And that’s particularly interesting considering Google’s planned fiber broadband access experiment and the US FCC’s current plan to make 100-Mbps broadband available on a nationwide basis. If the telcos and the government can’t make it happen in certain areas, perhaps Google will.
For all that, of course, the same dynamic is unlikely to happen in Asia-Pacific, if only because the regulators and governments that have already committed to national broadband plans have firm control over the process. Singapore’s IDA, for example, has already decided who gets to build the open infrastructure for its NBN project. It’s hard to imagine Google being allowed to come in and engineer a workaround with local partners.
Ditto Australia’s NBN project, although the current dithering and shouting between Telstra and the government over the details could conceivably delay rollouts enough to make some local players wish they could rope in Google or someone to help them put together a decent broadband service sooner.