[Nrsolis]

I'm not so sure how I feel about this.

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.

[wmf]

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?

[Nrsolis]

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?

[phlux]

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?