The “Break it Down” Blog

Todd Swarthout sent me one of the more interesting reads I’ve gotten a chance to take a look at recently.

This is a piece by Robert Cringely over at PBS.org and is exactly 1 year old today, but just as fascinating today as it was a year ago… and IMO, surprisingly insightful.

The premise of the article is an educated guess at what Google has been doing over the last 10 years while it:

• Buys & Indefinitely Leases more “dark fiber” than any other company on the planet.
• Builds some of the largest data centers in the world in many locations across the US.

At first guess, about 10 years ago, it looked like Google was poised to grow, poised to service folks with faster search and more services (Email anyone?), but it was probably 5 years ago, after Google continued to build infrastructure that could handle everyone on the planet doing a Google Search at once, in multiple locations… connected by more dark fiber lines than anyone else owned that people started to scratch their heads.

I personally thought Google was just super thorough. Wanting to make sure searches took nanoseconds instead of milliseconds (I kid), but Cringely’s take on what Google is doing and how it’s going about doing it was fascinating and frankly, dead-on.

Cringely points out that 10 years ago (maybe more) Google saw the writing on the wall… the internet was it. It wasn’t just another service that would function along side our TV networks, Phone networks, Cell networks, Satellite networks and so on… no way… the internet itself was the end-all-be-all. With enough bandwidth, it would simply replace all other means of communication information and entertainment.

But that’s the problem… “with enough bandwidth”… and it doesn’t have it, right now that is.

The hodge-podge of fiber networks out there and the ginormous data centers that are hubs for all these modes of communication have been feeling the crunch over the years as video, communication and entertainment is all moving online.

Some companies, like Comcast, solve this problem by blocking certain types of communication to take the strain off their network. Other networks just crap out under the load. The point is that the writing is on the wall… running networks (plural) and by association, a single internet that is robust enough to handle not just the demands now but the demands of the future (10 years when 1080p streaming is common and TVs have built in P2P clients and Netflix Streaming clients, etc) will destroy the internet infrastructure we have right now.

This is where Google comes in. Google has effectively been building the managed infrastructure for the next generation of the internet. The super-reliable… super-redundant… super-fall-back-capable internet that will carry audio/video/gaming entertaining into the next century.

This ultra-reliable internet infrastructure will go on sale at some point not to you and me, but to Qwest, Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Cox and anyone else that wants to run their traffic on this robust fault-tolerant network instead of managing their own.

Naturally AT&T/Comcast isn’t going to be laying off their team of techs and scapping their own data centers any time soon, the customers will start smaller, but this is the same idea behind hiring a hosting company as opposed to managing/hosting your own servers. The idea is that they do it better/faster/more reliably than you can, and this is what Google will do with the internet.

I’d encourage you to read the article to take a look, but people have been speculating something like this from Google as far back as 2005. I had no idea the Google was this big already, but I suppose when you are a $1 Trillion company with the smartest people in the world working at you… you tend to… do more extravagant projects.

$10 says the only reason Google had an IPO was to raise the cash to continue building this infrastructure.