Via Slashdot, “Google’s Secret Plans For All That Dark Fiber?“:
“The idea is to plant one of these puppies anywhere Google owns access to fiber, basically turning the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid. While Google could put these containers anywhere, it makes the most sense to place them at Internet peering points, of which there are about 300 worldwide.”
Via Slashdot, there’s a comment about a Cringley article talking about something that Google is up to with both dark fiber, that I mentioned before, and what may essentially be semi-mobile processing and storage borg cube. These borg cubes then become a platform for just about anything. Certainly, they can cache the google video and image content closer to the users which are becoming more and more capable of broadband speeds. Google could also leverage the cubes for delivery services, like what Akamai does or acting like active peers in BitTorrent or other sharing networks. These borg cubes could also become hosting locations for network applications or more mundane web and blog services.
Moreover, along with just about anything the imagination could conjure, these cubes could become the host of a Google VOIP service and act as the peering points for Google MuniWiFi services. (One might watch to see if they put one of these cubes at the peering point for any place where they’ve implemented their MuniWiFi.)
Instead of moving the network connection to the public peering site, Google might be moving the services to the public peering site and using the fiber as a private network.
UPDATE 7jan06: Well, looks like I was close with the comment about caching video closer to the users, but didn’t quite see that they would be going after the pay-to-play / TV downloads market.