About two weeks ago I was walking from my house in SF and at 20th and Douglass (http://goo.gl/WD2SX) I saw 4 "HP Communications" trucks (http://www.hpcomminc.com/) installing multi-strand fiber on the telco poles.
It shows they do a very substantial amount of cable and fiber installations. That packet, being confidential, is submitted when they bid on work and attempt to get large projects.
The words of the installer were "Yeah" to my question about the install being for Google.
If this were some po-dunk little company, and they did not have such a strong sales sheet - I would be less-inclined to think that installer was telling me the truth.
The fact is that I didnt reveal all info about myself - I asked him if he was installing for the [google code name for the FIOS project] and he said yes....
so - all the information that I have, leads me to believe them - though, obviously it is circumstantial.
On one hand, this is a direct shot across the bow of the cablecos/telcos. By essentially taking the roadmap of bandwidth expansion via slow, rolling upgrades over a long long period of time and going straight to the ultimate destination, GOOG is sucking a whole lot of "value" out of the existing infrastructure.
On the other hand, this will place enormous stress on the regional/long haul networks which I'll be forced to upgrade yet again. Unless they can charge more, this cant be good news for level3 or VZ or T.
I forsee an acceleration towards metered b/w in our future.
I think Google fiber can answer the question of how elastic bandwidth demand is. If you give someone effectively unlimited bandwidth, how much will they actually use?
They? I think the better question is what kind of applications are enabled and what that revenue model looks like. How does that revenue stream get allocated between network and app provider?
Im less concerned about metered BW than I am every single farking packet I create passing through the hands of a deeply technically capable company that is google.
Will digital freedom exist in the future? in 20 years, will the thought police/BB be monitoring every action, input and response? [Edit: More-so than now, with Eschelon?]
Sure, the google "Free Candy" van looks really enticing now - but what about once I get in and am too far into the trip to say no?