Google's Dark Fibre Plans?

sebFlyte writes "According to news.com "Google is looking for Strategic Negotiator candidates with experience in...(i)dentification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network." Is the search giant planning to build a global fibre-optic network?" Or perhaps simply use unused fibre that they can get for cheaper then from the datacenter providers; although at least from my talks with the datacenter folks, Google's not paying much per Mbps as it is.

You mean "than"

Not "then".

Dark Fibre (Fiber) defined.

The free encyclopedia definition: [wikipedia.org]

"Dark fibre or unlit fibre (or fiber) is the name given to fibre optic cables which have yet to be used. They are hence not yet connected to any device, and are only there for future usage."

Re:Dark Fibre (Fiber) defined.

Thinking about it... maybe Google is planning an entrance into the ISP market?

I mean, Google might be getting cheap rates for www.google.com, but that probably wouldn't extend to customers, plus accessability wouldn't be that great...

I'm not quite sure what Google's angle on the market would be, except perhaps high-speed/low-cost, but that doesn't seem as elegant as Google's usual offerings...

Re:Dark Fibre (Fiber) defined.

Dark fibre or unlit fibre (or fiber) is the name given to fibre optic cables which have yet to be used. They are hence not yet connected to any device, and are only there for future usage.

There is a second meaning: It is fiber which is not lit by the provider. For example if you have two locations and lease a dark fiber between the two, you are essentially getting two ends of a single fiber with no networking equipment in the loop. You will then connect your own equipment at each end and light it your self.

Re:Dark Fibre (Fiber) defined.

There's more to it than that... my understanding is that when you lease "dark fiber" it means that when you get it, the fiber is _still_ dark from end-to-end, i.e. there is no mux/demux equipment or any telco "value add" services associated with it. It's sort of like the "alarm circuit" that telecoms used to sell, which was a "dry copper" pair from one location to another with no telecom switch or repeaters on the line. It's not just "unused" fiber - it's fiber that you get to signal on however you want (within some power limits I'm sure).

This means you provide the equipment, potentially giving you vastly more bandwidth than the telecom could sell you on that fiber. It also means you can upgrade your equipment later for faster speeds. It also means less points of failure on the line because its just optics all the way through.

Dark fiber usually isn't sold by the telecoms. Usually you'll have to get it from companys such as the railway and sewer owners - the guys who oversee the cables themselves, not the higher level services.

The disadvantage of dark fiber compared to a telcom OCx circuit are 1) you can't get channelized services eg split this DS3 into a few DS1 to this locations, and few DS1s to that location, a couple DS1s for ISDN PRI, etc etc. 2) you have less flexibility in choosing the endpoints - your choices are limited to big data centers where the vendors are willing/able to provide dark dervice 3) you don't get to deal with the really nice helpful people at the phone company

Re:Dark Fibre (Fiber) defined.

You can lease dark fiber from a telco... I worked for a company that did it for a short while.

There's probably 100* more dark fiber than lit fiber in the world - when they're putting it down it's dirt cheap to put a few more bundles in. You can get it pretty much anywhere to anywhere (where there's some kind of physical link anyway).

The real cost though is lighting the thing. It costs a fortune to rent the mux equiment, and it's large enough that space considerations at the other end come into play. That's mostly the reason why it's still dark in the first place (that and the telcos have so much excess bandwidth already they don't know what to do with it... it's more cost effective to negotiate a cut rate on a piece of existing fiber).

Re:Dark Fibre (Fiber) defined.

When you're buying that kind of fiber, you can buy whatever kind you want.

When 2 pair costs $.20 per foot, without install costs, and 12 pair costs $.30 per foot, and it costs the same $10 a foot to bury the sucker, you might as well guard against future expansion, breakage and whatnot by installing the 12 pair. Standardizing on 12 pair also simplifies inventory work. I've heard that many telco's standardized on 12 pair everywhere except for major, major backbones because the savings from standardized purchasing, inventory, and etc made it cheaper.

*all costs are estimated

Re:Dark Fibre (Fiber) defined.

The nice thing about dark fiber is that it is more efficient. While regular fiber uses light to transmit data, dark fiber uses a lack of light to transmit data.

Unification

Ah, so has Google unified String Theory, Dark Matter, and Dark Energy?

We knew it would happen

Once Google went public, now they have joined the Dark Side. The Chairman [perantivirus.com] will show you the true nature of the force, he is your master now.

The thing is

You really can't fail with responsive organisational projections - the consultants recommend interactive administrative time-phases. Actually the solution can only be homogenised management mobility..

I wouldn't be surprised to see 'em buy a Level 3

Seems like buying a Level 3 (or similar sized network provider) would be an easier route, as these guys got hammered in valuations due to over-capacity and a lot cheaper to buy existing capacity rather than building your own.

