It has recently been announced by search engine giant, Google that it will be building a 1Gbps high-speed broadband directly to the homes of users as an experiment to see how expensive such a network would be to build.
There are currently a number of ongoing discussions regarding the cost of building a super fast broadband network and also whether building such a network is really needed. The experimental network from Google is designed to answer many of these questions and will see many industry specialists watching the forthcoming rollout with great interest.
Many companies in the US and in other country are currently unwilling to build networks offering these kinds of speeds as they can require huge amounts of investment to build the infrastructure. A number of groups are also fighting for an end to net neutrality, which maintains that all data travelling through a network should be treated equally, saying that users should have to pay for the bandwidth that they use. The big reason for this is that most service providers are finding that only a small percentage of their users are account for most of the bandwidth usage over their network.
A range of different technologies will be used by Google to deliver its Fiber-to-the-home network so that the results of its network experiments can be passed on to other network providers so that they can learn and build on its experiment results.
Communities are being given the opportunity to apply to become a test site for the new upcoming Google network and the company is advising that its network will be an open one and it will in no way discriminate against any of the data that passes through its network. Many see this latest step by Google to be the push that many network providers need to begin looking at their own networks and begin upgrading them to suit their user’s needs.
Source – BBC