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Google Fiber Is Looking For Organizations To Test Its 20-Gig Internet Service 42

Posted by BeauHD from the need-for-speed dept.
Google is looking to partner with businesses, education institutions, and non-profits to help test its 20 Gig symmetrical internet service. TechSpot reports: Nick Saporito, head of multi-gig & commercial product at Google, said they are only looking for eight additional partners so space is incredibly limited. Ideal candidates include those that are already downloading and uploading massive data sets, those conducting research that commands loads of bandwidth, or perhaps organizations working on future-focused tech that Google hasn't even yet considered but needs lots of throughput. If selected for the test, Google will reach out to your organization to discuss the next steps.

Google has been testing the 20 Gig service since at least late last year. We know this because Saporito shared a screenshot of a speed test conducted at his house in Kansas City highlighting his connection's throughput. Speaking to his home connection, Saporito said he tried to test its limits by streaming as many World Cup games in 4K as he had devices but didn't even come close to saturating the connection.
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Google Fiber Is Looking For Organizations To Test Its 20-Gig Internet Service More

Google Fiber Is Looking For Organizations To Test Its 20-Gig Internet Service

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  • They would be able to saturate an 100 Gig connection in no time.

    • That is starting to sound like hoarding old newspapers. I used to think maybe one day I'd retire and live in an RV for a few years, and in the evenings or when it was raining I'd watch or re-watch all these movies and series I never took time to watch over the years from an onboard HDD array. But now with Starlink even that isn't much of a use case.

      • Here's a good reason to hoard old(er) movies and TV shows (and books as well, be it in digital or hard copy format): Politically correctness / SJW trends of rewriting history and censoring stuff. I'd rather watch original productions, as they were made, while understanding and acknowledging their mistakes, rather than a horribly butchered "contemporary" variant.

        • It would be trivial to find organizations that would easily use this. Any small ISP. Any large content distributor (Google themselves, Apple, Amazon AWS, Disney, Hulu, HBO.

          These companies use internet at hundreds of times this capacity anyway, would have datacenter switching required to move >10GB traffic down to servers, and would have high utilization rates. Just allow them to advertise their block, and the traffic would fast put this circuit to good use, and you can test how well your service is ho

  • Google graveyard (Score:5, Insightful)

    by The Evil Atheist ( 2484676 ) on Thursday May 18, 2023 @06:12AM (#63531795)
    So, who wants to be a volunteer for something that they're going to lose interest in supporting 5 years down the line?

    • Yeah, that. There's absolutely no way I'd sign my organization up for this unless Google paid the full installation cost, and for any equipment I couldn't reasonably reuse. The odds of them shutting down the service are just too high.

      • Even if G paid for it all, when they shut down there is still a cost in time and effort to replace them on short notice later.

        If I was still at my big government job, we'd take this because hey free bandwidth, our budgets were faked up shit and staff time has no value because we massively over hired. Under those circumstances it could be fun and interesting but I'd never sign up any of my real companies. Your tax dollars at work, btw.

        • Any agile tech-oriented non-profit with large data needs should be interested. Here are some., Blue brain, (are they non-profit?) Gitlab, that organization that's compiling a diff for human DNA, Sci hub (lol) SETI, and the Human Genome Project. There are a number of non-profits which simply provide, on a grant basis, compute power for worthy projects too,. Often enough with specific supercomputers, but otherwise as well.
      • They got booted from Louisville for destroying roads. I get cutting to trench the fiber but if you cut into a street, fill it back in with something other than spray insulation foam. The winders have way too much thermal expansion and contraction. It literally trashed all the roads. They should have used directional boring combined with conduit in the utility easements.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Even if they lose interest in the consumer side, this is probably aimed more at business users and other ISPs.

      20Gbps service has been available in a few cities in Japan for some years now. They already sorted out all the technology and found uses for it, like streaming 8k TV service. Of course most users don't come close to saturating it, and most PCs only have a 1Gbps network port, but there is huge potential to deliver new services. Streaming 3D video for VR headsets is one example.

      Huawei has demonstrated

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Even if they lose interest in the consumer side, this is probably aimed more at business users and other ISPs.

        That is even less enticing. Forcibly changing upstream because the "tech giant" lost interest in providing you service is more of a bother for businesses and ISP yet moreso.

        Usually a better idea to deal with a company of comparable size and in your vicinity. So you can drop by for coffee and get to know the people that matter for keeping your service, and thereby your business, going.

