“Google, indeed, appears to be playing a chess game,” said David B. Yoffie, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “If they can create an even mildly credible commitment to offer superfast broadband to the home, it could strike fear in the hearts of cable and telcos, stimulating an arms race of investment — just as they did in the auction for spectrum a few years ago.”

In a post on its corporate blog, Google said it planned to build and test a high-speed fiber optic broadband network capable of allowing people to surf the Web at a gigabit a second, or about 100 times the speed of many broadband connections. Thase trial could be offered in several communities and extend to as many as 500,000 people.

In an interview, Richard S. Whitt, Google’s Washington telecommunications and media counsel, said Google was not entering the broadband or Internet service provider business, but rather was using the test to push the industry into offering faster Internet access at lower cost. “This is a business model nudge and an innovation nudge.”

The European Commission will urge the 27 European Union countries Wednesday to reserve a uniform slice of broadcast spectrum for a pan-European mobile broadband network, one that could enable flat-rate, international voice and data calling plans.

A copy of the proposal, reviewed by the International Herald Tribune, sets out technical guidelines for E.U. countries that choose to redeploy part of their low-frequency spectrum, a bandwidth that has been used exclusively by television broadcasters since the inception of the industry more than 50 years ago.

Full story.

Assuming that the backbone is relatively static technology, this might work as well as having a private entity operate the backbone under regulation. Given it will be an essential facility, there had to be regulation anyway.

One does have to ask why none of private bidders met the requirements. Were the risks too much? Did they want to lose?

THE federal government will establish its own company to build the national broadband network to provide faster internet across Australia. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made the announcement during a joint press conference with Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner in Canberra today.

Mr Rudd described the announcement as “historic”, describing broadband as the core of 21st century infrastructure.

The network, described as the single biggest infrastructure project in Australian history, will be built in partnership with the private sector. The new national broadband network will take eight years to fully roll out, and will cost taxpayers $43 billion.

While the Government will be the majority shareholder, it will also need significant private investment. That will be capped at 49 per cent.

Within five years after the network is built and fully operational, the Government will start selling off its majority stake. Not one of the private consortia tendering for the network met the government’s requirements, Mr Rudd said.

The survey, conducted by the Oxford Said Business School in London and the Universidad de Oviedo in Spain and released Friday, found that Canada is below the global broadband quality threshold, which measures the proliferation of high-speed internet in a country, as well as the speeds available and the reliability of connections.

While Japan was the only country to meet the study’s standards for future readiness, broadband networks in countries such as Latvia, Romania and Bulgaria scored better than Canada, which ranked 27th out of the 42 nations covered. The United States ranked 16th.

Researchers calculated a broadband quality score, or BQS, by testing download and upload speeds in each country, as well as latency, a factor that measures how instantaneously information travels over a broadband network. They found that in order to meet the demands of today’s internet traffic, broadband networks need to be able to deliver steady download speeds of 3.75 megabits per second and uploads of one mbps with a latency no greater than 95 milliseconds.

Read the full report in CBCNews here.

F.C.C. Hands Google a Partial Victory – New York Times

The Federal Communications Commission moved cautiously Tuesday toward creating a more open national wireless broadband network, handing a partial victory to Google, which was pushing for more competition in cellphone services.The agency approved rules for an auction of broadcast spectrum that its chairman, Kevin J. Martin, said would promote new consumer services. The rules will let customers use any phone and software they want on networks using about one-third of the spectrum to be auctioned.

The F.C.C. did not approve a provision that would have required the winner of the auction to sell access to its network on a wholesale basis to other companies. Google favored the rule as a way to hasten competition and innovation in the cellphone industry, a market it is considering.

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