AfterDawn: News

Google to test 1Gbps fiber network at Standford

Google has said today that they will begin testing their incredibly fast 1Gbps fiber high-speed broadband project in Stanford, California, whilst still evaluating applications sent in by other cities that want to test the network.

The company will start introducing the network early in 2011 to the Residential Subdivision at Stanford University, which happens to be just a few miles from Google's headquarters in Mountain View.



Google Product Manager James Kelly says the new implementation is a "beta" for the broader Google Fiber project.

At 1Gbps, the network is at least ten times faster than even the speediest of current home connections.

In February, Google announced that it was looking for a community in the U.S. with between 50,000 and 500,000 people to deploy the network, for free. 600 communities applied and one, Topeka, Kansas, even renamed itself "Google" for one month.

Google will introduce the winner by Christmas.

Written by: Andre Yoskowitz @ 21 Oct 2010 21:44

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• 3 comments

• Mr-Movies

  I’m not sure what Google is doing here? Are they trying to compete with local LAN broadband systems? Or are they going to work with them? Competing would be difficult because municipalities’ do not support the infrastructure and even if they allowed Google to lay their own fiber it would be extremely expensive to do. We already have fiber in our community and I have a 1G network in my home so how is this 10x stronger than what I have? It isn’t! Also why 1G when 10G+ is already test proven? What are their needs that require new protocol? This article is soooo vague it is not even worth reporting, it tells us nothing and leaves to much open to interpretation.
  
  Here is a USA News Week article about this; it will give you a bit more of nothing on this venture
  

  22.10.2010 14:26 #1

• mscritsm

  Delivering 1 Gbps to the home is not "done". While fiber to the home can deliver it, it's still too much aggregate bandwidth to deploy across a community. And even though you may have home networking equipment rated at 1 Gbps, most home equipment is so cheap that it can only do it in short bursts. 10 Gbps is actually very hard and very expensive to do. It's only deployed in massive switches that only your ISP can afford.
  
  Why is Google doing this? In large part for the publicity, and to get communities thinking about 1 Gbps. But they also want to know if there are qualitative differences as well as quantitative differences at that speed. If people have 1 Gbps, what new things will they do besides watching higher def videos? What new markets will be opened?

  26.10.2010 11:10 #2

• Mr-Movies

  Not true some businesses use 10G and my home has business 1G routers/switches so again not true. It is true that we are not getting 1G straight to the home however even if we were they would limit it anyhow unless you want to pay for a deadicated T3 line. At any rate the fiber can certainly handle the aggregate bandwidth presuming they installed it properly as I assume they did.
  
  I can get a T1-T3 line right now if I want so again this venture given the lack of insight does not make sense. Give us more info and maybe it will make sense.
  

  26.10.2010 15:20 #3