Google’s announcement Wednesday that it will roll out a high-speed fiber trial in select U.S. locations unleashed a flurry of comments ranging from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski to the telecoms and cable industries to network-neutrality advocates.
Google is asking cities, counties and states to indicate interest in having Google-built one-gigabit-per-second fiber service. The company emphasized it is not entering the Internet service provider business but rather is conducting an experiment to see what happens when truly high bandwidth is available.
“We’re excited to see how consumers, small businesses, anchor institutions, and local governments will take advantage of ultra high-speed access to the Net,” said Richard Whitt, Google’s telecom and media counsel.
Toward the National Broadband Plan
“In the same way that the transition from dial-up to broadband made possible the emergence of online VoIP and video and countless other applications, we think that ultra high-speed bandwidth will lead to many new innovations — including streaming high-definition video content, remote data storage, distance learning, real-time multimedia collaboration, and others that we simply can’t imagine yet,” Whitt wrote on the Google Public Policy Blog.
“Big broadband creates big opportunities,” Genachowski said. “This significant trial will provide an American test bed for the next generation of innovative, high-speed Internet apps, devices and services. The FCC’s national broadband plan will build upon such private-sector initiatives and will include recommendations for facilitating and accelerating greater investment in broadband, creating jobs and increasing America’s global competitiveness.”
Free Press, a nonprofit group that supports network neutrality, called on the FCC to “adopt these high standards and aspirational goals when it delivers the national broadband plan to Congress in March. The national broadband plan should chart a course to guide the United States in the near term to universal deployment and adoption of high-capacity Internet infrastructure, and in the long term…