Google's announcement yesterday that it was going to finance some ultra-High Speed Broadband test markets only highlights the dizzying ascent of video online. The average broadband user spends about 760 minutes a month watching online video. Clearly the world of IP TV is almost here, but Google's move is a rather cynical inside the beltway ploy that will not bring the High Band Future any closer.

In 2008 Google started bidding on wireless spectrum against the incumbent carriers. It had no intention of running a wireless network, but rather wanted the telcos to know it could make the auction very expensive for them if they didn't open their networks to a Google Phone service. This is a similar ploy to get open access to the Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T networks at some sort of wholesale rate without having to spend the billions to put fiber in the ground. If the FCC buys this, I've got a bridge to sell them in Brooklyn.

The irony of course is that Verizon already has fiber to the home in much of its markets and could easily open up the pipe to the speeds Google is talking about (60-100 MBPS). It could also deploy the kind of symmetrical Interactive TV and Telemedicine services Google is highlighting. The other three incumbents (AT&T, Comcast, and Time Warner) will have to spend billions to catch up for different reasons. Comcast and Time Warner are both running Hybrid-Fiber Coax systems that are good for downstream broadband, but have very limited upstream capability. And AT&T thought it could deploy an IP TV network keeping it's old copper connectivity for it's U-Verse system. It's a joke and they are going to have to put fiber all the way to the home in the next five years, but they just don't want to tell Wall Street. As for their wireless system, the problems of I Phone users highlight the huge capex expense ahead of them. I've been told by a former FCC manager that last year AT&T had less than 3% of their cell phone towers with fiber backhaul! No wonder the system keeps dropping calls and can't handle the wireless data traffic.

Fourteen years ago I founded a IP Video on Demand company with a couple of friends ( called Intertainer based on the idea of "I want what I want, when I want it"--that we were moving from a push media universe (broadcasting) to a pull media universe (on demand). Like all pioneers we were early and had to fight off the oligopolies (we won an anti trust suit against Sony, Time Warner and Universal) and now we just license our patents to companies like Microsoft, Apple and Comcast. But I'm still convinced that our 1996 vision of the future--a world of truly interactive on demand media in high definition--still is on track.