From Slate.com
By Farhad Manjoo
Last week, Google announced that it plans to launch an "experimental" broadband network in several cities across the country. In other words, Google will become an ISP—it will provide Internet access to a small number of customers (50,000 to 500,000, depending on the cities it chooses), serving as an alternative to the broadband service offered by phone and cable companies. The news itself wasn't much of a surprise. For years, Google has been buying up "dark fiber"—extremely fast fiber-optic lines that were built during the Internet boom of the late '90s and had since been lying fallow—and observers had expected that the search company would do something with it soon. Still, the scale of Google's plans is shocking. The company wants to build home Internet connections that run at 1 gigabit per second. That's 100 or 200 times faster than the connection you're using to read this story.
Why is Google doing this? Because its future depends on better broadband. Like all Web firms, everything Google does goes through other people's lines. What's worse, the companies that run those lines have shown little interest in innovation. Most things in Google's orbit advance at a breakneck pace—computers keep getting faster, hard drives keep getting bigger, software keeps getting better. But broadband is static; it's not getting much faster, cheaper, or more widespread. Broadband—especially broadband in America—is Google's limiting factor.
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**Posted by Shelby. "What would Jefferson County do with 1 gigabit per second?"