Slashdot Mirror
Is Google Planning To Fibre Britain?
Barence writes with this excerpt from PC Pro: "Google has emerged as a surprise contender to invest in Britain's fibre broadband network. The search giant yesterday announced plans to build a gigabit fibre broadband network in the US. The test network will see Google deliver fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) connections to up to half a million US homes. The move raises the possibility that Google is behind the Conservative Party's ambitious plans to deliver nationwide 100Mbits/sec connections by 2017. Parliamentary sources have told PC Pro that the Tories' plans were based on foreign investment in the UK broadband network."
Someone has to do it... When they are done in Britain they should come and lay fibre all around New Zealand.
Google have tried network infrastructure before - they even made it free to use: http://www.google.com/tisp/
Is Google Planning To Fibre Britain?
No, because there is no such verb as fibre (nor fiber, for that matter).
At the bottom of the
Great, kick the ISPs with some heavy competition.
But I'm getting a little scared of Google.....To many fingers in to many pies. We are meant to use a Google Thin Client, to access Google Services, over Google Fibre....
They make their money by gathering data about us from our data. Shouldn't that make us question them owning so much of our data? They could have us by the short and curlies. Maybe "don't be evil" makes that safe for now, but who knows what the future holds? Even if Google can for ever be trusted, and don't give the data to those who can't be trusted, it's them who decide who to trust! We can not trust the markets to resolve this. Consumers will just blindly sleep walk into this if it makes for a easy life now. Which they might with Windows being so bad for malware, virus etc etc (because of the nature of Windows and it's users). "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin - 1775
So at every juncture Google will be connected to everything?
Potentially access the interner via a Goggle ISP, accessing Google DNS, using Google search, communicating via Google email, using Goole chat and Google Buzz with my friends.
Am I being paranoid or will my privacy become a moot point?
I do use Google search and gmail on a regular basis and it's also free of charge. In return they use my data - cannot complain about that.
If it really bothered me I can use alternatives.
I think it is commendable that Google are willing to roll-out fibre (in the USA only at the moment) and improve the technology.
But "holy crap" that is an expensive undertaking!
I read about this somewhere else and I think Google were going to charge a "competitive" fee for access.
Broadband in the UK now largely sucks arse because the cost of improving/replacing existing lines is very expensive. No company is willing to take the risk so Google stepping forward ideally is a "good thing".
However, if they can guarantee the same rights some other ISPs in the UK then great and I am willing to pay for it. If Google want to analyse all my packets of data and use it to advertise stuff to me then I'm not so sure I will like this development.
Entities like Phorm, BT, Virgin & Tiscali (Talk Talk) are more than happy to follow the UK Government's / music industry's lead on intrusive surveillance. That's why I refuse to use thier services.
If Google want to lay down infrastructure then that's fine - as long as I have a choice to do otherwise.
This is mainly due to Eric Schmidt's comments on your expected privacy.
I still want the freedom to choose while I have it.
You still haven't delivered the algorithms you promised to open 12 years ago. Your top executives believe that no-one online is entitled to privacy (unless he is a top Google exec, who will deny press information to journalists who publish information about him). You require NSA clearance for any significant technical positions.
Only an idiot today would think you "do no evil". You're just like any nasty group in its early years - start off promising the world, slowly reneging on promises which matter, and one by one revealing your true intentions. You give people the sense of security they'll so easily swallow until it's too late to clamour for alternatives.
We don't want you in the UK. BT is a heap of steaming shit, but at least their gross incompetence limits their ability to cooperate effectively with the Crown Estate of Mandelson.
Please stop verbing nouns.
That corporate whores enjoy fucking with language is no good reason for us to bend over and spread ’em.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
There isn't one, any more than there is a verb for Wednesday.
But will this service be HTTP-only like the Wifi Google provides at some airports? After all protocols other than HTTP and maybe XMPP don't really fit into Google's way of doing business.
