Schmidt says governments, not Google, should help ease bandwidth squeeze

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt noted that Taiwan already fared better than the US in terms of broadband penetration, the speed of its internet, and the percentage of its people with smartphones. Yet there was still one looming problem, he noted, and that was the rising cost of building more advanced telecommunications networks. This is an issue globally because the spread of smartphones and the rise of mobile computing has meant a surge in demand for data delivered over telecom networks, to the extent that it is threatening to exceed operators’ capacity to do so at high speeds. “The good news,” Schmidt told Douglas Hsu, chairman of Far Eastone, one of Taiwan’s biggest telecom operators, in front of an audience of hundreds, “is that your customers love you . . . the problem is that they love you too much.” Schmidt said that the capacity issue could be resolved in the short term by increased investment into existing telecom infrastructure, but “that would [only] buy us some time”. If data usage continues to increase at the current rate, beyond the five- to eight-year time frame “I don’t know exactly how we’ll solve that problem,” he said. Still, Schmidt argued that one solution was for governments around the world to do more to help network operators to roll out faster and better networks. “I think it is important that governments realize that we need to make it easier for telcos to get financing” for infrastructure investments.

Schmidt defended his company as a great innovator, contradicting an unflattering portrait drawn by Apple (AAPL) co-founder Steve Jobs before he died last month. Schmidt told reporters that he is still "very sad and recovering from the sense of loss" from Jobs' death Oct. 5.