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Google's Sinister(?) Plans
puppetman writes "This week, Robert X. Cringely makes some interesting observations as to what Google's up to next. He theorizes that Google is looking to create a bandwidth shortage that will drive ISP/cable/telephone customers into it's open arms (often with the blessing of the ISP/cable/telephone company). The evidence: leasing massive amounts of network capacity, and huge data centers in rural areas (close to power-generation facilities). The shortage will only occur if the average bandwidth consumption by individual consumers skyrockets; think mainstream BitTorrent, streaming moves from NetFlix, tv episodes from iTunes, video games on demand, etc, etc. Spooky and sinister, or sublime and smart?"
Come now, Google don't do evil.
I love my sig.
Maybe Google will run fiber to my home out here in sunny Ridgecrest, CA. Verizon sure isn't going to any time soon.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
If microsoft was pulling some of the stuff that google had done in the past, people would be up in arms. Instead, simply because they're not microsoft, they get the public's and the IT's blessing.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
April first already?
"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."-THG
Quit your whining; at least your roads are paved.
I've been waiting for something faster than dial-up for ten years!
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Cringley's an idiot, and we're all dumber for having been exposed to this. Sinister? Creating a bandwidth shortage? How about anyone can see bandwidth usage is going up, and will likely do so further into the future. I don't really see how this can be considered anything other than gambling on a developing market. Sinister implies something evil. That can't be right, Google's credo is Do No Evil after all. To sum it up: Cringley=bad, Google=business.
Wow, just goes to show that maybe the tinfoil hat and magic 8-ball are correct sometimes! It kind of reminds me of when everybody thought it was just a fad or something.. and they were wrong.
C|N>K
How exactly does one "create" a bandwidth shortage?
It's Skynet, of course. Somebody get John Connor into hiding.
So total internet data traffic is going to multiply by 30 in the next 3-4 years you say? That's a nice statement to make without any research to back it up.
The only thing he's got is google buying up loads of fiber and apparently power for their datacenters, while the immediate goal for this is as yet is unknown to us, a takeover of the internet infrastructure would be one of the less likely scenarios.
So Google bought MILLIONS of dollars worth of cable and data centers in case bandwidth demand SKYROCKETS by some freak chance that Bittorrent suddenly becomes massive? And they're EVIL for considering this? Right.
Does that mean the blue E will be replaced by a blue G? Yeah, I know what is Internet, the blue E...
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
At least the blurb makes it sound like the author of the article thinks actually USING your bandwidth is a BAD thing. I think that if google (or anyone else, even microsoft or apple) gave people reason to use more of their bandwidth (like more streaming content, more stuff to download that appeals to joe sixpack without taking even as much effort as going to the pirate bay or another site to try and find a torrent) is a GREAT thing. At first it may cause the internet to have some pains (if its a sudden surge, most likely it'll be a slow acceleration), it'll be only temporarily before the ISPs upgrade their network's capacity (which several are already doing anyways), which would mean EVERYONE would end up with higher speeds much quicker.
How exactly would that be a bad thing (or did my not reading the article mean I completely missed the point? If so, I'm sure many a slashdotter will be correcting me)
Google only buys/own fiberoptic backbone. They have bought this beause it has been for sale really cheap, because there is a *huge* surplus of it.
Also, Google needs this for its long term strategy of delivering search functionality to the world without beeing controlled other fiber providers.
The bandwidht limitation is largely artifical and created by ISPs, as a revenue generating business model.
ISPs could open up the valve on all DSL lines, and not need any more fiber to support it. Maybe some cheap equipment upgrades here and there.
Example: A fiber cable may consists of a few hundred fibers delivering from 10Gb to 10TB for a total of 1-100Tb. A city like San Jose, CA, with 100k households, this gives 10Mb-10Gb per household. (And there are actually more than 1 fiber cable)
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
This is just plain good business. Of course, there are many nutjobs (rhymes with star-heft-miberals) that will always look at big business with shifty eyes. And, Google certainly is as big-business as they come. But good strategery like this is just common sense. They are most certainly not out to create a artificial (or whatever he is implying) shortage.
And, Google builds data centers in rural areas (and gosh, everywhere else) near powerplants for economic reasons as well. Heck, look at the economics of building that new data center in SC that they announced today. Average salary is shy of $50,000 for some few hundred jobs. Compare to placing that data center in suburban Chicago or San Jose or in Manhatten. I mean, this is just math. Makes for a pretty good conspiracy theory, though.
This Cringely article comes off very tin-foil hattish. Look at all the disclaimers and suppositions and "theories." Gosh, so shocking that a big company is "secret" about their overall strategy. He wants to know Google's "secrets" (strategry) just like an analyst of the oil industry wants to know BP's strategy. Any huge corporation is not going to let that out. Google is no more "secret" than anyone else. It's just that more people are asking Google.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
Frankly, I'm sick of commentators and "analysts" proposing outlandish theories with no hard evidence to back them up. Someone should create a website that tracks the accuracy of such predictions...
If you are about to write IT'S, ask yourself "IS IT 'IT IS'" ?
If it's not IT IS, then it's ITS.
Think: HIS HERS ITS.
not HI'S HER'S IT'S.
Otherwise you look like an idiot.
Google can't possibly corner the market on communications. It makes more sense as a defense against the breakdown of network neutrality -- the whole point of killing network neutrality is so that big teleco's can extort money from big network players like Google; the little guys aren't worth billing...
