A lot of water has gone under the bridge lately over Google’s WiFi plans.
Among the chief critics is Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital
Democracy. In a long piece at The Nation, he calls it a ploy, a trick aimed at destroying privacy. The reason? Google would offer some service free, in exchange for ads fed by a Google cookie.
Unstrung notes that this is just the low-speed plan, that Google (and its new partner, Earthlink) will offer All You Can Eat (AYCE) WiFi for $20/month, at much higher speeds, so those with means will be paying customers. This leads us back to the argument of municipal WiFi advocates, including me. The service should be free (since the frequency is free) and the "franchise" can’t be exclusive.
All this misses the key point, however.
Given a business model, Google will light its fiber.
(C’mon Google Light Your Fiber)
Over the last few years Google has been buying all the dark fiber it could get its hands on. Most of the purchases have been at fire sale prices. Most of the fiber remains unlit.
But if Google can see a reason to light its fiber, everything changes. Everything.
- The Bells’ stranglehold on the U.S. core is broken. According to the economics of light, a single competing core means prices can fall to the floor, because both cores can handle all the traffic.
- The Bells’ stranglehold on local access is broken.
According to the details in the media, Earthlink is going to build-out the local access portions of these networks. Google will not be a consumer ISP, Earthlink will be. Earthlink will build wherever it can find customers. Earthlink figures, for instance, that it can build-out New Orleans from a 15-mile radius of the city center for $15 million.
After five years of being slowly strangled by Bell lobbying and intransigence, Earthlink will, with Google’s help, be a national ISP, with an incentive to provide ever-faster service speeds, and a radio-based plant that can be written-off (and re-installed) every three years.
Best of all, Earthlink doesn’t have an exclusive here. Once the fiber is lit, Google can look for other backhaul customers. Essentially it becomes Level 3 with a better balance sheet. It becomes the Bells’ worst nightmare.
Once this starts, the Bells only have a limited number of options:
- They can try and line up exclusive franchises with cities, which Earthlink can fight in court.
- They can increase the amount of bandwidth they actually supply over DSL, and lower prices, which is good.
- They can try and get accelerated write-offs of their existing
plant, or spin-off the wired plant into some Bellco that aims to go
bankrupt, meaning lower costs and competitive prices. Also good. - They can use their political strength to define Google, and Earthlink, out of business. In other words, they can be evil.
Earthlink, and taxpayers, will fight the attempt to create exclusives
in court, and the Bells will lose because the unlicensed spectrum does
not really allow for exclusives. Google shouldn’t worry about
exclusives, because Earthlink won’t be the exclusive user of its fiber.
There is no legal reason I can see why Google couldn’t re-sell its
capacity to other ISPs, as well as Web hosting outfits, and it has every financial incentive to do just
that.
Once we have competition, in other words, in both the core and at the
edges, the problems of the Bell monopoly are over, without the need for
new legislation.
