Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Offense, the best defense

There's been a lot of coverage today of the Google WiFi VPN story, and Om is on it (seems his whole GoogleNet hypothesis is shaping up very nicely). Beyond the obvious apparent benefits of security in public hotspots and driving as much traffic through Google servers as possible, I wonder if this also doesn't relate in some way to all the hoopla that Verso has been making. In other words, maybe this is a way to ensure the integrity of Google service-related traffic (the massive amounts of voice, video and data referred to in the post) in a future era of "rogue service" traffic degradation by carriers. The IP Media Monitor article linked to in Om's post closes with the observation, "But the last-mile is, as always, the problem." Maybe this is their response, not to the bandwidth issues, but to user experience issues.

UPDATE: The ever-excellent Richard Stastny seems to think I'm on the right track, and states it more clearly in this post.

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