Re: WOW! Just another Google Beta pgm - no support; walk away
at least Google even had the balls to push the limits rather than just sitting there never advancing anything. Sure its a beta, but even Verizon has not kept pushing FiOS because its investors have no balls.
Along those lines, Google may have done this specifically to have a bit of "history" when they do battle with ISPs that want to above-and-beyond-what-both-ends-pay, charge them for the use of their pipes. They can point to their experience with running FTTH and hopefully be the voice of reason when it comes to government lobbying.
I still recall Ed Whitacre's rant about the Googles of the world using his pipes and wanting a bigger piece of that action or else. It seems so similar to the organized crime payments mom and pop small businesses would make to the local Carlos, Joey, Vito or Tony that "protected" them from accidental fires.
And that's it. Google itself was an experiment, and has run hundreds of these employee inspired alpha , beta and dozens of outside tests, about 1 in 6 moves on, at least for a while. They certainly can afford to invest in some internet service provider research which will no doubt net the most interesting and valuable thing on earth...Information.
whether this continues on or they dump it in a couple years the will learn something from it (and we can guess) but it's pretty early for pundits to start stamping it sucess or failure, or declaring it a model for all future providers/networks.