Google has launched its new fibre division, Google Fiber, which will provide broadband and television services, initially in Kansas City.
The move marks the internet giant’s first tentative steps into network infrastructure and follows the company’s…
Google has launched its new fibre division, Google Fiber, which will provide broadband and television services, initially in Kansas City.
The move marks the internet giant’s first tentative steps into network infrastructure and follows the company’s recent exploration into hardware.
Google Fiber promises to offer broadband speeds of one gigabit per second, which it claims is 100 times faster than the US’s average internet speed.
Whether Google’s foray into fibre means the emergence of a new major player in the industry remains to be seen.
Michael Kende, a partner at Analysys Mason, is sceptical. “It’s hard to imagine they’d want to become a telecoms company,” he said. “They’d really have to start from scratch in many capacities”.
Kende instead saw it as an exercise in displaying the possible. “What it highlights is that the whole network needs to become faster,” he explained. He said that while Google Fiber probably would roll-out in other cities, the purpose was unlikely to be nationwide expansion. Instead, Google wanted to put pressure on telecoms companies to upgrade their broadband networks by showing people the speeds they could be experiencing.
Milo Medin, Google VP of access services, wrote in a blog post “Gigabit speeds will get rid of these pesky, archaic problems and open up new opportunities for the web”.
In October last year, media reports had suggested that Google could also build a fibre network in a European country.
