Only days after critics began to seriously and publicly wonder whether Google would ever follow through with its offer to build a 1 Gbps broadband system for some lucky U.S. city, the search engine giant has come through and announced Kansas City, Kan. as the choice.
Milo Medin, vice president of access services at Google and the former Excite@Home exec brought in to run the whole thing, blogged that "our goal was to find a location where we could build efficiently, make an impact on the community and develop relationships with local government and community organizations." Kansas City, among the 1,100 who sought the honor, best fit the bill.
The network--scheduled to begin service in 2012--will put a "spotlight on the stark difference between those goals that have been set (by the feds) for broadband versus what people really want and is possible," Craig Settles, a broadband strategist told FierceTelecom. "We have a government saying we want 100 Mbps for urban; we want 4 Mbps for rural (and) you look at Google and it's putting this gigabit network in place and people are going to say, 'We want that.'"
For more:
- FierceTelecom has this story
Related articles:
Hey Google, where's the fiber?
Google conducts FTTX network dress rehearsal at Stanford University
Google brings on Milo Medin to lead high-speed broadband demo launch