Slashdot Mirror
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.
BTW, the Light Reading guys were the ones who "broke" this story back on January 6th
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Maybe this is the beginning of Google Broadband. With all the other non-search areas they've gotten themselves into, maybe they're looking to take on MSN and Yahoo in the ISP realm.
GoogleISP: Dark fiber to your city, fiber to you home coming soon.
And after they can give everyone a super high speed broadband connection, it's just one more step to selling a subscription for the comping suite of web-based apps that GMail proves they're so good at.
if google were to go into the telecommunications business they could make a killing if they did it properly.
What i am thinking though, they want to build their own private network which links their many datacenters around the US, so that we can get our search results even faster, or any of the other things like gmail.
Storing mail in two seperate locations is possible, but it would make for a pain in the ass if it takes to long to sync the changes between the servers in different datacenters to get people even faster response times from gmail.
This is off course all speculation.
Google in the telecommunications being a competitor to Verizon, T-Mobile, bell, Comcast, OOL, and other internet providers would be a good thing. They would be on of the only companies that would know how to do VOIP the right way.
cat
Thinking about it... maybe Google is planning an entrance into the ISP market?
I mean, Google might be getting cheap rates for www.google.com, but that probably wouldn't extend to customers, plus accessability wouldn't be that great...
I'm not quite sure what Google's angle on the market would be, except perhaps high-speed/low-cost, but that doesn't seem as elegant as Google's usual offerings...
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
I would be. It's far from their core competency and there's so much competition in the telco business that everyone sells at cost anyway. Maybe a datacenter chain like Equinix would be a better acquisition target.
OK, here's my WAG. Google needs to up revenue soon, beyond what they are doing now. They provide a ton of services, quite a few of which are really free, as ads are easily ignored.
*Maybe* they will keep the freebie version of google for the peons, then offer a "corporate enterprise class scalable google data searching and management solution" whatever buzzspeak over this new controlled-by-them backbone setup. Say one of the features might be much better content filtering, spam control, antivirus scanning of webpages offered, whatever. Perhaps different search results, more fine tuning of results, more features, etc. Charge bigbuck$ for it.
Hello,
Considering what Google has built internally for server management and redundancy, I would hypothesize based upon available data (i.e. GFS) that they're looking to light up fiber between their data centers, while running either TCP/IP or IPv6 (with modifications of existing IGP and routing protocols, more than likely BGP or OSPF) between them.
This is a very smart move on their part, if this is true. This would allow them to do their own internal traffic control and shaping over a private network, and develop/modify algorithms for efficient transfer of data over said network, without having to "play" by Telco/ISP rules.
In other words, they're more than likely building their own global network to more efficiently transfer data over the Internet by completely bypassing it for their inter-server traffic. This is a very smart move, if true.
They're going to create a global super computer. Local servers gives higher performance. What do you think the Google bar is for? Coming versions will ask you if you want to donate your free CPU cycles to Google. Google in turn will sell these to corporations that needs CPU power.
Based on stuff I heard in another life, Google used to get transit contracts with the fastest connection they could get, but the lowest commited rate. The syncs used to take place in the proverbial top 5% of the 95th percentile.
As in: they used provider A for 36 hours, provider B for the next 36h, provider C for the next 36h, etc... (bear in mind it was not surfer facing transit, just used to sync up the DCs.)
They've probably reached the level where they've got too much data to get away with that scheme. So they've got a pretty simple choice:
- Pay for the commited rate they really need.
- Link the 2 Data Centers with dark fiber lit with 10GigE.
Based on the over provisionning most fiber companies did when they built their networks, there's a lot of room for negociation when you're shopping for fiber, especially when you can hang the promise of a huge internationnal network in the balance.
The second option is pretty much guaranted to turn out to be much more affordable.
Adding products like Gmail on top of their infrastructure changes the sychronization schedules... e-mail is far more time-sensitive than bulk updates sychronizing their web search index. It could simply be due to a change in their needs.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
What can a bunch of geeks do with a lot of fiber, a lot of money, and disruptive technology?
Google + WiMAX + VoIP = enough technology and brains to stomp any RBOC or cable company.
The only problem with this is that the WiMAX timeline is far away, and it's unclear how much the end-user antennas will go for. Will users want to install another dish?
Even if they don't go this route, that dark fiber could be a useful asset down the road. If they can price it well enough, they'll be on the "buy" side of a make-or-buy decision.
Maybe they'll buy akamai while they're at it.
One possible explanation is that Google is looking for something to do with their current $55B stock valuation. Other than making the founders incredibly wealthy, the high stock price by itself isn't particularly useful to the company. But it can be used as collateral for loans to acquire assets that could be useful both now and in the future. Given the massive storage and computing resources that Google already manages, I suspect that they can manage their own fiber network for very little incremental expense (I'm less sure about the physical care of the fiber -- who fixes your dark fiber when someone cuts it?). As they attempt to provide more and more services, they may simply want more control over the underlying transport.
returned 75 hits.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
First there was the web, ang Google became the best search engine, allowing you to check on anything, even if your credit card number is exposed somewhere out there.
Then there comes email, and Google figures out how to provide the best email service.
Next comes spam, and Google buys dark fiber to produce entry points into the Google Mail Facility, where you can rest assured that if the GMF sends you mail, it is not spam. The corollary will be, the only way to get email delivered is to have the GMF accept and deliver it.
Same Google knowledge is transferrable, massive cpu power to analyze email for spam patterns, massive database to identify/track spam sources, Google Way of cheap computers, smart software.
Why didn't I think of it? Oh, the day of spam is coming to an end! Oh, the humanity!