Google brings on Milo Medin to lead high-speed broadband demo launch

Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) has concurrently--or at least as concurrently as things happen in today's fast-moving world--named @Home veteran Milo Medin to the new position of vice president of access services and immediately told him to complete the search engine's highly touted but going nowhere high-speed demonstration network.

If this seems a lot happening at one time, it is. First to Medin. He is the man who co-founded @Home, watched as it merged with Excite to become Excite@Home then go down in flames as cable companies, having figured the whole broadband thing, took matters into their own hands and networks.

The high-speed demonstration network is Google's way of showing how broadband can change people's lives. It asked towns sized from 50,000 to 500,000 people if they'd like to be part of the test and 1,078 of them said sure. This, in turn, led to what in the broadband world is known as network congestion due to contention: too many people, too few resources.

Now Medin has been brought in as the referee/traffic cop to make it all happen. "It isn't a beauty contest," he said of a selection process that includes things like right of way for fiber optics cables and community permits. "It's about what's on the inside, but not what's on the outside."

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