If Google owns it's own pipes, they have a level of immunity.
The shortage will only occur if the average bandwidth consumption by individual consumers skyrockets; think mainstream BitTorrent, streaming moves from NetFlix, tv episodes from iTunes, video games on demand, etc, etc.
Curiously, all of these things are being done by other companies, and Google are doing nothing of the sort. How strange. Or not, considering this is all random speculation.
Did he ever think that maybe they need TONS of bandwidth to replicate thier data between the thousands of servers in thier giant backend? Did he ever think that power costs are significant enough that not moving near cheap power is a significant business disadvantage? I work on a team dealing with exactly the same datacenter issues and I highly doubt any sinister plans on googles part (even though I don't personally trust them for completely different reasons).
The answer is easy, Google is just trying to keep up with the monster they have created.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
Ridgecrest? I grew up there! Greetings!
C'mon, people! Think about this for just a sec... Cringley's claiming that Google has been buying rights to data lines (future bandwidth) - secretly - for some time now. Cringley hypothesises that Google's motivation for this is their corporate insight concerning the future of a more bandwidth-intensive public. Assuming that this hypothesis is correct (it's reasonable), how is it sinister? Google sees that users are using more bandwidth, they see that they can position themselves in such a way as to capitalize it in the future. It's good business sense. Their stock probably is undervalued.
Anybody who has ever planned a large network (meaning .0000000000001% of Slashdotters) already knows that getting users to hog MORE bandwidth doesn't require an evil plot. All it requires is a network and attached computers.
If you build it, they will come. If you offer something for users to use, they will use it.
It's simple reality, no evil plot required.
I'd sure as hell jump at subscribing if Google offered an ISP service around here that was halfway decent.
Even if they *were* evil, they could hardly do worse than the local ISPs!
Welcome our new well-heeled big-piped overlords.
But the grammar standards of adults are pathetic.
/= its people, and I thought only kids were stupid enough not to know the difference.
"drive ISP/cable/telephone customers into it's open arms"
should be
"drive ISP/cable/telephone customers into its open arms"
Otherwise the first quote would expand to be
"drive ISP/cable/telephone customers into it is open arms"
which makes no fucking sense.
It's
Who here remembers Williams Communications and their bandwidth exchange, back during the height of the bouble? This is simply an extension of commodity hedging in the absence of a liquid market. The only way you can achieve such commoditization in the current environment is to invest in the related infrastructure. Much as any company hedges against the cost of key input commodities, critical to thheir business -think airlines investing in oil futures- Google anticipates increasesing commodity costs. There's absolutely nothing sinister about about this. It does however, seem to tip Google's hand with regard to their expectations of Net Neutrality. Vint has probably realized that his quest for net neutrality legislation will fail, and Google will face significant changes in network monetization through a vastly expanded peering fee structure. Where previously, peering fees were (and are typically now) paid by smaller network providers, to larger providers for the right to connect to their networks, in the future, such fees will be structured not based on network size but relative volume of traffic sorted by type. Google wants to minimize the impact of such peering fees (passed from colo provider to colo clients such as Google) by leasing as much network infrastructure as they can acquire. The simple point here is the fewer connections to foreign networks, the smaller the overall cost of peering under any model, regardless of the outcome of the net neutrality debate, but especially if it gets shot down. The point is, there's nothing sinister here. It's simple corporate risk management. Google would be negligent if they didn't do this.
-- CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Mr. Cringely
Do I have you mistaken for someone else or have you not been going on for some time with a meme about Google building some sort of super computer that is the Internet? Moreover, is it not established fact that none of these predictions have come true and Google has remained what it has always been, a search engine with text ads driving revenue and some interesting, but non-revolutionary and non-revenue producing side applications?
I'm calling you out. I ask that you fully disclose in a follow up article any stake-holdings you have in Google, its partners, or investors and, if existent, when you acquired those interests.
To the particulars of your argument, Google has a massively distributed database and a very high volume of queries. There need not be any conspiratorial or unusual reason for them to acquire lots of bandwidth and build distributed data centers aside from supporting their main functionality in a cost-efficient manner.
I do not think rampant speculation on the basis of scant fact, and repeated rampant speculation without any indication that past speculation has been borne out by actual facts, represents responsible journalism.
Sincerely,
A Concerned Slashdot Member
Robert X. Cringely seems to be saying the same things the providers say with regard to internet eutrality issues:
1 034_3-5537392.html
This bandwidth leveraging hasn't been a problem to date, but it is about to become a huge problem as we all embrace Internet video.. there is no way the current network infrastructure will support that level of use...Instead of using 1-3 gigabytes per month, as most broadband Internet users have in recent years, we'll go to 1-3 gigabytes per DAY -- a 30X increase that will place a huge backbone burden on ISPs. Those ISPs will be faced with the option of increasing their backbone connections by 30X, which would kill all profits, OR they could accept a peering arrangement with the local Google data center.
Google does support "neutrality" and I've never suspected it was from any idealism.
I knew they were buying up dark fiber a couple years ago:
"Google wants 'dark fiber'"
http://news.com.com/Google+wants+dark+fiber/2100-
All it takes is someone to offer $100 million in tax breaks over 30 years http://www.newsobserver.com/104/story/534056.html
After RTFA, here's a summary:
- Google owns (leases) tons of fiber, they control the bandwidth market.
- Google plans to build a lot of large data centers in rural areas.
