Net Neutrality 9-15-2006

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Google End Runs AT&T, Verizon and the other Telecomms

Google is leasing a huge chunk of space, almost two full floors, at 111 Eighth Avenue in the Chelsea District of Manhattan in the landmark former Port Authority Headquarters. . . . But it isn’t the building that’s the key to understanding this move. According to the breaking story in the Village Voice,

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.

The tenant list of this building reads like a Who’s Who in High Tech, with many of the top internet and Telecomm players in residence . . . There’s a “meet me” room known as NYC Connect . . . a carrier neutral facility . . . This will allow Google to bypass the Telecomms and go directly to Tier 2 service providers. The meet me facilities “are built to N+1 redundancy.

There is much speculation about why Google is doing this, but what it really comes down to is that Google is now master of its own fiber optic destiny and can’t be held hostage by Ed Whitacre or any other Telecomm. And if you add up the ongoing purchases of dark fiber all over the map, it spells out a future where the Telecomms will never be able to hold Google hostage to additional fees or slow down delivery of Google Video or VOIP.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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