Everybody knows Google is one of the net's big kids, but how big is it exactly?

Well, as Arbor Networks measures it, if Google were an ISP, it would be the third largest in the world and the fastest growing – if you are measuring the amount of traffic passed from its network to another.

Arbor sells network-control and monitoring equipment to the net's biggest ISPs and networks, and knows as much about global network traffic as anyone.

Now much of that traffic comes from YouTube, since a three-minute video is the traffic equivalent of thousands of pages of search results – but that's still a staggering number for a single company.

Moreover, Google has a dual strategy for moving away from paying top-level internet transit providers to serve as the middleman between its servers and the world's consumer ISPs.

Now, more than half of its transit traffic is sent to those networks through direct peering relationships, according to the data ISPs provide Arbor Networks anonymously.

Moreover, Google has been deploying banks of servers inside those same networks, so traffic to Google's servers never has to leave an ISP, cutting down on lag time and transit costs. Arbor estimates that more than half of the ISPs in Europe and North America are home to a bank of servers known as a Google Global Cache.

So where does this all fit with Google's prominent announcement that it will test out a residential network that will bring internet connections of 1 Gbps to hundreds of thousands of people's homes?

Well, it's unlikely that Google will want to become a full-on ISP, but the changes and innovation Google is showing highlights just how important net transit is to its business.

What should frighten the world's current ISPs is that Google's plans call for working with a community to build infrastructure on which any company can sell internet services, so long as they pay a fair rate to use the infrastructure. If Google can come up with a partnering model that costs them little or uses a revolving fund, they could create a workable model for communities to get beyond reliance on companies like Verizon and Comcast. Using some of Google's cash, a lot of its know-how and citizen dissatisfaction with the current costs of not very fast broadband, municipalities could forge a viable alternative to the current system of begging and pleading for telecoms to lay fiber in their areas.

Certainly, Google has the motivation and a pocket full of cash. It's just a question of whether its innovation in transit can extend from its current efforts to rework how its packets get to consumers to remaking how networks are owned and built. Someone needs to do something about $30 a month 1.5-Mbps DSL lines, and if the national broadband plan isn't going to do it, it might as well be Google.

Graphs courtesy of Arbor Networks; Google Cache page from a Google presentation.

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