Google Delays Selection of Fiber Projects to "early 2011"

12/15/2010 09:04:00 AM

Earlier this year we announced an experiment we hope will help make Internet access better and faster for everyone: to provide a community with ultra high-speed broadband, 100 times faster than what most people have access to today.

This week I joined Google as vice president of Access Services to oversee the Google Fiber team. Over the past several months I’ve been following the progress the team has already made—from experimenting with new fiber deployment technologies here on Google’s campus, to announcing a “beta” network to 850 homes at Stanford—and I’m excited for us to bring our ultra high-speed network to a community.

We had planned to announce our selected community or communities by the end of this year, but the level of interest was incredible—nearly 1,100 communities across the countryresponded to our announcement—and exceeded our expectations. While we’re moving ahead full steam on this project, we’re not quite ready to make that announcement.

We’re sorry for this delay, but we want to make sure we get this right. To be clear, we’re not re-opening our selection process—we simply need more time to decide than we’d anticipated. Stay tuned for an announcement in early 2011.

Posted by Milo Medin, Vice President, Access Services

Comment by David Lassner on December 21, 2010 at 9:50am: The permanent buildings on the UH-Manoa campus are pretty much all connected with fiber running 1GbE. The backbone and some high-traffic buildings use 10GbE. (Inside wiring is variable, some going back >20 yrs.)

UH was a charter member and is still part of Internet2. UH connects to the major I2 hubs in LA and Seattle, where there are also connections to the other national Research & Education (R&E) network, National LambdaRail (NLR). UH also connects to the Australian R&E network, AARNet, in Sydney.

In general, there is now plenty of bandwidth available out of Hawaii -- at a price.

There are exceptions of course, but in general, big submarine fiber projects have not deployed substantial excess (dark) fiber as is commonly done in terrestrial projects where bundles are fat, amplifiers can be added on the fly in manholes, and material is off-the-shelf.

PLUG: The best place to network with the Trans-Pacific fiber community is at the Pacific Telecoms Conference (PTC), coming up at the Hilton in a few weeks. Pretty much anyone who's doing anything in this space in the hemisphere comes to Honolulu every January for this event to wheel and deal. http://www.ptc.org/ptc11/

Comment by Eric Nakagawa on December 19, 2010 at 2:44pm: Does anyone know what sort of fibre runs into UH Computer Science/Engineering?

I swear UH was part of Internet2 back in early 2000. Are they still part of this or projects that succeeded this project?

Does Hawaii have a lot of latent or unused fibre coming in?

Anyone know what % of fibre coming in is dark?

Comment by Daniel Leuck on December 19, 2010 at 2:53am: We were really bummed to hear this, but we understand they want to make the right decisions. We've been posting updates about the project on the Gigabit Hawaii Facebook page.

Google Delays Selection of Fiber Projects to "early 2011"

An update on Google Fiber

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