- Google anticipates a massive growth in bandwidth usage due to p2p, youtube, etc.
- ISPs will be faced with buying tons of new bandwidth OR contracting with Google to use / connent to the nearby data center directly.
No sir. Google needs a lot of servers for their services. Sure they profit from their local data centers as edge proxies the same way Akamai does, but the whole theory about controlling ISPs, targeting contracts with your local ISP etc. is BS. These data centers are used for their CPU / memory power and then to minimize latency.
You do know that Apple is located in California?
... to coin the term GEvil? For shame, Columcille.
aslong as we get the gourmet meals and time to work on projects, let them take it over already.. it couldn't be worse than things already are..
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
One of the reasons that Google has been snatching all that dark fiber is so it can locate new network centers in areas where electricity is cheaper. Right now Google is pushing the envelope on their multi cpu platform to the point that power usage is of more concern than the cost of the hardware. Having access to all that dark fiber makes is easier to run a smooth distributed network, plus it does not hurt them if they decide to offer broadband services.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
Google has created its business on a single rock-solid concept: integrity.
Google will not route weird advertising to you just because they get paid for it. They will do their level best to allow you to run your own searches, and find whatever it may be that you seek. Any advertising is strictly ignorable in the right column.
Granting Google the possibility of ethical and honest conduct, I can think of a more likely possibility.
AT&T, the *Mother* of all telephone companies, wants to provide net services to all their customers. As part of their "services" they intend to randomly interrupt the flow of packets, effectively degrading the truly fearsome competitor to the phone company: Vonage.
Google, with power backups and significant broadband capability, can deliver what AT&T wants to disrupt: quality Vonage or other VOIP services.
After that, who needs MS? Google can be your phone company.
I sure trust them more than I do AT&T or Ed Whitacre.
All is paradox. Retired lawyer, so this is just one more layman's opinion.
Don't you mean AT&T? Why would Verizon run fiber to your home in CA?
Perhaps Google's research group has been assessing the requirements of it's beta offerings and has now recognized that to provide quality services, they need more bandwidth.o w+++-%22charlie+rose%22+-buy
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=type%3Atvsh
Or, perhaps Google has decided it's cheaper to pay for bandwidth and save on the datacenters.
If they build in a rural area near a power station, they save on land/rent and it would be a lot cheaper to add more power capacity when necessary. Employees have a lower cost of living, so may be willing to accept lower pay.
They only need to bandwidth to carry the data from there to the urban centers where the requests come from. Maybe on the scale of Google, it's cheaper to do things that way?
If Google is really building datacenters and buying cables to control the internet bandwidth, because "in the future" we will all use 3GB daily, and this is Google's bet, then they suck.
/me waits for a Google C*O to say: T1 is ought to be enough for anybody.
10 years ago everyone had dial-up. It took only a decade for everyone to download/stream movies. And the technology to transport data will only get better. It won't stop at cable, at 1MB or 2MB per second. Maybe it'll even be wireless. I wouldn't strategize my business around the non-existance of a technology that WILL come, and it will NOT take long.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Is there anyone else who thinks it's funny that somebody named Robert X. Cringely is accusing anybody of having sinister plans? That name belongs to somebody trying to kill Superman.
And post on Cringely's site, if you want him to read you.
Who here remembers Williams Communications and their bandwidth exchange, back during the height of the bouble?
Interesting.. I worked for a company that wanted to do that a couple of years back. They even claimed to be getting a patent on the idea... They'd just been bought out by this US investment company, sold on the flashy words ('if we get 1% of the bandwidth market you'll all be millionaires' and other crap (Yes the statement is factually true but the size of that 'If' dwarfs the rest of the statement)). They even had special routers on order that measured bandwidth usage/availability (now *that* would be a hard sell... shall I go for a cisco or this unknown company with no track record?? hmm...)
All the employees knew that it was hogwash but management was just seeing dollar sign. One of them even remortgaged his house to plough into the business. It turned out that this 'multi million dollar investment company' had a staff of 5 people. They'd tried this 3 times before and all of the ventures had gone bankcrupt.
I wonder if Williams Communications was in the early history of these clowns (given their patent claims).
If you google those rural facilities, say 'Google Ann Arbor' a google jobs link is the first hit. When you click on the job descriptions you'll notice they are looking for people to scan books, an IT staff for infrastructure needs, and HR for staffing.
I bet the bandwidth they're leasing is for hosting this among many of their other possibly unannounced projects. Which will have their own facility. Now imagine if they had some sort of cache synchronization routine between these facilities. And each one were devoted to cataloging the web servers hosted by that and neighboring ISPs, you think that might improve the performace of their search engine? Sorry, while I doubt all of Google's motivations are benign, they are supposed to make money after all, I seriously doubt they are planning to create a bandwidth shortage.
i've been reading slashdot for about three years now. in that time, i've seen titles go from announcement oriented (Gentoo 2005.0 came out!) to this kind of crap (Google's (Maybe?) Sinister(Huh?) Plans (It could happen?))
in just the past two days alone, i've seen sensationalist crap like this:
Hardware: Printers Vulnerable To Security Threats (OH ~GNOES LEZ GET RID OF ALL PRINTERS)
which only serves to spread FUD.
and this type of stuff:
Your Rights Online: Political Bloggers May Be Forced to Register
Science: Cancer Drug May Not Get A Chance Due to Lack of Patent
That sort of headline is not unlike CNN's headlines or even Fox's (Great President? or Greatest President?)
please editors, make a note to not post this sort of crap.
mod me flamebait / troll / whatever, but realize that three years ago this site would have modded this comment +3, Insightful.
