Google Testing High-Speed Fiber Network At Stanford Res Halls

GovTechGuy writes with this news from "Google has reached an agreement to build its first ultra-high speed broadband network near Stanford University, the search giant announced on Thursday. The agreement with Stanford means the university's residential subdivision will be the first place to test Internet speeds up to one gigabit per second, more than 100 times faster than the typical broadband connection in the US. The plan is to break ground early next year." That might just be worth $50,576 per year to have.

This is not for students

[Wesley Felter]

This network is for houses on Stanford's campus where faculty and staff live. The students will have to be content with only 100 Mbps in the dorms.

Re:Yeah what is this crap

[bv728]

In fact, if you RTFA, you'll notice the phrases such as 'Test' and 'learn from the small deployment how to scale the Google Fiber program effectively for larger communities.'. This is intended as a close to home, easy deployment.

Drexel University has had this for years!

[GerbilSoft]

I'm currently a student at Drexel University, and they've had gigabit Internet links for several years. It was initially implemented in the main buildings, but then extended to dorms around two years ago. I regularly download files from public Internet servers at over 20 MB/s, and the connection's mostly limited by my laptop's hard drive.

Re:$50k? Uh, it's already available elsewhere

[mmaniaci]

The $50k is housing and tuition costs for Stanford students, not the price of the service. I'd link you to the source, but, yeah, you won't click it.

Re:How convenient...

[Caspin]

umm... RTFA?

There are only 850 homes that are being serviced at Stanford, mostly faculty (no dorms). Google has plans to scale they're broadband experiment up to 50,000-500,000 homes before their done.

Stanford was selected to be the first because it was small and close to Google's campus. It is essentially the trial run before the really big deployments.

The rest of the communities will be selected before the end of the year.

Re:How convenient...

[timeOday]

I can see how this situation might not be realistic though, considering colleges ban torrenting. Just imagine: A 1 million K line and you can't use it for its main purpose. Disappointing.

Actually the main purpose for bittorrent vanishes with 1gbit symmetric Internet. Why bother pooling upstream when it isn't scarce any more? You'd still want lots of peer-to-peer servers (so 10,000 clients weren't all hitting the same server), but there would be no reason for a single client to connect to more than 1 server, which would eliminate most of the complexity of bittorrent. Just find any server with the file you want that isn't too heavily loaded, and download it from them.