Netizen

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...

I have said before, if Google is to end up a trillion dollar company - and it has a higher chance than does Apple, Apple has peaked - then the ISP space is where it is at. Google has to go global with its ISP ambitions.

Google’s Internet Service Might Actually Bring the U.S. Up to Speed

a radical new business direction for the company .... Google’s gigabit Internet service is priced at $70 per month ..... Users subscribing for a TV service get a two-terabyte storage box for recorded shows and a Nexus 7 Android tablet to use as a remote control. (As a budget alternative, Internet at five megabits per second is available for a one-time fee of $300.) ...... it can cost between $850 and $1,250 per customer to get fiber installed ..... entry of superfast Internet may aid local entrepreneurship .... (In Verizon’s case, the company generally charges $99 per month with a two-year contract for service of up to 300 megabits per second for downloads and 65 megabits per second for uploads). .... Another route to juicing Internet speeds to gigabit-per-second levels is government investment. Chattanooga, Tennessee, received such a boost when the local power utility got a $111 million U.S. Department of Energy grant as part of federal stimulus efforts that built out the city’s smart grid

spectrum (Photo credit: Free Press Pics)

It is good news that the bad news is not all that bad. There will not be a spectrum crunch. But there is one now. The possibilities have not been realized.

The Spectrum Crunch that Never Really Was

Cisco estimates that mobile data traffic will grow by a factor of 18 by 2016, and Bell Labs predicts it will increase by a factor of 25..... when wireless networks are overloaded, the real culprit may be inefficient use of existing spectrum rather than a fundamental shortage. ..... "We don’t have a spectrum crunch so much as we have a spectrum policy crunch .... The so-called ‘spectrum crunch’ really reflects artificial spectrum scarcity" ..... “The challenge now is to extend those proven successes to enable wider-area broadband access using other underutilized portions of the spectrum.” ... such strategies could increase wireless capacity by thousands of times...... half the new demand through 2015 would be handled by small cells—Wi-Fi plus cells handling frequencies used by 3G and 4G networks ...... it might be possible to increase capacity tenfold even without spectrum sharing. ..... rigid regulations don’t allow the use of flexible new technologies like cognitive radio ...... “Right now, we have a 15- to 20-year backlog of new technologies and architectures, including sharing and small cells, which can take us a long way into the future.”