becoming a reality. The company has announced plans to roll out 1Gbps fiber-to-home internet connections to at least 50,000 Americans and possibly as many as 500,000 if it gets the kind of community support it wants.
"We're planning to build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. We'll deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today with 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We plan to offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people," Minnie Ingersoll and James Kelly, product managers at Google, wrote.
The company has been very careful to underline, repeatedly, that it's not planning on becoming an ISP, this is just a trial run designed to test new services and ideas and to spur others to implement faster connections. This being Google, it also approaches the whole problem with a fresh perspective and believes openness of the connection and the services will benefit everyone, the ISPs, web services and sites and, of course, the users.
Google has three main goals in mind with its new plans. First up, it wants to see what kind of apps will spring up and how developers will take advantage of the huge leap in bandwidth the gigabit connection will provide. At the same time, it's also trying out "new deployment techniques" for fiber optics networks in an attempt to bring cost down, and Google says it will share its discoveries with the world so others can implement them as well. Finally, Google will allow any provider, even competing ISPs, and service to access the network and offer their own products using it.
The plans are still in the early stage and Google doesn't have anything fleshed out yet regarding how it will actually build the networks, either with in-house engineers or hire outside companies, or how it will operate them. Currently, it's taking in requests from communities in the US and will choose from them the locations where to deploy the trial based on a variety of factors.
Google says it will try to offer competitive prices, as its goal is to get as many users as possible not to make money out of this. Most likely, Google will be loosing money as deploying fiber-to-home connections is quite expensive even if the company hopes to bring down cost. However, the company has a lot to benefit from this wider and faster internet access, which means more people online, which translates into more advertising revenue. And a sizeable network offering gigabit connections, when most of its competitors are barely offering 10 Mbps speeds, will put a lot of pressure on existing ISPs to step up their game. There hasn't been any response from the big name ISPs in the US yet, but expect them to be very critical of the move.