Google's Move Into Fiber Networks

Mayor Kiss, Jonathan Leopold, the City Council, Burlington Telecom and city taxpayers may have just found their financial savior. They had better get cracking to write their application for Google's recently announced high speed fiber experiment.

Google doesn't have to place the fiber, except to insure the build-out is complete throughout the city. Google would be concerned only with the electronics and the premises equipment to insure that the high speeds they intend could be provided. The underlying fiber infrastructure should be perfectly adequate.

They'd have a major medical center and colleges and universities to participate and 38,000 potential residential customers along with hundreds of small businesses.

Burlington may also be able to leverage Google's investment in Clearwire to bring 4G WiMax wireless technology to the city.

What an opportunity! Sell BT to Google or bring them in as the 'private partner' recommended in the recent BT blue ribbon commission's report. This is a-once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to solve BT's and the taxpayers' financial problem.

(from WSJ 2/11/10)

Google said in a statement it knows "that other companies have been in this business a long time, and we're not pretending to have all the answers here." It added, "We do have experience with Web infrastructure from operating our data centers."

Ms. Ingersoll said Google will manage the deployment of the fiber network, but probably partner with contractors to help build it. Google said it would offer service at a speed of one gigabit per second—100 times faster than what many U.S. consumers have access to today.