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September 15, 2006

Google's Big Bandwidth Plans

Lots of people are talking about this Village Voice story on Google's office plans involving a mega-bandwidth peering point in New York City. It's interesting stuff, but I don't buy the usual conspiracy nattering, from a parallel internet, to Terminator fantasies. This just strikes me as the information age equivalent of locating  a really big aluminum smelter near a really big freshwater supply.

That's why what lies beneath 111 Eighth Avenue may be more important than the building itself. The old Port Authority headquarters sits atop one of the main fiber optic arteries in New York City—the Hudson Street–Ninth Avenue "fiber highway." The venerable behemoth is already one of the country's most important "carrier hotels"—loosely speaking, the physical connection points of the world's telecommunications networks and the World Wide Web. As a result, Google will "have access to as much bandwidth as possible and as much variety of bandwidth as possible," says Dana Spiegel, a technology consultant and executive director of NYC Wireless.

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