I saw this article linked by Bill Harris at Dubious Quality. It’s pretty interesting stuff.
Google wants to – in its own way – control the Internet. In fact, they probably control it already and we just haven’t noticed.
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I think Google is building for a future they see but most of the rest of us don’t. I’ll go further and guess that Google is planning to build similar data centers in many states and that the two centers they are apparently preparing to build here in South Carolina are probably intended mainly to SERVE South Carolina. That’s perhaps 100,000 servers for four million potential users or 40 users per server. What computing service could possibly require such resources?
The answer is pretty simple. Google intends to take over most of the functions of existing fixed networks in our lives, notably telephone and cable television.
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Looking at this problem from another angle, right now somewhat more than half of all Internet bandwidth is being used for BitTorrent traffic, which is mainly video. Yet if you surveyed your neighbors you’d find that few of them are BitTorrent users. Less than 5 percent of all Internet users are presently consuming more than 50 percent of all bandwidth.
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It is becoming very obvious what will happen over the next two to three years. More and more of us will be downloading movies and television shows over the net and with that our usage patterns will change. Instead of using 1-3 gigabytes per month, as most broadband Internet users have in recent years, we’ll go to 1-3 gigabytes per DAY – a 30X increase that will place a huge backbone burden on ISPs. Those ISPs will be faced with the option of increasing their backbone connections by 30X, which would kill all profits, OR they could accept a peering arrangement with the local Google data center.
They are building huge datacenters in quite a few places, but does it really mean that they’re intending to service states directly with them? My take was that the datacenters are frankly geographically located in places away from tons of places where they can make use of cheap efficient energy. Hence their giant datacenter at The Dalles.
I suppose it’s a plausible strategy for Google to control various backends and if there was a company to do so it’d be them.
It’s a hedge against losing the network neutrality political battle as well. If a major backbone starts to throttle Google TV or whatever, they can fire up some of their fiber and run it themselves.
Looking at this problem from another angle, right now somewhat more than half of all Internet bandwidth is being used for BitTorrent traffic, which is mainly video. Yet if you surveyed your neighbors you’d find that few of them are BitTorrent users. Less than 5 percent of all Internet users are presently consuming more than 50 percent of all bandwidth
I find this data pretty staggering. Is it substantiated? Seems like the telco’s would have already responded.
This jives with what I’ve heard. They don’t want to put a stop to this though, they want to monetize it and find ways to turn it into a revenue stream.
Why are both building giant datacenters in such a hurricane prone state? Wouldn’t it be better in some place like… Montana? Then they wouldn’t have to air condition the buildings all year either.