BTW, the Light Reading guys were the ones who "broke" this story back on January 6th [lightreading.com]

Re:I wouldn't be surprised to see 'em buy a Level

I would be. It's far from their core competency and there's so much competition in the telco business that everyone sells at cost anyway. Maybe a datacenter chain like Equinix would be a better acquisition target.

Re:I wouldn't be surprised to see 'em buy a Level

No no no.

Why the hell would Google want to buy up an existing ISP/telco with all the crap that that entails?

What they are doing is actually very sensible.

By looking to negotiate purchase/lease of dark fibre over the medium term they are avoiding the big cost which is actually putting fibre into the ground.

I imagine that they would ensure that the maintenance of that fibre is the responsibility of the provider, so they don't need to run their own maintenance crews either.

And the BIG plus with having access to fiber is that you can then ramp up your capacity by using WDM (Wave Division Multiplexing) to get more bandwidth out of your fibre.

They have probably realised that to ramp up their networks to cope with their future plans they need more bandwidth that they can afford to buy as "service" from a regular telco. Its just too damn expensive!

By leasing the fibre themselves, they light it how they want, rather that how the telco wants to sell it to them.

This *might* have biogger up front costs, but the recurrent costs are MUCH lower.

Re:I wouldn't be surprised to see 'em buy a Level

Don't forget that Google parks hardware all over the place. They've got a pile of it sitting in datacenters run by Savvis, who bought up the dregs of the Cable & Wireless operations (who bought up the dregs of the Exodus operations). But unlike Exodus, C&W also had tons of dark fibre. Savvis has been trying to make everything lean and mean, but they've got a pretty nice inter-datacenter-network... but not necessarily any bargains when peering with other people's operations. I can imagine that Google would love to get outside the loop of having the datacenter operators dictate what terms they're willing to live with when setting up new peering arrangements. Especially as Google's needs become more instantaneously multi-directional (rather than crunch-and-publish, it's real-time ad stats, mail, etc).

Even if all these new hires do is help Google's datacenter providers make good decisions about new or altered peering networks, they'll probably earn their keep.

The Google Empire

And thus it begins....it was difficult to see at first; what Google's plans were. Only after it had struck first using highspeed fiber to initiate the subroutines in the Google desktop search companion did humanity realize its vast mistake. Only it was too late...Google was selfaware...and it was hungry...for pie...I mean Pi...

They've been connected to the ams-ix for some time

I have seen traces from the Netherlands to www.google.com go over the amsterdam internet exchange [ams-ix.net] for some time now. According to their member page [ams-ix.net] they have been connected since march 2004. Traceroute:

5 bb2-ge6-0.amsix-telecity.home.nl (213.51.158.153) 28.478 ms 27.683 ms 26.895 ms
6 r2-ge1-2-0.amsix-telecity.home.nl (213.51.158.158) 26.563 ms 35.185 ms 33.987 ms
7 core1.ams.net.google.com (195.69.144.247) 32.044 ms 32.543 ms 30.484 ms
8 64.233.175.246 32.806 ms 32.560 ms 30.529 ms
9 216.239.46.173 30.058 ms 29.058 ms 26.684 ms
10 216.239.49.254 37.532 ms 36.958 ms 39.685 ms
11 216.239.48.50 41.163 ms 41.902 ms 43.109 ms
12 216.239.49.62 35.543 ms 34.004 ms 33.173 ms
13 * * *

The AMS-IX is the largest Internet Exchange / NAP in Europe.

Who has got the bigger one?

Both AMS-IX and LINX staff can impress the girls/guys with having the bigger one. LINX's switches are pushing more data (71 Gbit total include private+public/49.23Gbit for public peering) Ams-ix is doing 49.7 (dunno if that includes private)

AMS-IX has more members 210 against LINX having only 169 members.

However they are both equally fun to party with. ;-)

GoogleISP

Maybe this is the beginning of Google Broadband. With all the other non-search areas they've gotten themselves into, maybe they're looking to take on MSN and Yahoo in the ISP realm.

GoogleISP: Dark fiber to your city, fiber to you home coming soon.

And after they can give everyone a super high speed broadband connection, it's just one more step to selling a subscription for the comping suite of web-based apps that GMail proves they're so good at.

Video search plans???

hmmm....maybe this could provide the bandwidth needed for the initial indexing of video material? And maybe the constant re-indexing of TV shows, etc. straight from the providers.

I know!

Bastards :)
They want to take over the Internet. :)
Create a new backbone. Replace InterNIC and all the suits who control the net now.
Then compete and eliminate most first tier providers, and generally own the global network.
Best luck, Google! I hope you will succeed!

