Verizon, AT&T, Google Partake of Broadband Speed Race

Plans by Google and others to provide ultrafast broadband may push Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast to accelerate their own deployments

By Olga Kharif

The race to provide ultrafast broadband is on.

In May, Cleveland will become a test bed for a service, spearheaded by Case Western Reserve University, that lets residents of more than 100 homes download data at about 1 gigabit per second. In February, Google (GOOG) said it plans an ultra-high-speed broadband network covering as many as 500,000 users. "The purpose of this project is to experiment and learn," Google said in a blog introducing the idea. "Network providers are making real progress to expand and improve high-speed Internet access, but there's still more to be done." The U.S. government's National Broadband Plan, released on Mar. 16, also urges that speedier broadband be more extensively deployed.

The plans by Google and Case Western may add to pressure on the largest broadband providers such as Verizon Communications (VZ), AT&T (T), and Comcast (CMCSA) to accelerate their own deployments and could create a windfall for the makers of networking equipment, analysts say. "Pre-Google announcement, it would have been five years" before such speeds became common, says John Mazur, a principal analyst at Ovum, a telecom market researcher. "Post-Google announcement, it could be sooner."

A download speed of 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) is 20 times faster than top speeds Verizon offers consumers and more than 256 times faster than the speeds available to the average broadband subscriber. Broadband providers are trying to meet a surge in demand for video and other services delivered over networks, sometimes wirelessly. Global data traffic may increase fivefold by 2013, according to Cisco.

Government Goals

The National Broadband Plan proposes that the Defense Dept. make 1 Gbps connections available on select military bases. It also wants American schools, hospitals, and government buildings to have access to such connections by 2020. The plan outlines measures designed to create more broadband providers through auctions of airwaves needed to provide wireless Internet services. "You radically change the price by creating competition," says John Muleta, co-founder of M2Z Networks, which plans its own nationwide wireless broadband network. Muleta formerly was head of the FCC's wireless telecommunications bureau. The government is also spending $7.2 billion in stimulus funds to expand broadband access to underserved areas.

Verizon says it's up to the task of matching Google's speeds. "We are not currently seeing any limits to how we can support [what] the market needs in terms of speeds," says Vincent O'Byrne, a technology director at Verizon. The carrier could upgrade its fiber-optic network to provide Google-like speeds in some places in as little as six months, Ovum's Mazur estimates. Verizon's O'Byrne didn't say how long it might take to deliver 1 Gbps across its entire fiber-optic network, which is available in more than a dozen states from New York to California.

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