Google’s head of special initiatives, Chris Sacca, went into spin cycle last week while explaining his company’s dark fiber investments to Light Reading.
“I’ve bought a lot of fiber for Google,” Sacca says. The Google people believe their fiber buys have been misunderstood, and therefore viewed with an undo amount of suspicion by outsiders. (See Google Goes Optical.)
“People don’t understand that it’s not Google trying to take over the world,” Sacca says. Sacca explained that Google began investing in dark fiber for two main reasons: to connect the server farms and to “peer” with telecommunications service providers.
The part of the network neutrality debate that is never heard, Sacca says, is the fact that Google and AT&T have a massive peering arrangement. People like AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre and Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg have said early that Internet companies like Google can’t just leverage service provider networks without paying up.
Sacca says that the other side of the story is that Google is buying up fiber network so that it can “peer” with the AT&T network as would a large service provider. This, he says, saves Google money by eliminating the need to buy long-haul transport services.
But the term “peering” implies the mutual sharing of traffic by like partners — a trade-off. And it’s unlikely that Google carries AT&T traffic over its own fiber. Google seems to use the “peering” term to mean buying capacity on metro or access networks.
A few days after our conversation with Sacca, the Google public relations department sent this email note about Google fiber: “ . . .we use it to interconnect our data centers (for example, to replicate our search index to all of our computing sites),” writes spokesman Barry Schnitt. “We have users and data centers all over the world, so our connectivity needs are global in nature.”
“We have one peering point in San Francisco and some journalists say we’re trying to take over the world,” Sacca says. “That’s the thing that a lot of journalists don’t get,” he says, “is that one peering point does not a telecommunications network make.”
Google has also become a member of Northwest Access Exchange in Portland, Oregon’s Pittock building. NWAX is a layer 2 Internet exchange. They connect member networks using Ethernet. It is public knowledge that Google is building a server farm in the Dalles, Oregon. Hiding in plain site.
.gif)
