Wirelessnorth.ca

Can you hear me now?

While your favourite major ISPs bemoan and gnash their teeth to regulators across North America about how hard it is to manage capacity and why they can’t possibly provide faster unfiltered access to the masses or to the independent resellers…

Google is launching experimental fibre broadband networks in several U.S. cities in an effort to push high-speed internet development.

The networks, which will be available to between 50,000 and 500,000 people “at a competitive price,” will offer connection speeds up of up to one gigabit per second, or more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today, Google said.

Google said it also wants to learn about deploying fibre, and it plans to share its networks so that other internet service providers can connect to it.

“We’ll operate an ‘open access’ network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers,” Ingersoll and Kelly wrote. “And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory and transparent way.”

In so doing, google is sticking a major fork in the eye of the ISP lobby. Of course the real impediment to ultra-highspeed broadband has always been a severe business model issue, never a technical one. With such bandwidth, last century’s distribution models like “broadcast TV”, “cable packages” or “paying for telephone service or long distance” become highly irrelevant.

Meanwhile in Canada, the CRTC still refuses to enforce their own mandates by not forcing Bell to offer anything more than 5Mbits of service to independent ISPs. For the record 5MBit is 200 times slower that a Gigabit.

Read more: Google launching fibre broadband networks