The main argument for this type of a network is to give high bandwidth applications a home to be tested because the theory was that broadband networks in the US were constricting applications to very low bandwidth. But does broadband really lag applications, or is it really the other way around?

Following the announcement last week that Google is looking for community partners to develop a 1-gigabit test bed network, Om Malik asks, “Where Else In The World Can You Get 1 Gbps to the Home?” He points to a couple of rural telephone companies here in the US that are supposedly offering such service.  I [...]

The Internet has two billion global users, and the developing world is just hitting its growth phase. Mobile data traffic is doubling every year, and soon all four billion mobile phones will access the Net. In 2008, according to a new UC-San Diego study, Americans consumed over 3,600 exabytes of information, or an average of 34 gigabytes per person per day. Microsoft researchers argue in a new book, “The Fourth Paradigm,” that an “exaflood” of real-world and experimental data is changing the very nature of science itself. We need completely new strategies, they write, to “capture, curate, and analyze” these unimaginably large waves of information.

Wyoming wireless operator Brett Glass has 20 questions for the FCC on Net Neutrality.

The American Consumer Institute Center for Citizen Research
The Informed Policy Maker’s Guide to Regulatory Impacts on Broadband Network Investment
Dr. Larry F. Darby
February 10, 2010

Digital Society Q&A Podcast
Episode #5
Length: 17min 24sec
Topic: Google: The ISP

What if those greedy telecoms and cable companies could learn to be good like Google and care more about making the Internet a better place with gigabit broadband than their profits? We decided to quantify the amount of “good” that would be done if ISPs could be more like Google and it wasn’t what most people would expect.

Chairman Genachowski “gets a little peeved when people suggests that he wants to regulate the Internet.” But Genachowski’s good intentions pave a road whose outcome is far less clear that net neutrality supporters like to believe.

Google accounts for 6% of all Internet traffic and has almost 86% of the search market. Google’s YouTube accounts for 10% of all mobile data and the company owns 3 of the top 10 websites on the Net, and 6 of the top 20. It would seem that a company with that much power getting into the ISP business should frighten the Free Press crowd. Not only would they control what you access online, and how you find it, but as an ISP they would control your very connection. Instead, they’re cheering the move.

Google wants to show the rest of the nation how broadband should be operated, but they’re only going to deploy in ~2% of the easiest communities where the deployment costs are minimal. But this can’t possibly scale at 90% deployment level when costs can be several times greater.