A recent job advert by Google’s on its website calls for a “strategic
negotiator” to help the company to provide a “global backbone network” — a
high-capacity international infrastructure.
By investing in capacity, Google could circumvent the problems of quality and
reliability and guarantee better service.
Although Google is reluctant to talk about its plans, the logical use of such
a network would be to help to support a new telephone service. The company would
buy capacity cheaply, by taking up slack capacity left behind when the internet
bubble collapsed in 2001.