People, please RTFA article first before confusing the biased story summary with what Cringely actually said. It is a very interesting column, and of course quite speculative. I didn't get the impression that Bob was suggesting anything sinister on Google's part, certainly I don't think he was suggesting that they would create a bandwidth shortage. What nonsense.
There's a whole lot of dark fiber out there, and the fundamental feature of P2P and P2G protocols is that they automatically distribute the load to make it difficult to overload the network. Sure, some of the peers may be far away, but if there is any network congestion as a result, the local peers will have the advantage and balance things out. If there is any planning along these lines, my guess Google is just betting on more information flowing, and lots of it.
However, I'd like to see a network infrastructure extension for variable power WiFi. That would scale without limit. As the density of the nodes increased, they would reduce their transmission power at each node, so the local connectivity remains constant. In regions with sufficient node density, you could take the wire/fiber backbones completely out of the equation. (My idea for this would include local accountability. Essentially you would ask your neighbors to borrow a cup of connectivity (or other resources), and they'd check your behavior with your other neighbors to see if you deserved the help or if you should go to the bottom of the priority queue.)
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Mod this guy up. This is the only logical reason why Google is doing what it is apparently doing.
Of course, hedging against a breakdown in Net Neutrality isn't quite as sexy as "Google's going to become SkyNet, OMGWTFBBQ!!!"
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
and avoid net neutrality issues. Google has more hits and content (with GooTube) than anyone else. If you wanted to bypass the bottlenecks in a very disorganized Internet (just look at the freaking maps, but take your heart medicine first) then you buy up NOC space and cache as much in a distributed network as you can.
On this one, Cringely is dead wrong.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Around here, backhoe appears to be the method of choice.
(Wish I were kidding...)
The guy is a joke. He doesn't even use his real name.
Have you looked at satellite Internet? The latency is terrible, but unless you're playing Quake, it's probably still better than dial-up.
http://outcampaign.org/
Cringely didn't call it sinister or even imply that it was. He just suggested that google was positioning itself to take advantage of the coming bandwidth shortage. The only passage that even suggests sinisterness was his aside that maybe gathering up leasing deals should trigger government scrutiny and that seemed to be only a remark on policy not google's plan.
It's only the tinfoil hat slashdoters that added the word sinister.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Most ISP are very reluctant to increase there capacity unless it's almost to the point where they are loosing customers.
Anything that drives services and network bandwidth forward and reduces it's cost is a wecome and wonderful thing.
It actually evens the playing field away from the New AT&T monopoly that controls almost all phone and cable TV today.
For the past 50 years the last mile has been the barrier keeping the Internet and any potential competition out of the game.
If google could change those rules so the last mile become ubiquitous and cheap, god bless them..
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
I have to snail-mail cassettes from my Vic-20 just to get posted on /.
Do you believe that?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Think about it.
There are two parts of an AI -- there's the information, and then there's the building relationships and queries to that information.
The Web is the information. Pretty soon, a majority of the information in the world will be within reach of Google's spiders. That's not a surprise.
But, the building the relationships between those data is the hard part. That's the cool part of Google -- they have millions of people doing that work, for free.
Google is using the queries and query patterns of their users to build that half of the AI. Say you want to know, oh, how to build re-entry vehicles. You can search the web, and find lots of information about re-entry vehicles - but how to do separate out the good from bad information? Maybe you can wait until people start *searching* for information about re-entry vehicles, and watch what they do. Watch which sites they click-thru to. Watch how long they spend at each site. Watch the referrer tags of people that come to Google, to see where they were before. Watch how they modify their search terms to refind their search. Watch when they are apparently satisfied in their searches.
Now, do this with a billion people a day.
It's gonna be interesting.
Thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I didn't RTFA, but I did search it for the word 'create'... it's not there. Google isn't netflix, bittorrent, or any of that stuff. Maybe the ability to predict the future based on information about the present is 'sinister', but then so is anything with a nonzero IQ score.
Granted, jars of mayo are clearly sinister.
Google Internet Cafe chain, coming soon to your neighborhood.
Didn't Disney exhibit the same behavior when they started buying up all kinds of land in Florida years ago ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Do you believe that?
No.
"Women are just like ninjas; They lie even when it is more convenient to tell the truth." ~ Unknown
Google builds Google Video. Google buys up fiber and builds datacenters. Google buys YouTube. My $5 is on Google starting Google TV - advertising tailored specifically to you, content flowing in from both major networks, who've played nice and licensed their content because of YouTube, and individual creative types (you). Think video blogging taken to the next level, something akin to Joost but with AdSense video ads and the ability for anyone to create content for it so that, essentially, you can run your own TV show, as long as its ad revenue supports its expenses. I bet the Apple TV supports it. I bet the Apple TV supports Joost at some point, too. It'll definitely work with the new Xbox 360, and Tivo will find a way to get in there, too. Local affiliates and their parent companies are doomed.
This bandwidth leveraging hasn't been a problem to date, but it is about to become a huge problem as we all embrace Internet video. When we are all grabbing one to two hours of high-quality video per day off the net, there is no way the current network infrastructure will support that level of use.