Re:I know!

Either that or they want to be able to sync their world-wide collection of data-servers in an 'accpetable' length of time.

Not surprising...

They've got several (lots of?) datacenters that have to sync up lots of data. Anyone with enough data to transfer around can save money just buying the strands of fiber or wavelengths on lit fiber instead of paying a provider to light it. It's not surprising that Google has enough of this work to do that they want to hire someone with experience in it.

Re:Not surprising...

Based on stuff I heard in another life, Google used to get transit contracts with the fastest connection they could get, but the lowest commited rate. The syncs used to take place in the proverbial top 5% of the 95th percentile.

As in: they used provider A for 36 hours, provider B for the next 36h, provider C for the next 36h, etc... (bear in mind it was not surfer facing transit, just used to sync up the DCs.)

They've probably reached the level where they've got too much data to get away with that scheme. So they've got a pretty simple choice:
- Pay for the commited rate they really need.
- Link the 2 Data Centers with dark fiber lit with 10GigE.

Based on the over provisionning most fiber companies did when they built their networks, there's a lot of room for negociation when you're shopping for fiber, especially when you can hang the promise of a huge internationnal network in the balance.

The second option is pretty much guaranted to turn out to be much more affordable.

Unlit fibre

if google were to go into the telecommunications business they could make a killing if they did it properly.

What i am thinking though, they want to build their own private network which links their many datacenters around the US, so that we can get our search results even faster, or any of the other things like gmail.

Storing mail in two seperate locations is possible, but it would make for a pain in the ass if it takes to long to sync the changes between the servers in different datacenters to get people even faster response times from gmail.

This is off course all speculation.

Google in the telecommunications being a competitor to Verizon, T-Mobile, bell, Comcast, OOL, and other internet providers would be a good thing. They would be on of the only companies that would know how to do VOIP the right way.

quick grammar question

Which word is "dark" modifying, "plans" or "fibre"?

--
so dark, you'll forget the fibre

"Glut of fiber assets"

I'm getting really tired of all these "experts" talking about the glut of fiber in this country. The press makes it sound like there's dozens of dark fibers just a few inches from your house, and those darn telcos/cable companies just don't want you to have access to them. The reality is that most of the cash cow areas (such as Boston, NYC, LA and the bay area) have over capicity. Most of the rest of the country, where the payback is greater than 5 years, is very underserved.

And even where there is overcapicity, it is mostly in the urban areas, put in place for business, not single family homes. Good luck getting dark fiber in the 'burbs, let alone the sticks

I LOVE GOOGLE

you know it might just be me, or my google desktop search tool, but if google does it, it must be good.

Perhaps just better performance?

It could just be an option play - the option in the future to improve pae performance by shuttling most traffic through a Google-only backbone.

I think people may be reading too much into this. They're talking about hiring out a small number of positions. Going from that to wanting their own national fiber network is a huge leap, but I suppose its fun to speculate...

Google steps towards "GoogleZon"?

I watched this video (flash) just a few days ago EPIC [broom.org] and now this?...hmmm

than

It is "cheaper than", not "cheaper then". Only on slashdot does a Belgian reader teach English grammar to an American editor.

Am I the only one....

Am I the only one who thought of a few laxitive jokes when they read this?

I For One

I for one would like to welcome our new dark Google overlords...

two tier google

OK, here's my WAG. Google needs to up revenue soon, beyond what they are doing now. They provide a ton of services, quite a few of which are really free, as ads are easily ignored.

*Maybe* they will keep the freebie version of google for the peons, then offer a "corporate enterprise class scalable google data searching and management solution" whatever buzzspeak over this new controlled-by-them backbone setup. Say one of the features might be much better content filtering, spam control, antivirus scanning of webpages offered, whatever. Perhaps different search results, more fine tuning of results, more features, etc. Charge bigbuck$ for it.

Proof, At Last

>>"...that they can get for cheaper then from..."

At last, proof that /. really doesn't use editors.

observation with a chance of sarcasm

I wonder if Google is thinking to duplicate the highly successful "dark fibre" telecom business model developed in the late 90's? It meshes well with Google's proven strategy of selling ad space linked to Google internet searches.

more seriously, could someone shed light on what use dark fibre would be (could be something other than just another internet backbone) that couldn't be achieved merely by using existing providers?

It's About Data Mining...

Or maybe after grabbing a significant amount of backbone, they will sniff it, and start attaching targeted advertising to each packet... But seriously, they could acquire quite a bit of data by mining the traffic on a backbone.

This isn't about what you think

Hello,

Considering what Google has built internally for server management and redundancy, I would hypothesize based upon available data (i.e. GFS) that they're looking to light up fiber between their data centers, while running either TCP/IP or IPv6 (with modifications of existing IGP and routing protocols, more than likely BGP or OSPF) between them.

