Google Router Rumors

An anonymous reader writes "There's a new rumor that Google is developing its own router. The company won't comment on the story, but it's been in the hardware business for a while and expanded its presence with Android. If Larry Ellison can go halvsies with HP on a server, then Eric Schmidt should certainly be able to make Cisco nervous."

one more reason...

...to procrastinate on the CCNA test.

All that I need now is google underwear!

All I need now is google underwear that twitters for me with real time gps tracking so I know where I've been.

Re:All that I need now is google underwear!

Do you really want to wear underwear that's in perpetual beta? Ouch!

Re:All that I need now is google underwear!

Don't hold your breath, have you seen the Google Appliance [google.com]?

Re:All that I need now is google underwear!

I loved getting the big yellow Google box at my last job. And it came with a black Google t-shirt too! I had one job setting up a NOC for sextracker.com back in the day. I ordered 10,000ft of Cat5 in hot pink. Made it easy to find my stuff in the colo.

In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried

Even looking at Google from the outside, even by just knowing that they have hundreds of thousands of desktop machines behind their world class search, even just knowing that those machines have to be connected someway somehow .... you know they

1. Already have something that beats what Cisco offers.
2. Have been testing/improving it for years.
3. Can simply point to their success as reasons you should buy into their technology (no matter how proprietary it is).

I seem to remember rumors of them building their own insane (10 GbE) hardware switches [nyquistcapital.com]. And I don't think that's hard to imagine as nothing on the market at the time could possibly meet their needs.

Of course, there's a lot of questions that remain to be answered ... like many claims they could not be operating on TCP/IP stacks on the inside. Because it's such a resource hog in some respects but that's irrelevant--I'm certain they can apply some of their ideas universally. I would put my money on them being the leader in research on networks and network theory ... probably past Cisco even (although behind the NSA as no one's ever sure about those guys). I feel that networking is so closely tied to their bread and butter search application that they should be dumping huge R&D into that field. I can't offer proof but it certainly makes sense to me.

And all I can say is that it's about time someone put pressure on the home & enterprise networking hardware companies. What a stagnant squabbling market that has become.

Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried

And all I can say is that it's about time someone put pressure on the home & enterprise networking hardware companies. What a stagnant squabbling market that has become.

The fine article seems to be down, so I can't tell what it claims. But I suppose the "Google Router", if it exists, will put an end to Juniper and Cisco in the same way as Bigtable does for Oracle, PostgreSQL etc.: it doesn't because the technology is so fundamental for Google's success that they simply don't share it.

Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried

But I suppose the "Google Router", if it exists, will put an end to Juniper and Cisco in the same way as Bigtable does for Oracle, PostgreSQL etc.: it doesn't because the technology is so fundamental for Google's success that they simply don't share it.

Reading TFA, It is basically saying that the loss of Google alone as a customer would doom Juniper. It doesn't matter if Google shares its technology or not as far as Juniper is concerned.

Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried

"And all I can say is that it's about time someone put pressure on the home & enterprise networking hardware companies. What a stagnant squabbling market that has become."

If they do get into network tech, I seriously hope they release some home routers. I'm probably not the only one tired of having to reboot home routers every so often, especially with multiple people connected and having their wireless connection suddenly drop.

Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried

Simple solution -- quit buying crappy (i.e. Linksys) routers. I've used Netgear routers for 10+ years, and have never had to reboot or replace a broken router.

Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried

I've had problems with both Netgear and Linksys routers, usually because of the cheap PSU's they use. Put it on a UPS and haven't had to reboot my home Linksys or Netgear (WRT54G and DG834N WDS'd together) in years now.

Mostly seems to stem from power fluctuations, google search [google.co.uk] brings up nothing specific, but anecdotal evidence on my part and some customers seem to agree. Anyone else have this?

Re:In My Opinion, Cisco Should Be Worried

although behind the NSA as no one's ever sure about those guys

The real secret of the NSA is that they've got a zombie Alan Turing kept functioning on a combination of nutrient bath and Jeff Stryker porn.

If they do

I hope they include sensible and up-to-date standards and protocols. I'm thinking about the possibilities of the interface of the tomato firmware and importantly, inclusion of ipv6 support. If we want this to happen in this generation we need to get software support on at least basic networking devices(thinking of routers and OSes).

Re:If they do

The Apple Airport Express and Airport Extreme routers support IPv6, although there's a bug in the latest firmware for doing configured tunnels.

Google was just trying to save money

It seems likely to me that since Google is full of really smart people who seem to have a touch of the NIH syndrome, it probably isn't surprising that they wanted to develop their own routers from scratch instead of paying through the nose for Cisco or Juniper devices, especially since they needed hundreds or thousands of them and really don't want to have to pay for support contracts. I'd see a Google router announcement as just a productization of something they already use internally, just like Protocol Buffers.

The problem is that Google develops tech internally that is extremely good at solving their problems, but they don't always apply well outside of Google. Protocol Buffers aren't exactly obsoleting XML and from all indications they probably never will. The Google router will probably be super fast and simple, but lack a whole bunch of the more obscure features. The problem is that there's someone out there for each one of those obscure features, and if you don't support it your product won't even make it in the door. This is a problem Juniper runs into a lot, they have good and fast hardware, but the only thing it does is route.