Personally I think this guy's an idiot. The more into the future you go, the more bandwidth we use, which is true - but what is also true is that RIGHT NOW this second we are using more bandwidth than we did yesterday, and the day before that.. yet I fail to see any signs of servers around the world suddenly bursting into flames because they're being flooded with packets.
This goes right along the theory of the whole internet blowing up one day because of over-use.. no wait, that IS the same theory.
From the article:
It is becoming very obvious what will happen over the next two to three years. More and more of us will be downloading movies and television shows over the net and with that our usage patterns will change. Instead of using 1-3 gigabytes per month, as most broadband Internet users have in recent years, we'll go to 1-3 gigabytes per DAY -- a 30X increase that will place a huge backbone burden on ISPs.
Hahaha, I wonder where he pulls these numbers out of? I may be using more bandwidth now than a year ago, but I doubt it's 30% more.. maybe more like 10% more (if that). The truth is that whatever our internet and bandwidth habits are, they will probably stay that way for a long time. So for example if 30% of the internet users are heavy bandwidth users, then it will most likely stay that way, even if the number of internet users grow by two-fold, only 30% of them will be heavy bandwidth users. The demand grows with the ammount of service the ISP's provide, but obviously he's not see'ing that.
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Seems you might be criticising him for lack of research when you haven't done any yourself. I suggest you read this thread that recently occurred on the NANOG mailing list -
Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
There already is.
Williams was and is an Oil infrastructure and services company. Their Communications subsidiary now provides cable, fiber and communications infrastructure services. At one point they tried to create a bandwidth exchange. I first became aware of them only when they started advertising on some of the sunday morning political discussion shows (along with Enron). I gater they were able to shed the exchange business without sustaining significant losses.
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
Yeah just like they put DSL in college heights, verizon is just lazy.
"When they invent bitch slaps that can go through a monitor you better f'ing duck" --deft (253558)
Nobody's said "I for one welcome our new data harvesting/search algorithm overlords" yet!
First Google usage would have to exceed SPAM (and DNS traffic). How likely is that?
... And fiber to the curb and fiber to the premises will take care of the denser population areas and well, DSL and cable modem service in rural settings already have enough issues to limit their bandwidth they won't be much concern ... :-)
When the fiber boom of the 90s took place they laid fiber bundles from 22 up to 720 fibers in a cable and often more than one cable. I watched 'em bury 5 conduits and feed 3 of em with high count cables across WY. And there are 12 independant fiber bundles going up the street about 1/2 mile from my house. And I am not in a major city just one around 100K in population. Currently there is so much dark fiber in place that it would take next to no time to upgrade the backbones using those fiber runs to just use more fibers. Currently they almost always increase the capacity of the existing pairs in use through more modern equipment keeping a lot of dark fiber still on the market. So any shortage of bandwidth will be at the "last mile" to the consumer
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Google uses more bandwith then...well, a hella lot, and it just keeps going up. Bandwith means lotsa fiber or copper. And them server guys. There's a ton of fiber laying around cheap to buy. Google got boatloads of cash sitting around getting moldy. Price of land and electricity certainly ain't going *down*.
;)
What would you do?
I really think it's that simple. It's like when I go to home depot for something on purpose, usually related to the "honey-do" list., look in wallet, a few spare bucks left over, snag some extra tool I don't already have, just in case I might need it, and I usually do eventually. Whut the heck and stuff. Just their "whut the heck" stash has a lot more zeros on the side of that digit to the left of the decimal point than mine.
the bastards
Its almost like we didn't read the same article. Cringely's premise was not that Google had been gathering fiber to create a shortage but that they were preparing for the coming shortage that will occur as user bandwidth increases 30X with bit torrent video usage becoming mainstream. I am frequently amazed at what others gather when we read the same text.
Can we please PLEASE PLEASE stop posting stories from these ridiculous nincompoops? NOTHING they say ever has any merit, its ALWAYS just to drive ad revenue, and ALL of us have better things to do than read these socially retarded jackasses' hair-brained theories.
Slashdot editors, I beg you - if the words Dvorak, Cringley, or Enderle appear in a submission, can you pretty please just delete it?
Google is likely building the Oregon server facility because the electricity is cheap, and the quality of life is such that hiring will be fairly easy. There is worldclass windsurfing, flyfishing, white water boating, skiing(OK, maybe not world class, but quite good), and some of the most beautiful country in the world. MSFT is doing the same in Moses Lake, an eastern washington town, for similar reasons. The BPA power rates are favorable, and BPA has good PR value, hydropower not being from carbon generating sources. I'm not inclined to think there is much that is nefarious there, but I'm a trusting soul.
As to the bandwidth, I don't think the author considered the simple thought that Google serves a cubic buttload of pages, and maybe company management think it likely that their load will grow. Afterall, YouTube probably uses a little bit. This just says to me that their content businesses are successful.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
I thought we already went over this, but you PC users are so slow to learn. It's because you're boring, unadventurous folk, so intimidated by passion that you'll shy away even from missionary. But we Mac users? When we have sex, we don't just have sex. We have S E X. It's not news to those of us longtime Macworld and WWDC attendees that Rendezvous (cum Bonjour) lives up to its name. And when it comes to juggling commitments, the word "reschedule" is not in our vocabulary, if you know what I mean. There's a reason events in iCal are see-through.
And somewhere in that frantic fuckfest, sure, you're bound to stick it in a pooper or two. But you know what? We're not the neurotic type of person to care. Even leaving the sausage out of it, we're still having more sex than you.
