Broadband Communities

MAY-JUN 2013

BROADBAND COMMUNITIES is the leading source of information on digital and broadband technologies for buildings and communities. Our editorial aims to accelerate the deployment of Fiber-To-The-Home and Fiber-To-The-Premises.

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Summit Coverage A Vision For the Gigabit Future Excerpts from the keynote address given at the 2013 BroadBand Communities Summit by Milo Medin, vice president of access services for Google A s we look forward to deployment in Austin and other cities, one of the questions I get is, "Why is Google doing this, anyway?" What is so broken that it would prompt a company like ours to leave our traditional role in the Internet economy and get into the access business and even the TV business? At Google, we really care about speed. It's not just because speed makes it nicer for you to browse the Web and more pleasurable to read your email. It's because speed empowers you to consume a lot more information in the same amount of time and do things that would be impossible or impractical without it. Watching a Khan Academy tutorial on YouTube just wouldn't be practical on a slow network. Google Maps would be so sluggish that you would pull out your old traditional map instead. Uploading photos would be so slow that you'd just print them out and mail them instead. It wasn't that long ago that networks were like that in the U.S. None of these now-common experiences would exist if we had not made the leap to broadband and speeds that were about 100 times faster than the dial-up network it replaced. We have whole teams of engineers at Google who spend their days working hard to make the Web go faster – a millisecond here, a millisecond there. Speed is part of how we diferentiate ourselves because every day our users make a choice. Tey choose to use us for search, they choose to use us for maps, they choose to use us for mail, and the competition is just a click away. We have to provide a better experience every day, or we'll lose our users. We invest billions of dollars on infrastructure and talent to keep innovating. It's a way of life for us. NETwORkS ARE CONSTRAINED Increasingly we've begun to see that we're more and more constrained by the networks users use to get to 50 | BROADBAND COMMUNITIES | www.broadbandcommunities.com | Milo Medin, Google's vice president for access, giving the keynote address at the 2013 BroadBand Communities Summit. our services and other people's services throughout the Internet as well. Not everywhere but certainly in the U.S., this is increasingly a problem. Te statistics back this up: According to the latest OECD data, the U.S. ranks 16th in terms of average advertised speed. We do excel in another category – we pay some of the highest prices per Mbps in the world. We used to be a leader, and now I think we're in a state of blissful mediocrity. Speed matters to Google and to our users as well. I've never met anyone who said their Internet connection was too fast. When Google solicited cities to work with us to deploy a gigabit May/June 2013

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