Google’s gigabit broadband experiment

As you may have seen in the news and through advertising recently, BT has been harping on about its new “superfast broadband” roll-out. It’s called BT Infinity and it promises speeds of up to 40Mb/s (Megabits per second) downstream and 10Mb/s upstream (the upstream is the speed that you can upload or request web pages). Virgin Media has already had its 50Mb/s broadband around for a while now and these days users are reporting that they can get the full 50Mb/s downstream. However, Virgin’s version still only has an upstream of 1.5Mb/s meaning that if you have multiple users all doing bandwidth heavy tasks (like uploading video content) your internet will still become very slow or unresponsive no matter what your download capability is. In a business/multi-user environment this can become a massive problem so for this reason BT Infinity seems like a good answer... when it finally arrives.

Now let’s take a quick trip across the Atlantic. After many efforts to advise the FCC (America’s Federal Communications Commission), Google has decided to launch its own broadband service. It’s called Google’s Gigabit Broadband Experiment and, as the name suggests, will be rolling out Gigabit (that’s 1024Mb/s) broadband services to between 50,000 and 500,000 homes. At present Google is trying to decide which communities deserve to be the test subjects for this truly superfast broadband service, but they say the technology is already available. Google also says in its report that it is going to share all its findings with the rest of the world, documenting problems and solutions it finds along the way so that other communication providers can plan and start building the same service in other areas.

So if this is the case, what is BT playing at? Why would BT be about to spend millions on an already outdated and slow service If Google is so willing to share? It was not so long ago our so called prime minister was throwing his Digital Britain plans around, saying that we should be leading the world with our communications network and how this would shape Britain’s strong future economy. Following the report, Gordon Brown committed to giving every home 2Mb/s broadband by 2012. I guess he has never googled “fast broadband” and seen the results about Japan’s almost Gb capable homes in 2007 or Sigbritt Löthberg’s 40Gb/s home broadband connection.

From this day forth, AoG is running its own Digital Britain and we want your help. Let’s get the conversations, blogs and forums flowing with technical discussion and ideas of how Digital Britain should be progressing and make sure we don’t get left behind... again!

Sources:

Google’s Gigabit Broadband Experiment - http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/
BT Infinity - http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/consumerProducts/displayTopic.do?t...
Digital Britain (Gov’s version) - http://interactive.bis.gov.uk/digitalbritain/
World broadband speeds 2007 - http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0711/