Lonely and loveless as is your life, perhaps it's time you came to realize that beige really ain't all that hot.
I still recall the internet bubble and all those companies that went out and built fiber cable networks that are still BLACK because they overbuilt. Many of those companies even folded after spending billions of investors dollars. The evil Google conspiracy theory of creating a bandwidth shortage is a waste of bandwidth itself.
I'm sorry, but I think Google is one of the best businesses I have ever seen. From everything I hear, their work environment is awesome. They have honestly good products (buggy, fine, but much less buggy than M$FT products, so don't complain about the annual bug in Gmail). Google doesn't force things upon users. Google doesn't make secret agreements with other companies to have exclusive control over an aspect of their sales (M$FT does). Google wins by having a good product, not by handwaving and using legalese to trap customers. Google caters to average users as well as advanced users. Google supports the open source community. Google funds a lot of cool projects. Google's projects support and promote the idea of free information and knowledge, and making information more accessible.
What more could you ask for?
And why would Google want or care for a shortage of bandwidth? Shortages of bandwidth are not likely to happen any time soon. While processors are starting to see speed limits before we turn to physicists for help, communication lines are nowhere near the bit rate limits that are possible with current technology. Moore's law will still hold for the coming years in terms of bandwidth, at least.
The simple answer is that Google is trying to end-run MS and destroy their monopoly. Anybody who takes MS head-on, loses. So they are increasing the value of the net to the end user. I suspect that by 2008, we will see a free Google OS. It will be Linux. At this time, I do not fear Google or the ppl that currently run it. Problem is that they will not be in charge all the time. In addition, as they say, power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. If nothing else, look at MS. 25 years ago, BG was a good guy. Now, he is the epitomy of absolute evil (except for the foundation which was designed to get ppl to think that he is a good guy).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
..Google is doing evil in some respects, but I think they are doing alot more good in a more holistic fashion. Think of these rural datacenters as spreading the technological wealth across the country and away from high-priced pockets like major city centers. They are bridging the great divide of the haves and haves-not. Just like building an autoplant in some rural area, the offshoot businesses and infrastructure are what builds a strong, vibrant nation and economy. Think of a utopian future where we can be a part-time organic farmer, a SaaS entrepreneur, raise our family with the values that built this great country on the farms of our grandfathers, and drive around in hydrogen-powered eco cars. Google is run by smarts guys, they are futurists that can see where to go.
Here's what I don't get: How exactly would the increasing bandwidth useage of customers force their ISP to come crawling to Google? Since the ISPs have a de facto monopoly in most markets, their more demanding customers will just be told "Tough shit: you assholes saturated our network and now your connection is slow. It's not our problem, it's that evil bittorrent." Have they ever done anything else in response to traffic slowdowns? To picture them crawling on their knees to Google because they want oh-so-badly to provide customers with the bandwidth they want... that's just funny.
Let's say you take YouTube and Google Earth seriously, and really believe it's gonna take off or you're going to grow them, that's hefty content and you need two things, hefty bandwidth and local nodes for efficient network dissemination. Come on people this conspiracy stuff is just spectacularly unimaginative.
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I am at a loss to understand why folks continue to take this man seriously. Two years running he's modified predictions so that he can say that he got them right, specifically as it looks like he has an axe to grind against the company he made the predictions against. See http://blogs.sun.com/tpenta/entry/modifying_your_p redictions_does_not for more.
Tp.
Don't complain. The stones with binary dots are too heavy for FedEx, so I have to walk to their headquarter in two meters of snow.
[sig]
it's not going to let anyone "do evil".
Which is really going to piss alot of people off...
When the country falls into chaos, politicians talk about 'patriotism'. Lao-Tzu
People just don't fail to beg notice out of totally outlandish notions.
Yuck!
You can't really 'beat' Wolverine, of course, he just keeps coming back. Eventually, Batman's technology would run out of charge and his armor would be shredded, and he would be toast.
Of course he would talk Wolverine down long before that, and they'd go get a few dozen pints...
Of course Wolverine would also be able to out drink the Bat, but Batman would hook up with the best looking babe in the joint and take off before that ("wanna shee my basht mobeeel"), and Wolverine would get pissed and beat the cr*p out of everyone left at last call.
When the country falls into chaos, politicians talk about 'patriotism'. Lao-Tzu
Remember all of those stories regarding Google investing in ip-over-power lines a couple of years back? Google is doing a remarkably smart thing:
building data centers in rural areas near power generation facilities.
This is smart because: land there is cheap, is close to power, which means less chance of outage... and, well its close to power (see point 2)
remember those stories about google investing in ip-over-power?
They're already looking to invade newspapers, the next frontier is TV.
Think about it... I think Cringley is blowing a lot of smoke; he always does at the beginning of the year.
Could the reason my resume wasn't a deliriously happy match at Google be that I am right handed?
And it's frightening to think how easy would be for them to find that out.
a company is evil for encouraging people to use services? OMG STRING THEM UP! this has to be the stupidest crap i've ever read.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Howdy, neighbor!
The Dark Knight is basically unbeatable.
"So remember kids, keep saving those quarters, because with enough MONEY you can do ANYTHING!"
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
"He theorizes that Google is looking to create a bandwidth shortage that will drive ISP/cable/telephone customers into it's open arms"
Well I think that Google is planning to launch a mission to the moon in which they will mine the cheese that we all know it's made out of and use it to incite a mouse and rat invasion against the planet Earth.