        Huawei has demonstrated 50Gbps over passive fibre for consumer use, with products later this year.

        "Passive fibre" is such a shitshow. "Look, we have a point-to-multipoint ISP business because we originally built it on a br

    • Google fiber is still operating.

    • So, who wants to be a volunteer for something that they're going to lose interest in supporting 5 years down the line?

      Google Fiber was launched 13 years ago and is still operating, still expanding (albeit not quickly) and still rolling out new services. It's not going anywhere.

  • The obvious use case for a relatively normal person to me is some kinds of remote work and backup.

    So for instance if you've gone remote and want to backup 1 TB of storage before doing something important, at 1 Gbps that's 2 hours, while at 20 Gbps that's 6 minutes, assuming we're on solid state storage.

    • That's not going to happen very often. Backups are normally a full followed by incrementals which tend to be very tiny relative to the full. Then every so often (one a week or month or whatever), you do another full.

      And even for the uses cases with huge incrementals or that require fulls, those are niche verticals.

  • Bandwidth is not the bottleneck. Their crap software (client and server) is.
  • Trying to test a 20G circuit using 4K streams seems to be a really silly test. I doubt that the streaming providers would exceed 30Mbps for online streams of the World Cup. Even if he was able to somehow get a 4K Blu-ray quality stream (128Mbps) he would need 6+ devices to even exceed a 1Gbps connection, let alone 20Gbps.
  • I doubt it is sustainable because all that data has to be dealt with by software and once the software buffers are saturated the bandwidth speed will have to significantly slow down to accommodate, sounds like a "pig in a poke" deal to me

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by nasch ( 598556 )

      This is 20g for an entire business, right? So it would not necessarily be one NIC using it all.

      • This is 20g for an entire business, right? So it would not necessarily be one NIC using it all.

        BINGO! no one single device would use all 20gbps. 20gbps would be for the entire company or building as their WAN. You would need a specialized gateway to use that kind of bandwidth.

  • How about coverage instead? (Score:3)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Thursday May 18, 2023 @07:50AM (#63531897)
    I'd rather rural areas get fiber coverage than rely on dialup/dsl or crowding up space with satellites than seeing the urban elite get the equivalent of being a bandwidth billionaire.

    • I am less than 2 kms from city hall in a city with almost 1 million people. My fastest "advertised" upload speed is 30 Mb/s. I am a long way from a symmetrical 1GB connection ...

      Given the state of things in town, I can't imagine what its like for the truly rural folk.

      The number of places that you can get a 1GB internet from two different providers in North America is pretty small. If you can only get it from one provider, then that provider isn't going to try too hard and will gladly extort you for the

    • Yes, our rural town (outside Kansas City) is digging and installing fiber as we speak. We hope to have 1 Gig when it's all done later this year. We do have Cable internet, but we currently pay more to get it up to .5 Gig.

    • My first thought was to add "... to BOTH of their services areas" to the tagline.

  • SDR (Score:2)

    by tprox ( 621523 )
    Run a ton of SDR IQ data streams at full bandwidth to a remote datacenter for processing.

  • My fiber company has been offering 100Gig service for quite a while now. Google Fiber continues to show how behind they are. There's a reason they went through 4 CEOs in a single year. They're even more disorganized than other Google projects.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Where do you live and how much does this service cost?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GoRK ( 10018 )

      As a professional, I'd hope you would well understand the difference between building a 100G link with dedicated fiber and equipment that is widely available off-the-shelf, vs deploying 25GS-PON in its current state of development.

      Google Fiber is not trying to compete with you; they essentially use the business as a testbed for consumer access and networking technologies at scale.

      To be quite frank, you don't sound like you understand your business vertical all that well. Sounds typical of a small WISP lucky

      • Used to oversee the NOC at one of the largest ISPs in the country, and the largest pipe in the midwest at the time. Nowadays, that's below my pay grade, so I don't concern myself there. Just have 100gig fiber at home and that's fine enough. But feel free to go on and on about network technologies at scale so that we can all laugh along.

  • will google cover the cost of 20G routers / switches? any maybe the cost to run some new fiber cables in the office?

  • Just imagine the porn you could download with that!

  • It Me (Score:3)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Thursday May 18, 2023 @06:29PM (#63533555)
    Hello, yes, I am an "organization". I would like 20 Gig internet please.

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