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

[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: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.