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Friday, March 5, 2010
Boston, Somerville in hunt for high-speed Google Internet network
By Rodney H. Brown
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California’s Google Inc. has created a new gold rush — not for the mineral resources of the Golden State, but for a limited number of planned super-high-speed Internet connections that would be 200 times faster than the average connection in the United States.
Scrambling to carve out a stake in this new stream of possible torrential data flow are towns and cities around the country, and the Greater Boston area is well represented. The upside? A city like Somerville, for example, could market itself to businesses as having the fastest access to the Internet in the world in nearly every building — a whopping 1 gigabit per second.
What does that number really mean? If you are on a broadband connection from Comcast, chances are your Internet connection tops out at about 12 megabits per second.
Google made the announcement Feb. 10 and set up pages where individuals can nominate their communities, but also where municipal officials can make their cases for being chosen for some of the 50,000 to 500,000 connections Google is planning.
One of the big selling points for Somerville is its compactness, said Karthik Viswanathan, the city’s chief information officer.
“We are relatively small in size,” he said. “It’s only 4 square miles with a very dense population. So any kind of infrastructure costs Google would have to spend, they would get a return on their investment relatively quickly.”
Viswanathan said that the only concern officials have is why Google is doing this in the first place? Not that it will slow down their nomination.
“The biggest question is we don’t know what Google’s motives are at this point — whether it’s to build the fiber so they can drive traffic to Google’s applications, or to actually provide what they (say they) are looking for — net neutrality.”
Google declined to provide an executive to interview, but spokesman Dan Martin said that the company is interested in deploying the network efficiently and quickly and is hoping to identify communities that will work with Google to help them do that. He couldn’t say when the network would be completed, but he did say the communities should be named by the end of this year.
For a city like Boston, which is working up its proposal, being chosen would also carry some concerns. For instance, if Boston were given, say, 50,000 connections, which parts of the city would reap the benefits?
“We’re looking at the geography of the city,” said Bill Oates, the chief information officer for Boston. “We are looking at where we think the opportunities and the benefits for an infrastructure like this will best serve us, but we haven’t come to a decision on that yet.”
Oates is Boston’s point person in pulling together the proposal for Google, and his IT department would be the main connection to Google during any build-out, should the Hub get picked. He says Boston should be a strong contender because of the variety of types of use it could offer — from large-scale government housing projects to wealthy townhouses to very tech-savvy businesses.
“We think we provide a really good mix for what Google wants,” Oates said.
Cambridge and Newburyport are also pondering making submissions. Cities and towns have until March 26 to get their nominations in.
Network speed at a glance
Average broadband speed in 2009 in U.S.: 4.8 megabits per second.
Proposed Google network speed: 1 gigabit per second.
Source: Information Technology & Innovation Foundation
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