If you haven’t heard, Google has announced they are CONSIDERING running fiber to the homes of selected communities with populations of 50,000 to 500,000. This would give those homes download speeds of 1 THOUSAND Megabits per second. That’s 1 Gigabit-per-second.
This represents a great opportunity for communities. However, I’ve noticed some people talking about how it would be great to have this as long as it doesn’t cost the community anything. I think this is the wrong approach to take. Read more to find out why.
Somewhere in the past, I recall a speaker on negotiation talking about 2 different investors building 2 different malls. One firm decided where they wanted their mall and announced their decision, then began trying to make all the deals needed. With huge amounts of will-power and effort, they managed to build most of their original plan, but way past deadline and way over-budget. The second firm selected several locations and said to the community leaders “we’re THINKING about building a mall here. Are you interested?” When leaders who saw it as an opportunity for their community worked to HELP the mall-builders, this firm was able to build on-time and on-budget, and the community gained many new jobs for its people.
With that in mind, communities who see this fiber-network as a huge value-add SHOULD SPEND and COMPETE for it. In the end, Google might pay to build it, but there is a LOT more to it than buying miles of fiber lines and connecting them to the internet. They will need, I’m sure, to obtain office space, buy real estate, relocate existing Google employees, hire new Google employees, obtain many types of permits, obtain licenses, perhaps re-zone some places, corporate equipment, obtain corporate vehicles and more.
What will a chosen community GET for this? PLEASE comment below with your ideas of the benefits. I’m sure I will fall short. But plain and simple: when people can get more work done in the same number of hours per day, that makes them more EFFECTIVE and more EFFICIENT. It also gives them more work satisfaction and the company more PROFIT.
- A Google OFFICE would likely be opened in chosen communities to oversee both the construction portion of the project and the technology deployment. That means high-paying, high-technology jobs. Other tech-related jobs will likely spring up around these.
- TV and Film related work takes huge amounts of data. Orlando has a lot of such work. If OUR home-based businesses can produce, send and receive MORE, doesn’t that give our community an ADVANTAGE? And when you add the word “3D”, you’ve just DOUBLED the amount of data needed.
- “AVATAR” – oh yes, the biggest grossing major motion picture of all time. Would the NEXT director trying to make an “Avatar” pick companies where the whole area is built for transferring data between sub-contractors?
- Audio and video content on the internet in the form of “PodCasts” (or “NetCasts”) is booming on the internet. If OUR residents can build and deliver specialty talk shows and video productions more easily, that’s an ADVANTAGE.
- More and more people are working from home. GoogleFiber would give those workers MUCH more ability to work with large amounts of data from the main office or offices far away. It would give them MUCH more opportunity to PROVIDE data services with large amounts of data. I am such a self-employed person, but I also service companies whose employees work at home on weekends or in satellite offices. The boss may be at home on the weekend, but wants to look up something in the database at the office without having to drive in. However, the cable-modem is too slow for this to be very usable (yes it is, the technical reasons would be too hard to explain here.)
- For those not working at home, many are still working in satellite offices away from the main office where the big servers are, or in micro-offices. With better networks, our communities can get more work done in those offices.
- Businesses such as BlockBuster, NetFlix and iTunes are selling and renting movies over the internet. These movies are large in size. They are especially large if the movie is in Hi-Definition. If those companies can deliver MORE content to OUR citizens, our citizens will look like more DESIRABLE customers. Maybe those companies would locate an office in such a town. (More high-skilled jobs for our citizens.)
- Data services related to smart phones and devices like iPhones, iPads, iPod Touch, Palm Pre, Google Android phones, Blackberry, and so on are a developing industry. These industries employ software developers, video producers, and graphic artists (lots of apps need lots of catchy icons and logos.) All of these are trained and employed by Orlando-area schools and companies. (Full-Sail, DAVE school, UCF, Rollins, Valencia, SCC, local training companies and many more.)
- Speaking of our schools and colleges, can’t they recruit students and teachers more effectively if GoogleFiber is available?
- Technology firms – we can’t leave out all the networking, defense, simulation, and video game makers in the area. Won’t they have an easier time recruiting employees to move to a fiber community? Won’t their workers be more able to work at home? Won’t consulting firms be able to do more? (More tech firms = more jobs for our graduates and more internships for our students to gain experience.)
- Speaking of games, online gaming is a fast-growing industry. With the best networks right around OUR game companies, they can recruit top game-makers more easily. Not to mention our communities will have the best gaming experience, attracting more gamers to spend money. Some video game companies are investing in central servers that make VERY high resolution pictures of the game and ship each frame of the video across the network. If WE have the BEST network, who will they pick as the first customers? Where will they market first?
- Companies providing online backup services are growing fast. Others providing “Cloud” services want to replace desktop computer storage altogether. Both of these types of growing companies would look at our community as EXCELLENT customers with this kind of network. Perhaps they would establish local offices? If not, perhaps someone else will.
- Other factors you can consider: online meetings will function better with more bandwidth. People will spend less time traveling and more time working. Who needs to burn CDs when you can just send the data? (Less litter and pollution.) None of our workers will need to put a huge amount of data on a hard drive and drive it across town to the next part of the TV/Film/Audio/Graphics process. (Less time wasted, more work done, less traffic, less pollution, more efficiency.) Computer professionals can solve problems by remote more easily. Online Education can expand. Musicians and authors can work more quickly and easily and sell their products electronically.
By coincidence I recently listened to an I.T. Conversations podcast interview with attorney Jim Baller, founder of the US Broadband Coalition. They discussed the Coalition’s report on US Broadband Strategy. Among items they discussed were reasons behind successes and failures of municipal broadband efforts. If I recall correctly, they also discussed the benefits those communities gained.
And excerpt from the report:
A rapidly growing segment of the US economy is tied directly or indirectly to information and communications technologies. This includes industries that develop, deploy, finance, operate, and maintain communications networks and the equipment that runs them; industries that focus on devices that interconnect with the communications networks, including computers, Netbooks and PDAs; industries that develop, operate, and service the applications that run over the networks, including Google, Amazon, Flickr, Facebook or eBay, etc.; industries that conduct business of all kinds over the Internet, and so on.
With so MUCH to be gained from such a network, we have to realize there is a lot to LOSE by not spending to ensure we get it.
Links
- Googles Fiber Announcement and details: http://www.google.com/appserve/fiberrfi/
- City could become Google test subject: http://www.dailypilot.com/articles/2010/02/25/business/dpt-google022510.txt
- Broadband Coalition: http://www.bb4us.net/
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