Google has announced plans to roll out their own fibre optic network in the United States, offering internet connections 100 times their current speed. Initially the network will connect half a million premises with a fibre to the home connection and deliver up to 1Gpbs of bandwidth to customers. It is believed that by offering speeds of up to 1Gbps will enable Google to increase it’s advertising revenue as new services are offered to consumers using the service.
In response to Google’s announcement Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski applauded it, saying “big broadband creates big opportunities”. The move by Google into the consumer network space however tightens the internet giant’s grip over consumers and is likely to come under scrutiny of the Federal Trade Commission. To combat this, Google has highlighted plans to open up the network to retailers similar to the model employed by Telstra providing access to their ADSL broadband network infrastructure to other providers to resell. This model has been a farce in Australia, but Google hopes this will keep the FTC off their backs in the United States.
The Australian Government as a part of it’s National Broadband Network initiative plans to roll out 100Mbps fibre to the home to 90% of Australians. As to how long this will take is not known, however a roll out of the Tasmanian portion of the network commenced last year. There already exists a limited roll out of Fibre to the Home broadband (operating at 100Mbps) by Adelaide based internet company Internode which has been operating for a number of years now, however there are only limited plans to expand the Internode FTTH network beyond it’s current deployment at this stage.
