Google Starts Experimental 1 Gbps ISP Trials

Where do we sign up? One thing which can really make you survive in the tech world is innovation. Google is the company which gave us a revolutionary search engine; a 1GB e-mail storage, when 100 MB was considered enough. They’ve given us products such as the free Google Maps with Street View which would’ve been considered impossible a few years ago. They don’t plan on stopping there, so they’ve decided to bring high speed fiber network powered internet services to our homes.

Fiber optic communication has never been exploited to the fullest and it’s failed in reaching out to the masses. Google plans to change this by testing high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States. Fiber optic communications is the method of transferring data from one place to another by sending pulses of light through an optical fiber cable. Google plans to revolutionize internet speeds forever by introducing connection speed of a mind boggling 1 Gb/sec for as many as 500,000 people. That makes it about 20 times faster than the highest internet speed provided by AT&T or Verizon in USA or about a 1000 times faster than the average speed we see here. Google says that they are doing this for a couple of reasons - to encourage the development of bandwidth-intensive applications whose development had been somewhat restricted, to explore new ways of deploying fiber networks and provide an “open access” network which gives the user a choice to have multiple service providers. If this experiment becomes a success, Google can redefine what internet speed is all about.

Although, this looks quite promising, this can take up some time to come into practice. Laying an infrastructure for fiber optics is a cumbersome and time consuming process. Also, the estimated cost of the project has been put between $500 million and $1 billion. Google’s lack of experience in this field may also prove to be a hindrance. This will not be a smooth ride for Google and as one industry expert says “If it was easy, everyone would have done it.”

So like we asked early, where do we sign up? The trials are taking place in the US now and there’s no saying when we get to sample Google’s ISP project. But when it does, it will surely be very big. Imagine downloading 200 of your favorite songs downloaded in about 8 seconds. The prospects are obviously exciting but we will have to wait and see how this shapes up. Till then, we just have to hang in there with our 600kbps and 1Mbps lines.