Now, why doesn't my theory have it's own Slashdot entry yet?
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
Such a logically submitted argument. No one can argue with it ...!!! Pinhead
To secure peace is to prepare for war
Well, with the different snippets of news that come out, they're doing SOMETHING.
Mobile shipping containers (to negate a datacenter fire?), buying out the fiber, building massive data centers, etc..
Perhaps he's right, but perhaps Google is planning something a little LESS sinister.
Like, maybe Gubuntu is a reality that they're developing to grab the little old lady market. Just run down to wallymart and grab a $50 device that will "just work(TM)", be fast and lean (and ROM based so it can't be futzed up). They'll need content servers for that.
Or maybe they REALLY think they'll have a corporate market. Plug and play device that will take on 90% of the corporate market (oh, and yeah, sorry, all your data are belong to us!), putting those legacy Win32 apps on Citrix servers (provided by Goog?).
Or maybe they're just hedging their bets and controlling the majority of dark bandwidth to interconnect their servers and make a low-latency cheap GoogleWAN.
Or maybe they're scared of "Net Neutrality"..
Or MAYBE they're building SKYNet
= Grow a brain...
Burton MacKenZie has a speculative analysis on google's ascendancy to power as well.
Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
If you guys ever have any questions, comments or concerns; AOR ever feel like our services may enhance the Google endeavors, please do not hesitate to contact us. Thanks, Chief Information Officer // The Galactic Pigeon Poop Removal Service
Don't try time this is at light home, but.
Spooky and sinister, or sublime and smart?
Try criminal. I don't think Google are as stupid as all that, though.
by increasing the demand or decreasing the supply. Both seem feasable to me.
Offer easy acces to high bandwith content, demand goes up (good?).
Buy up large parts of the infrastructure and shut parts of it down (evil?).
Or create demand but don't add extra bandwith. (good? evil?)
Of course there will be other bandwith providers filling the gaps, especially when the demand goes up, but if you are a large player you could probably make some good money with such strategies anyway.
... for not stating the obvious:
"I, for one, welcome our new overlords."
Yes, they're dabbling in evil these days. Deciding if it is for them, and how far they want to go into it. But they do offer great search. Nothing comes close. I even do my spellchecks in Google these days; it's contextual so give it a few words and its guesses will blow you away. The Microsoft Visual Studio help searching is so lousy, it is faster for me to dialup and search Google instead.
If Google data centers use so much electricity that they are beneficially located near power generation facilities, they must have a hell of a cooling load. Someone should think of the obvious and sell that heat in one form or another to nearby commercial or domestic customers. Not entirely straightforward perhaps, but it would be the responsible thing to do in this day and age.
This is blue-sky thinking but...
Right now, Google is building infrastructure -- distributed data centres, lighting up dark fibre trunks etc. That way they've got their own backbone capacity that can't be leveraged away from them with price hikes or lock-in deals between the existing backbone operators and the big telecomms/data providers.
Step two would be the biggie -- Google subcriber fibre. They enter the "last-mile" business and provide their own seriously high-capacity home and small business connections. The Big Guys can't touch them at this point since they have their own backbone operation already in place, not requiring essential ATM hookups that are a de facto momopoly. It's a Google-owned operation end-to-end.
The future is higher capacity, higher bandwidth for the individual user. BitTorrent, Joost and other streaming technologies are in their infancy but lots of distributed data centres are ideal for supporting that kind of messy ad-hoc multiple-connection data model. Google's planning seems to fit that vision of the future, but only if it gets down and dirty in the supply business rather than just standing off and expecting others to carry their content (if they feel like it) to the end-user who pays the bills.
Step 3? Profit! Expect the dinosaurs to scream like raped apes when something like this is sprung on them -- they believe they have a de-facto monopoly on last-mile (hence the Net Neutrality fan-dance), but it's something that could easily be overturned by the right iconoclastic company.
They've been campaigning against it, but if the tiered internet takes off, it's better to be prepared. Massive bandwidth also gives them leverage against people that would restrict google services to lower tiers.
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
against at&t and other shits' attempts to monopolize and rule internet by the fiber.
Read radical news here
Google is out to do one thing, and that is make money.
When i turn on a new PC i get google shoved down my face, when i install winzip i get google shoved down my face, when i upgrade java runtimes on my desktop and workstations i get google shoved down my face, when i try and do anything on the net i get google shoved down my face.
Infact i see more "GOOGLE" staring at me then i do any other "brand" and its wearing me thin. Not to mention that google has no user privacy plan, no way to allow you to delete your accounts, no way to cancel services, no way to talk to a human for 99% of its services. I'd rather pay a few hundred bucks to speak to a human than deal with the BS that is google customer service.
Maybe you like all the free crap they offer but if you bother to scratch the surface and open your eyes a bit you will see how they're not just a "Good company" but someone out there to make money at whatever cost.
and you think they care about the consumer? HA HA HA HA
people like you make me laugh
Excellent - the natural progression of this would be to run one cable from each computer on the internet to every other computer on the internet - so as to not have to pay to share cables. And if the major ISPs get their way it might be cheaper that way too.
Gotta love technological steps backwards. I always thought the whole point of packet-switching is that you DON'T need 3 bazillion circuits between point A and point B. But we'll end up having them anyway since every ISP is going to be at 1% utilization but charging and arm and a leg just the same.
I've read this post somewhere before... probably in another slashdot article.
Hey, mods, get this guy; I believe he's a spammer-troll.