This is a very smart move on their part, if this is true. This would allow them to do their own internal traffic control and shaping over a private network, and develop/modify algorithms for efficient transfer of data over said network, without having to "play" by Telco/ISP rules.

In other words, they're more than likely building their own global network to more efficiently transfer data over the Internet by completely bypassing it for their inter-server traffic. This is a very smart move, if true.

Nice business idea

They're going to create a global super computer. Local servers gives higher performance. What do you think the Google bar is for? Coming versions will ask you if you want to donate your free CPU cycles to Google. Google in turn will sell these to corporations that needs CPU power.

Video on demand/search Google style?

would all these pipes allow us to watch shows we want, whenever we want, where ever we want? And google gets to add their own special advertisement within the video clip? hmmmmmmm another thought is VoIP/IM but I dunno how Google will make money other than charging people.

they're calling the project...

gLax... hahaha.

Dark Fiber? That's the COOLEST buzzword.

I don't care about anything else in the article. Google shmoogle.

But 'Dark Fiber' is the first industry catch phrase which, A) Actually means exactly what it says, and B) Doesn't make me want to strangle business pigs by their tasteful neckties. Those two things are almost certainly related.

Have a great day!

-FL

Seeking assets

One possible explanation is that Google is looking for something to do with their current $55B stock valuation [yahoo.com]. Other than making the founders incredibly wealthy, the high stock price by itself isn't particularly useful to the company. But it can be used as collateral for loans to acquire assets that could be useful both now and in the future. Given the massive storage and computing resources that Google already manages, I suspect that they can manage their own fiber network for very little incremental expense (I'm less sure about the physical care of the fiber -- who fixes your dark fiber when someone cuts it?). As they attempt to provide more and more services, they may simply want more control over the underlying transport.

Google makes a move into the government sector

Google will create a massive distributed infrastrucutre for processing all electronic communications using their existing search technology and their keyhole mapping technology. The system will be complemented by a series of satellites launched by Google to monitor all activity on the planet. Google will purchase North Dakota and set themselves up as an independant state, and will then sell the results of their new search system to governments for a nominal fee. Governments will flock to the new service as it reduces the cost of maintaining their own spy network and allows them to avoid pesky local privacy laws.

We joke about welcoming our new overlords, but, in earnest, I for one welcome our new all seeing, all knowing, all searching Google overlords.

ISP - transit vs peer

A more likely reason they would want to build a backbone network in the US is to attempt to get peer relationships with the large backbone ISP's rather than just being a customer buying transit service.

Traditionally, peering was free, buying transit service was not. Now such relationships are done by secret contract so the exact economics vary contract by contract, but it is a safe guess that peering is dramatically cheaper than transit. Google is likely getting to the scale (both from their web crawling and customer access) that the difference is important.

A simple Google search

returned 75 hits [google.com].

Why bother with dark fibre?

A problem with a lot of the dark fibre is that the equipment to transfer data on that kind of fibre is old or obsolete. poeple wouldn't abandon it if it werent useful. My office still has miles of coax in the walls next to the cat5. We just never use it because we would need ISA cards and slots to utilize it and things with ISA slots inside are pentium and 486 machines

An Obvious Step

First there was the web, ang Google became the best search engine, allowing you to check on anything, even if your credit card number is exposed somewhere out there.

Then there comes email, and Google figures out how to provide the best email service.

Next comes spam, and Google buys dark fiber to produce entry points into the Google Mail Facility, where you can rest assured that if the GMF sends you mail, it is not spam. The corollary will be, the only way to get email delivered is to have the GMF accept and deliver it.

Same Google knowledge is transferrable, massive cpu power to analyze email for spam patterns, massive database to identify/track spam sources, Google Way of cheap computers, smart software.

Why didn't I think of it? Oh, the day of spam is coming to an end! Oh, the humanity!

dot goo

I see it coming; look out for

.goo

.No sig required

Re:horrible writing

this article is horribly written! impossible to understand.

Why did you try to read it?

Nobody else here ever does.

Re:First post?!

Can't you see the connection between "I don't believe in first posts." and my signature. Funny (5).

Re:Google is taking over the world.

People are mad at Microsoft, but google is a forthcomming world dominator....

If that's so then Slashdot will be the first to declare allegiance.

We are practically a Google Temple here, folks.

MOD PARENT UP.

Just because Google can "do no evil" now, doesn't mean we shouldn't watch them closely. They are a publically traded company now, which means whatever conscience they might once have had is gone. "Power corrupts..." so the more powerful they get the more skeptical we should become.