GoogleNet, dark fibre…

From engadget: Man, this whole GoogleNet thing is getting sticky and suspicious and interesting—a real page turner, if you ask us. So if you recall, we reported before that Google was supposedly buying up unused fiber and spare backbone bandwidth like crazy—enough to move some serious, serious data. Then yesterday our man Om pointed out IP Democracy’s report that Google has been further reviewing bids for building a nationwide DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) fiber network, one theoretically capable of terabit speeds, and at the bargain basement price of under $100 million—apparently this thing could even be up and running in months, according to their sources. Yes, we know how crazy-conspiracy-theory this stuff sounds sounds, but where it goes from here is increasingly less questionable. So even though Goog can easily snap up all this backbone bandwidth, they’re left with the last mile issue, hence speculation of a WiMax or WiFi network. Now today it’s come out that yes, they actually have a piece of working WiFi VPN software to download, and that it “is only available at certain locations in the San Francisco Bay Area�—coincidence that that’s where they happen to have a test bed of location-tracking WiFi hotspots to provide Google-local based ads on top of free WiFi access? And knowing Google, of course they’d want VPN software running on “GoogleNet,� what kind of PR nightmare would it be for them having millions across the nation getting online on open WiFi on account of the “do no harm� company? Ordinarily we might say this is all kind of crackpot speculation, but these pieces keep falling together and it’s kind of freaking us out.

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Free Wi-Fi? Get Ready for GoogleNet.

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