That said, macs are kinda lame, but that's WAY offtopic in a Google discussion.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
Sinister? Hmmm...maybe. Are Larry and Sergey left-handed?
Google is not creating a bandwidth shortage. It's predicting future demand and preparing for it. They know there's not going to be enough for everybody.
Puppetman, did you write this or just cut and paste badly?
>"Google is looking to create a bandwidth shortage"
>"The shortage will only occur if the average bandwidth consumption by individual consumers skyrockets"
If customers usage jumps Google isn't 'creating' a shortage, the customers are. How is it 'evil' for them
to offer a service people voluntarily want to participate in without coercion?
If you're going to try and create controversy out of thin air you need better
material.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
The smoke sign67 for this post was c0rrptued by r41n.
Godless heathen.
Google consumes between 50-60% of the bandwidth every month on our Absolute Michigan site*.
Their spider visits hundreds of times each day despite the fact that our site is only updated a day**. Interesting (at least to me) is how poorly our massive "All Michigan, All the Time" site does on the general search for "Michigan" on Google. Way, way after a totally defunct Michigan alternative news site. I assume that most database generated sites experience the same thing.
*Google is also the largest referrer, so it's not as if they are all bad!
**Yes, I am aware of the "changefreq" variable in Robots.txt and Google sitemaps. Most people certainly are not and even aware of these options, let alone using them.
Absolute Michigan
Your argument is they're buying a bunch of resources that won't be valuable unless the demand for bandwidth goes up. Encouraging usage is not evil. It encouraging people to just use the network.
That's like saying buying deep oil wells or tar sands because you expect oil prices to go up above $80 is sinister. It's not. It's speculating on the price of a resource.
While there is some economic argument that speculation is somewhat harmful, the entire US is speculating on stocks and house prices, so this isn't particularly notable.
--Michael
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
Do you have pr0n tapes?
Would you trade pr0n with me? I'm paying for the shipping all the way to Afghanistan.
Best Regards,
Junis.
When I read the article, I didn't see anything about Google creating the shortage; they're just predicting it and positioning themselves to take advantage of it.
Hey, you try to find an open nick these days!
I don't know about you, but I could go for less iSex and more wiiSex.
those of us longtime Macworld and WWDC attendees that Rendezvous (cum Bonjour) lives up to its name
... undiscriminating ... sexual preferences, I'd say.
Well, MacWorld yes indeed, as you can expect from getting a large number of healthy mixed sex people together for any avidly shared interest, but WWDC? Since the crowd there almost exclusively conforms to neither of my qualifiers to "people" above, poster must have an amazing ability to find Teh Magic Invisible Babes, or has
I think this is all part of google's plans to get into the video on demand market. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if they are in talks with set top box makers to include a google video on demand function as part of the hardware, it would be really easy to implement. They have already been in talks with content providers for a long time and I wouldn't be surprised if they roll out "google tv" in the next year. This would allow studios to make available their entire back catalog of television shows and movies, with searching so you can find that exact episode you want to see. They already do extensive data mining via your google account, which is tied into google mail, google desktop and google searches, add in your television and movie viewing (with google TV) and product purchasing (with google wallet or whatever they just rolled out) info, and I can see them deliver ultra-targeted high premium advertising with built in one click purchasing option through your remote. That would make a KILLING.
I thought XML was the big conspiracy. The huge bloat it creates drives bandwidth, storage and RAM needs.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck filled with data cassettes.
The carrier pigeon service this winter isnt all that great hopefully this message makes it...
Doctors do Massage in Longview WA now, who knew?
Past: MSFT Shills everywhere; Present: GOOG shills everywhere.
For all those who believe in Google's marketing slogan "don't be evil", wake the hell up.
Google is yet another large corporate entity intent on making profits. They will achieve that by whatever means they deem fit. Heads could roll tomorrow, big shots could be replaced by someone from the NSA. Maybe Pagey and Sergey would be zapped by an evil ray and they'd turn over all our records to the CIA.
Don't be too complacent about google's increasing power. You never know when they'll shaft you.
... with the very bad design of google groups.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Knowing that carriers like AT&T want to charge Google a surcharge and have basically threatened to give bandwidth preference to others what else can they do. Poor carrier broadband coverage in rural areas my lower their costs but it also cuts into Google's revenue stream. Also consider that high bandwidth is a requirement for web based office applications. Google can't depend on the carriers to supply it.
Thank a veteran -- George
http://img150.imageshack.us/img150/6645/08wwdcm5pi .jpg
And now, a PSA from David Lynch.
We all know how things go from there. Mister Rogers wins.
Ah. Low standards.
"... the most sophisticated, high-class, debutante ... bus station skanks."
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
I wonder if the location of the "data centers" in rural areas and near power plants actually has to do with Google's investment in BPL (broadband over power lines) technology. Perhaps Google will roll this out in a big way soon? The FCC seems to be one of the biggest cheerleaders for the technology. http://www.eham.net/articles/11388
"a truck filled with data cassettes" is just storage,
you need to get it movin to get some bwidth
While the amount of fiber laid is underutilized by an order of magnitude or two, there is a far more limited ROUTING capacity. Existing routers would melt under the load of 10Gb per household in a large city all trying to download something through bittorrent... and that's even assuming all that dark fiber has any equipment at all on either end.
When you're willing to drop a few hundred million dollars on routing hardware for San Jose to light up all that fiber, you get back to me.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.