Read more.The tech giant has been in talks with CityFibre to extend its Google Fiber project to Britain.
Read more.The tech giant has been in talks with CityFibre to extend its Google Fiber project to Britain.
Bloody Sky, they're a parasite to the media and networking systems.
Bloody Murdock!!!
Strange this happens after Google's petulance about the privacy laws. It might be a complete coincidence, but it seems odd for a business of their size to go into something like this without following all of these angles. It feels to me like they're being a bit disingenuous: running a little publicity stunt to rustle our feathers and make us value them as a provider more than our own competition rules.
There are times, like this one, when those rules might seem unfair or appear to serve the wrong master. I still think we should be wary about jumping on Google's say-so. We might gain fiber optic broadband a year or two faster, at the expense of something far more valuable.
Few things would delight me more than Google never getting even a toehold in UK internet infrastructure, whatever the speed implications.
Otherhand (18-07-2014)
"so what speeds would Google give me?" 1000mbps
"and what speeds would sky give me?" uh... kinda 80? They're piggy-backing off BT
"..."
*cut to riots outside sky headquarters, pitch forks and fire and all the rest*
Let me fix that for you
http://www.cityfibre.com/gigabit-cities/
Beginning to find Google seriously creepy. You can now be using your Google-made phone/laptop with its Google OS using its Google browser, connected to wireless that's backed by Google fibre, perhaps using Google DNS to resolve hostnames, in order to check your Google mail or perhaps do some work on your Google Documents, or maybe see what your friends are up to on Google+ etc etc etc.
Obviously you don't *have* to be using Google anything, but by making the cost of entry of everything so low because they can later reap back the reward in search profits, they've gained a massive foothold in literally every part of the stack. It seems like it's fast becoming a monopoly I'm really not all that comfortable with. Worse still, I've totally bought into the whole thing. Even my workplace email for my last two jobs has been provided by Google.
Should any single company be allowed to build such a monopoly that has so much control over the entire stack of technologies that powers the internet? If Google's cloud offering gains traction and starts taking significant market share from AWS, a lot of the websites you visit that aren't already directly run by Google could soon be running on Google's servers as well. It just doesn't seem like a good thing for one company to have that much power/control over the internet.
edit: And I didn't even need to mention the maximal creepiness that is Google Glass.
Otherhand (21-07-2014)
Has always been that way though. Go back far enough and IBM was three times the size of the rest of the computing industry put together. Microsoft have been making a dogs dinner of things for the last decade, am only too happy that their reign seems to be at an end. Google now seems to be heading for top dog, well better them than Apple in my book.
True enough about IBM. It stopped more or less when PCs became ubiquitous (due largely to MS), but prior to that, about 70% of the computer industry was IBM, and everybody else (DEC, NCR, Honeywell, ICL, and so on) shared the remaining 30%-ish.
As for Google v Apple, I am not a particularly a fan of any large corporation, but personally, I prefer Apple. Yeah, they had some very hard-nosed business practices, but what large and prominent/dominant (in their market segment) corporation doesn't? But they didn't try to capture, and sell, information on just about every aspect of individuals lives. If you didn't buy Apple hardware, what they did didn't really affect you. Whereas Google sucks up data about individual people and their lives, whether they agree or not, and often, without them even knowing.
But you're fine with probably everything you eat, drink and watch and everything else boiling down to the same group in their own respective markets or more. For example, you can wake up and eat some Cheerios, have a Nescafé, head to work or school and buy a Coke and drink it with your Aero. Go home and eat a frozen pizza (that's one of the owned brands) and guess what, you stuck with ONE brand, Nestlé.
Oh but when it comes to competitive internet/broadband in the UK, yup that's going too far!
Why? How is Google any worse than the current market providers? I really want to know this, because the more fighting for a share in the market, the BETTER for the consumers. Actually paying what was advertised speed, yeah I'm sure that's the last thing you're interested in right.
Because a large part of their business model isn't about providing service, it's about data acquisition, data warehousing and data mining. If you dress a skunk in make-up and a fur coat, it's still a skunk.
Google are intrusive enough about other people's privacy with existing services, but at least we can use other mail services or search engines, but personally, I don't want to see them get ANY toehold in UK internet infrastructure, and certainly, there are no circumstances under which I'd have a net account with them, utterly regardless of either speed offered, or price. It could be the fastest connection in the country, and free for life, and I still wouldn't accept one.
This is a bit of an odd analogy. There is much more competition in the food market than there is in internet services, and I don't buy Nestlé, ever, without even trying. I make everything I eat from scratch, and I only drink tea (not a Nestlé brand). Conversely, I can't make my own internet.
Competition is inevitable, if you can't take the heat.... well you know where to go.
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