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Google not "the world's ISP"

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

Thursday, June 22, 2006
18 years ago2,330 views

There's a Mercury news article (http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/business/14764837.htm) about Google's wireless access progress in San Francisco and Mountain View. I responded to Nathan Weinberg's blog about it (http://google.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2006/06/21/google-government-search-adwords-dayparting-googlers-on-orkut-portugal-day-doodle-and-muni-wifi-progress-report/) with the following:

Regarding the Wireless project, isn’t Google being contradictory?

On the one hand they said they did not plan to do more than the 2 cities and they don’t want to be the world’s ISP.

But on the other hand he said, “We were saying, folks in the U.S. get nowhere near the broadband speeds of Europe and Asia. There are not many content or applications that take advantage of mobility outside the home. We think it would be neat to solve that problem. It’s not advertising that’s driving this.”

So they’ve resolved a US-wide problem in 2 cities. That barely starts to resolve the issue they outlined.

Art-One [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Not everything that says Google is true.

Those sayings are in my humble opinion just meant not to lay pressure on those projects.

I think those projects are just test cases, real life labs, in which Google is experimenting with technology.

If those experiments show that there is a real business case for Google, Google sure will extend it to everywhere it can be economically usefull.

And it's logically that Google says that it doesn't wants to be the World's ISP. If big telecom companies didn't succeed to be it, if Microsoft didn't succeed to do it, it should be a bit to dangerous for Google to say such a thing...

Niraj Sanghvi [PersonRank 10]

18 years ago #

Art-One, not quite...they are laying any speculation for future development to rest:

"It's never been Google's intention to go ahead and be the world's ISP (Internet Service Provider). We're not rolling out any more networks like this. We want to use it as an opportunity to build applications that other ISPs will want to use."

"Q Google did not express interest in the project to build a Silicon Valley-wide wireless Internet network (known as the Smart Valley project). Are there any plans for Google to build more networks?

A Nothing concrete at this time. From day one, it's never been our ambition to go beyond San Francisco and Mountain View. It's not our core competency to be a global ISP. We have more than once sat down with the folks at Smart Valley and shared a lot of our lessons learned. We hope we can help them craft a great RFP."

That said, they have to do it eventually. He even mentions in the article that local businesses expressed interest in advertising through this kind of wireless service, so Google will inevitably end up forming an ISP service in order to push their ads to more users. Not just existing internet users, but those that couldn't or didn't want to pay for it too.

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