Google Fiber: network centerpiece for your business
We’re about five months in to Google Fiber’s business offering, and I’m being told that a lot of service providers are telling people that it’s suitable only as a backup service–a fairly cheap $100/month standby for your main circuit.
I suppose if I made most of my money selling Internet access, I’d be telling everyone that too.
But it just isn’t true.
Google Fiber should be the centerpiece of your network. Here’s why:
- The capacity is a gigabit, both upstream and downstream. But you knew that much.
- It can be used for both voice and data services. Yup, that’s right. Most service providers don’t offer voice over Google Fiber, but that’s either because they’re trying to protect their Internet business or because they’re incapable.
- It is consistent. Latency, a measure of delay across the network, is consistently very low. Speeds across the network–especially upload speeds–are consistent. That contrasts with high-speed services over coax offered by cable companies that are wildly inconsistent, especially up.
- It is reliable. It should be: it’s a brand-new fiber network. It’s not without downtime, but Avid’s experience is that the downtime is similar to other well built, fiber-based connections.
One area of concern is that Google does not offer Service Level Agreements, which define penalties the service provider suffers if the service does not meet their standard for, among other things, uptime and speed of repair. I would say that my limited experience with Google Fiber outages would indicate room for improvement in speed of repair. But for customers sensitive to any downtime, no matter how rare, there are options for combining Google Fiber with other connections that wind up being very economical and highly reliable–a combination that heretofore has not existed.
So don’t listen to the misinformation perpetrated by those who stand to lose from Google Fiber’s service: it’s the real thing.
