Google looking to build European high-speed fiber network
The Wall Street Journal reports that Google senior vice president David Drummond said on Friday that the search giant is considering deploying a high-speed fiber network to Europe, in a bid to widen high-speed Internet access across the continent.
In a meeting at the French Industry Ministry, Drummond said that the company is "looking very closely" at branching out the fiber-network to Europe, but failed to disclose any further details.
Google's offer may come at a time when Europe is mostly ahead in the world rankings of broadband speed, but still lags behind a developing 4G network in the United States, and already-established fiber networks and high-speed connectivity in East Asia.
As GigaOm reports, the Netherlands and parts of Scandinavia already deploy fiber to home communities, but has restriction-laden ISPs that filter content on the behalf of copyright holders.
As the United Kingdom has one of the stronger economies, despite the increasing inflation costs amid the outcome of the recession, the UK's broadband speeds combined with its economical output factors would make the country a logical one. However, depending on the spread of the presumably non-experimental European network, it could be rolled out over mainland Europe to localise fiber connectivity across multiple countries at a lower cost.
Google's European fiber dreams will be some years away yet, however. It took over two years to reach the point it is currently at in Kansas City, yet still remains a small off-shoot project for the search giant.
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