There are lots of places as little as 2 miles from the town center that have piss-poor broadband because of the way telephone exchanges are located. Fiber to the Home/Fiber to the Cabinet is the obvious solution, but British Telecom have a monopoly on last-mile wiring in the UK*, and have very little incentive to deliver high-speed broadband to homes. And let's not even talk about exchange capacity, or their traffic-shaping practices. So yeah, if Google or anyone else is going to get involved, more power to them. Britain's positively stick-in-the-mud compared to Scandinavia, Korea and Japan**, and it'll take a lot of doin' to bring it into the 21st century.
*except for Hull and some cabled areas (and I think Virgin's cable ducts were dug by BT)
**though to be fair, most of the high-speed internet in these places is to be found only in densely populated urban areas. Anyone know what broadband in lightly populated small towns/villages is like in Scandinavia/Korea/Japan?
PS. There's a great site for UK Slashdot readers -- Broadband Notspots UK, it's worth a visit if you're checking out what a particular place is like broadband-wise.
Go somewhere random
This is the industry that twisted "architect" into a verb. Presumably "build" or "code" weren't pompous enough.
From the article: "Parliamentary sources have told PC Pro that the Tories' plans were based on foreign investment in the UK broadband network. Google is one of the few companies with the necessary capital and motivation to invest in British broadband" so this story is based soley on the fact that Google is a foreign Internet company with money?
Well my fkn broadband connection is (UK South Coast). I hope Google do step in and do this because BT sure as hell take little interest in my little village (that's assuming Google will!)
AT&ROFLMAO
Actually, London is a problem - it is spaghetti under the streets and a lot of areas have poor connectivity.
However, you really do need to reconsider your voting. The Party that wants us out of the EU (civil liberties, human rights) seems to want to allow us to be bought by the US. Energy privatisation under Thatcher just worked so well, didn't it? So well that we pay the Germans and the French for the privilege of supplying us with energy, and then they nearly run out of gas because they have emptied our tanks to be sure their home markets are OK in a cold spell. And we have to be bailed out by the Russians. And now the idea is to get the US to pay for our broadband infrastructure so that for the rest of time our money can be exported to US companies, who will naturally bend over backwards to supply our data to the US and avoid European data protection laws.
The Conservatives went wrong when they appointed a PR man with media connections to run the Party rather than an old fashioned English patriot. I can't see how David Davis (who understands civil liberties) would have gone along with this. It would be funny if it was not so sick that the Conservatives are run by the man who did PR for the channel that puts on Big Brother.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
In case anyone doesn't realise, there's going to be an general election in a couple of months or so. The current extremely unpopular party is likely to be replaced by another slightly less unpopular one with broadly similar policies, the main difference being that instead of being fronted by a dour Scotsman they have a posh ex-PR bloke with a nice smile. At this time politicians on all sides are more likely than ever to say stuff and not mean it.
What the Tories actually said was this:
http://www.conservatives.com/News/News_stories/2010/01/Conservatives_to_deliver_nationwide_superfast_broadband_by_2017.aspx
The key weasel words there are "up to 100mbps" and "the majority of homes". Roughly 50% of UK homes have cable available now, and Virgin Media are already offering headline speeds up to half that. 100Mbps by 2017 is hardly flying car territory.
They were actually responding to a Labour suggestion of universal (i.e. 100% not 50%) of UK homes getting 2Mb coverage by 2012:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7858498.stm
The Labour plan sounds less exciting but would actually be much harder to achieve (not that they'll have to - they're unlikely to get reelected and have been careful to say it only in an "interim report").
As to what orifice the PCPro writer pulled Google out of, your guess is as good as mine.
My old company had an offshore dev team in New Zealand and one morning (in 2004) I came into work to find that they couldn't access our UK based SVN server. While discussing it I browsed onto Slashdot and found a link to an article hosted in NZ (I think it was the guy who built his own jet engines and claimed he could build a Tomahawk cruise missile equivalent for 75k).
Anyway, it turned out that the Slashdot effect didn't bring down the server, it brought down NZ's pipe to the outside wall.
I for one welcomed our new nerd overlords.
-- For evil to triumph it is enough that good men do nothing.