In fact the article points out that Google's router is most likely to compete directly with Juniper instead of Cisco.

Re:Google was just trying to save money

The problem is that there's someone out there for each one of those obscure features, and if you don't support it your product won't even make it in the door.

Too right on this point. I used to work for Cisco, and was always amazed at the number of bugs filed by customers around really obscure and esoteric features. Every one of those obscure features is in IOS because somebody (usually somebody big with deep pockets) is still using it... Even simple things like OSPF timers - they all have to be adjustable, because some big shop has decided that they can squeeze an extra .1% of bandwidth out of their pipes by fiddling with those timers - and if your new box requires them to reconfigure their whole network to standards (or worse yet, to the values that worked best in Google's network) they're not going to be very interested...

I can see it now...

I can see it now...

Z:\>ping 192.168.1.20

Pinging 192.168.1.200 with 32 bytes of data:

Reply from 10.2.1.254: Destination host unreachable. Did you mean 192.168.1.2?
^C

Re:I can see it now...

I'd be rather surprised if "ping 192.168.1.20" resulted in trying to ping 192.168.1.200. Might want to check your network settings or something.

TFA says Juniper is doomed. Not so fast.

TFA says that Juniper is doomed because Google is getting ready to switch to their own in-house brand of routers. I find this difficult to believe for several reasons. One is that even if Google is Juniper's biggest customer, one customer does not a demise make -- Juniper has many other customers, including the entire UUnet (MCI, WorldCom, Verizon Business, whatever they're calling themselves this year) backbone. But there are far more practical reasons. Routers contain a lot of specialized hardware designed for rapid switching of packets. Google may have a lot of smart people working for them, but they certainly don't have the resources on board to design and build all of those ASIC's and other custom hardware, and it doesn't really make sense for them to get into that business during a recession just for an in-house project. (And no, don't give me that line about how a fast enough server with multiple Ethernet cards can substitute for even a mid-grade Cisco or Juniper. I manage a data center network and know the numbers. It can't even come close, no matter how good the software is, because a general purpose computer has to forward every packet using software, while a real router only makes a routing decision once and then all the rest of the packets for that destination are switched in hardware at wire speed.)

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Re:TFA says Juniper is doomed. Not so fast.

Of course Google would not waste time developing their own ASICs. Companies like Marvell, Broadcom, and Dune offer plenty to choose from, and companies such as FDRY and JNPR already use these to build their own offerings.

It only makes sense for Google to use the building blocks to make a device that meets their specific needs.

Re:TFA says Juniper is doomed. Not so fast.

Or Google could buy Juniper. Let the rumor drive down the stock and pick them up at fire sale prices.

Re:TFA says Juniper is doomed. Not so fast.

"...even if Google is Juniper's biggest customer, one customer does not a demise make..."

That really depends. For smart companies, they've sufficiently diversified their client base such that the loss of one will hurt but not cripple. Some clients, however, just become so damn big and a company simply can't get enough other clients or the increase the volume from the other existing clients high enough to balance against that one mega-client. Once one client represents a massive percentage of your revenue and the loss of that client would force you into immediate emergency restructuring in the hopes of survival, then yes, one client a demise can potentially make.

No Thanks.

My router works fine, and I don't have Google stealing all of my LAN packets and serving me ads.

A fucking grouter had better make me warm delicious waffles if they want me to buy it. Even then, I'd only use it to make waffles.

And now I'm off to amazon to look for a waffle maker.

Not in "hardware business," won't sell routers

Everybody seems to be assuming that these new routers will be for sale. That's obviously not going to happen — there just isn't room in the marketplace for a new player, even if that player is Google. Breaking into a new hardware marketplace is hard. You have to develop sales channels, create a hardware support organization, set up an operations organization to manage production, etc. etc.

I know about these things because for the last couple of years my job has been to document some of Sun's hardware products. Before that I mostly documented software, and the shear complexity of designing, building, distributing, selling and supporting actual physical products still boggles my mind. At product team meetings I sometimes feel at sea, even though the technical concepts I have to deal with are actually much simpler than those I faced when I was on software product teams. The logistics are just mind boggling.

Google isn't set up to be "in the hardware business". They make their own servers because there are no manufacturers that are able to meet their specialized needs. Now they seem to have decided that their routers also require specialized in-house designs. They haven't tried to sell these servers to other companies, and they won't try to sell their routers. Even if they could hope to compete, it would mean building up the kind of technical bureaucracy that Google's top echelon has no interest in managing.

Hell, they don't really have a proper bureaucracy for the much simpler job of creating and distributing their software products. If they actually charged money for most of them, they'd be trouble.

And Android? How does Android count as being "in the hardware business"? Is Google selling a cell phone I haven't heard about?

Am I then only one who...

Am I the only one who read this and thought, "Hmmm, it must be time for Google to renew their support contracts with Juniper.".

"leak" a rumor about no longer needing Juniper, and watch juniper lower their support rates.