Google’s ultra high speed fiber network — which the company says can offer speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second — is about to get its first trial outside of the Googleplex.
The trial is fairly small and not too far from home; the company will be deploying its network at Stanford University to “a group of approximately 850 faculty- and staff-owned homes on campus. “
Google also points out that this isn’t part of its call for small-to-mid-sized communities to submit proposals to get “Google Fiber” in their towns. That competition sparked an amusing social media battle earlier this year between dozens (if not hundreds) of towns ranging from Topeka, Kansas, to Huntsville, Alabama. Google says that they, “still plan to announce our selected community or communities by the end of the year.”
That said, Google has again made it clear that it doesn’t plan to get into the ISP business, as many originally speculated it would when it first announced the initiative. Rather, it falls into Google’s broader goal of making the Internet faster, an effort that also includes experiments with its own DNS and a potential HTTP protocol replacement.
Taken from Mashable