On one hand, this is a direct shot across the bow of the cablecos/telcos. By essentially taking the roadmap of bandwidth expansion via slow, rolling upgrades over a long long period of time and going straight to the ultimate destination, GOOG is sucking a whole lot of "value" out of the existing infrastructure.

On the other hand, this will place enormous stress on the regional/long haul networks which I'll be forced to upgrade yet again. Unless they can charge more, this cant be good news for level3 or VZ or T.

I forsee an acceleration towards metered b/w in our future.