Google Router Rumors

An anonymous reader writes "There's a new rumor that Google is developing its own router. The company won't comment on the story, but it's been in the hardware business for a while and expanded its presence with Android. If Larry Ellison can go halvsies with HP on a server, then Eric Schmidt should certainly be able to make Cisco nervous."

Comments

In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried

[eldavojohn]

Even looking at Google from the outside, even by just knowing that they have hundreds of thousands of desktop machines behind their world class search, even just knowing that those machines have to be connected someway somehow .... you know they

1. Already have something that beats what Cisco offers.
2. Have been testing/improving it for years.
3. Can simply point to their success as reasons you should buy into their technology (no matter how proprietary it is).

I seem to remember rumors of them building their own insane (10 GbE) hardware switches. And I don't think that's hard to imagine as nothing on the market at the time could possibly meet their needs.

Of course, there's a lot of questions that remain to be answered ... like many claims they could not be operating on TCP/IP stacks on the inside. Because it's such a resource hog in some respects but that's irrelevant--I'm certain they can apply some of their ideas universally. I would put my money on them being the leader in research on networks and network theory ... probably past Cisco even (although behind the NSA as no one's ever sure about those guys). I feel that networking is so closely tied to their bread and butter search application that they should be dumping huge R&D into that field. I can't offer proof but it certainly makes sense to me.

And all I can say is that it's about time someone put pressure on the home & enterprise networking hardware companies. What a stagnant squabbling market that has become.

Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried

[blahplusplus]

"And all I can say is that it's about time someone put pressure on the home & enterprise networking hardware companies. What a stagnant squabbling market that has become."

If they do get into network tech, I seriously hope they release some home routers. I'm probably not the only one tired of having to reboot home routers every so often, especially with multiple people connected and having their wireless connection suddenly drop.

Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'd be very surprised if they had anything that could, or would even be interested in, solving the basic problem with home routers, which is that they are cheap crap and built right down to price. All the ingredients necessary to build highly reliable home routers are already in place, it's just that they cost enough that people will leave them on the shelf, en masse, in order to buy $40 d-link boxes.

There are plenty of options for robust routers, even smallish ones; but the cost of entry will be 2 or 3 times higher than the cheapies.

Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried

[duguk]

I've had problems with both Netgear and Linksys routers, usually because of the cheap PSU's they use. Put it on a UPS and haven't had to reboot my home Linksys or Netgear (WRT54G and DG834N WDS'd together) in years now.

Mostly seems to stem from power fluctuations, google search brings up nothing specific, but anecdotal evidence on my part and some customers seem to agree. Anyone else have this?

Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried

[pyite]

Isn't Juniper's business plan to install FreeBSD on cheap embedded hardware and pretend that it's special-secret-proprietary-magic? I wouldn't be surprised if Google could undercut them, for in-house use at the very least.

This is not really true. On the higher end Juniper boxes, while the control plane is running FreeBSD, the real work is done on the forwarding plane which is comprised of custom ASICs. You can't route at an enterprise or carrier level using commodity hardware.

If Google is building an in-house router, it's down to the hardware design level. Either they're developing their own ASICs (plausible) or they're using merchant silicon (even more plausible) and rolling their own OS and chassis.

Re:All that I need now is google underwear!

[pemerson]

Don't hold your breath, have you seen the Google Appliance?

Re:If they do

[Kickboy12]

I really hope they throw in IPv6. There are no consumer-level routers available with IPv6 support; it's been driving me crazy. Everyone will probably be forced to buy new routers in a few years anyway.

With that said, I think Google is probably developing a router for their own in-house use. I have doubts this will actually hit the consumer market.

Re:Google was just trying to save money

[mshannon78660]

The problem is that there's someone out there for each one of those obscure features, and if you don't support it your product won't even make it in the door.

Too right on this point. I used to work for Cisco, and was always amazed at the number of bugs filed by customers around really obscure and esoteric features. Every one of those obscure features is in IOS because somebody (usually somebody big with deep pockets) is still using it... Even simple things like OSPF timers - they all have to be adjustable, because some big shop has decided that they can squeeze an extra .1% of bandwidth out of their pipes by fiddling with those timers - and if your new box requires them to reconfigure their whole network to standards (or worse yet, to the values that worked best in Google's network) they're not going to be very interested...

Re:TFA says Juniper is doomed. Not so fast.

[LWATCDR]

Or Google could buy Juniper. Let the rumor drive down the stock and pick them up at fire sale prices.

Re:TFA says Juniper is doomed. Not so fast.

[bberens]

I've often heard this referred to as the Wal-Mart effect. Once Wal-Mart distributes your product nationally, they basically own you. Because once you ramp up production to meet Wal-Mart needs, you can't just scale back down if they drop you... and they can and will drop you if you do not behave.

Re:If they do

[Anonymous Coward]

The lines between software and hardware are actually really blurry. Most NICs, for example, have hardware which assists in manipulating packets--anything from simply managing the checksums to VLAN tagging. Some cards even come with prioritization in the ASIC. Then you get highly programmable NICs which basically include an FPGA and a programming interface. With these, you can implement a somewhat arbitrary portion of the TCP/IP stack in the FPGA.

"But it's still softare!" you may cry. Well, maybe. But that's the point. The line between software and hardware is wide and blurry these days which, incidentally, is part of the reason why we have binary blogs for wireless drivers in the Linux kernel (they're basically firmware for the cards which the OS loads on boot.)

So saying "the software level" really just doesn't make sense. The layers in the OSI model don't distinguish between hardware and software--in fact, software isn't really mentioned except in layer 7 (the application layer.)

Re:Not in "hardware business," won't sell routers

[pyite]

Huh? Gigabit ethernet is "hardly relevant"? What world are you living on?

The world of high performance networking. GigE is "hardly relevant" to the notion of building your own router because it's now ubiquitous. Everyone can do GigE and cheaply. There's really no money to be saved by building your own GigE router. 10 GigE is what everyone needs. If Google is building any hardware, rest assured it's for non-blocking 10 GigE port density and price.

Well, it's hard to refute a statement that uses marketing-speak like "enterprise-level pps performance". A commodity PC can achieve gigabit throughput, though

It's not marketing-speak. Poor packets per second performance is a common problem with networking gear. In actuality, it's a very normal "market-speak" thing to quote Gbps numbers without specifying packet size (like you did). Do you know the difference between being able to forward 64 byte packets at GigE and 1500 byte packets at GigE? Hint: small frames/packets can often kill commodity PC routers. So saying something "can achieve 2-3 Gbps" is meaningless if you don't specify a packet size.

And to be clear, Vyatta might very well be able to do 2-3 Gbps with 64 byte packets. Google really wouldn't care though, as 2-3 Gbps is nothing.