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Google's Dark Fibre Plans?
sebFlyte writes "According to news.com "Google is looking for Strategic Negotiator candidates with experience in...(i)dentification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network." Is the search giant planning to build a global fibre-optic network?" Or perhaps simply use unused fibre that they can get for cheaper then from the datacenter providers; although at least from my talks with the datacenter folks, Google's not paying much per Mbps as it is.
hmmm....maybe this could provide the bandwidth needed for the initial indexing of video material? And maybe the constant re-indexing of TV shows, etc. straight from the providers.
Either that or they want to be able to sync their world-wide collection of data-servers in an 'accpetable' length of time.
A hollow heart and empty head makes the streets run red.
No no no.
Why the hell would Google want to buy up an existing ISP/telco with all the crap that that entails?
What they are doing is actually very sensible.
By looking to negotiate purchase/lease of dark fibre over the medium term they are avoiding the big cost which is actually putting fibre into the ground.
I imagine that they would ensure that the maintenance of that fibre is the responsibility of the provider, so they don't need to run their own maintenance crews either.
And the BIG plus with having access to fiber is that you can then ramp up your capacity by using WDM (Wave Division Multiplexing) to get more bandwidth out of your fibre.
They have probably realised that to ramp up their networks to cope with their future plans they need more bandwidth that they can afford to buy as "service" from a regular telco. Its just too damn expensive!
By leasing the fibre themselves, they light it how they want, rather that how the telco wants to sell it to them.
This *might* have biogger up front costs, but the recurrent costs are MUCH lower.
Do you have any statistics to prove what you said that "The AMS-IX is the largest Internet Exchange / NAP in Europe."?
Last I heard the largest Internet Exchange was located in London.
cat
And even where there is overcapicity, it is mostly in the urban areas, put in place for business, not single family homes. Good luck getting dark fiber in the 'burbs, let alone the sticks
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
It is? I was always under the impression LINX held that honour..
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
If they were truly making such plans they would also have to hire literally tens of thousands of people, or make a monstrous acquisition. Neither of which appears in the cards from what I can tell.
Don't forget that Google parks hardware all over the place. They've got a pile of it sitting in datacenters run by Savvis, who bought up the dregs of the Cable & Wireless operations (who bought up the dregs of the Exodus operations). But unlike Exodus, C&W also had tons of dark fibre. Savvis has been trying to make everything lean and mean, but they've got a pretty nice inter-datacenter-network... but not necessarily any bargains when peering with other people's operations. I can imagine that Google would love to get outside the loop of having the datacenter operators dictate what terms they're willing to live with when setting up new peering arrangements. Especially as Google's needs become more instantaneously multi-directional (rather than crunch-and-publish, it's real-time ad stats, mail, etc).
Even if all these new hires do is help Google's datacenter providers make good decisions about new or altered peering networks, they'll probably earn their keep.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Just because Google can "do no evil" now, doesn't mean we shouldn't watch them closely. They are a publically traded company now, which means whatever conscience they might once have had is gone. "Power corrupts..." so the more powerful they get the more skeptical we should become.
A more likely reason they would want to build a backbone network in the US is to attempt to get peer relationships with the large backbone ISP's rather than just being a customer buying transit service.
Traditionally, peering was free, buying transit service was not. Now such relationships are done by secret contract so the exact economics vary contract by contract, but it is a safe guess that peering is dramatically cheaper than transit. Google is likely getting to the scale (both from their web crawling and customer access) that the difference is important.