Google's local servers

I don't know how this slipped by me, but it's finally appeared in my Google Alerts:

Stafford Masie of Google SA at a MyADSL conference in November 2007 [thanks ITWeb]

“We are going to establish a point of presence in this country, which means the international bandwidth problem is solved. There will be a big announcement in a month,” Masie said at the time.

Google do host a lot of bandwidth-intensive services, and having these served locally will help a lot with latency (for the cached stuff, of course) and cheaper bandwidth, especially for consumers.

Those local-only ADSL accounts are starting to look great. Telkom's partial-compliance with the ICASA rulings on local bandwidth will help too. Perhaps using Stefano's DSL split-routing setup will become more commonplace.

Of course, a month from November 2007 was December 2007 or, charitably, January 2008. Still no word though. Google - what news?

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Let's see, the more bandwidth-intensive Google services are:

• GMail
• Picasa and PicasaWeb and Image Search
  
• Docs (watch out Microsoft - your anti-piracy drive may backfire)
• Maps
• Google Video (and does this mean YouTube will be served locally too? What about Limelight?)
• Google Earth (mmmmmm)
• full list of all services