In February last year Google got cities around the U.S. excited as it introduced an offer to hook some of them up with a fiber-to-the-home 1Gbps network. While most locations struggle to offer anything past 20Mbps, Google is making the leap to 1Gbps and taking some communities with it.
A little over a year later and Google has decided on the first city it will work with to implement the super-fast network: Kansas City. When first announced, Google said it needed city representatives and the individuals who thought it should come to their city to get in touch and state their case. It seems Kansas City made the best of that and really impressed with its commitment to the project if it was selected.
A development agreement has already been signed and the network will be up and running at some point in 2012. The Kauffman Foundation, KCNext, the University of Kansas Medical Center are all involved in its development and deployment.
Google has restated its commitment to select other cities to work with and rollout 1Gbps networks to, but you have to expect that once Kansas City is up and running Google will have a much better idea of how to plan and organize city-wide projects like this. The team handling the projects will only get faster and more efficient at implementing them, and then just needs the full backing of a city to make it happen.
This could definitely set the bar for the future of U.S. Internet access if all goes well, and I don’t think anyone will complain about Google coming to their city if the end result is phenomenal connection speeds everywhere.
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