The Emerging San Francisco Model

Wi-Fi Networking News: Google, EarthLink Submit Joint San Francisco Bid

Inside Google: Google - EarthLink Wi Fi Proposal

Earthling: More on Earthlink and Google and a Lack of Wires

A new model for metropolitan broadband is emerging out on the West Coast. As detailed in the links above , the combination of Earthlink and Google may be a winner for metropolitan broadband, for several reasons.

1. Different motivations. Google and Earthlink are stepping into the gap created by a lack of action from incumbents, high prices, and changing perceptions and possibilities based on new technologies. Their goals are Extension and Expansion, to create more eyeballs for their ISP and content search businesses.

2. Stronger motivations. These companies do not face the risk of canabalizing existing revenue streams, so they can proceed to act, without competing inhibitions that slow down incumbents. This corporate-sponsored metropolitan-broadband model has great potential because it lines up the motivations of well-funded private corporations with those of munciipalites.

3. Innovative Approaches. These guys have shown their willingness to approach metropolitan broadband in new ways; for instance, the varying service model (Free at low levels of bandwidth, with a fee for accelerated speeds), complemented by the ad model, which will subsidize the for-free base level of service to get more people on-line, faster.

Posted on February 25, 2006 at 04:11 PM | Comments (0)