Google has announced that it will be rolling out superfast broadband as demonstration projects. “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.
The Negroponte Switch sees all that was wireless becoming wired. That means no spectrum for broadcasters. Next best is less spectrum. The digital dividend. The 700 MHz Band.
Interesting route chosen by Australia: taxpayers will fund most of the costs of building the broadband network and the operators, including the formerly government-owned Telstra, will have to buy capacity on it to provide services. Unlikely to be effective in most countries, but Australia along with the Scandinavian countries was among the most advanced in providing services to most citizens during the period of government ownership. 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.
Canada is woefully positioned for future internet usage and the quality of current broadband networks is barely enough to cope with current traffic because of a lack of investment by providers, according to a new study. 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.
A partial victory for those making the case for open wireless networks (Carterfone 2). 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.